“Shh, I’m reading,” she said.

“Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard my telly playing and told Mrs. Wattlesbrook, and I had to toss it out this morning. If they spot me hanging around you...

“You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.”

“Bugger, Jane. . .“

“Martin, please, I’m sorry about your TV but you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high Home Ec when I made a pair of gray shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t played pianoforte since I quit from boredom at age twelve, and I haven’t read a book in the middle of the day since college, so you see what a mess I’m in.

“So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me again when there is no one else to flirt with.”

Huh! thought Jane.

He snapped a dead branch off the trunk.

Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away.

“Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds this morning. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?” Jane shrugged.

“You do?”

“More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.”

Martin squinted up at a cloud. “I’ve never understood the women who come here, and you’re one of them. I can’t make sense of it.”

“I don’t think I could explain it to a man. If you were a woman, all I’d have to say is ‘Cohn Firth in a wet shirt’ and you’d say, ‘Ah.

“Ah. I mean, aha! is what I mean.”

Crap. She’d hoped he would laugh at the Cohn Firth thing. And he didn’t. And now the silence made her feel as though she were standing on a seesaw, waiting for the weight to drop on the other side.

Then she smelled it. The musty, acrid, sour, curdled, metallic, decaying odor of ending. This wasn’t just a first fight. She’d been in this position too many times not to recognize the signs.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she asked.

“Were we ever together enough to require breaking up?”

Oh. Ouch. She took a step back on that one. Perhaps it was her dress that allowed her to compose herself more quickly than normal. She curtsied.

“Pardon the interruption, I mistook you for someone I knew.”

She turned and left, wishing for a Victorian-type gown so she could have whipped the full skirts for a satisfying little cracking sound. She had to satisfy herself with emphatically tightening her bonnet ribbon as she marched.

You stupid, stupid girl, she thought. You were fantasizing again. Stop it!

It had all been going so well. She’d let herself have fun, unwind, not plague a new romance with constant questions such as, What if? And after? And will he love me forever?

“Are you breaking up with me.. . ?“ she muttered to herself. He must think she was a lunatic. And really, he’d be right. Here she was in Pembrook Park, a place where women hand over scads of dough to hook up with men paid to adore them, but she finds the one man on campus who’s in a position to reject her and then leads him into it. Typical Jane.

Boyfriend #5

Rahim(last name forgotten),

AGE “THIRTY-FIVE” (POSSIBLY FORTY+) “You are so lovely,” he told Jane across the perfume counter. She was nineteen, in college, making minimum wage, and she’d just had the worst haircut in her life. Possibly that’s why his compliment felt more important than it was, a gorgeous bird she couldn’t bear to let go.

For three weeks he took her to restaurants, expensive restaurants, and he paid’ In a spree of crazy extravagance, she ordered appetizers and dessert. Then one night he lured her to his apartment, which smelled like oil. Body oil. The kind that pools on skin that hasn’t seen a shower for a week.

With his eyes half closed, his hand mauled her shoulder, and he said, “I want to make love to you,” in a clumsy swat at romance. She thought of the moment Elizabeth runs into Mr. Darcy at Pemberley; by comparison, Rahim’s slippery pawing made Jane laugh. Out loud.

There was an excruciating pause. She cleared her throat and mumbled an apology as she left.

day 7, continued

JANE WORE HER LEAST FAVORITE evening dress to dinner, the green one with the brown trimming that fit like a tent. It didn’t matter. Martin wouldn’t see her, or anyone else for that matter, as she trudged along at the rear end of the prece4 beast. She thought she hid her gloom well, and then she got tired of hiding it. In the drawing room, she grabbed a book slumped as best as her corset would allow.

“Do sit down to cards with us this evening, Miss Erstwhile, Miss Heartwright said as the gentlemen joined them in the drawing room. “I can’t bear to have you reading alone again.”

Jane wanted to glare. Miss Heartwright, even when sitting straight with a Regency woman’s wood-plank spine, maintained an effortless manner, as though she were simply lounging against the sturdiness of her own perfection. And then there was this twinkle in her eye and her impossibly white teeth. Maddening.

“No, thank you.” Jane was in no mood to banter.

“Come, you must. “Mr. Nobley,” Miss Heartwright said, turning to her favorite of the gentlemen, “help me persuade Miss Erstwhile out of her tortoise shell.” Mr. Nobley glanced up from his book. “If Miss Erstwhile wishes to read rather than play, I will not provoke her.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nobley,” said Jane, and she meant it.

He nodded, as though they were co-conspirators. It was disconcerting gesture from that man.

“Mr. Nobley,” Miss Heartwright intoned with the sweetest smiles, “you at least I can entice for a short round of speculation.

For her, Mr. Nobley put down his book and joined the table. The sight of it made Jane declare she would retire early. This time she stopped in her chamber for her pelisse and bonnet.

It was a relief to be outdoors. In the chill and dark, the world seemed closer, intimate. She shivered and walked until her blood warmed and helped her fight the ache of vulnerability. She wished for Molly, a best friend who’d laugh with her over her Martin mistake and loyally find Jane faultless and everyone else in the wrong.