At least I tried to. I opened my eyes wide enough to see that he was still staring at my mouth. Didn’t that jackass have anything better to do? I st...red at the sign over the coffee shop kiosk and sucked a meatball out of the sub. I licked the sauce from the bread before it could drip onto the table and pretended that I really did have a great deal of interest in the price of a cup of bad pseudo-Starbucks coffee. My eyes weren’t paying attention. They flicked over to the major instead of. .. not exactly. I’m just not saying everything there is to say.”He gave Christine a rather forced smile, and walked out of the Chorale South ‘clinic’.“I want her in a hospital!” he growled to Radhika.“And how will you explain her condition? The FBI and Homeland are all over the blast site. Anyone showing up with her injuries is going to jump to the top of their lists. And neither you nor I can begin to guess if they’d be able to make a connection between her and the ‘bomber’, but I don’t think. That’s why we had gotten fully comfortable with suggesting and then fulfilling thoughts about getting off together but anything more felt like taboo. Once fall arrived, Mike began talking about heading up to North Carolina to go skiing with us before taking a company skiing trip to Vermont in early spring the next year. I had wanted the three of us to go up to North Carolina together, hoping it would present an opportunity to broach the subject of sex and lead to a group circle jerk, if nothing. My daughter was eighteen and about to leave home for college in a couple of months anyway. She had always been very precocious, fiercely intelligent and the kind of girl who both always knew just what she wanted and always managed to get it. As I stepped into the room and sat beside her on the bed, I couldn't help but think that she had grown into a lovely, beautiful woman, even as she glared angrily at me. I knew that she had always been popular with boys, something she had often used to get.