How to Talk to a Widower

of Hailey and me—we hadn’t gotten around to albums yet—waiting for the last bits of afternoon sunlight to stop pouring through the windows to illuminate the galaxy of floating spores, so that I could legally break out the Jack Daniel’s.
    “Poor Doug,” Laney says, pulling me back into her embrace, and I can feel her hardened nipples, like two sand-smoothed pebbles against my chest, can smell her skin in the hollow of her neck, that earthy scent unique to redheads, and I actually find myself thinking about opening my mouth against her neck, running my tongue against her skin, and seeing what will happen. It’s been a shitty, shitty day, and the idea of undressing the voluptuous and seemingly game Laney Potter, of losing myself in the folds of her soft dimpled flesh, is suddenly very appealing. I can tell that she’ll be an energetic lover, that she’ll be loud and wild and without boundaries of any kind, and when was the last time I had that kind of sex? I haven’t gotten laid in a year, and maybe a little slap and tickle with Laney Potter would be just the thing to cheer me up.
    But even as I feel myself growing hard against her, even as I feel her heartbeat accelerating in her chest and her breath against my ear becoming more pronounced, I know it would be a mistake. She’ll start coming over every week, maybe even more than once a week, and before I know it we’ll be in some twisted relationship, and then she’ll start complaining to me about Dave and how she’s thinking of leaving him, and so I’ll have to start avoiding her, which won’t be easy since I never leave the house, and all of this because in a moment of weakness I mistook my own immense loneliness for garden-variety horniness.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, stepping out of her embrace. “I’m a little out of it today.”
    “Can I do anything?” she says, her face ever so slightly flushed, her eyes flitting anxiously around the kitchen.
    “I think I’ll just have some dinner and go to bed.”
    “I hate to think of you all alone here when you’re not feeling well. You want me to stay for a while?”
    She’s talking and I’m talking, but there are other conversations going on, between our carefully averted eyes, our nervously animated hands, and our throbbing groins, and that’s just too many conversations for me to follow. It’s like blasting the radio while you’re watching television, vacuuming, and talking on the phone.
    “No, I’m fine,” I say, walking ahead of her toward the door. “Really. I just need to get some sleep.”
    “I can tuck you in,” she says, and I can feel her eyes on my back.
    “It’s okay. Thanks.”
    At the door, she hugs me again, and this time I kiss her cheek, ridiculously proud of myself for having resisted the temptation. I’ve never slept with a married woman, less out of principle than because it simply never came up, but something tells me that now would be a bad time to try it. Dave Potter, Laney’s husband, is a lawyer in private practice and partners with Mike Sandleman, the man who will be marrying my sister Debbie in a few weeks. Did you follow that? The interconnectedness of everything? Your wife dies dramatically and your life becomes a goddamn soap opera.
    Still, Laney has those ridiculously sexy lips, like two tapered pillows glossed to a slick sheen, and since I’m not going to sleep with her, I don’t see the harm in letting the corner of my mouth accidentally graze them as I kiss her cheek. “Thanks for everything, Laney.”
    “I’m always here, Doug, for anything you need,” she says meaningfully, looking into my eyes before she goes. “You know that, right?”
    “I do.”
    Her smile is a naked confirmation that something is happening between us, that it’s there for the taking. And I feel the smallest pang of regret as I watch her get into her car, can still feel the soft fullness of those lips on mine. I don’t know why she’s offering herself up to this possibility, could be that her marriage is lousy, could be that she’s lonely, or bored, or that Dave is as dull in bed as he is out of it, but whatever the reason, I think the wisest course is to maintain the status quo. Because, ultimately, I would just have to break it off and she’d feel used and I’d feel bad, and while I don’t know exactly how it would all play out, I’m pretty sure it would mean the end of Tuesday nights with Laney Potter. And in the final analysis, I think I would miss her