Mostly, he comes over for dinner and we play Scrabble afterwards. He teaches me to build words from the board, the high scoring locations that are available, not the letters on my palette alone. He often helps me then he helps my mom and dad too. He is what my parents call a savant. He has memorized every two-letter word, every three-letter word, and every playable combination with the letters Q, J, X, and Z. My favorite is qi.

Our house is filled with his paintings. There’s one in almost every room. The shapes are abstract, but they gesture towards everyday objects. A wine bottle, a medicine cabinet, a woman’s leg next to a piano. The way he does this, simplifying the familiar vignette while estranging it in the composition, makes me look at the paint first, the texture of it on the canvas, and the colors, muted and dense.

We spend three summers on Menorca together. Each year, he brings a different girlfriend. Lotte then Meridian then Eva. I love them all. Beautiful and removed. Feminine. Long hair with round faces. Girlish but older than me. I try to emulate them. They don’t wear perfume or makeup, but tinted chapstick and oils, so that when you lean in for a hug, the smell sticks to your skin. I don’t know these words yet but I learn them. Vetiver, sandalwood, cedar.

I watch the way he touches them, playfully at the beach, tenderly at dinner, slinking his arm around a waist or over the shoulder. I am shocked whenever I trace the curve of his elbow to find his hand relaxed on a breast or on an inner thigh. His posture is so casual but the touch so carnal.

The third summer, I am fourteen and I have a friend with me too. Caroline. We have braces and we order every alcoholic dessert on the menu. We steal wine from the kitchen cabinets and then we fill the bottles with water. Of course, Grant notices first. But instead of tattling, he simply teases us. Go easy next time. Try the rosé.

We make hats on his birthday, crowns, to celebrate his thirty-fifth year around the sun. In our rental house, we find a cabinet filled with construction paper, feathers, jewels. We write him a card. We’re freaking out, we say, you’re so old. And when we bring him the cake, candles flitting in the summer breeze, his hand falls to my calf and he leaves it there.

From then on I see my body through his eyes. The shape of my breasts, the straps of my bra. Can he smell my period, metallic, even when I have a tampon in? The way he looks at me, stares at me, I feel that he can, that he wants to.

After this trip, he stops coming over for dinner. First, he fights with my dad. You’re controlling, he says, and my dad replies, I’m just trying to help. It is a fight about money. Grant is represented by galleries here in Santa Fe and also in California, but still, the paintings don’t sell often and he is usually broke. He wears the same shirts in a short rotation and when I tease him, the smell, he looks at me and says, pheromones, baby.

He and my dad stop speaking, but he tries to stay close with my mom. He’s known her since he was eighteen, since both of his parents died. A painter, she hired him to help her finish houses. Detail cabinets and old adobe walls. They laugh easily together, darkly, and I can feel that my mom is attracted to him. It doesn’t seem sexual but it is also not maternal.

Soon though, there are more fights at home. My dad, like a kid on the playground, it’s not fair, you have to choose. Him or me. My mom picks the marriage. The house on Acequia Madre, the rose bushes and lilacs. Our newly remodeled kitchen. Cherry wood and carrara marble.

I learn to drive, borrow my parent’s car, and I go straight to Grant’s. He doesn’t have a cellphone, doesn’t believe in an answering machine, so I just come over unannounced and hope that he’s home. I miss his company or whatever it was that he provided by always being at our house.

Mostly, we stand outside the car. Don’t hug me like a lesbian, he says, pressing his torso more firmly against my own. Often, he gives me alcohol for parties. I don’t yet have a fake ID. Be safe, he says, and then he runs back inside. Rumors are that he misses Lotte even though he’s the one who left her. Rumors are that he met Eva before he even left Lotte. My dad says that he took her for a test drive. I want to know if they kissed on this test drive or if they had sex. How far do you go before you’re confident enough to leave one person for another? The other thing my dad says is, You don’t lose your girlfriend in Santa Fe, you just lose your turn.

The implication is that we live in a small town, there aren’t many people here, and this feels true. I kiss one boy, Nate, at Zozobra, and the next day everyone at school calls me Thirty-One. When I finally find the nerve to ask someone why, she explains that it refers to the number of girls Nate’s already fucked. Thirty-one. We didn’t even have sex, I say, but it doesn’t matter.

I avoid Nate for a whole year, but then he convinces me to go out on a date, a real date. We eat gelato and walk up to the Cross of the Martyrs. It’s windy and when he goes to kiss me, hair blows between our lips. He giggles and then pushes the strands away. As soon as our mouths part, the wind whips the hair right back over my face. He comes back, laughing again, more determined to kiss me. We date all summer and when we have sex, I don’t ask his number and he doesn’t ask mine.

