“I just wondered. We spend so much time together, it’s like you have a twelve-hour shore leave, or we’re cramming for a state exam on one another, or . . .”

“Cancer,” he said, nodding. “That wouldn’t have been the analogy I would have chosen.”

After their fifth date, he hadn’t called her for six days. Suzanne was stunned. She forgot what he looked like. “Smoke in a room, that’s what he is,” she told Lucy. “Smoke in a room.” She started thinking about him as the guy she liked who never called her again.

“What’s the matter?” Michelle asked her.

“I’ve been in a dating accident,” she announced dramatically. “A terrible, terrible dating accident.”

It became Suzanne’s favorite phrase. “Ask me what’s the matter,” she said to whomever she talked to.

Then he called, and again she was stunned. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” she told him.

“Why?” he asked. “I told you I was going to New York and that I’d be back on Monday—today.”

She had forgotten, but because of this mistake he had become more vivid to her, more real. They’d had a crisis in common—though, to be sure, in Suzanne’s mind more than anywhere else—and they’d come through it. They had survived the dating accident together, and on their sixth date they had total endless nightmare sex. “Big Kabuki Sex,” Suzanne called it.

“This is interesting, isn’t it?” Jesse remarked during a rest stop, then said, “That sounded odd. I just didn’t want to frighten you with affection.” Suzanne thanked him, and wondered if she should say that she, too, thought the sex was interesting.

Instead, she said, “I called someone the other day, and his message gave the number of his car phone. I left my home number and said that if I wasn’t there, I could probably be reached in my crop duster.”

“I consider it a kind of defeat to call someone in their car,” Jesse countered, stifling a yawn.

“Do you want to stay over?” she asked, her chest tight.

“I really should go. I’m writing in the morning, but I—”

“Okay,” she interjected quickly. “Okay,” she said again, this time quieter.

“I’d love to, though,” he said, nuzzling her affectionately. “You’re so calm, so still.”

“I’m like a peaceful flesh rock,” she said moodily.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he said ironically. He turned her toward him and put her head on his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.

“Which nothing?” he asked.

There was a beat, after which Suzanne said quietly, “You’re leaving me.”

“I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving to write. I have to—”