Which meant no smoking when there was every reason to: the fact that Gaby’s interview was twenty minutes away, the sloshy mix of dread and possibility when she thought about her working in the cubicle just down the hall, the prospect of doing this drive together every morning, Zanne’s fingers brushing against Gaby’s thigh when she downshifted the truck onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

It had been the usual game of cat and mouse when they met four months ago at the Metric show in San Francisco. Zanne had seen Gaby dancing in the corner with friends and known she was worth five of the girl onstage. She’d drifted closer, sensing Gaby wanted to be plucked, the dark curls falling over her face offering only a pretense of absorption in the music. After the show, they’d gone to a diner in the Mission that Zanne had been eating at for years, whenever she visited, and then to the spot on Valencia where Gaby was dogsitting. They’d fucked on a thin mattress perched atop a row of milk crates. Later, still in bed, Gaby had asked Zanne how old she was.

“How old do you think?”

Zanne traced the edges of Gaby’s belly button.

“Twenty-eight?” Gaby guessed.

Zanne laughed hard. “Try adding ten years.”

But she could see that the difference hardly registered for Gaby, who was so far away from the expiration date on her own beauty that she couldn’t conceive of Zanne approaching hers. Zanne’s fingers wandered downward.

“Your eyes are so blue,” Gaby had said, gazing up at Zanne. “You’re not wearing contacts, are you?”

“No.” Zanne didn’t mind the comments so much anymore, now that it was mostly women who made them. She was still a little bit pretty, but men didn’t seem to notice anymore. Every now and then one might allow that she was “striking,” but usually they were intimidated by her toughness or flummoxed by her masculinity or else they looked right through her because she was not for them. She liked things better this way.

“You’re like Snow White, if Snow White was a daddy.”

“I’ll be your daddy,” Zanne had said, and Gaby had shivered into her hand.