When she arrived at the restaurant, he was already there, the way German trains are always already there, waiting in the station. His size was something else again. It was impossible not to notice him, looming a head or even two above everyone around him. If someone asked her in that moment—the waiter, for example, going past with his tray held high—whether she liked being made to feel physically small next to a man, she would have had to answer yes. Yes, but with an asterisk! *Physically small but spiritually powerful. In other words, she liked him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing until she said he could be a wolf, and then he should be pure wolf with no trace of the sheep for the duration of time they would spend fucking in her bed, after which he should go back to being someone who wouldn’t in a million years think of grabbing her throat when he wanted something. Was this a problem? And one more thing: from time to time he should be very slow and gentle when he went about blowing her house down.

He handed her a stem of tiny, pale purple flowers. She thought he’d picked them on the way, but later it turned out that he’d bought a whole bouquet, but gave the rest away to a pregnant woman on the subway who’d admired them and asked who they were for, because at that moment it occurred to him that he’d bought a bouquet of flowers for a stranger, which might have been overdoing it. They were shown to their table. The restaurant was dim and warm, the walls lined with the old glass cabinets of the pharmacy the place had been until, after having been boarded up for decades, it reopened as an Italian restaurant. Whenever a waiter or waitress came to the table, the German Boxer stopped what he was saying to smile and thank them for whatever they had just set down.

The conversation moved lightly, swiftly. His nose didn’t break easily, only his ribs, he told her, and his lips—his lips tended to get busted and bleed when he boxed, because they were big. He asked if she had long arms, and before she could answer, he took her hand across the table and guided it to where his bottom left rib stuck out because it had been broken clean through, leaving it to float unattached in his body.