THIS AGREEMENT BETWEEN                           (hereinafter called the “Reader”)

AND

             ANDI MYLES                        (hereinafter called the “Author”)

The Author shall:

Supply as much information as required to provide the Reader with sufficient detail such that the Reader will not be confused about significant specifics of the Author’s “most controversial relationship.” The Author will deliver, at minimum, satisfactory entertainment value. “Satisfactory” will be determined solely by the Author and any/all editors who help in the production of this manuscript. She will answer, to the best of her ability, common questions stemming from the Reader’s confusion and curiosity as follows:

1. I acknowledge, much to my chagrin, that he is the most interesting thing about me.
2. I know how scandalous it all is. The middle-aged married man, the ingenue—I too watched those movies and read those books with a greedy voyeuristic thrill. And yes, it really was very much like the movies, though I am not sure if it is because they are good at mimicking life, or we were doing our best to mimic those stories.
   1. I will not remark on the fact that the age difference between us is almost exactly 22 years.
   2. And I certainly won’t reveal that he was married to my father’s cousin.
3. At fifteen, I spent a warm summer evening with him wandering the streets of New York City looking for my grandparents. I hate to admit that it is entirely possible we walked right past my grandmother and I didn’t notice—that’s how absorbed I was by him.
4. I’d rather not to tell you that I was seventeen when he and his wife visited us and “the whole thing began.”
   1. I don’t like to talk about how one night he stayed out late with a friend he knew in town, and I was upstairs, trying to gather the courage to get a glass of water in my carefully chosen pajamas with a plan to just “happen” to run into him when I heard the front door click.
   2. I will tell you about the time eight of us crammed into an SUV with seven seatbelts. I slipped off my seat when my father took a sharp turn. I won’t mention that I probably exaggerated my slide just a bit and when he reached out to catch me and our skin touched, the pent-up desire sparkled between us so brightly that I looked up at him in surprise. I won’t describe for you the hungry look in his eyes that, at seventeen, I was only just beginning to recognize.
   3. I will not share the hundreds of pages of emails we exchanged over the next few months or the fact that on the surface, they seemed innocuous. Rambling and grandiose philosophical exchanges that referenced Kahlil Gibran and Plato paralleled the mundane and meticulous details of my senior directing project for theater class and the pros and cons of joining the Air Force Academy six months after the invasion of Iraq. You’d have to read carefully to find the suggestion of anything more. I will not express how desperately I looked.
   4. I doubt I need to mention that it was his idea to invite me to their house for spring break.
5. I refuse to provide a timeline of our relationship.
   
6. He used the word love first, he leaned forward to kiss me as we sat crisscross-applesauce on my dorm room bed, and I never, ever, called him.
7. The guilt and shame was so strong that throughout my college years, I routinely woke up in the middle of the night and ran barefoot under flickering fluorescent lights to the shared bathrooms to vomit. I will not comment on the fact that he attempted to teach me breathing techniques to deal with stress.
8. I will not give a full psychological analysis of what drew me to him, including but not limited to: my relationship with my father, my resolute belief that I was fundamentally unattractive, and my desire to be seen as wiser than I was.
9. I am delighted to tell you that I—one year from the age he was when we began our affair—am happy. I would love to tell you about my healthy, strong, but comparatively boring marriage and my 2.5 kids. Would you like to hear about my chickens?
10. I don’t want to disclose how I cringed when, years later, he told me about how his new girlfriend—a few years younger than me—was a virgin when she started dating him at 25. I don’t want to tell you about the time, years after that, as he began overseeing a college theater group, he told me that it was “good to be working with young people again,” and I wondered, Can’t he hear himself? Why would he say that to me, of all people?
11. I am most embarrassed when I remember how cool he seemed to me back then.
12. I won’t share with you that while he did not take my (classically defined) virginity, he managed to be my first for pretty much everything else.
13. Stop. No more.
14. I won’t admit that occasionally, for a few minutes once or twice a year, I forgive that dumb-ass teenager for being so fucking young.

The Reader shall:

1. Stop asking for more.