They’d slept together that first day, even—which is a gentle way of saying that she had given him head in his garage and he’d spent most of the afternoon fucking her from behind while the gardener was trimming the hedges—and so he decided to throw her a bone and invite her out to lunch-slash-dinner. Some nice spot on Melrose, he reasoned—one of those Italian ones—which would make her happy to be seen at but was actually a year or so out of the loop. This way, if he were to run into somebody that he knew—or, even worse, mattered—then he could laugh it off rather than have to explain himself or worry about some picture showing up in People magazine or the like. Some days he wished dinner was a little easier to manage, rather than the elaborate shell game that it often turned out to be. It was also unthinkable to have to go through the whole dance of taking her home, then coming back to the house for a few hours while she got dolled up, and then having to go back to her place again later and meet her friend-slash-roommate, who would go on and on about how much she loved his films (this happened almost every time he dated an aspiring actress and every time he dated a “civilian,” so this wasn’t some pathetic, elevated sense of self; he was simply being realistic), and then driving her over to the restaurant. Instead, he suggested that they go down and park a bit early—she insisted that she couldn’t go out looking like she did, in her workout stuff—and he’d buy her something new, a nice new outfit, which could be a lot of fun. For her, at least. Her eyes lit up when she heard that one, the idea of going shopping and having dinner all in one fell swoop. This was going to be just like hanging out at the mall with her girlfriends back in Kansas—she was literally from Kansas, no joke—except that she’d be having sex again later, which is probably not how her shopping sprees at home in Overland Park usually ended. Although who knows? People are funny.