How to Talk to a Widower

time just kissing someone. It always seemed to me that any kissing that didn’t advance to naked foreplay after the first ten minutes simply grew stale from lack of direction. But Hailey and I could go at it for hours, until our lips were swollen and chapped, tongues numb, jaws locked, and afterwards I’d climb back up to my apartment to ice my aching balls, with the taste of her delightfully lodged in the back of my parched throat, her scent inhaled so powerfully that it penetrated my brain behind my eyes in lavender cloudbursts. It seemed juvenile, really, a man my age barely getting to second base, but there was something undeniably exciting about it too. And while we knew that sex was inevitable, was the driving force behind the whole process, the fact that I was dating a single mother made me feel particularly responsible about introducing sex into the relationship before I knew I was committed. Also, she was a beautiful woman who’d been with the kind of men who routinely score beautiful women and, frankly, I was scared I wouldn’t measure up.
    But innate horniness will always prevail, and soon enough we ended up naked and sweaty in my bed, venting a month’s worth of pent-up desire in a wild, unprecedented session that left no sexual stone unturned. When it was finally over, we lay motionless and panting beside each other on my wrecked sheets as the sweat cooled and dried on our skin, like two wounded soldiers left behind on the battlefield. “Oh my God,” Hailey gasped softly, her eyes wide and incredulous in the dim light of my darkened bedroom.
    “Who knew?” I agreed.
    “Well, I had my suspicions,” she said, turning her head to lick the sweat off my neck. I reached over for her and she rolled easily into me, throwing her thigh over mine, her head resting on my chest. “We fit perfectly,” she said, and as I kissed her scalp, I felt the tears inexplicably come to my eyes. I knew from having been on the other end that crying after sex can send a bad message, so I closed my eyes and hoped Hailey wouldn’t look up. She seemed to know, but instead of questioning me, she pressed her lips against my chest, her fingers splayed out over the line of hair bisecting my stomach. After a minute she said, “You okay?”
    “I’m just a little more in love than I thought,” I said, surprising us both. First tears, now love. I could practically feel the testosterone evaporating through my pores.
    She nodded, and kissed my chest again in a way that made me shake. “Don’t let it freak you out.”
    “I won’t if you don’t.”
    She looked up at me and grinned. “After what Jim put me through, it would take a lot to freak me out.”
    “You want to tell me about it?”
    She slid up to rest her head in the crook of my neck. “Our story begins with the pubes in the wastebasket,” she intoned softly, like Alistair Cooke.
    “As such stories so often do,” I said, and she shoved me playfully, and we both laughed. And it was good.

20

    WHEN DOGS MEET, THEY SNIFF EACH OTHER’S ASSES. When women meet, they check each other out to determine who is prettier. When men meet, the paramount question is who would kick whose ass in a fight, and when Jim came by to check me out shortly after I moved in with Hailey, that wasn’t really an issue up for debate. Jim was big, the kind of big that made me feel small and off balance. Somehow, in describing him, Hailey had failed to mention the sheer bulk of him, the superhero chin, the thick, corded neck of a Greco-Roman wrestler, the imposing, bearish frame, and large sausage fingers that closed over mine like a clamp when we shook hands. Thick raised veins snaked up his forearm like rural back roads on a map, all converging on the Wal-Mart of his bulging bicep. My first instinct was to match might with might, but to do that you have to actually have some might of your own, so instead I let my hand fall limp, taking the high road, refusing to be engaged in Jim’s macho bullshit, but then I thought I might be coming off like a wuss, so I tried to consolidate my hand in such a way that, while not squeezing back, it would still feel solid and unyielding to Jim’s force. Basically, I fucked up the handshake. It would never be mentioned, but I knew it, and Jim knew it, and that was all that mattered. I would soon learn that the unsaid things were all that mattered in dealing with your wife’s ex-husband.
    “How are you doing?” Jim said, nodding smugly as he looked me