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Gaines had broken up with his girlfriend, with whom he had been in love, and, after a couple of months, attempted to get back on the horse. His date's name was Sandy, and she was a friend of some friends who were always trying to find Gaines a wife. Sandy was an aesthetician, which felt to Gaines like an occupation he should be making fun of. According to the wife in the couple who set them up, though, it meant that Sandy waxed women's crotches and squeezed their zits. Gaines, who was an ER doc, often felt like a professional zit-squeezer himself. Except the zits were abscesses and boils. It was the same basic principle, though: get the crud out.
     Gaines knew in advance that Sandy was attractive because he had been forwarded a picture. This depressed him, because pretty women, in the end, tired him out. In theory he would have one on his arm, but in practice, he would spend his time fretting that they didn't match, that people thought him "lucky." Experience had taught Gaines that he did best when the woman was thought to be the lucky one.

     Still, he put on a show of confidence when she arrived to pick him up. He tried not to stare. He reminded himself that he could have any woman he wanted since he made a lot of money, while simultaneously trying to ignore the fact that he wouldn't date a woman who wanted his money.
     "It's nice to meet you," Sandy said, and she held out her hand. Gaines shook it, then, as an afterthought, kissed it. "Oh," Sandy said, and he immediately wanted to run back inside his apartment.
     On the way to the restaurant Gaines had picked, Sandy came up against a bad driver. Gaines insulted the man by suggesting he had Attention Deficit Disorder, and Sandy said, "I have Attention Deficit Disorder. I take medication." Gaines winced. To try to make things right between them, he confessed that he had been molested when he was ten.
     "That's terrible," Sandy said.
     "It's okay," Gaines said. "I've worked it out."
     The restaurant was full and would be for a while, so they had to go to a place across the street. Gaines liked how they both acted like the new place was even better than the old one, even though it wasn't. He started to relax a little.
     After they ordered, Gaines asked Sandy about her job. She said she loved it and that she met interesting people. Gaines asked her how they were interesting, and she said they all told her their problems like she was a bartender. "I used to be a bartender," Gaines said, and Sandy said, "Really?" in a way that told him it wasn't time to start talking about him yet.
     It was getting so that Gaines couldn't stop staring. This depressed him terribly. He didn't want to be in a position where he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Soon he wouldn't be able to tell if Sandy had a bad personality or not. He would just see the raven hair, the hefty breasts, the hands filled with muscle memory. Already — in the way she broke her bread or unfolded her napkin — he thought he had recognized his own hands at work, spreading open some woman's vagina.

     Now she asked him if she could ask him a personal question. "Sure," he said.
     "When you got molested, did it turn you on?"
     "Yes," he said. Not even his shrink had gotten around to asking him this, and he had been waiting.
     "Was it a man or a woman?" she asked.
     Gaines hesitated. He preferred for people to assume it was a man. When he told them it was a woman, he could tell they thought he had confused getting molested with getting lucky. "A woman," he said finally. He waited for Sandy to ask how old he had been. People who were willing to go along with the idea that a woman could molest a boy tended to need the boy to be very young.
     But Sandy didn't ask. She just said, "Man, thanks a lot, lady," and they both laughed.
      

Gaines had thought that since he and Sandy had laughed about the woman who had molested him, they would share a kiss goodnight. Instead, Sandy drove him back to his apartment after dinner and held out her hand. "It was nice meeting you," she said.
     Gaines felt insulted. "I'm not shaking your hand," he said, and he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. When he pulled back, she was still holding out her hand. "Put that away," he snapped, and she retracted her arm.
     Back inside his apartment, he tried to justify to himself why he had been so aggressive with her. It wasn't anything to do with having paid for dinner and feeling like she owed him. Otherwise Gaines would've dated a hooker. It was to do with the fact that Gaines had felt tricked. As if Sandy had opened a vein and bled him without any intention of replacing what she had taken.
     Finally, he gave up and felt the truth of things: that he had probably blown it, that he had set a new personal best for letting his anger — which he had held back from his ex for a good five dates — escape him, that a kiss on the cheek was suddenly making him feel like a date rapist.
     He stripped and got into bed with his cat, who planted herself on his chest, and was still there when he woke up in the morning.