The TV anchors were mourning the loss of Ronald Reagan, and I was sitting in a random Tex-Mex restaurant in metro Atlanta, wondering if I, too, had lost my bloody mind. My brain was having trouble processing everything going on at once: Brian telling stories, chipper music from the radio station, Maggie Thatcher eulogizing Reagan, the utter tastiness of the quesadilla I was eating.

I know this body like I know my own. Boastful girl, you know better; bodies change as lives change. The man of six years ago is not the man of now, no more than you are the sum total of six years' worth of change on the body that married him on that July day.

Silly girl.

We sat across from each other in the restaurant, sharing guilty giggles over queso on conversations that cannot be breathed into other ears.

"You know me well," he said, swiping extraneous sauce from his lips with the nearest napkin.

I'd fully intended for cat.net to stay silent until my return. Life rarely works out the way I planned it, though.

We set out on a Saturday afternoon to conquer the wilds of the furniture stores, a few days after Misty and I had performed our scouting mission for sectionals. I consider furniture shopping an occasional, horrific necessity, similar in scope and pain threshold to car shopping.

Do not mistake me: like the purchase of my car two years ago, I will celebrate the purchase of this sectional once it is completed. We are both looking forward to the furniture shuffling that will take place once the purchase is made, but the process....Well, the process of getting there, I could really and truly do without. Okay, perhaps not the entire process, but I think I'd be happier if I were at least allowed to superficially wound the furniture salesmen that annoy me.

When I awoke from my nap the clock said 10:12; the room, dark. Almost automatically, my awareness drifted down to my legs and found him: there, snuggled close. Not interested in being cuddled or petted, but in nearness, in gathering warmth. I swirled fingertips down his back, and his muscles quivered and rippled in response, his spots and orange splotches shivering with the touch and then settling back down to their normal spaces.

"We've got this black-hole policy. Things that get said at the compound stay there."

"Funny," I said, "because we've got something just like that here."

With that said, Chris visited, but so much of what we talked about falls so squarely into the realm of "no one else's business" that I hardly know what can be said about the time he spent here except to acknowledge that it happened.