Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich

broccoli.
    He sometimes thought she might be more trouble than she was worth. Maybe he’d move on. Maybe next week. Maggie claimed to be 36. Joe was 41. There was still time for a nasty breakup, years of painful therapy, slow healing, and then someday someone else. The next woman in his life might be a fighter pilot or a taxidermist. He really wasn’t in over his head with Maggie. And there was that stealing business.
    “Hey, look,” she said when he opened the door. “I brought the wine.” She held up a couple of bottles of wine—one red, one white, both too big to be plausibly hidden on her person. Maybe she’d swiped them one at a time? No, she would have done them both at once. She could be so distracting. Tonight she wore an incredibly colorful T-shirt with target swirls of red and green and blue that pulled the eye in toward her breasts and then away up and over her shoulders and back again just in time to be blinded by a smile. Cut-off jeans, which meant she could put one leg out and snatch your attention (was this when she planted the produce in his ears?). Sandals. And every toenail a different color. If you looked very closely, and you wanted to look very closely, you might notice there were messages in tiny letters written on her toenails like bumper stickers—if you can read this you’re too close!
    She held the wine out away from her body with both hands and stepped up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. When he opened his eyes, he had to take a step forward so he wouldn’t stumble into the hallway. She had slipped by him.
    After dinner, he lighted a fire and they settled on the couch with coffee. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, and she sighed and snuggled in. She idly moved one hand up and down the front of his shirt, expertly unfastening and fastening the buttons. He thought she was not even aware that she was doing it, until he felt her cool hand on his chest. He kissed her. He could feel her muscles moving under his hands, as if he were holding a cat when it doesn’t want to be held, but Maggie wanted to be held. He was lost in the kiss and the feel of her, the smell of her. There was something else happening just under the surface. He imagined opening his eyes and seeing that the scene had changed, that they were no longer on his couch in front of the fire, but had been moved magically to a South Seas beach. He could almost feel the wind moving across the bare skin of his back.
    Then with a cheerful “Ta da!” Maggie leaped away from him, and as she went, she took his shirt, his pants, his shorts, his shoes and socks, his watch. He flopped back onto the cushions stunned and completely naked.
    “I think it’s just so incredibly sexy, me being fully dressed with a naked man,” she said. “Don’t you?”
    He did.

    The night she stood him up, he figured it had finally ended. He’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. And this was it. He knew that he made most of his own problems with such thinking, but he couldn’t help it with Maggie. Maybe it was because he never had understood why she would have been interested in him in the first place.
    He drank a little too much that evening and went to bed early. When the phone rang at three in the morning, it took him a long time to rub the stupidity out of his eyes and ears.
    Maggie was in jail.
    So, she hadn’t stood him up after all.
    “That’s a heck of an excuse,” he said.
    “What are you talking about?” she said. “Come on, Joe, wake up. Can you help me out here? I know it’s asking a lot.”
    “I’ll be there.” He didn’t know where the jail was. She gave him precise directions.
    She’d been busted for shoplifting—captured on video, a stupid lapse on her part, she told him. That was bad enough. But she’d also drawn a cop she couldn’t charm. He wasn’t the least bit amused when she returned his handcuffs with a smile after he’d locked her hands behind her back. Joe wondered if she’d