Mimi was undoing his belt buckle, then pushed him back on the bed and plucked his Sambas off, followed by his pants in record time. She straddled him and then placed her hand over his mouth as if she thought he was going to protest, and she wasn’t interested in hearing it.

Ezra closed his eyes and tried to refocus. But now his mind was spinning wildly, a whirling buzz of nerves that hit him like a tornado: about Mimi’s alleged canceled flight, about the whole shebang with Frankie, about last night’s poker game, about the Zamboni and property destruction, about, well, all of it. And he tried to breathe in and out and count to five just as Frankie had done with him in the café earlier this morning, but he couldn’t concentrate on kissing Mimi and counting, so he must have recoiled or put his hands on her shoulders to push her away and give him a little space. His chest felt like it was going to explode; his stomach had bottomed out.

Mimi rolled off from him and bounced to her feet in one fluid motion.

“Great, so now you’re not interested in sex?”

Ezra pushed to his elbows and tried to breathe, tried to stay calm. “What? No. I’m always interested in sex.” He extended his hand to draw her back onto the bed, but he didn’t cover it well, and she stepped back. He inhaled, felt his pulse slow just enough, and tried again. “Mimi, come on. I’m just really wiped. And I feel like I need to shower, brush my teeth. That stuff.” He exhaled, inhaled, exhaled again.

She tapped her foot and crossed her arms.

“Well, were you going to tell me about her? If I hadn’t shown up?”

“Why wouldn’t you have shown up?” Ezra hadn’t meant to ask it. He didn’t want to ask it! His pulse spiked all over again. Shit shit shit shit shit. All he wanted was to kiss his girlfriend, propose at midnight, and move on. Why were the past twenty-four hours so packed with emotional land mines, when he had spent a perfectly wonderful, perfectly placid thirty-two years avoiding them? He couldn’t even blame Frankie for this last one! He stilled himself and willed Mimi to move on too, not make this any more complicated than he feared it was about to get. They were so compatible, so in sync, that he thought she might float on down the river of denial with him.

“No, I mean, yes, I was always showing up, obviously,” Mimi said. “But I thought we agreed? That you would keep your distance?”

Ezra blinked, surprised at the implication, and something roiled in him. That even while she was concealing something, and Ezra was growing increasingly, uneasily sure that she was indeed concealing something, that she could turn it back on him. He squelched his rising agitation. He had to get through this; he would just press through this.

“Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “Come here. I’ll brush my teeth and all of that later.”