I kept my arms around her. My stomach rumbled and I had an idea: The path to a man’s heart was through his stomach; did the same hold true for a woman? It couldn’t hurt. I might have been a subpar cook regarding lunch and dinner, but when it came to breakfast I was a pro. It was the meal I most often skipped when I had wrestled, and in retaliation for those lean days, when I could finally eat at will I taught myself to make a mean breakfast, and make it well.

I crawled from bed and dressed. Carolyn’s panties rested atop my shoe and I glanced at her to be certain she was asleep. I grabbed them and held them up to the light. They were red plaid, string bikini. There was a tear in the band, the cloth thin and slightly discolored at the crotch. I felt gleefully dirty with them in my hands. Then I stuffed them into my pocket and rushed out the door.

I wasn’t hung over, was curiously sharp when I should have been groggy, as though my mental clarity depended on something as simple as who I happened to sleep beside the night before. I thought of going back to leave a note in case Carolyn woke, but I didn’t and ran down the dusty stairs and out into the freezing Chicago morning through the flakes of snow that fell from the low sky and melted in the waiting slush; the cold air came sharply into my lungs and numbed the edge of my nose. I made it to the grocery store in five minutes, up one aisle, down the next, the entire time feeling the indentation of Carolyn’s panties through my denim pocket while wondering why in the hell I had taken them in the first place. Well, because I was a pervert. That’s the answer I came up with, and true to form, I continued relishing their presence.

I left the store and hurried back, quietly opening the door to keep from waking Carolyn. But she was already awake, sitting up with her back against the wall and pulled tightly into herself like a bouquet of flowers. The blanket was pulled to below her pits, revealing the white in her throat and the delicate line of her barely visible collarbones. Her clothes lay untouched on the floor. I grinned at her as though we shared a secret unknown to the rest of the world.

“Hi,” she said playfully.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. A little bit of a headache.”

“Are you hungry? I picked up a few things for breakfast. And I bought coffee, too.”

“Yes, I’m starving. But I really have to pee,” she said, as though the two were somehow connected.