" I wasn't eager to show you anything, last night," I said. "I was merely hoping that the evening wouldn't end too soon. I was having fun. I was enjoy...ing your company. I wasn't trying to... do anything." So, if I'd invited you back to sleep in my bedroom, you'd have refused, right?" No. No, of course not. But that's not what I expected to happen. I didn't even hope it would happen. It was far beyond any... expectations... that I might have had." But you wanted us to go out together. You kept. The room was thick with tobacco smoke. He touched the diamond-looking stickpin at his breastbone and sipped his watered brandy, patiently waiting for his drinking companion to find the end of a muddled story about some inebriated duck hunters on the Eastern Shore."So," his young friend said loudly, bending over with unrelieved glee on his pock-marked face, "the damned cannon exploded, scared off all the fowl and they got nothing but wet feet and a few powder burns."Mac Holmes joined in his. My name is Jayden St. Pierre. I'm thirteen years old.Hope to hear from you.Jayden.'I really didn't expect an answer but I dream about all that money and what a wonderful Christmas I could have with mom and Robbie. After school, when I come through the door, Robbie is crying."Jayden, some boys pushed me down and I bruised my knee." Come over here, Robbie, and let me look at it."Dropping his pants, he shows me a large bloody area on his knee. It's only a deep scrap but it looks terrible. I walk. Out of frustration I turned and headed back to the apartment. As I walked down the street oblivious to almost everything around me I realized that my relationship to you is like one of those watery puddles. I can peer into that liquid mirror see everything that I am and everywhere I want to be just blinking back at me but the second I reach out to touch it, the image distorts, changes form, and becomes unlike anything it was before. Damn the rain, damn the heavens for pouring it down on me and.