Free 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life by Kristen McGuiness

but not so sunny romance telling myself I would never need to learn this lesson again. And the lesson is this: Don’t take candy from strangers. Because the kind words, the generous offers of romance, the moony, starstruck eyes are all wonderful, but if you don’t know who is giving them to you, then I wouldn’t advise getting in their truck. But only a year later, I end up in Jimmy’s truck.
     
    I know the minute Jimmy closes the trunk of my car that something is, in fact, different. Perhaps it’s in the way he tosses his bag in my car, or his distracted embrace upon greeting me, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t kiss me or tell me I look pretty or even really smile when he walks up and sees me. I try to pretend that he is just going through something, busy worrying about work or his family or anything that has nothing to do with me.
     
    Two nights before, Jimmy had come over to spend the night at my apartment. This was huge because every man I have ever dated has had an aversion to staying at my place. For some reason, the idea of waking up in my bed has always caused an anxiety apparently too great for any man to sleep anywhere but his own home. I made Jimmy tea, and I offered him pie, and I attempted to show him my world in one night. I tried desperately to find my favorite quote by Salman Rushdie in my worn-out copy of Midnight’s Children , “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” But I couldn’t, and so I aimlessly rooted around the book searching for the page. This has been a bad habit of mine since cocaine. I was well-known to spend a good hour of a party sitting in a corner, searching through The Norton Shakespeare anthology, all for one line from one play I read in college years before. It typically drove everyone crazy, but thankfully, there would be enough people around that they could just ignore me, until I shouted out, “Here it is!” And then forced them to listen to whatever passage I had been so desperate to find.
     
    “It’s okay, Kristen. I can hear the quote some other time,” Jimmy said as he tried to get me to put the book down.
     
    “Just a second, I think it’s in this chapter.”
     
    I wanted him to know; I wanted him to hear it; I wanted him to believe like I do that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” Because I believe that though Jimmy and I might not always share the most comfortable conversation, we share this. This bold zest for living, this power and intensity that I think might be the bond that makes what we have feel real. Jimmy went to the bathroom, and when he returned, I was still sitting in the kitchen, searching for the quote.
     
    “Oh my God, put it down,” he said.
     
    I laughed, and I thought that Jimmy would too, but he seemed more annoyed than loving when he took the book from my hands and led me into the bedroom. Then he unzipped my dress, and my lips were against his, and I forgot all about Salman Rushdie and men named Sunshine and the fear that there is something missing from this very powerful thing.
     
    When I awoke in the morning, my heart lurched, and I didn’t know why. His head was buried into my chest, and my lips were pressed into his forehead, and we fit together perfectly. He murmured into my skin and kissed my breast, and as we drifted back into sleep I thought, “I will be sad if this ends.”
     
    Two days later he closes the door to my trunk, and we drive to his family’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and though he is nice, and introduces me to everybody, I can tell, as he stands across the room playing with his little niece, that there is an estrangement here where before there was none.
     
    His sister and her husband are cordial, but once again I get the feeling they’ve met many before me. They ask some cursory questions but only in the way that they don’t really expect to see me again. When Jimmy’s brother-in-law jokes while passing the turkey that I’m “a quick one,”