Smooth Talking Stranger

"I respect you," he murmured. "And your views. I think of you as an equal. I respect your brains, and all those big words you like to use. But I also want to rip your clothes off and have sex with you until you scream and cry and see God."

I reflected that for all the people you lost touch with or couldn't hold on to, life occasionally made up for it by giving you the right person at the right time.

This small, solemn creature couldn't even say my name, and he depended on me for everything. Everything. I'd known him for little more than a day. But I would have thrown myself in front of a bus for him. I was shattered by him. This was awful.

All my life, I'd had to grapple with the needs engendered by the lack of a father. It had left me with a deeply buried attraction to strong men, men with the capacity to dominate, and that terrified me.

("You have no melatonin," Dane had once marveled. "It's like you were meant to live in the library.")

The phone stayed silent. I guessed that Jack had given up on calling me, which made me perplexed and uneasy. As much as I didn't want to talk about Luke, or how I was feeling, I wanted to know how Jack was.

Have you eaten

I didn't bother with my contact lenses. I decided to wear my glasses, a pair of sensible rectangular wire-rims

"Mama," he says.

I thrill to the word. And I go to him

I married Jack two months after he proposed, which shocked all of my friends and most