Grant keeps seeing Eva and she gets pregnant. He reaches out to my mom, he wants family nearby when the baby comes. She asks if Eva was on birth control. Yes, Grant says, sitting at our counter, spinning on the stool, but she knew I wasn’t ready. I think, you know, I think she fucked it up on purpose.

Grant, my mom says, hollowing out his name.

Now when I go to his house, I check to make sure Eva’s car isn’t there before I knock. We play Settlers of Catan at the little dining table or we lie on the couch together, head to toe. He massages my feet until it hurts. Ow, I say, but he keeps pressing. Doesn’t that feel good? No, I say, laughing. And this laughter is a kind of disavowal, negating my own negation.

His house is small, an old adobe, and there’s no door to the bathroom, so I know he can hear when I pee. I wash my hands, press my cold fingers onto my cheeks. We hug at the car. Bye, I say, mainly into his chest. His smell is the same as always, like a match after it’s been blown out, woody, singeing the back of my throat.

I meet my parents at a Vietnamese restaurant in town and they tell me they’re getting divorced. This makes sense. My mom has been unhappy for years. I call Grant from the parking lot, from my car, and he tells me to come over again. I’ll make you feel better, he says, Eva is out of town. For the first time, the implication is clear.

But I have a yeast infection, I say.

Yum, he says, frothy.

His son is born in September. Liam, they call him. For Christmas, my mom gets a tree and has everyone over for dinner even though we’re Jewish. There’s a weight in the air and it reminds me of the cold on summer nights, unexpected and foretelling. Eva is quiet, her face swollen from earlier tears. Apparently, she wanted to buy a red highchair from Ikea, but Grant said, I don’t want any of that plastic shit in my house. My guess is that they won’t make it through another year.

I go to college and they break up. Grant becomes a fanatic single dad, strict with bedtimes and screens. He reads everything in sight, filling his house with children’s books and legos. There is not an inch of visible floor. When I visit for Christmas, he asks me to babysit. I just need one night to myself, he says, please.

Of course, I say, and I don’t ask to be paid. It’s clear there still isn’t any money here. Liam is sweet, intelligent. He’s memorized the books, the different lego cars. Above the fireplace is an old rusted sign, painted, that Grant originally stole for me, RKING it reads. Only now do I realize what it used to say before the first two letters were sheared off.

When Grant comes back from dinner, I expect him to sit with me on the couch, but he doesn’t. He stands and washes dishes. I just can’t keep up, he says. The sink is overflowing. I do not ask if he’s still painting.

Liam turns four and then five. Grant empties his art studio, abandons the lease. He sleeps with an old friend of mine who’s moved home after college. I hear it from Caroline first then from Maddy herself.

How was it, I ask.

Good, yeah, she says, it was alright.

He didn’t pressure you or anything, right?

No, of course not, we were both drunk.

Maddy is not very pretty but she is young and I imagine he liked that, licking the pussy of a woman half his age.

Eva moves to England and then Grant really is all alone. How’s New York? He asks while we walk to pick up Liam from school. Sleep with any women yet?

Not yet, I say, though this is a lie. It’s a question I received all through college, attending a women’s only school, and while I didn’t sleep with anyone there, I did sleep with a new friend after I graduated. Somehow, I felt more free then, less like a cliché.

The following year, I bring home a new boyfriend. We go over to Grant’s and play Settlers of Catan at the same table we’ve always used. Liam almost wins but Grant has the longest road. Noah, whose dad died while he was in high school, knows not to ask about the particularities of these extraneous relationships. I could say that Grant is like an older brother or an uncle but neither of those would feel true.

I get a job in advertising and I learn to write copy for Nationwide, VW, Pfizer. Noah and I break up and then I fall in love with someone else. Then this relationship ends too and I start eating cookies every day. I gain five pounds then ten then twenty. My dad says, you don’t have to be thin like me, you’re curvy, that’s great.

Dad, I say, you can’t say that.

No, he says, I don’t mean it like that. I mean sexy.

I tell Grant what he’s said. It’s Christmas again. Farolitos on top of the adobe buildings, snow on the mountains. You’re still beautiful, he says, don’t ever doubt that.

Liam is sleeping at a friend’s house so Grant and I are parked by the basketball courts at Fort Marcy. We pass a bottle of Vida back and forth and I tell him that I used to smoke hookah here, in Caroline’s car. How is she, he asks, and when I tell him, he says, can we kiss now?

You and Caroline?

No, me and you.

Grant, I say, my voice hollow. He puts his hands up, makes a gesture like alright, alright.

