Martin plunks them down, shimmery lowballs nursing big craggy ice cubes. “Sazeracs.” He’d made Rachel’s as weak as he could get away with. Reynard downs most of his and looks at the ceiling while his belly—Martin and Rachel can almost see it in his shirt—purrs with it, some sleeping creature in its lair. Rachel is repulsed and drinks to forget it. Yet his eyes on her. Yet his hands on hers. Yet his face, more and more unshaven with every, what is happening, single second, his mouth moving and orange inside, yet, yet, yet.

“What is it?” he asks her.

He says this new startling thing like he’s continuing a conversation, but then she answers it like one, too. “I married him,” she says, “and everything sweet about him is irritating sometimes.”

“Well, that’s awful.”

“There’s project management—”

“Worse than that.”

“—so he’s gone, at work, all the time, and I don’t know how to spend the rest of it,” she says. “They won’t increase my hours past part-time. So there’s the other part of the time. I can only do the gym so much, a book with too much fancy coffee, and then I just wait.”

Reynard widens his eyes and they’re something in a planetarium, spinning and starry. She moves into orbit. “What are you waiting for?”

“I get scared,” she says, “all the time.”

“I can take your time away,” Reynard tells her.

Martin clinks a bottle cleaning up, on purpose. Rachel backs out a little. “What are you talking about, what do you mean?”

“I think you need something inside you,” Reynard says. “Smells like your husband isn’t the right one. You need something wild and toothy.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”

“No,” Reynard says, “we definitely are.”

She reaches behind her, her fingers moving slow and useless, then down in front where the bar has little hooks, for a sweater if she brought one. “I have to go.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I’m going home.”

He is leaning very close and talks like he’s memorized it, a set of rules or an eternal prayer, right quick to her worried face. “We could go to anyone’s home. My boot through the window, gone in a flash before the owners get back. What are you afraid of?”

“A large horse,” she says, automatically, and for the first time.

“I know all about that.” Reynard’s murmur is like a lizard through the door. “I’ll lick you right on your own neck. We don’t even need a house. There’s a field, a copse—”