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‘you’
    and ‘me’—didn’t make sense.” He stared at the smoke stringing up from his cigarette. Outside, a car horn blared.

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    In my imagination I’d woven a life for her that made sense, and he was tugging at all the loose ends, unraveling it. But with the liquor running in my limbs, it wasn’t an unpleasant unraveling, like the slow breakup of a chord my father sometimes played just before the real beginning of a hymn.
    “I have to tell you,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s the lone-liest person I ever knew.” I thought she just had an independence he couldn’t see. “It’s like she’s walking around with a big hole blown out of her, where most people’s hearts are.”
    “But she never listened to anybody’s stupid rules,” I said.
    His face strained into a longer, hollower shape, and it seemed as if he were looking down at me from a height of several feet.
    “No,” he said hoarsely. “She listens too hard. To everybody.
    That’s her problem. She has to fill up that hole.” He leaned forward, so close I felt his hot breath on my neck. “Otherwise she’d come back to me.”
    The dust particles in the beam of window light between us shimmered. His Hanna had a different face, a different past. I thought if I could part some warm curtain, I could look inside him and find her.
    His eyes crinkled. “Well, you can’t be a universe to each other for very long. Everything starts to seem really small.”
    I knew I’d drunk more than I should have when I looked up at the ceiling and the cracks shivered like black lightning. “You still want her to come back, don’t you?” I smoothed the folds in the lap of my skirt. I was talking too much, but couldn’t help it.
    “Wouldn’t you do almost anything to feel as if she were closer?”
    I felt light. The room looked blurry from under my lowered eyelashes.
    He laughed uncomfortably and rubbed his knees. “I wouldn’t do anything. No, the truth is, most of the time I’ve pretty much forgotten her.”

    34 / RENÉ STEINKE
    “I don’t believe you,” I said. It seemed to drag Hanna closer to us.
    He swung his finger around the lip of his glass, leaned toward me. Outside, children were laughing. “Oh, well, I’d do something to feel closer to her.”
    “To pretend,” I said, resting my hand on his thin arm.
    He edged around the coffee table and moved to sit beside me on the couch, his chest caved in under his narrow shoulders. Our breath was so thick with bourbon, it smelled flammable. “Sometimes when you move your hand that way, under your chin, it reminds me of her,” he said.
    “Really? No one’s ever said that before. Do you think she put her hand there to cover that birthmark?” It was red and could have been mistaken for a love-bite, but she usually kept it hidden with a scarf or thick makeup.
    “Yeah, that’s right. She was always worried about that—especially if she didn’t know people. You have one of those too?” He pulled my hand away from my chin and stroked my neck.
    “Nope.”
    When he kissed me, his tongue was soft and insistent, like a thumb dipped in honey. As I felt him stroke my collarbone, I imagined what it must have been like to be her, with her smooth complexion and dimples. The walls started to spin in a pleasant, carousel way as he inched his hand under my blouse, inclined it so it held the edge of my breast. His other hand went under my skirt, slowly rubbing my leg. “What’s this?” he said, his finger catching at a ridge of scars. I flinched, but he pushed me back on the couch and turned out the light so I relaxed a little. For a while at least it must have been good, to have someone that in love with you, someone who paid enough attention to think they knew you. His hand swept up my thigh, pulled down my stockings and underwear. Everything seemed fuzzy, rose-colored and gentle. He

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    kissed the thin skin on the inside of my thigh, and his tongue butterflied upward. It