The One In My Heart

I pretended to think, cutting my stack of pancake into neat pieces. “Well, you’ve found my weakness—I can’t say no to Chinatown.”


“Me neither, as it happens,” he said cheerfully, passing me the butter dish and a small cruet of maple syrup.

I looked at him a moment too long before putting a forkful of pancakes into my mouth. “These are good.”

The banana-and-pecan pancakes were more than good: warm, moist, fluffy, the sweetness of mashed banana perfectly balanced by the subtle tang of buttermilk. With the addition of butter and maple syrup they were practically breakfast heaven.

“Before I went into construction, I was a short-order cook at a twenty-four-hour diner for a few months.”

“Tough work.”

“It was. But I was thrilled to find out that I could handle it. Up to that point in my life, someone else had always footed the bill. Bringing home a check made me feel like a man.”

“Did you feel like a hundred times the man when the millions started rolling in?”

“You’d think, but I treasured my grease-smudged checks more. That was an honest exchange of labor for remuneration; the investment income felt like Monopoly money. Especially since I wasn’t even that good an investor.”

“You made a twenty-fold return on your original investment. No need to be modest.”

“I’m not modest. I put half the money I cleared from the auction into start-ups my financial advisers recommended. The other half I put in random ones—like, pulling-names-out-of-a-hat kind of random—because I wanted to see whether my advisers would get me better returns than a dart-throwing monkey.

“And guess what? Seven of the nine companies that later sold for big bucks were out of the control group. So when I say I’m no Warren Buffett, I’m not being self-effacing; I was literally the dart-throwing monkey. Not exactly the sort of accomplishment to make me feel like I’m swinging a twelve-inch dick.”

“You aren’t?” I said, my eyes very wide.

He laughed—and maybe blushed a little. Then he leaned forward. “You know what does make me feel like ten times the man?”

I rubbed the pad of my thumb against his stubble. “What?”

“When I can get you to say yes to anything.”

My heart skidded. Twenty-four hours ago I wouldn’t have understood. Twenty-four hours ago I’d have pointed out that I caved in to his demands every step of the way. But then again, twenty-four hours ago my grasp of the situation had been as backward as when people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.

But now I was following proper scientific procedures. Now I saw how much effort he had put in where I was concerned. Now I knew I’d been given yet another piece of proof that my new hypothesis was not only sound, but ironclad.

“Well,” I murmured, “you’ve found Chinatown. I always say yes to Chinatown.”


AFTER BREAKFAST WE RESTARTED THE movie. But the poor flick didn’t stand a chance once I showed Bennett what I was wearing under the pajamas he’d loaned me. In nothing but those fuck-me bits of transparent fabric, I went down on him with an almost trembling greed.

I’ll never forget the reaction I wrought from him—his head thrown back, his pelvis coming off the bed, his hands knotted tightly in my hair. And the sounds he made, so much raw lust, a cascade of filthy imprecations that turned me on unbearably even as I drove him out of his mind.

He returned the favor and ate me until I was limp from my orgasms. And then we made love playfully, rolling around the bed, kissing, nibbling, and exploring at will.

The lunch crowd had half dispersed by the time we arrived in Chinatown, which meant we didn’t need to eat with the speed of a house on fire. So we lingered over our lunch and talked, with Bennett asking me lots of questions.

I told him how the Material Girls came to be, and how we all ended up in the five boroughs. He laughed at our antics surrounding the Annual Boyfriend Roundup.

“STEM girls know how to have fun,” he said.

“Absolutely. When nerds let loose, they really let loose.”

For a moment he looked as if he might lean in and whisper something naughty in my ear. But he only said, “I remember you telling me that your father didn’t care for your interest in the sciences. Was it ever a matter of contention between the two of you?”

I thought back. “Not really. I mean, he couldn’t help letting you know how he felt, so I always understood it wasn’t what he would have wanted. But there wasn’t a sexist element in his desire for me to be a Manhattan hostess—he’d have loved to be its male equivalent, if he’d managed to marry a woman of sufficient means and status.

“And in a way, it was how we connected with each other. Nobody ever did anything to his standards, which meant that he was the one who stood over me as I practiced my handwriting. He was the one who gave me an education in art. And he was the one who taught me about fabrics and construction of garments, among other things.”