Everything Changes

gently. “I expect the both of you to be in top form when I get back.”
    “We’ll do our best.”
    “I’ll call you from the airport.”
    I tell her I’ll miss her, but by then she’s gotten out, and the taxi door slams on me in midphrase. As the cab heads west through Central Park, I wonder whether I’ve done the right thing, not telling her about the biopsy. She was on such a high about the London trip, I didn’t want to spoil her mood. She wouldn’t have been able to go off to London knowing that I’m sitting here on pins and needles waiting for the results. Still, I feel bad that I didn’t tell her. Or maybe I feel bad because I suspect she might have still gone anyway.

Chapter 15
    This is what happens. You’re out at a bar on a cold Friday night with your two best friends, feeling inferior and hopeless because one, Jed, is the indisputable stud and the other, Rael, is newly married and just along for nostalgia’s sake, to bask in the utter irrelevance of it all. So one has nothing at stake and the other has nothing to prove and there you are in the middle, with plenty at stake and everything to prove, and no real prospects of success. It’s been eight months since your last relationship, six months since you’ve had any kind of sex, and that was of the desperate, rebounding nature, and you’re starting to feel invisible in the Big City, wishing you could go back home to your small town, where it was so much easier and the girls were so much more approachable, so much less jaded. Except that you don’t come from a small town; you come from here, or, at best, a soulless suburb of here, and there’s nowhere to go back to, so you’re just going to have to soldier on, get over your fear of rejection, and find someone who will somehow recognize that thing in you, that thing you can’t even recognize in yourself but you know is there, that will make you seem like a worthwhile investment, the thing that will somehow inspire a woman to take you home and exchange fluids and then stories and then secrets, in the hopes of finding a love that will fill you both up to the point where you can stop looking for it.
    Who could blame you for being a little drunk?
    Your crew is well positioned on three stools by a high table at the window, where you can watch the people come and go, and you’re joking around rowdily with Jed and Rael, hoping you look like three guys who could care less if there are even any women in the room, feeling self-conscious even though you know there’s no reason to, since no one’s really checking you out.
    And then you see her, standing with her girlfriend against the wall, holding her Coors bottle just a little too perfectly, not organically, not like someone who has a genuine relationship with longneck bottles. And she has this sweeping mane of sandy-colored hair and a square jaw that frames her features perfectly, features almost childlike in their delicacy, that bespeak a childhood of privilege and insulation. Her eyes are the blue of faded denim, her nose small and wide, like a kitten’s, and her cheeks soft and ever so slightly plump, the cheeks of a nymphet. And you know, instinctively, that she hates those cheeks, that she habitually looks into mirrors when she’s alone and sucks them in, and you want to tell her she shouldn’t, because, set as they are atop her lean, gym-toned body, and under those mesmerizing blue eyes, they’re two pockets of soft, flawless flesh that hold the infinite promise of untold pleasures, like the perfect ass above her lean, muscled legs, or the lovely, upturned breasts above the flat expanse of her abdomen. You know what it will feel like to brush those magnificent cheeks with your own, what those cheeks will look like from above with her eyes closed, lips parted, as you lie on top of her, lowering your head to kiss her open mouth.
    And you’re so caught up that you forget to man the controls of your disinterest, and she catches you staring at her, so there’s nothing left to do but get off your stool and, drink in hand, walk over to where she’s standing, and as you do, you feel an alien resolve clicking into place with the muted thunk of a luxury-car door, and since you’re already committed, you decide there’s nothing to lose.
    “I’m Zack,” you say, raising your voice to be heard above the din of the jukebox, the loud conversations going on around you, and the frenzied fluttering of the butterflies in your