Then I hugged you and you hugged me back and we held each other and the feel of you was too much and then your hands started moving and then mine did, too, and it felt like my insides caught fire and then our lips were pressed together and you moaned and, Lauren, I can’t tell you what that did to me, hearing you respond to me, feeling like I had that effect on you. Do you know how long it’s been since I felt a woman respond to me that way?

So all that time over the last several weeks ruminating and deciding that this can’t happen and within ten minutes, it’s happening. We can’t keep our hands off each other, we’re naked on your couch, going at it like animals, raw and sweaty and ravenous.

And there was nothing in the world that has ever felt as satisfying as hearing you climax, Lauren, that tiny hitch in your voice, that harsh gasp in my ear, the spasm of your hips. I felt like the greatest man alive! Is that what love feels like? Feeling like when you’re with the one you love, you’re on top of the world? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten.

I feel like I’ve just taken my hands off the wheel, closed my eyes, and floored the accelerator.

12

Simon

In the morning, I start with my Five at Five—a five-mile run at five in the morning. My mother used to do that. Four days a week, at five bells, she’d strap on her shoes and “eat some pavement,” as she put it. She had eighteen marathons to her credit, qualifying for Boston repeatedly. “It’s time all your own,” she used to say. “No stress, no phone calls, no arguments, just you. It’s like a million dollars’ worth of therapy.”

I head east, crossing over Austin into the west side of Chicago. You wouldn’t call the most crime-ridden and violent part of the city scenic, but there is something about its dilapidated humility and gritty determination that moves me.

Everyone thinks about the shootings and carnage, but I see the teenage girl playing violin by her second-story bedroom window near Augusta and Waller every morning at the crack of dawn; the old man in a beige uniform sitting on his stoop, getting ready for a red-eye shift, drinking coffee out of a thermos and calling me “a damn fool!” as I run past Long Avenue; the grandmother doing Bible study with several teens on the front porch, weather permitting, otherwise by the front living-room window; the woman in the apartment on Leclaire, coming home in a green waitress uniform with a backpack full of books after her overnight shift ended.

Running through this neighborhood reminds me that some people have bigger things to worry about than whether they get promoted to a stupid full professorship at their school. Some people are fighting for a decent life.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy for jogging through here, and maybe Vicky’s right that I’m just too stubborn not to run here, like I’m trying to prove something. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been followed by a police cruiser, the officers slowing next to me and asking me what the hell I’m thinking. Maybe I am a damn fool. But hey, I’ve been called worse.

—

Like “Mini-Me,” for example. That’s what Mitchell Kitchens, a massive senior, an all-state varsity wrestler, used to call me, back when I was a diminutive freshman at Grace Consolidated, barely over five feet tall and maybe a hundred pounds. Mitchell was built like a brick house, with a neck like a tree stump, so thick it was hard to see where it ended and his head began. He had these nasty teeth and bad breath and a nose that had been broken several times. His eyes were narrow and spread wide apart, giving him a prehistoric look.