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and I let my hand drop. He rested his forehead against mine and waited there.
    “Anything I can do?” he asked quietly.
    I thought about saying, stay. Just stay with me. I could tell him , make a decision. Love me or leave me, but you have to pick one. It was right on the tip of my tongue to tell him, I love you. I love you. Does that matter at all? It was so close to the surface. Surely my eyes were telling him every truth he didn't want to hear. But instead all the emotions balled up inside me and stuck in my throat and I shook my head, trying to give him a look of wide-eyed innocence. I tried to look as though the question surprised me and just answered, “No.”
    He must have known. There was a half beat of pause while his eyebrows came together, but all he said was, “Business is good?”
    “Yes. Both of them.”
    “And your mom?”
    “She's fine, Leo, stop.”
    He met my eyes. “Then what?”
    “Hang out for a bit,” I said instead, too casual, though that wasn't what I meant and he knew it. He nodded anyway, his forehead moving against mine, and then he kissed me again. I wondered if he could hear how my heart was pounding.
    “I really did miss you,” he said.
    “Where did you go?” In general, he didn't tell me where he went or what he was doing when he wasn't here with me, but sometimes he liked to share small details. Places he'd seen. Places he still wanted to go. Strange people he'd met.
    He didn't answer at first, and I figured that he would just ignore the question. I took to kissing the top of his shoulder, where it rested upon mine and he sighed a little and moved against me.
    “I was in Mexico,” he said suddenly. “It’s been years since I was there.”
    “Did you like it?”
    “Well, it was warmer,” he said, giving me a smile that made it all the way up to his eyes, and made my heart speed up a little. Why couldn't he always look at me like that? I would have done just about anything to keep that smile on his face.
    “I was in this tiny village,” he said. “All the kids were wearing Nike tshirts.”
    “What were you doing there?”
    He paused again, and then rolled onto his back, settling himself in the crook of my arm. “Someone told me that there was a woman there who could raise the dead.”
    I whipped my head to the side to look at him, surprised. “Was there?”
    He shook his head. “No. I mean, I found the woman they were talking about, but she couldn't . . . do what you can do. She might have been something, had some sort of power, but I think mostly that she was just a good hypnotist.”
    “Hmm.” I thought about it for a while. “Guess you're stuck with me then.”
    He smiled again, that same eye-crinkling smile and let his hand trail down my stomach to my suddenly attentive penis. “It's too bad, I know,” he smiled wider. “The old woman didn't have any teeth.”
    I laughed and he tickled my belly and then we kissed again and he ended up staying almost to dawn.
     

Chapter Four
     
    The next morning I got up early, took another shower to clear the cobwebs from my brain, and headed out to my truck with my chin tucked into the collar of my coat and a travel mug of hot coffee in one hand. Leo had been gone when I had woken up, and I took a second to look into my spare bedroom. It was empty, of course, except for some stray free weights I had picked up at a garage sale and now used to hold the carpet down. The closet door was closed though, and I knew better than to look inside. The trailer felt still and small around me. I could have almost dreamed the prior night’s activities, if not for the Post-it note stuck to my car keys that read only, “See you tonight” in Leo's oddly fancy penmanship.
    I slipped on the slushy, wooden steps of my trailer and righted myself somehow without spilling my coffee. A thin layer of snow blanketed the ground. Despite the numbing cold, I expected that the afternoon would be sunny. Early November weather could be