"I used to see you around headquarters," he said, "across the cafeteria, turning a corner at the end of a corridor. Or sometimes I'd be sitting in a meeting and I'd see you walk past the open door." He shook his head and smiled, as if the memory gave him pleasure. "You know how my office looks out over the parking lot? I'd watch for you in the evenings going out to your car. I'd stay at my desk waiting, finding something to do. I never wanted to go home until I saw you."

I stared down at my hands in my lap and remembered all of the times I'd stood at my car and glanced up for him-quickly and furtively so that no one, especially Bill, would catch me-just to know that he was there. And I remembered the emptiness I'd felt when the light was off and he was gone. I'd never seen him looking back. But then, that had been the story all along. I'd always reached for him and never felt him reaching back.

"Alex, I couldn't stand the thought that you were with someone else. It made me crazy. A hundred times over the past year, I almost called you."

"Why? To find out if I was seeing anyone else? Because in the end, Bill, when I wanted you to call me, when I needed to hear from you, you weren't there."

"As I recall, you dumped me." He said it with a little smile, trying but not succeeding to sound light. "You didn't want to see me anymore."

I caved back into my chair, instantly weary from the notion that as hard as I'd tried to help him understand, he hadn't gotten it then, and he still didn't get it. "It was not you, Bill. It was never you. It was the circumstances. For me, they began to overwhelm everything, and you wouldn't change them."

"Alex, I couldn't go public about us."

"I wasn't asking you to call a press conference. All I wanted was to stop sneaking around like a couple of fugitives. I wanted to be able to go out to dinner without worrying that someone might see us together. I wanted to stop feeling as if I wasn't worthy of being with you. The longer that went on, the more I started to feel that you… you were ashamed of me."

"You know that wasn't it. I was about to be named chairman, and I could not be involved with a woman who worked for me. The company has rules about that. And it wouldn't have been good for you, either."

I resisted snapping back. I had always hated it when he'd made a decision that clearly benefited him, then turned it around to make it sound as if he were really doing it for me.

He reached for the bread, which I hadn't even noticed had arrived, and tore off a piece that was dark and dense. "All I'm saying is you could have given it a little more time. You could have waited."

"The minute I raised the issue, Bill, the very second I spoke up and finally asked for what I wanted, you backed off. You were suddenly unavailable. You were in meetings. You were traveling. You stopped calling." I took a breath and tried to steady my voice, which was starting to inch up the decibel scale. I wanted to tell him how deeply painful that had been, how thoroughly destabilizing, how it had removed from me any sense of security and self-confidence I'd managed to nurture in the shelter of our relationship. But I thought if I did, I would start crying. "It wasn't about timing, Bill. It was you not wanting to be with me as much as I wanted to be with you."

There. I'd said it. I'd ripped off the scab, and it hurt as much now as it had then. Maybe more.

"And the worst part, the worst thing you ever did to me, was to not tell me. You disappeared. First, you didn't want to be seen with me-"

"That is not true, and you know it."

"-then you vanished from my life. And I had to keep going to meetings with you and sit across the table from you and watch you give presentations. And you, all the while ignoring me, or pretending I wasn't there. I couldn't stand it anymore. That's why I left." I reached out and touched the base of my wineglass. "At least I told you I was leaving. You were gone long before we ever said good-bye."

The words were old, the feelings familiar, the hurt still there. This was well-trod territory for us, and I was disappointed to realize that there was nothing new here.

Henry reappeared to top off our glasses. As he served, I looked out at the other tables, because I couldn't look at Bill. What do you know? We weren't the only two people in the world tonight. A sprinkling of women dotted the dining room, but I could hear only men's voices. It was as if the years of exclusivity in this place had filtered out the sound of a female voice. I tried to tell from their faces what they were saying. Were they happy? Sad? Hurt?

The cubes rattled as Henry slipped the bottle of burgundy back into the ice bucket. I looked at Bill. "Why would you come here like this? Why would you want to dredge all this up again?"

"You called me."

"I called for professional support."

His gentle smile acknowledged my stubborn self-deceit and, at the same time, let me get away with it. "You're so smart about these things, Alex-smarter than I am. I thought you would have figured it out by now."

"I haven't figured anything out, Bill."

It was his turn to look around the room and gather his thoughts. "You scared me."

"I what?"

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. He was speaking quietly, but with so much urgency, I couldn't look away. "You're right. I did back off. At the time I thought… I don't know what I thought, that it was best for you, that with two careers, both of us in the same company, it was never going to work out. But the truth was, I was thinking about you all the time. When I was with you, when I wasn't with you. I couldn't get you out of my head."

"That's how people feel when they're in love. It's how I felt about you."

"I never felt that way about my ex-wife-or anyone else, for that matter. I thought that because I couldn't control this thing, it was a weakness, some kind of a failure of will. I've never lost control like that. I thought the best thing was to take a break, to let things cool off a little."

"If you had just told me that's what you were doing-"

"I wasn't thinking about what that might do to you. It was a mistake and I came here to apologize to you. I'm sorry, Alex. I'm sorry."

I sat back in my chair and felt the resentment I'd been carrying around, the intractable knot of bitterness, begin to melt like the butter softening on the plate in front of me. I looked at his face. He'd shaved since this morning, shaved for me. I remembered how it felt to touch his hair. It was thick and dark and rich, the kind of hair Italian and Greek men take to their graves.

"All I can tell you is that I miss you. I miss talking to you and holding you and laughing with you. There's no one else in my life that I feel that way about. And I miss being with you, making love to you. When I got your message, I can't tell you how that made me feel after so long. And when I saw you today in that meeting, being that close without being able to touch you, I thought I was going to grab you right there in front of all those people. I took it out on poor old what's his name with the funny hair."

"Big Pete."

"Even now… just seeing you again…"

I could feel his eyes on me, on my hair, on my eyes, my lips, my throat, and I began to feel a flush rising under that big sweater.

"I need you," he said. It was a statement so elegant in its simplicity and so powerful, I felt the distance he had come to say it to me, and not geographical distance.

His hand, when he offered it to me, palm up, looked like a cradle. The candle in the center of the table threw an odd light on it, making it seem to glow in the dim corner where we sat.

Leaving him had been painful beyond belief, like cutting off one of my arms at the shoulder with a dull knife. The wound still throbbed, especially at night. Or early in the morning before dawn when my room was silent and my bed was empty and I was thinking about starting another day alone. I always told myself that it had been the best thing for me, that there had been good reasons. But time and distance had made it harder to remember what they were. And even if I could, this close to him, it wouldn't have mattered. It might not have mattered even if he hadn't said he was sorry. What mattered at that moment was his hand reaching out to me. What mattered were the things my body still remembered when I closed my eyes. I felt him in my skin, my muscles, my bones-every part of me, the deepest part of me remembered how I'd felt with him and wanted to feel again.