We’re lying on the couch, grinding on the couch, when he says, finger to my lips, in an overly innocent voice that has no idea the incredible faux pas it’s about to commit, “Now you be a good little girl and don’t move. Just wait right here.”
I pause, distracted, jolted. “Excuse me?”
His eyes widen as the multiple potential layers of his statement sink in, meanings rife with candy, white vans, and puppies. “Oh dear!” he says, “I promise that’s not where I meant to go with that.”
We collapse laughing, the moment lost now in something else. We lie curled together, our hands lost in each other’s hair, and I tell a story of being approached once by a young man in a nightclub who’d had one too many beer, “We’d been dancing, nothing special. We didn’t know each other at all, but he came up to me in a pause in the music, drink in hand, smiling, and said, You know what I’d like? Of course I shook my head no. I didn’t even know his name. If you came home with me so I can show you who your daddy is.“