“Listen, baby, let’s go somewhere else. We don’t need to be here, right?”

Pat sucked the last drops of whiskey out of the ice and nodded. He was entering a world below the one he normally lived in. “Where do you want to go? Can you drive?”

“I can’t drive, but I’m around the corner. It’s a nice place. Quiet. Private.”

“Oh, how far?”

“Just one block behind here. We can walk. And plenty to drink, baby. Beer, liquor.”

Pat checked his leg. Completely numb, which was good; he could make the walk slowly. Pat threw a final $10 on the bar, and that took care of things.

They exited to the outside world. The chilly evening air felt too deep, the parking lot somehow calcined and hyperreal, and this lacerated Pat’s senses, sending him into a slight stumble. Carmen held his hand, and he steadied. A few doleful Irish ghosts pilgrimed past his mind. His parents, various Christian Brothers, an uncle or two. No need for this, Pat, they told him. Like a bandit she lies in wait, and multiplies the unfaithful among men. But then at the end of the pockmarked asphalt—on the corner of Lovers Lane, no less—he overruled them. No one will know. We’re all damned anyway. Carmen’s hand was at his back as they turned the corner toward her apartment building. At the door Carmen pulled out her key ring, which held a rabbit’s foot dyed purple. Carmen pressed Pat’s shirt and straightened his Brooks Brothers pinstripes, her hand sweeping his chest and down his arms, half propping him up, half hugging him. Pat barely noticed because he had justified this to himself as all well and good, and he wasn’t stumbling along with some whore. As she popped the dead bolt, Pat did study Carmen in the streetlight—pancake makeup that now showed its brushwork, a few eyelashes clotted with mascara. The door swung open, and she swept them back into the darkness. Carmen took them three steps in and kicked off her heels, her dark red toes soaking into the burnt-orange shag carpet. The house smelled of a potpourri of adobo, incense, cigarettes, and Aqua Net hair spray. She turned toward Pat, and before his eyes could adjust to the dark she was kissing him and her lips tasted like whiskey sour and her fingers ran along the back of his neck and she took all the tension out there. Pat’s hands came around her awkwardly, embracing her back like this was a movie kiss. And it was so strange because this was a stranger he was kissing, and he didn’t know where to put his hands, but then lust finally kicked in and his fingers crept up to her chest.

“Oh, Pat, you’re a bad boy, huh? I like it.”