The novelist—call him Dick, because he is big and albino and has a crooked jaw like the whale in Herman Melville’s novel—sits next to a woman, the protagonist of this story. Dick is trying to peek down her tight white top. They are alone on a bench in the church hall. She sells cookbooks to support her kid’s music school, and she has offered to sell his novel as well.

“My publisher is Love Universe,” he tells her. “Print on demand.”

She nods. She has never met a novelist before. When she looks at him, butterflies flutter in her tummy. Unless they aren’t butterflies, but bugs that crawl inside you when you sleep naked, and never leave. Does this mean she is in lust? It can’t be sexual; she loves only her husband.

“There is no demand,” Dick adds under his breath.

His elbow touches hers. The protagonist moves away. The man looks just a few years younger than her, so she is certain she’s not a cougar. That thought reassures her.  She has never had sex with a real writer. Her husband is a bookkeeper, and he prefers spreadsheets to spread legs and rumpled sheets.

She tells the novelist about her ten-year old son. “You know, he got this big piano award at school last year. Do you have kids?”

He leans toward her. “You have skin like a peach. So smooth.”

Corny, she thinks. I have to drive him away, but I must sound both gentle and smart. He is an intellectual, after all.

“You know,” she says, looking away and wrinkling the skin of her forehead. “The Y chromosome is defective. Next to the X, it looks like it has a broken leg. Ergo, men are lame next to women.”

She is very proud of her “ergo” and her metaphor. It’s a bit confusing, even to her, but still…

“Love is not lame,” he says.

She shifts in her chair. Her bottom in tight pants gets hot from the plastic. “What is your book about?”

She doesn’t want to call him Dick anymore. She’d rather call him Ishmael. She has been published once herself, in Smashed Potatoes Quarterly.

“An aunt who has steamy sex with her nephew.”

The protagonist blushes. She should have asked this question before she had offered to sell his book here. The hotness spreads from her bottom to her lower belly. She is sweating down there, too. Does it mean she is easy?

“Is that so?” she asks.

“There is a motel across the road,” Dick/Ishmael whispers in her ear. “I’ll pay the bill, naturally.”

She gets up and glares at him, her ears on fire. “What do you think I am?”

He gets up, too. “You say no because I’m an albino? I bet you’d refuse sex with an African-American. Or with a Buddhist monk.”

Two hours later—after she drove the kid home and made a feeble excuse to leave her husband for a bit—Ishmael raises his head from between her legs and grins.

She refused the motel, and insisted on a Holiday Inn. She paid the bill. He was a first time novelist and she thought he must be poor. She gave her name as Anaïs Nin, and had a hard time explaining to the clerk how to spell it.

She fights the urge to wrap her legs around his neck and strangle him. She can’t do this. Not in this universe. Instead, she grins back and moans. The sound rises to the ceiling and beyond, perhaps trying to escape to the universe where love is more than an adjective in the publisher’s name.