Centaurs and Lovers.

*** Three: What She Was at Twenty

The bar they went to on Fridays was called Tully's, which had the advantage of being three blocks from the Alderton and open until two. She went with Cara and sometimes with a woman named Deb who worked the lunch shift and knew everyone. They dressed for it.

She was twenty, she was a little plump in the way that made certain men look twice and other men look away, and she had learned early and precisely which was which. The ones who looked away she didn't think about. The ones who looked twice she had a use for - not just for what the night might become, but for what their looking confirmed, which was that the other kind of looking wasn't the verdict. That the room hadn't decided yet. That she got to keep being someone desire moved toward rather than past. Being wanted directly was easier than wondering what people saw when they looked at her, and it was easier than knowing, which was the thing she was actually afraid of.

She was good at the bar the way she was good at the restaurant - she read the room, she read the man, she knew before the second drink whether the night had somewhere to go. She liked the efficiency of it. She liked being wanted by someone who knew nothing about her and wanted her anyway, which was a different thing from being known and wanted, and she liked both, and the first kind was easier to come by.

***

In November a man appeared beside her at the bar - mid-thirties, good-looking in an uncomplicated way, not from the university. He bought her a drink without asking, which she normally found presumptuous, but he did it without presumption somehow, just set it in front of her and turned back to the bar as if he had no particular expectations about what came next. When he turned toward her his eyes moved over her once, unhurried, the way certain men looked when they'd already decided and weren't bothering to pretend otherwise. She knew this look and this one she trusted.

She turned toward him. They talked for a while about nothing important - his work, her work, the badness of the music. He was easy to talk to in the way that some men were, the ones who listened as much as they talked.

After a while he said: "Do you want to get out of here?"

She considered him. "Yes," she said.

His apartment was fifteen minutes away. She noted the books on the shelf, the absence of dishes in the sink, the way he moved through his own space - comfortable but not careless. She noted these things quickly and without commentary.

Afterward she lay there for a moment in the dark of his room, listening to him breathe, looking at the ceiling.

"You don't have to go," he said.

"I know," she said.

She found her clothes in the dark and dressed without turning on the light. At the door he said her name - he'd remembered it, which not all of them did - and she looked back at him. He was sitting up in bed watching her leave with an expression that was not quite asking anything.

She smiled and went.

Walking home she felt the cold and the particular lightness of the hour and something she could only describe as satisfaction, which was not a small thing. She had wanted something and gone after it and gotten it and it had been what she wanted. This seemed to her, at twenty, like the whole of the lesson.

She went back to Tully's the following Friday. And the Friday after that.

Three or four times a week, for several months, she didn't even count, and over time this reluctance to count became part of the process. She was genuinely, specifically not unhappy. She had work she was good at and friends she liked and a succession of nights that delivered what they promised.

What she didn't account for was the way appetite pursued directly long enough stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the shape of things. She was inside the shape. She couldn't see it from there.

***

There was a man in the spring who wanted to see her again. She was gentle about it. He took it well enough and then said, not unkindly, just as information: you're hard to read, you know that?

She said something light. She couldn't remember what, after.

He nodded and left.

There was a man in the summer who she liked more than she'd expected to. This was awkward and she managed it: she noticed it, made adjustments, and moved on. She was good at this. She had a lot of practice.

What she didn't notice, managing it, was what the managing cost. She was twenty-two. The cost seemed theoretical.

There was a night in October - she was twenty-three by then - when she came home at two in the morning and stood in her kitchen drinking a glass of water and looked at the window, which gave back her own reflection, and felt something she didn't examine and went to bed.

She lay there for a while in the dark.

She was fine. She was genuinely fine. She went to sleep.

***

There was a morning in the first semester when she woke in a room she didn't recognize.

This was not, by then, unusual. What was unusual was that she was alone, and that she had no memory of the previous night past a certain point, with lots of semen stuck to her pubic hair, which she noted as information requiring investigation.

She lay still for a moment and took inventory.

The room: a fraternity house, from the look of it. Posters, textbooks stacked without conviction, the disorder that accumulated when young men lived without oversight. Morning light coming through a curtain that didn't quite close. Someone else's sheets.

Herself: intact. No soreness that suggested anything she hadn't chosen. No residue of anxiety, which she'd learned was its own kind of data.

Her clothes: folded on the chair by the desk. Her shoes on the floor beside it, placed heel to heel, toes forward, exactly as she placed them when she got undressed.

She looked at the shoes for a moment.

She always placed them that way. It was a habit so ingrained she did it without thinking, in the dark, at any hour, in any state. The shoes were placed correctly. That meant she had placed them. That meant she had been present and deliberate at the relevant moment, had undressed with her usual care, had been - whatever else the night had been - herself throughout it.

She got up. She used the bathroom down the hall, which was unoccupied. She dressed. She found her bag where she'd apparently left it, hooked over the back of the desk chair with the automatic tidiness that was, one of the more reliable things about her.

