EXCERPT (from History of the Branded Heart)

All my life I've been told my sins are countless and will send me to hell. So I'm going for broke. I wait until Hank's asleep before I to through his wallet. Standing here in the bedroom naked, using the moon as a flashlight, I'm no better than a prostitute hunting for a little something extra. But I do it anyway. I have to know.

Two tens, four ones. A parking permit from the college where he teaches. Every day he sets it on the dashboard of his Austin-Healy so it won't mar the chrome of his bumper. He is an untenured professor of folklore and mythology, a Ph.D. The closest I've come to finishing college is lying here in the crook of his arm. But I'm not stupid. Even before my fingers close on the tissue-thin doctor's receipt, I have suspected.

Hank's heartbeat, until tonight, has always been like a medium trot on a well-seasoned horse - those measured beats as important as the spaces. But tonight when I listened, offhandedly at first, then closer, as if I were hearing gossip about myself, there were lapses. It skidded into a rushing gait, all wrong, before it settled.

"What's this?" I asked, my finger on his nipple like I was taking his pulse.

"Just PVC's," he told me. "What I get for drinking American beer."

"Did you see a doctor?"

"It's nothing. My heart just hammers every once in a while."

"Just hammers."

"Tap, tap. Like a rubber mallet. Reflexes."

Is it because he keeps getting turned down for tenure? Or because I make him dance the two-step when he really doesn't want to? Could be either. All those weekend cowboys at C.Cs's Yellow Rose and my Hank. The crowd's breathy hum-along to "Hearts on the Borderline" while he missteps, whispering in my ear that I should go back to college. Finish something. Different path down the same old trail. To tempt me, as if it's his classes I would be taking, he tells me the story of Bellerophon, the Corinthian prince who tamed Pegasus. Folklore I, opening lecture; I've seen the course syllabus.

"Oh, neat," I said, though putting wings on horses in my opinion is overkill.

"Not entirely," he answered. "It wasn't enough that he killed the Chimera and danced with Amazons. He got ideas about moving to Mount Olympus."

"You make it sound like a singles complex."

He Laughs. "It kind of was."

"So? Don't leave me hanging. Did he get in or not?"

"Nah. Zeus got rankled that he didn't think of it first. So he sent a mega-horsefly to Pegasus and he bucked our ambitious prince to earth. Boom. Blind and crippled. Don't you just hate it when that happens?"