He really had met Stacy in a strip club; she'd gone there on a dare from some of her old college friends and he'd been toying with a screwdriver at the bar, only half his attention on poorly-lit gyrating women and sweaty crowds of horny men.
She'd been Stacy Childress then, dark sleek hair and a flush of red like rouge on her cheekbones when she'd sat down next to him at the bar and offered to buy his next round if he'd only spare her some intelligent conversation. He'd snorted into his glass but hadn't refused her request, and something about the Southern lilt of her voice and the way she talked with her hands made a small tight knot in his stomach uncoil. She was gorgeous, there was no doubt about that, and he'd felt the electricity between them even through the smoke and blue haze of the bar.
They wound up talking for the better part of two hours, work and med school and law school and who had the stupider friends; Stacy moving from water to seltzer to wine as he finished off his third screwdriver, and during one particularly heated exchange she'd laid her small warm hand on his wrist and just like that, he was lost.
She scared him a little, if the truth were to be told; she radiated passion in everything she did, be it career or leisure or sex. The first time, lying there afterward with her still half-draped over his hips, Greg had closed his eyes and tried to still the thrumming of his heart and wondered with something almost like terror: Jesus, could this really be it?
He pushed her buttons, made her think, she gave as good as she got and somewhere in between the night he'd kissed her on her doorstep and the afternoon they spent cross-legged on his floor amid a pile of debris, sorting her books and papers and trinkets from boxes(and he, refusing a few of them out of hand: "I'm not having a pink elephant in a tutu on my bookshelf. God, I can feel my testosterone leaking out of my ears as we speak."), she'd gotten inside him, into him and beyond him, and for a little while he went around wondering if everything he thought he knew might be wrong. If Stacy Childress were the exception, the flaw in the rule, if maybe the disgusting majority might be stupid, sure, but maybe a few shining examples were left.
It was movies, and lazy Sunday
afternoons spent lying in bed listening to the rain; it was throwing
popcorn at the back of random theatergoers' heads until she was
giggling and helpless and flushed. It was her small yet dexterous hands
on his shoulders, unwinding the tension that his own hatred of the
ignorant had wound in, it was listening to his ravings on the sick and
unwashed masses and touching his lips and after five minutes, he
couldn't help but smile. It was the way she looked at him when his
brain was on fire with comprehension, mystery diagnosis and the thing
he did best of all, and it was picnics in the rain and tennis and golf
until the day he'd half-crumpled with a bolt of thick heavy pain in his
thigh, and after that it hadn't really ever been anything anymore.