“Try me,” he says softly, and there is something in his half-swollen eye then that worries me more than the three bruisers who’d jumped him on the sidewalk.

“Oh yeah?” I try to sound macho. “If you’re so big and tough, why was I the one chasing away the goon squad, then scraping your sorry ass off the pavement?”

“Jumped me from behind,” he says ruefully, adjusting the ice packet. “Who were they, friends of yours?”

“Oh, just a couple of locals who found out there was a registered sex offender in the neighborhood. Come back tomorrow night. Same time, same place, you can probably catch the same show.”

“Feeling sorry for yourself?” he asks quietly.

“Absolutely.”

“That explains the whiskey.”

“I got a whole ’nother bottle. Want some?”

“I don’t drink.”

For some reason, that pisses me off. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do? … Goody two, goody two, goody goody two shoes.”

Jones stares at me funny.

“Jesus,” I explode, “it’s Adam Ant. From the eighties? Where’d you grow up, under a rock?”

“In a basement, technically. And you’re too young to remember the eighties.”

Now I shrug uncomfortably, realizing too late how much I’ve given away. “I knew this girl,” I mumble. “Big Adam Ant fan.”

“This the one you raped?” he asks levelly

“Oh shut up! Just shut the fuck up. I’m so sick and tired of everyone pretending to know all about me and my goddamn sex life. It wasn’t like that. It. Was not. Like. That.”

“I looked you up,” he continues, monotone man. “You had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. That’s statutory rape. So yes, it was like that.”

“I loved her!” I explode.

He stares at me.

“We had something special. It wasn’t all sex. I needed her. She needed me. We were the only two people who cared about each other. That’s special, dammit. That’s love.”

He stares at me.

“Well, it is! You can’t help who you fall in love with. Plain and simple.”

He finally speaks. “Do you know that among hard-core pedophiles, the single largest common denominator is having had their first sexual experience be with an adult while they were under the age of fifteen?”

I close my eyes. “Oh fuck you, too!” I say tiredly. I find the surviving Maker’s Mark on the counter and go to work on the cap, though I’m starting to feel so nauseous that my heart isn’t in it.

“You shouldn’t have touched her,” he continues. “Restraint would’ve been love. Letting her grow up would’ve been love. Not taking advantage of a lonely and vulnerable junior high student would’ve been love. Being friends would’ve been love.”