“So what the fuck is friendship?” Jill asked Kevin after she told him about Anita. In the old days the narration would have been between but now it was after. Now his chest hair is white and her belly skin sags. Now there are no cigarettes and the bed is her own. But they have the oldies FM radio station on, so the music is the same. Their vision is dimming at the same pace that the wrinkles appear. And they don’t have to look over their shoulders for spouses or best friends.

Jill ran into Kevin four months ago. They’ve worked in proximate financial districts for the nearly thirty years since they met, and that’s never happened before. They encountered and appointed and reminisced, and then they did it some more. And Jill might say it was the best sex ever if she were careless about recording her history. But she’s always aimed to remember her life, and she and Kevin are old now; there’s no way it could be the best any more. When Jill hears newly enamored peers proclaim they’re experiencing best ever, she knows that they’re forgetting their old vigor. The girls are mistaking their middle-aged languor for some new orgiastic capability, and the boys, so guarded and orchestrated now about their infrequent ejaculations, are spending more time on the girls.

It wasn’t the best ever, but it was the easiest.

She exited her building on Pine Street at three on a gorgeous Thursday. She looked upwards after reading seventy-four degrees on the Bank of the Orient sign, and the sky was so blue it almost hurt her eyes. The air felt smooth on her forearms and the shadows were crisp as stencils on the ground. She had the bank deposit in her back pocket and the office keys in her front. She was unencumbered and enjoying it. And suddenly, there was Kevin.

He wore khaki slacks and a blue sport coat. His belly pushed his jacket open. His pockets were distorted by personal electronic devices. His grey hair was too short but it still covered his head. He held two inches of a cigar in his left hand. Old Kevin.

“Hey hey!” he exhorted when he saw her. He stopped walking and pulled his upper body back. Kevin had jowls even as a young man – hanging neck and dangling balls Jill would never forget – and his rear-back folded his wattles into fourths.

“Hey hey” he said again, and she came smiling into his strong hug. Then he looked at Jill, at the cigar, again at Jill, and he tossed the stub in the street. “Well hey … you look great.”

They met in 1978. They were introduced by Jill’s friend Anita, they fell for each other immediately, and the next day Anita tried to cancel what had begun so well. Anita had a history of sorts with Kevin, and she said Jill couldn’t have him. Jill resisted that cancellation, which produced an episodic but enduring problem between Anita and her, acutely during the initial affair and chronically since then, just about every time the subject arose, permitting the exchange of active respect and love but prohibiting the transfer of trust, like some one-way valve. The sore old subject was their elephant.

“It’s good to see you too. I can’t believe this … just running into you.”

There’s really nothing special about Kevin. At least nothing for which he can take credit. Never was. That may be his attraction for Jill. He’s an average white guy, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, an inch over six feet, tending to fat now that he doesn’t do sports any more. He was a good team player, an outgoing guy, a decent student who always lacked motivation.

Kevin’s a good old guy, successful with women but popular with other sporting men. He’s always had a model for whatever role he cared to play, so he’s an habitual acolyte too. He’s exactly the type of man Jill never has, which is almost surely why she has wanted him.

Jill was always a nerd magnet. The good friend to all eggheads and the secret infatuation for many of them. A specialist with the distractible, the stutterers, the odd. She was often the friend and sometimes the mentor of the quarterback and the cheerleader, but she never got to be a player. So she’s a sucker for a guy like Kevin. Now and then a jock has found her exotic, and she has fallen hard for that attraction. It didn’t matter that it bored her to be with him; the anticipation of the date, or the embarrassing memory of his physical confidence at the end of it, invariably animated her interest for more.

Kevin was bright enough, for a jock. Less smart than Jill thought at first, but intelligent enough to spend hours with. He always had an amazing memory. Almost as good as hers. In the same way that Jill has been misled sometimes to think someone stupid because he can’t remember things, she tends to mistake good memory for good brain. Kevin was never as bright as his memory made him seem.

But Jill knew all that four months ago. She knew it twenty-eight years ago, when first she fucked him. The truth is, he looked at her with sincere desire and a wide smile, and she fell for it again. He acted powerful and determined and even though Jill knows about his eczema and chronic reflux she felt myself condense and tuck in under his arm.

They had a drink that first day, and then a late lunch the next week, which ended in her bed. The sex was good enough, but it was not what it had been when they were young. Kevin remembers how exciting he found it then, the way she held his head to take her pleasure. As widely experienced as he was, Jill was the only woman who ever did that to him.

She doesn’t hold his head any longer. Either she know it’s going to be productive, or they just wriggle out of that now. But he holds hers. She knows he’s really just trying to get himself going, but it’s arousing anyway, to have his hands firmly about her ears, pulling her face to his mouth as he wrestles her beneath him.