She let herself out. The house was quiet in the early morning way of places where people had been up late. She walked back to her dorm in the pale autumn light, her breath visible, the campus empty in the way it was empty before nine on a Sunday.

She showered. She shampooed twice. She stood under the water for longer than necessary and thought about nothing in particular and then got out and dried off and looked at herself in the mirror.

She was fine. She was genuinely fine.

She went to breakfast. She ate. She did her reading for Monday.

She did not think about who the boy was, or whether she would see him again, or what the night had been from his side of it. These were not useful questions. She had the information that mattered - the shoes, placed correctly - and the rest was the ordinary residue of a night that had happened and was now behind her, which was where nights went.

What she noticed, walking to her afternoon class, was that she felt neither ashamed nor triumphant. The same person she'd been on Friday, moving through Sunday, heading toward Monday. The night had been part of the texture of things and the texture of things continued.

She filed this away with the other things she was learning about herself that semester, which were numerous and not always comfortable and mostly useful.

The following Friday she put on her good jeans and went out with Cara.

***

There was a night in the spring of the first year that she thought about afterward more than she expected to.

She'd gone back to a fraternity house with a boy she'd met at Tully's. He was fine. He was enthusiastic in the unfocused way of boys who had decided they were good at this without having done the work to become good at it.

She'd learned by then to manage her expectations in these situations, which she did efficiently and without resentment.

She liked being wanted. She liked the specific sequence of it - the kissing, the getting undressed, the anticipation she felt in the moment just before, which was its own pleasure regardless of what followed. What followed was variable. She had accepted this as a condition of the arrangement.

He was done before she was anywhere close. This also she had accepted as a condition of the arrangement.

What she had not accepted, or anticipated, was what happened next.

He picked her up - the way you moved something from one place to another - and carried her across the room and set her down on the other bed. His roommate's bed. The roommate, who had come in sometime during and gone to sleep facing the wall, stirred and turned over.

She was irritated.

Genuinely irritated.

He'd picked her up and moved her three feet to the left as if solving a furniture problem.

"Seriously?"

Neither boy answered.

Then the roommate opened his eyes.

He rolled onto his back.

"You're really pretty."

She laughed once.

"You've been asleep."

"Not the whole time."

"That's horrifying."

"Maybe."

Then he kissed her.

The irritation went somewhere. She'd examine where, later, and not find a satisfying answer.

She expected him to rush.

Everyone rushed.

Instead he stopped.

Looked at her.

Smiled slightly, as though he had all night.

Not slow exactly - something more deliberate than slow. He paid attention to her, registering what worked and returning to it, adjusting, curious.

He spent a long time on her breasts.

He was much more experienced with girl's breasts and he did this wonderful little nibble, lick, suckle with both.

This alone was different. A kind of attention she hadn't known to expect and found, unexpectedly, that her body had opinions about.

Then he moved down.

She waited.

Nothing happened.

Then he kissed her thigh.

Not her, not yet - her thigh, the soft inside of it, which was not a place she had ever thought about.

Then the other leg, the same spot. He was doing something with intention and she had no map for it and she lay there in the dark of someone else's room and let him do it.

"Dude," the first boy said from somewhere behind them, half asleep. "Are you stealing my date?"

"Borrowing," said the roommate.

He went back and forth, each time slightly higher, and the anticipation she'd described to herself before as a general feature of these evenings revealed itself now as something that could be made specific, could be concentrated, could be drawn out until it was almost unbearable and then drawn out further.

When he came back up he kissed her and said something into her ear, quiet and deliberate, each word separated from the next, and his hands were on her while he said it and she felt it everywhere simultaneously and she thought: oh. This is what people mean.

His coupling was energetic. Several different positions over several minutes. He gave her a memorable orgasm.

***

She had a body. She had always known this in the practical, unsentimental way she knew most things. She knew its dimensions and its effect on rooms and its taxonomy of responses. She knew which looks it attracted and which it deflected and what each category meant.

She lay there after, looking at the ceiling, while both boys slept.

She was hungry. That was the first thing. She wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and it was three in the morning and she didn't know where anything was in this house and she wasn't going to go looking.

She got dressed in the dark and let herself out and walked home.

In the kitchen she made toast because there was no cheese and stood at the counter eating it and thought about nothing in particular. The heat of it. The butter.

She went back to Tully's the following Friday.

She was looking, now, for something slightly more specific than before. She didn't say this to herself in those terms. But she updated her model, she learned something new, and she moved forward, and the wanting had a different shape than it had had the week before.

***

There was a man that same year who was not a boy.

She met him at a lecture - one of the public ones, open to the university and whoever else wandered in from the city. She sat down next to him because the seat was available and he was already there, settled into his coat, reading the program with the attention of someone who had come for the lecture rather than the social occasion. He was older. Not professor-older. Considerably older than that.

They talked before it started, and then quietly during, and then afterward over coffee that became supper at a place he knew nearby. He was easy to talk to in a way that had nothing to do with the Friday night taxonomy - not the look she trusted, not the second drink and the assessment. Just a man who listened well and had read things and asked her questions that assumed she had thought about the answers.

