“I love my sister,” I say.
“You might not love her if she wasn’t your sister.”
“I might not know her if she wasn’t my sister.”
“Exactly,” she says.
I sit down on the stones beside M. “Do you mind if I sit with you?” I ask.
“You already did.”
“I can stand up again.”
“Don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother,” I say. “I have strong legs.”
“You just want to show off.”
“The ability to stand up from a sitting position is unremarkable,” I say, and I stand up again to prove it. “Tell me how this is showing off.”
“I can see your muscles.”
I look down at my jeans and T-shirt, but I do not see any muscles. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” she says. “Sit down again.”
I sit back down with my heart in an uproar. This is flirtation, plain and simple. The exhilaration I feel, flirting with M, is precisely what is always missing when I try to date typicals: I never know what’s going on, and because my attempts to find out lack the tactful goo that typicals smear all over their actions and words to blunt their real purpose, I come across as lurching and off-putting.
“I like you,” I tell M. “I always have.”
“Thanks. I didn’t know that.”
“What about Marc?”
“I’m in love with him,” she says.
“Will he mind that we’re sitting here together?”
“No. He trusts me.”
“Do you trust him?”
She hesitates. “Yes and no.”
“That means no. Trust is all or nothing.”
“No,” she says. “It’s a winner-take-all accounting system in which various gradations come into play.”
“Such as?”
“I trust his feelings for me,” she says. “But he could be helping the eluders.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Sometimes his mind seems far away.”
“The fact that someone’s mind is far away doesn’t mean they’ve defected to a secret network bent on destroying our business.”
“But it could,” she says.
“？‘Could’ and ‘is’ are so far apart as to be opposites.”
“No,” she says. “？‘Is’ and ‘isn’t’ are opposites.”
“I have an idea,” I say. “Since you’re attracted to me and I’m attracted to you, why don’t we go to my house and have sex and see what happens next, no strings attached?”
“That would be a betrayal of Marc.”
“You could call it that, or you could call it adding another gradation into the field of your trustworthiness.”
“Having sex with you would turn me from being trustworthy into being untrustworthy.”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “If we sleep together once and it’s not incredible, you’ll be more trustworthy and committed to Marc from that point on, because when you see my muscles through my T-shirt and feel attracted to me, you’ll think, I’ve already had sex with Lincoln and it wasn’t that great, so who cares about those muscles?”