“‘Dear Ricky,’” he began. By the time he had finished the letter—the gist of which was that Annie and Nick were engaged to be married, that Annie hadn’t deserved to be cheated on, and that Ricky would do well to leave her alone—Annie had her head on Nick’s shoulder, her arm draped across his leg. She had never been so physically affectionate with him before. Nick waited for some sign of arousal—a tingle in his groin—but he only felt happy. It was a relaxing sort of happiness, a concentrated warmth that trickled into every crevice of his body, like the slow pervasion of heat from a shot of bourbon: what an elderly man might feel for his wife, he imagined, after half a century of marriage, sexual desire replaced by the comfort of long-term commitment. To call such a feeling anything less than love seemed to suggest a limited interpretation of the word.
“What if I start asking people to call me ‘Nicky’?” he said, tossing the coaster onto the coffee table. “Actually, my mother calls me that, so who am I to judge?”
She patted his knee. “Jungle Hunt,” she said, sitting up from the couch. She refilled their glasses, setting the bottle down on the coaster. “How does a little Jungle Hunt sound to you?”
“Haven’t played it in eons, but I’m sure I can hold my own.”
Annie crawled across the carpet to the television stand.
“You shouldn’t wear makeup,” he told her, watching her thumb through a plastic box of cartridges. A thin layer of foundation coated her cheeks, giving her skin the appearance of fine suede, and her lip gloss made her lips look as though they were wrapped in cellophane. “You’re pretty anyway.”
“If that doesn’t sound like a line.”
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