Centaurs and Lovers.

*** Four: Philip's Education / How They Began.

She was twenty-four when Philip walked onto the construction site.

She noticed him before she had a reason to.

He was rugged in the specific way that bypassed her usual calibration - big through the shoulders, unhurried in his movements, the kind of older that had accumulated rather than declined. He had a great smile he used infrequently, which made it mean more. She clocked all of this in the first thirty seconds and told herself it was a professional assessment and knew immediately that this was not true.

He worked for the contractor doing the food and beverage interiors. She was responsible oversight - budget, schedule, all the ways that counted. She was, in the relevant sense, his boss. She understood this was complicated and found that the complication was not a deterrent.

He was just shy of ten years older than she was, thickening slightly through the chest and waist.

She flirted. She was good at flirting. She hinted, she maneuvered, she made herself available and interested in ways that she'd have called harassment if the genders were reversed - she knew this and continued anyway, which told her something about the degree of her interest.

He didn't ask her out.

She gave it weeks. She was not accustomed to wanting something this specifically and not getting it. The wanting itself was unfamiliar - not the appetite she'd been running on for years but something pointed, something that had a name and a face and the way of going still when it was thinking.

Finally she decided: if she couldn't get a date she'd settle for sex. She found him in his office trailer one afternoon, alone, going over plans. She walked up to him and before the moment could arrange itself into something manageable she flashed a breast.

He put his hands on her shoulders.

Oh.

Right here in his office trailer, then. Alright.

His jeans were very tight. She had to work at getting his fly open and his penis out. He came quickly, which she was grateful for, and she was able to get his semen swallowed and get herself straightened up before anyone walked in and stood there looking at him with her heart going faster than she'd expected.

"Would you like to have dinner with me," she said. Not quite a question.

He looked at her for a moment. "Yes," he said.

***

They talked about it later, after things had settled into something that had a shape. He told her: he hadn't been pulling her toward him. He'd been trying to push her away.

She looked at him.

"You misread it," he said. "I didn't know what to do. You were my boss. I was trying to figure out how to stop it without making things worse."

She had expected embarrassment.

She hadn't expected to discover she'd remembered the whole afternoon incorrectly.

She thought about the junior from the fraternity house, years ago. You're hard to read, you know that. And now here was the other side of it: she'd read Philip completely wrong and proceeded with total confidence and gotten exactly what she wanted.

She wasn't sure what to do with that.

"You still said yes to dinner," she said.

"I did," he said.

"Why?"

He considered this with the stillness she'd come to recognize. "Because by the time you asked, I'd already decided I wanted to."

She looked at him for a moment. She believed him.

***

He proposed four months later. She said yes.

What she felt, after - in the bathroom, looking at her own face, which looked the same as it had that morning - was not doubt exactly. It was the vertigo of having gotten something she'd gone after directly, and finding that getting it didn't resolve the wanting but changed its shape.

She went back out. He was sitting where she'd left him, watching the door, and when she came through it something in his face settled.

She sat down beside him.

"Okay," she said. "Yes."

"You already said yes."

"I'm saying it again. More deliberately."

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she was still learning to read. Then he laughed, low and quiet.

"Okay," he said.

*** Five: One Penny

The rush came without warning on a Wednesday, two servers short, the reservation system apparently unaware that the hotel had booked a conference dinner for forty.

Angela moved through the room with the focused economy of someone operating on instinct. Water, bread, specials, check back. Water, bread, specials, check back.

Table eleven was four men in expensive shirts, laughing at something before she arrived.

"Good evening," she said. "I'm Angela, I'll be - "

"You don't sweat much," said the one nearest her, looking up with the pleased expression of a man who'd been saving the line, "for a fat girl."

His friends laughed. One of them actually slapped the table.

She looked at him. He held her gaze, smiling, waiting to see what she'd do.

What she did was nothing. She took their order without expression, refilled their water, delivered their food at the correct temperature, and did not give them a single additional reason to exist in her memory.

When they left, Jonah appeared at her elbow and looked down at the four pennies arranged on the white tablecloth.

Nichole was across the room resetting a table and didn't look over, which was its own kind of tact.

"I'm sorry," Jonah said.

"Don't be," she said. She pocketed them. "I have his food order, his hotel room number, and a very clear memory of his face. He has four pennies' worth of power over my evening." She picked up the water glasses. "I know which one of us is ahead."

Jonah looked at her for a moment. Not the way he usually looked at her - the familiar sideways attention, the careful not-pushing. Something more direct, more brief. Then he picked up the water pitcher and went back to his section.

