She waved her hand to signify the kissing, all the moments spread out over the course of a week. That’s what happened when you had no definition. Your life was reduced to floppy hand gestures.

“This isn’t easy for me to admit,” he said. “I just want you to know the whole story. Do you want to hear it?”

It was a very good question. He sat down on the cement barrier, and invited her to do the same. She stood.

“In my town,” he said, “a lot of people settle down right out of high school. Something about that always scared me, that people got stuck doing that one thing for the rest of their lives, in that one town. I wanted to move to New York. I wanted to meet lots of people. Once I moved, I realized I couldn’t go back to that. Sarah’s great, but she was ready to…well, not get married right away, but stay together forever. That wasn’t what I wanted.”

“So why didn’t you break up with her before?” Scarlett asked. “Before me?”

“I knew I wanted to do it,” he said. “But we’ve…we had been dating for two years. I couldn’t break up with her over the phone, or in a note. I had to do it in person. I owed it to her. Believe it or not, I was trying to be decent.”

“Decent?” she repeated.

“It made sense to me at the time,” he said. “I was going to do it when I went home to visit, after the show closed. Which is a while from now. So I kissed you. I thought if I didn’t make a move, you’d meet someone else.”

Ordinarily, that would have had Scarlett in hysterics, but she wasn’t in a laughing mood. The familiar pang was kicking in. Eric wrapped his hands around the back of his head and gave a long, sad sigh.

“I thought I knew what I was doing until Sarah surprised me the other night. She drove all the way up from North Carolina. I had no idea she was coming. She just showed up at my door at one in the morning, exhausted. When you saw me the next day, we had just started the talk. It went kind of badly.”

It made Scarlett queasy to think that he had had a girlfriend all along—a tiny, tan, perky girlfriend—a girl who had been around for two years. But he had wanted to do the right thing. He had gone about it a little clumsily, but the effort was there. And he had broken up with her under emotional duress. The mouse of hope was chewing its way through the baseboard of “you don’t stand a chance.”

“Don’t think I don’t realize how this all makes me sound,” he said, his voice getting soft and drawly again. “And I don’t blame Spencer for what he did. He’s your brother. I would have wanted to do the same thing. I swear I was trying to do right by everyone, but I hurt two people in the process. A punch in the face is understandable. And I like to think the bruise makes me look more rugged.”