…Couldn’t go through another tryst with a married man. In the best of times he’d provide her a furnished studio with a river view in a piano-lobby building; an allowance so that she could shop well, take all the courses she wanted, enjoy movies and music and books, surround herself with quality things… All she had to do in exchange was to keep herself pretty and inhabitable so that he could move into her like he would into a house as the Patti Labelle song goes. That’s all she had to do. But she was tired. Tired of feigning desire, tired of lapping her sustenance like a lost dog from any man with the smell of meat on his hand.” – pg. 266, Trading Dreams at Midnight by Dianne McKinney-Whetstone
