How to Talk to a Widower

She pulls off her shoe, an expensive-looking sand-colored espadrille, and shuffles like a gimp over to the air dryer. “I really am going to leave him, you know.”
    “Laney.” I take a step toward her, but she holds out her hand.
    “Just go,” she says, and then hits the silver button and the noise of the air dryer fills the room like a jet engine.

    Later in my car with Brooke, in a random parking lot, a simple kiss has grown legs and turned into something more, something sweaty and breathless that fogs up the windows of my Saab. Mouths open hungrily, lips crush against lips, tongues dance and slide over each other, faces are stroked, hands slide easily under shirts to feel the skin baking underneath, sounds are made, soft gasps and moans, the universal dialogue of escalation.
    We end up in the darkness of my front hallway, pressed up against the wall kissing and grinding against each other, and the heat from our friction will melt the clothes to our bodies if we don’t undress soon. It’s just that I’m not sure where to go. I don’t want to bring her downstairs to the guest room like Laney, but I’m scared of what it will mean to bring her up to my bedroom, breaking the hermetic seal on Hailey’s last remaining sanctuary, bringing the bulldozers in to the last untouched rain forest, killing off entire species to make way for hotels and strip malls.
    Hailey,
I think.
Hailey, Hailey, Hailey.
Just the sound of her name, two syllables, beating in me like a telltale heart.
    But Brooke is sweet and sexy and somehow complete, and we had that moment back in the restaurant, that perfect kiss, where I felt loosely spinning things in me click into place, felt the planet stop rotating for just the tiniest fraction of a second to pay tribute,
    Hailey, Hailey, Hailey …
and now her wet lips are shining in the ambient light from the kitchen, and her eyes are smoky, their lids half closed and fluttering under the weight of her desire,
    Hailey, Hailey, Hailey
… and her skin glows like it’s lit from within, and we’re young and beautiful and we won’t always be, but today we are, soft and hard in all the right places, and we owe it to the world to have sex the way it’s meant to be had, and she tastes like cinnamon and sex and fuck it, this is what we’re meant to do, what we’re built for, and every molecule in our bodies is demanding it, and there’s nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but this.
    So I lead her up the stairs and into my bedroom, and shirts come off and the smooth skin of her belly is soft and hot against my lips, and her flesh against mine is electric, and I’m not thinking about Hailey, am not thinking about the last time we lay in this bed, the night before she got on that plane, how she finished on top, covering me like a blanket, her knees up beside my ribs, face flushed, smiling down at me through the hazy mist of our evaporating sex. How we were wrapped around and through each other, naked and sweating and thinking that it was just another beautiful day in happily ever after.
I had a wife. Her name was Hailey.
    “What’s wrong?” Brooke says, pulling back breathlessly to look at me.
    “Nothing,” I say, but something has changed, some unknowable but vital element in our chemistry, and she can taste it.
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Do you not want to do this?”
    “I do.”
    “Maybe it’s too soon.”
    “It isn’t.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Because we don’t have to.”
    “I know.”
    And now it’s officially arrived, the moment when you have discussed whether or not you are going to have sex too much to now go and have it, and I can feel levels falling, dials spinning furiously in reverse, molecules deflating as the air around us loses its charge.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, rolling off her.
    “You don’t have to apologize,” she says.
    We lie on our backs, side by side, staring into the darkness, and there’s nothing but the sound of our breath slowing down as heart rates and hopes fall. The room still smells of sex and sweat, but those smells no longer belong to us and so they bother me.
    “Just tell me if it’s me,” she says.
    “It has nothing to do with you,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m being like this.”
    She turns on her side to face me and puts a hand on my chest. “Please talk to me, Doug.”
    But I don’t want to talk, don’t want to navigate my way through one of those painful postmortems that