She noticed the look. She didn't ask about it.

Later, at the end of service, she found him in the side station doing his closeout. She refilled the salt shakers. They worked in silence for a while.

He said, without looking up: "You don't always have to be ahead, you know."

She considered this. "I know," she said.

He nodded, as if this confirmed something, and went back to his count. She couldn't tell if he believed her. She couldn't tell, for once, what he was thinking, and the not-telling was unusual enough that she noticed it and then deliberately set it aside.

On her way back through the room she passed a couple finishing their dessert course. The woman touched her arm as she passed.

"You're very good at this," she said.

"Thank you," Angela said.

The woman smiled and turned back to her husband and Angela moved toward the kitchen and the word good went with her.

She believed what she'd said to Jonah, about the pennies. She believed it when she said it.

In the staff bathroom ten minutes later she stood at the sink running cold water over her wrists. Her face in the mirror looked fine. Professional. The same face men flirted with at the bar. The same body some men watched openly and others dismissed without looking twice. She knew this about herself. She had always known it.

She turned the water off. Turned it back on.

She found she was listening for the table's laugh the way you listen for a sound that's already stopped - checking that it was gone, and in checking, hearing it again.

She dried her hands and went back out.

But it was the wrong thing that stayed with her. Not the man's face, not the pennies. What stayed was the sound of his friends laughing. That specific sound - the ease of it, how little it cost them. How available she'd been as a target, how simple. She'd given them nothing and it hadn't mattered. She found herself hearing it at odd moments over the following weeks. On the bus. Half-asleep.

She told herself she was fine, that she'd handled it well, that she was ahead.

She probably was ahead. It still found her in the dark sometimes, that sound. The ease of it. How quickly a woman could become a joke once a room agreed she was one.

***

The first person who told Angela she was pretty and meant it was Claire.

Claire was her best friend - total, unquestioned. They spent Saturday afternoons in Claire's bedroom doing nothing in particular, which was its own kind of everything.

The kissing was Claire's idea. She proposed it with the practical logic of someone who had thought it through: they should practice, she said. This seemed reasonable. Most things Claire proposed seemed reasonable at the time.

Claire went first. As the man, she said, with the gravity of someone establishing the terms of an experiment. She made her voice deeper than usual and looked at Angela with an expression of theatrical seriousness and began to say things.

She said: you're really pretty. She said: I like your smile. She said: I like the way you dress.

Angela sat there and let this happen. She felt warm and slightly shy and aware of her own face in a way she wasn't usually aware of it. She had not known, before this moment, that being told she was pretty could feel like that.

She had been told she was pretty before, by relatives, by her mother, by the occasional adult who said such things to girls without meaning much by it. This was different. This was Claire looking directly at her and saying it like it was true and specific, like it was about her in particular.

When Claire reached forward and put her hand on her shoulder Angela thought: this is actually going to happen.

It was awkward at first. Neither of them knew what they were doing and it showed. But she closed her eyes and the awkwardness became something else, became just the warmth of it, the closeness, the specific surprising sweetness of being kissed by someone who was paying attention, and she relaxed into it and found that she liked it more than she'd expected to like a practice kiss with her best friend on a Saturday afternoon in Claire's bedroom.

Neither of them named this. Naming would mean acknowledging something that would alter its shape - and that shape was good, and they had no intention of changing it.

Claire brought the pretext back once, briefly. She said: men liked to touch girls' boobies when they kissed. She said boobies.

Angela looked at her.

She said: okay.

This she liked even more than the kissing. She filed this information carefully, in the place where she was beginning to keep things she knew about herself, which was a place that was quietly filling up.

***

It ended the way those things ended - gradually, and then by going to different colleges, and then by not talking about it, which was not the same as forgetting it. Claire became someone she'd been close to once. The Saturday afternoons became something she didn't have a category for and therefore didn't tell, not at Tully's, not to Cara or Deb, not to the men in various rooms over the years who thought they were learning things about her.

What she kept, was that first telling. You're really pretty. I like your smile. Said directly, said like it was true, by someone with no particular reason to say it except that it was.

She had been, in that moment, simply believed in. She hadn't known how much that was worth until she spent the following years looking for it in rooms that were less quiet, with people who were less careful, and finding it sometimes and losing it again and looking for it again.

She didn't connect these things explicitly. She wasn't sure, even later, that she fully connected them. But Claire was there, at the beginning, before the systems, before she knew which looks to trust and which to discount - Claire with her hand on her shoulder and her deepened voice, telling her she was pretty, like it was simply true.

She had believed her. That was the part she carried.