I move into a new apartment on Bedford, a one bedroom under market value, and I stop flying home for Christmas. I get a dog, Rocky, and we go upstate instead. We take long walks through the rambling hills, snow crunching under my boots, and he bounds over the dry stalks of goldenrod.

Grant gets a cellphone, finally, and he texts me all the time. Mainly, photos of Liam. Sometimes, photos of food. Green chile stew, red chile enchiladas. Sometimes, I reply.

Can we visit you, he says.

Grant takes the futon and gives Liam the couch. They’re here to go thrifting, to see museums, to try oysters and sashimi. All the seafood we can’t get in Santa Fe, landlocked. Liam is thirteen now, reading Moby Dick. He tells me about the whales and I watch the dimples in his cheeks, the way his eyebrows move while he speaks. I tell Grant, he looks just like you, and he says, I think he looks like his mom. The wavy blonde hair, the round cheeks. Yes, he looks like Eva too.

While walking, Grant slinks his arm around my waist or over my shoulder. He grins at Liam as he runs ahead of us, talking easily with strangers. I can see that Grant is proud, easing his grip even. They’ve crossed through some threshold, through the insomnia of early parenting and the fatigue of doing everything alone.

Grant stops us in the park. Wait, he says, you should come home for my show. From his back-pocket, he pulls out a postcard. Time and date on one side. A new painting on the other. The image is entirely abstract, not a single figurative gesture remains. And the colors are no longer opaque, but transparent, washed out, so that I can see the pencil lines underneath.

After they leave, my fantasies run rampant. It’s not that I want to have sex with him or even to have had sex with him, but in the afternoons, alone in my bed, I like to imagine myself as a teenager, stretched out on his couch. Here, he says, let me show you, and we reposition so that I’m straddling him, conveniently wearing a skirt that just lifts up and he slides in. Ride me, he says, so that it feels good.

I have never fantasized this way before, retrospectively. Usually, my arousal is born from possibility, I can only get off if what I think about might actually come true. But now, the arousal stems from something else—the impossibility of what I imagine, the fact that Grant never did act that way with me.

His show opens at an old cathedral. Light streams in through stained glass, and mainly, people mingle on the patio, sipping where drinks are allowed, where there’s a view of our mountains. Liam serves Perrier.

I stay with my dad and his new wife. There are irises in the guest bedroom, yellow to match the primary colors accenting the rest of the house. Bliss, my dad says, when we’re all together. He tells Liam about his favorite Grant painting. A can of frijoles negroes. It’s large, four by five, and it hangs above the fireplace. Grant was about to throw it away, he says, and I bought it for a hundred bucks. Paid more for the frame.

Grant laughs. He’s heard this anecdote before. I knew I chose the wrong profession, he says. He’s sitting next to me on the couch, our thighs nearly touch but they don’t. I gesture to his wrist, hoping to see his watch, but he extends his hand out for me, thinking that I’ve asked to hold it.

The time, I mouth, and he looks embarrassed.

Oh, he mouths back, eight fifteen.

I am ready for the night to end, ready to retreat to my room. I stand and put plates into the dishwasher. After Grant and Liam leave, I play Scrabble with my dad and the new wife. He keeps misspelling words and he fights with me over “aze.” It’s in the dictionary, he says.

It’s not. But still, he wins.

In the morning, Grant calls and I stop by his house on my way to the airport. He climbs into the rental and sits in the passenger seat. Nice ride, he says.

Thank you.

I’m sorry, he says, about before.

About last night?

No, before, before. I know I could have been better, when you were young.

Oh, you were alright.

He stares past the dashboard, and I wonder at this, my instinct to brush aside his apology rather than accept it, validate both the weight of what he’s saying and also the weight of what I missed.

On my drive to Albuquerque, the sun beats into the car and I sweat. My thighs stick to the leather seat. There is that familiar pulse between my legs, an insistent press, indicating a need for touch. I keep one hand on the steering wheel and I unzip my jeans. I watch the speedometer, seventy-five, and I steady the pressure of my foot on the gas, careful not to accelerate, while I find a sustained rhythm on my clit. I am wet already, swollen, and I feel the moisture change texture on my fingers, silken now as I get closer. I look at the cars ahead and then the cars behind, trying to keep a safe distance. What is it that I want? Grant again. There is something about the way he teaches me how to reach for my own pleasure, demand it, and I realize that’s the source of arousal, a kind of prayer, not for the person perse, or even for the situation, but for what I wish I’d been able to learn.

Use me, he says, until it feels good. You can come first. And I do, easily, hard, my two fingers hinged, pruned. The desert rushing by, the road stretching ahead.

HANNAH WEDERQUIST-KELLER is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and she has received fellowships from Convent Arts and The New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her work is forthcoming in Waxwing and The Southampton Review.