“Yeah, Manhattan. I get it,” she says, without changing expressions. “It’s just not that funny.”

“Right,” he acknowledges, then moves ahead. “Anyway, that’s where we were, over by the softball fields, and, see, we got talking about stuff, had a couple drinks, you know, and we just hung out a few times or whatever.”

“I think they still call it ‘dating,’ even in New York.”

“No it wasn’t like a ‘thing’! We didn’t date or anything, we just …”

“Slept together.”

“… something like that.” He falters a bit but plows on, spitting out the truth. Well, part of it, anyway. “Yeah, this one time we did, yes. Do that, I mean. Not sleeping together, though, just some sex stuff. Sort of. But it was nothing …”

“So that makes it all right, then … what I saw.”

“No, not all right, I’m not saying that, I just mean …” He considers where to go next, what minefields to avoid and which to blunder off into. “… hell, I dunno, just that there’s some background there. A shared background between us.”

“Right. I see.” She responds quickly, in small, staccato bursts of language, rather than really thinking through her next sentence. “I get it. I do. I do get it.”

“So, it’s not like, I mean … a ‘fling’ or anything.”

“It isn’t?!”

“Well, OK, yes, a fling, but … a fling with qualifiers. With history.” He throws the last part in just for effect, the history bit, but hoping that it sticks somehow.

“You didn’t tell me, though. About this ‘history’ of yours, I mean. All this time and you didn’t say anything.”

“No, I didn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“I thought that I wouldn’t, you know …”

“Uh-uh, no, I don’t know. What?” Then she realizes. “Get caught?”

“No.” He stutters twice before saying, “B-b-be understood.”

“Well, you’re right, you wouldn’t b-b-be,” she says, obviously mocking him.

“See?”

“But that shouldn’t stop you from telling me!” She says this louder than she means to, but it’s out now. Hangs there in the air for a moment, her dark cloud of disbelief, then drifts off.

“What was I gonna say?”

“I don’t know, it’s not really my moral dilemma, is it?”

“It’s not a …” He thinks carefully now, a misstep here could be fatal. There’s definitely some sort of morality involved in having sex with your neighbors, he muses. “… OK, yeah, it is, like, a moral thing, but I think we can still …”

“Still what? What?!” She stops for a moment, stops loading clothes into her flowered Laura Ashley day bag and turns to him. Faces him directly. “I’d love to hear how that sentence ends. Tell me.”