He listened, smiling, as he sat on the sofa with his legs squeezed together, his head in his right hand. He looked even younger than he had the other night, more like an intelligent teenager who lets the grownups talk and keeps his impressions to himself. And conceals his own reactions behind an impenetrable smile.

No, I wasn’t going to panic again!

“You could’ve told me all that on the phone. Why did you make me come halfway across town in the rain just to hear your apologies?”

I confess, it caught me off guard.

“Did you think I was going to make a pass at you the minute you were in the door?”

His smile broadened, his eyes creased; he seemed to be enjoying himself.

“What I think is, I don’t know why I came any more than you know why you asked me. Let’s talk about something else or we’ll just keep going in circles. Besides, I’m hungry. You got anything to eat?

My dried-up cold cuts gave us a laugh. Mathieu insisted on eating them, even after I tried to tempt him with the Laurier Bar-B-Q.

“I eat barbecued chicken three times a week, but I don’t see horrors like those cold cuts every day of the week.”

He didn’t want either beer or wine and we knocked back a bottle of new-style Coke which provided a topic of conversation for another ten minutes. Complicity was established very quickly. Too quickly almost. After all, I wasn’t looking for a pal, if I was looking for anything at all—and I wasn’t sure I was, in fact—yet I felt safe with him, as if I’d known him for a long time. Once we’d polished off our meal Mathieu reminded me of the corny pretext I’d used on the phone to entice him into my lair and we watched L’assassinat du Père Noël on Radio-Québec. The whole thing. In silence. Like old friends.

Mathieu didn’t put his clothes on until it was time to leave, around eleven o’clock.

We shook hands affectionately, if you can say that about a handshake. I asked if we could get together again that week, he said sure, then he ran to his taxi after giving me his phone number at Eaton’s.

After he’d left I felt as if I’d learned something in the course of the evening. But what? I felt hokey as hell—and absolutely wonderful.

I fell asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

“We must have looked like a couple of kids. I felt like a ­fifteen-year-old about to sin for the first time!”

Everybody laughed. It felt good.