I said nothing.

“A good, low-maintenance woman of hardy stock who won’t give you any trouble? Cook for you, clean for you, laugh at your jokes, and never look at another man?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Ah.” Vanessa nodded and the waitress came back with her credit card and bill. Vanessa signed and handed the receipt copy to the waitress with a flick of the wrist that was, in itself, dismissal. “But, Patrick, I’m curious.”

I resisted the urge to lean back from the carnal force of her. “Pray tell.”

“Does your new woman do the real wicked things? You know, those things we’ve done with-”

“Vanessa.”

“Hmm?”

“There is no new woman. I’m just not interested.”

She placed a hand to her breast. “In me?”

I nodded.

“Really?” She held her hand out to the rain, caught a few drops, and wiped them on her throat as she arched her head back. “Let me hear you say it.”

“I just did.”

“The whole sentence.” She lowered her chin, caught me in the full impact of her gaze.

I shifted in my chair, tried to wish my way out of this situation. When that didn’t work, I just said it, flat and cold.

“I’m not interested in you, Vanessa.”

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

A dire abandonment broke Vanessa’s features into pieces, and I could feel the hollow chill of her beautiful apartment, the ache of her sitting alone at 3 A.M., lover gone, law books and yellow legal pads spread before her at her dining room table, pen in hand, the pictures of a much younger Vanessa that adorned her mantel staring down at her like ghosts of a life unlived. I could see a tiny flicker of hungry light in her chest, and not the hunger of her sexual appetite, but the conflicted hunger of her other selves.

In that moment, her features went skeletal, and her beauty vanished, and she looked like she’d fallen to scraped knees under the weight of the rain.

“Fuck you too, Patrick.” She smiled as she said it. Smiled with lips that twitched at the corners. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just…” She stood, a fist clenched around her bag strap. “Just…fuck you.”

She left the restuarant, and I stayed where I was, turned my chair and watched her walk up the street through the drizzle, bag swinging back and forth against her hip, her steps stripped of grace.

Why, I wondered, does it all have to be so messy?

My cell phone rang, and I pulled it from my shirt pocket, wiped the condensation from its surface as I lost Vanessa in a crowd.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” the man’s voice said. “Can I assume that chair’s free now?”

I turned in my chair, looked into the restaurant for the sandy-haired man. He wasn’t at a table. He wasn’t at the bar as far as I could see.

“Who is this?” I said.

“What a tearful breakup scene, Pat. For a minute, I was pretty sure she’d toss a drink in your face.”

He knew my name.

I turned again in the chair, looked along the sidewalk for him, for anyone with a cellular phone.

“You’re right,” I said. “The chair’s free. Come on back and get it.”

His voice was the same gentle monotone I’d heard on the patio when he’d tried to take the chair. “She has incredible lips, that attorney. Incredible. I don’t think they’re implants either. Do you?”

“Yeah,” I said, scanning the other side of the street, “they’re nice lips. Come on back for the chair.”

“And she’s asking you, Pat-she’s asking you-to come slide your dick through those lips and you say no? What’re you, gay?”

“You bet,” I said. “Come on back and fag-bash me. Use the chair.”

I peered through the rain at the windows on the other side of the street.

“And she picked up the check,” he said, his soft monotone like a whisper in a dark room. “She picked up the check, wanted to blow you, looks like six or seven million bucks-fake tits, true, but nice fake tits, and hey, no one’s perfect-and you still say no. Hats off to you, buddy. You’re a stronger man than me.”

A man with a baseball cap on his head and an umbrella raised above him walked through the mist toward me, a cellular pressed to his ear, his strides loose and confident.

“Me,” the voice said, “I’d figure her for a screamer. Lots of ‘Oh, Gods’ and ‘Harder, harders.’”

I said nothing. The man with the baseball cap was still too far away for me to see his face, but he was getting closer.

“Can I be frank with you, Pat? A piece of ass like that comes along so seldom that if I were in your place-and I’m not, I know that, but if I were-I’d just feel compelled to go back with her to that apartment on Exeter, and I gotta be honest with you, Pat, I’d hump her till the blood ran down her thighs.”

I felt cold moisture that didn’t come from the rain seep down behind my ear.

“Really?” I said.

The man with the baseball cap was close enough for me to see his mouth, and his lips moved as he approached.

The guy on the other end of the line was silent, but somewhere on his end, I could hear a truck grind its gears, the patter of rain off a car hood.

“…and I can’t do that, Melvin, if you’ve got half my shit tied up offshore.” The man in the baseball cap passed me, and I could see he was at least twice the age of the guy from the patio.

I stood, looked as far up and down the street as I could.

“Pat,” the guy on the phone said.

“Yeah?”

“Your life is about to get…” He paused and I could hear him breathing.

“My life’s about to get what?” I said.

He smacked his lips. “Interesting.”

And he hung up.

I swung my body over the wrought-iron fence that separated the patio from the sidewalk, and the rain found my head and chest as I stood on the sidewalk for a while with people walking around me and occasionally jostling a shoulder. Eventually, I realized standing there did no good. The guy could be anywhere. He could have called from the next county. The truck that had ground its gears in the background hadn’t been in my immediate vicinity or I would have heard it on my end.

But he’d been close enough to know when Vanessa left and to call within a minute of her abrupt departure.

So, no, he wasn’t in another county. He was here in Back Bay. But even so, that was a lot of ground to cover.

I started walking again, my eyes searching the streets for a glimpse of him. I dialed Vanessa’s number and when she answered, I said, “Don’t hang up.”

“Okay.”

She hung up.

I gritted my teeth and pressed redial.

“Vanessa, please listen a sec. Someone just threatened you.”

“What?”

“That guy you thought was a friend of mine on the patio?”

“Yes…” she said slowly, and I heard Clarence yip in the background.

“He called me when you left. He’s a total stranger, Vanessa, but he knew my name, and your occupation, and he made it clear to me that he knew where you lived.”

She gave me that martini chuckle of hers. “And let me see, you need to come over here to protect me? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t need these games. You want to fuck me, you should have said yes on the patio.”

“Vanessa, no. I want you to go to a hotel for a while. Now. Send my office the bill.”

The chuckle was replaced by a mean laugh. “Because some weirdo knows where I live?”

“This guy’s not your average weirdo.”

I turned on Hereford, walked toward Commonwealth Avenue. The rain had lessened, but the mist had thickened around it, turned the air to warm onion soup.

“Patrick, I’m a defense attorney. Hang on-Clarence, down! Down, now! Sorry,” she said to me. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Do you know how many gangbangers and petty sociopaths and freaks in general have threatened my life when I’ve failed to get them Get Out of Jail Free cards? Are you serious?”