Hardy grinned unrepentantly, his teeth white in his tanned face. "Don't tell me they're still holding that one little business deal against me?"

"The Travises are sort of touchy that way. And besides," — I paused to lick a raindrop from the corner of my mouth, and his gaze followed the movement alertly — "I'm not a substitute for Liberty."

Hardy's smile vanished. "No. You could never be a substitute for anyone. And that was over a long time ago."

It was raining harder now, turning his hair as dark and slick as otter's fur, his lashes spiking over brilliant blue eyes. He looked good wet. He even smelled good wet, all clean skin and drenched cotton. His skin looked warm beneath the mist of droplets. In fact, as we stood there surrounded by the city, and falling water and lowering night, he seemed like the only warm thing in the world.

He stroked a sodden curl back from my cheek, and another, his face still, severe. For all his size and strength, he touched me with a gentleness Nick had never been capable of. We were so close that I saw the texture of his close shaven skin, and I knew that the masculine smoothness would he delicious against my lips. I felt a sharp, sweet ache somewhere beneath my rib cage. Wistfully I thought of how much I wished I had gone with him that night at the wedding, to drink champagne under a strawberry moon. No matter how it might have ended, I wished I had done it.

But it was too late now. A lifetime too late. A million wishes too late.

The taxi pulled up.

Hardy's face remained over mine. "I want to see you again," he said in a low voice.

My insides turned into a mini-Chernobyl. I didn't understand myself, why I wanted so much to stay with him. Any rational person would know that Hardy Cates had no real interest in me. He wanted to annoy my family and get my sister-in-law's attention. And if doing that meant screwing a girl from the other side of the tracks, so much the better. He was a predator. And for my own sake, I had to get rid of him.

So I plastered a disdainful smile over the panic, and gave him a look that said I've got your number, pal. "You'd just love to f**k a Travis, wouldn't you?" Even as I said it, I cringed inwardly at my own deliberate crudeness.

Hardy responded with a long stare that fried every brain cell I possessed. And then he said softly, "Just one little Travis."

I went scarlet. I felt myself clenching in places I didn't even know I had muscles. And I was amazed that my legs still worked as I went to the taxi and got in.

"Where do you live?" Hardy asked, and like an idiot, I told him. He handed a twenty to the cabbie, a huge overpayment since 1800 Main was only a few blocks away. "Drive careful with her," he said, as if I were made of some fragile substance that might shatter at the first bump on the road.

"Yes, sir!"

And it wasn't until the cab pulled away that I realized I was still wearing his jacket.

The normal thing would have been to have the jacket dry-cleaned immediately — there was a service in the building — and have someone take it to Hardy on Monday.

But sometimes normal just isn't happening. Sometimes crazy feels too good to resist. So I kept the jacket, uncleaned, all weekend. I kept stealing over to it and taking deep breaths of it. That damned jacket, the smell of Hardy Cates on it, was crack. I finally gave in and wore it for a couple of hours while I watched a DVD movie.

Then I called my best friend, Todd, who had recently forgiven me for not talking to him in months, and I explained the situation to him.

"I'm having a relationship with a jacket," I said.

"Was there a sale at Neiman's?"

"No, it's not mine, it's a guy's jacket." I went on to tell him all about Hardy Cates, even going so far as to describe what had happened at Liberty and Gage's wedding almost two years ago, and then about meeting him in the bar. "So I just put on the jacket and watched a movie in it," I concluded. "In fact, I'm wearing it right now. How far outside of normal is that? On a scale of one to ten, how crazy am I?"

"Depends. What movie did you watch?"

"Todd," I protested, wanting a serious answer from him.

"Haven, don't ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once stuck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars."

I had always liked Todd's father, Tim Phelan, but I'd never understood his art. The best explanation I'd heard was that Tim Phelan was a revolutionary genius whose sculptures exploded conventional notions of art and displayed common materials like bubble gum and masking tape in a new context.

As a child I had often wondered at the perplexing role reversal of the Phelan household, in which the parents seemed like children, and their only child, Todd, had been the grown-up.

It had only been at Todd's insistence that the family kept standard hours for eating and sleeping. He had dragged them to parent/teacher conferences even though they didn't believe in the grading system. Todd had no luck, however, in curbing their wild house decorating. Sometimes Mr. Phelan would pass through the hallway, pause to sketch or paint something right on the wall, and continue on his way. Their house had been filled with priceless graffiti. And at holiday time, Mrs. Phelan would hang the Christmas tree, which they called a bodhi bush, upside down from the ceiling.

Now Todd had become an enormously successful interior designer, mostly because of his ability to be creative without going too far. His father disdained his work, which pleased Todd tremendously. In the Phelan family, Todd had once told me, beige was an act of defiance.