"It started as an endearment, her finger in his belly button an intimacy that was uniquely and solely theirs. His navel swallowed not one but two of the knuckles on her index finger.

“It’s just so deep,” she said.

“Fountain of youth,” he said.

She liked textures, how the hair on his chest and belly bunched between her fingers, the slow swirling of her palms and fingertips a steady growing arousal. Afterwards, her cheek on his matted chest, he rested his arm on her back, relaxed but secure. Then she dug in his navel.

"She hired me to shovel snow but when the waiter from Argentina never showed I was rotated into the waiting staff, two days busing, four days waiting, with Tuesdays off. First one on the lift, I'd ski behind ski patrol to The Lodge, brew the coffee, get the fireplaces going, take a little nap in a rocking chair, then start to shovel as sunlight ripped through the mountains. The solitude was awesome. Life was no bigger than the drip of an icicle, the call of a kingfisher, the shape of a snowflake."

"The hallway light is left on for my wife. It draws pale blocks of geometry down on the far end of the hall. At the edge of a long rectangle, between two doors, stands a child.

The light behind me falls somewhere between us; all I can make out is the fuzzy outline of his monkey-in-moons pajamas and his sleep-strewn hair. “Charlie?”

He remains unmoved, and though his face has dimmed, I feel him staring right through me, his head slightly cocked.

"The Marq was still frozen. The defroster blew open a set of eyes on the bottom of the windshield. Wayne swiped the ice off the dash and peered up the stairs to his apartment. He should've been inside, under his electric blanket watching season three of the M*A*S*H* complete collection, remote in one hand, Hawkeye-tini in the other. But it was first Friday of the month, and first Fridays were pool with Wally. A promise was a promise, and the little jerk would be waiting."