He chuckled again, but didn’t say a word. He glanced back a couple times in a couple seconds, but this time that other look was gone. There was another one in its place and that’s when I knew I had him. I knew this other look because I felt it had crept across my own face before, though I couldn’t actually see it. Didn’t matter. I knew it had been there. The first time Leroy clasped my waist real quick while I moved past him to reach a Lucky Charms cereal box sitting on top of the refrigerator, when his touch lasted way longer than an accidental brush. I had looked back at him and grinned in spite of myself, knowing what his offer was though he hadn’t yet officially put it on the table. A stupid, clumsy look—frozen by the disbelief I could be desired.

“What kinda fun you talkin’ about?” the cab man said, his interest betrayed by an adolescent crack on the question mark. Then, of course, he cleared his throat.

“I don’t know, just fun. Whatever that mean to you.”

“Naw, you tell me what it mean to you.”

It had to be his idea.

The speedometer jerked down from thirty-five to twenty and we were crisscrossing the street’s white lane boundary lines. I didn’t say a word even to correct him or to protect us. I just sat quiet and smiled out the window, catching real quick a star that was shooting or falling; I couldn’t tell which. Didn’t matter in the sky hovering over this part of town, so there was nothing to tell him he should see. A shooting star with nowhere to go aroused less excitement than a falling one.

“I don’t know what fun is anymore.” And that wasn’t a lie.

“Oh, you know.” He let the chuckle loose first so a stomach-filled laugh could slide into its place. “You know. I know.”

I just laughed right along with him, hoping he was thinking about head or a hand job. I thought about how the gray hairs on his chest would most certainly scratch. I wondered if he would be as hard, sturdy, energetic as Leroy. His age should get me off the hook with that, although it might not since it probably had been ages since he had been with a young thing like me. He retreated back to the chuckle before I knew it. Against Aunt Jewel’s instruction, I intervened.

“I guess my idea of fun is the same as everybody else’s. Me and a man I like doing the things we like to do.”