He bought her two drinks over the course of the evening. She understood, later, that this was because he was beginning to think about possibly kissing her at the end of the night.

She was thinking about something considerably further than that.

***

Outside his apartment building, in the cold, he kissed her on the forehead.

She stood still for it. Then he kissed her on the mouth - brief, careful, a question more than a statement.

She had seen this before. The forehead first, then the lips, the forehead functioning as a kind of preliminary inquiry, a way of testing the temperature before committing to the destination. She had noticed it with other men and found it faintly puzzling each time, because by the point a man kissed her forehead she had already been signaling clearly for some time. She was not subtle. She had no interest in being subtle. The signals were available to anyone paying attention, and most men paid sufficient attention to read them correctly.

What the forehead kiss indicated was not that he had failed to read them. It was that he had read them and didn't quite trust what he'd read. He was checking. Not from ignorance - from a particular kind of carefulness that was adjacent to insecurity without being identical to it. The distinction mattered to her. Weakness she had little patience for. This was something else: a man who knew what he wanted and wasn't certain he was entitled to want it, from her, given everything that lay between them - age, circumstance, the gap that had been present all evening without either of them naming it.

She found she didn't mind. His hand was still at her waist. The pavement was cold through her shoes and she could feel it and she thought about that briefly - the cold - and then she kissed him back with enough information that the question was answered.

Then they got into the cab, and he was thinking one thing, and she was thinking another, and the cold sidewalk outside his building was waiting for them.

He was thinking she would stay in the cab. She was thinking she would go upstairs. They stood on the sidewalk with this misunderstanding between them for a few seconds that were uncomfortable in the specific way of two people who have been entirely honest all evening and have suddenly, without intending to, arrived at a gap.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She went upstairs.

***

He once told her that he knew people did this kind of thing - meeting someone, going home - but that he hadn't taken her for that kind of girl.

She considered this phrase. That kind of girl. What kind of girl she was supposed to be and what kind of girl was the other kind, and she found she wasn't angry about it. He wasn't saying it with contempt. He was saying it with something more like wonder, and more like reassessment, and she found she could work with both.

They talked about it. They talked about a lot of things, over the weeks - in restaurants, in cabs, in his bed, which was where they were most comfortable talking, she came to understand, and where they did most of their real negotiating. He was a widower. He told her some things about his wife, not many, just enough that she understood the shape of that absence and moved around it carefully.

She grew fond of him.

***

Six or seven dates in - each one ending in his bed, a pattern that had established itself - she arrived one evening and told him, matter-of-factly, that she was having her period. She said she'd leave her tampon in. She spread a towel on the bed.

He went quiet.

She knew immediately she'd miscalculated something, though she couldn't locate the miscalculation yet. She took his hand and suggested they get into bed and talk about it, which was what they did when something needed talking about.

His wife, he told her, had never mentioned her periods. An oblique reference, occasionally, to not wanting to. That was all.

She lay there beside him and understood that she had walked, without knowing there was a door, into a room that contained his marriage. She had not intended this. She held the information carefully and didn't put it down awkwardly.

They talked the way they always talked in bed - her head against him, his hand moving through her hair, her hand resting on him with the easy warmth that had developed between them, not always arousal, sometimes just closeness, the intimacy of two people who had decided to be honest with each other and were finding out what that meant in practice.

He said he didn't want to make love while she was having her period. Not forever, he said. Just for now. He said it with the careful courtesy of someone who had thought about how to say it. That night his penis had been fully erect for the entire time.

She said she understood.

She did understand. She also felt the frustration.

She felt the need to satisfy him and began stroking him firmly, moving from caressing to stimulating.

She moved down and began blowing him.

He tensed. He pulled her up. He was clearly disturbed. He told her she didn't have to do that.

She told him she wanted to. More than that: she told him, carefully, that she considered it an honor. She meant this. She was aware it might sound like something she was supposed to say and she said it anyway because it was true and she had decided, some time ago, that true things were worth saying even when they sounded performed.

She did it anyway. His body, whatever his reservations, did not argue.

Afterward she moved up and cuddled against him and moved his hand.

He pulled it away.

She lay there.

More conversation. He wasn't ready, he said, to touch her there while she was having her period. His voice had the quality of a man who knew he was being unreasonable and was being unreasonable anyway, which was its own kind of honesty.

She was disappointed. She was not angry. She was frustrated in the specific way of someone whose generosity has not been returned, which was a feeling she didn't often let herself have and was having now whether she wanted to or not.

She reached for herself.

He didn't like that either.

She got up. She started getting dressed. He watched her with an expression she could feel without looking at - hurt and honest and crestfallen, the expression of a man who knew he had failed at something and couldn't yet locate where the failure began.

He asked her to stay.

She stayed. She didn't examine why, she believed he was trying. That was rarer than it should have been.

In the morning he made her breakfast.