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Read the story# The Long Game — Revised Scenes *Drop-in replacements for Chapter Four, Chapter Seven, and Chapter Fifteen.* --- ## Four — The Jetta They closed at ten, which felt like a personal insult. We went out to the parking lot and it was that raw Connecticut cold, the kind that gets into your jaw and makes your whole face feel borrowed. She had her arms crossed over the black top, jean skirt, no coat worth mentioning, and she was doing the thing where you pretend you're not freezing because admitting it means the night's over. She got in her car and started it and I could see her through the windshield with her shoulders up around her ears, teeth going audibly. And I said the smoothest line of my entire life: "My car has seat heaters." That was it. That was the play. A gray 2003 Jetta GLI, which I loved with an intensity I have since matched only for actual human beings, and it had heated seats, and it was the single greatest romantic asset I possessed. She looked at me for a second. Not long. Long enough. "You've been saving that," she said. "All night." She got out of her car. --- Inside, the heat came up slow. I turned the seat on for her and she made a sound I have thought about at inconvenient moments for twenty-two years — this low, involuntary, *oh* as the warmth came up under her, her head tipping back against the rest, eyes closing. "Okay," she said, to the ceiling. "That's not fair." "I told you." "You did." She turned her head against the headrest to look at me, and she didn't lift it. She just rolled her head sideways and stayed there, cheek to the leather, watching me with her hair falling across her face. That's the frame I've kept. That exact one. Twenty-two years and I could still draw it. We talked. I have no idea about what. I know that at some point she was turned toward me with one knee up on the seat, and that the windows had started to go, and that the conversation got slower and slower, the pauses stretching out until they were doing more work than the words. And then there was a pause that didn't close. She was looking at my mouth. I remember noticing that and thinking, very clearly, *don't blow this,* which is not a helpful thought and has never once helped anyone. She reached over and took the brim of that terrible baseball cap and pulled it off my head. Set it on the dash. Didn't say a word about it. Just moved it out of the way like it was in the way. Then she put her hand along my jaw. I don't know who closed