“I have a husband,” she tells him, but it just sounds ordinary, like having a shirt.

“And how did you meet him?”

She sighs and sips, drops to the rented sofa. “We met a few times, actually, although he never remembered. We met at a bar, at a party, and I was flirty with an old friend of his.”

Reynard sits opposite, on a chair, watchful as a chess champion. “Where’s the friend now?”

“Dead,” she says. Maybe if she makes the seduction lousy, then it won’t work.

“Were you drunk?”

“At the party? Don’t assume that.” Rachel takes another sip and feels her lips, juicy, relent and grin at him. “But yes. And then, the second time, he was on a porch with his girlfriend. She had this little dog, there’s another story about that, and it was peeing, out in the backyard where we were both invited for brunch. One of those scraggly yards in the Sunset where nothing grows, like a flying saucer landed and the crops all died. We talked for like ten minutes, and again he doesn’t remember that.”

“That’s bad,” Reynard tuts. “Men should remember.”

“Then I really met him,” she says. “My husband. I knew I was going to meet him. It was a fix-up only I knew about. That Something Dragon place on Balboa, with lazy Susans on every table. He’d just been dumped. It could have gone good or bad, but this time I was ready. I wasn’t young, tipsy, stupid, dreamy—”

Reynard leans farther in. “Innocent, reckless, nervous.”

“That time he remembered,” she says, “because that time the time was right.”

“We met before too,” Reynard says, “but it’s only now …”

He doesn’t finish it, just kisses her, on her denim, between her legs, which are, Rachel notices in the mirror put up to make the room seem bigger, wide open for him. Ready. What else do you do in a house you have rented in the late afternoon? You can drink in a bar, you can walk anywhere. But they are here and here they are. “This is all part of my evil plan,” Reynard says, his lips against her fleshy flesh. He’s got her standing up, his hands on her shoulders as he laps at her neck, and then down the stuffy hallway to the comfortable bed, the top of the window almost even with the tips of the neighbors’ trees, and the cotton clean and soft.

“I know it is,” she says, when she hits the sheets.

Reynard stands over her and reaches down to unbutton, unbuckle, unsleeve her out of what she, today, decided to wear.

“I should get dressed,” she says now.

“No, no, no,” he keeps murmuring at her body.