"Pepper."

He looked at her as if he was considering whether or not she was joking. "Really?"

"Yeah. Pep means vigor, and it's short for pepper, which adds vigor to food." It really did pay off to study with note cards. It sometimes amazed her how quickly she could digest one of Deb's lectures. She realized he was waiting for some explanation, like she'd just given the stats on the average rainfall of the Amazon rainforest. She shrugged. "I seem to know a lot about cooking."

She felt him stiffen next to her like she'd said something wrong, and she didn't think he'd say any more, but he seemed to relax himself deliberately. "I'll try not to hold that against you."

Surely he was kidding, but his serious look didn't go away. What an unusual man. He'd been an interesting boy as well. She tried to remember them together on the bridge. They must have crossed it a dozen times. On foot it was the easiest way to town and the grocery store right on the other side that stocked enough beer to float the campus.

She listened to the conversations mingling behind them as groups headed towards the restaurants and bars. She tried but didn't have one clear memory of Max to pull out of storage. It was too bad memory didn't work that specifically. Maybe good. Wonderful memories faded, bled together to become a general one, but so did the painful ones.

She wished, sometimes, she could store the past as conveniently as she stored recipe cards. Card by card, she could long for and retrieve a September day riding a bike across the bridge, Max beside her saying something bright and clever or maybe laughing at something she'd said. That would have been a good one to re-live in detail. Just like the recipe card with the individual ingredients that made up the whole, she could whip up a memory. September twenty years ago she would have complained about her mother half a cup and worried about what she was doing in elementary education since it was already proving a poor fit. Deciding what to major in would be a whole cup. The best time of her life with Max beside her deserved a quart. And, whether she wanted to see it or not, the doubts about him were probably the beginning of a teaspoon then.

Even on the best September day when she'd been in the middle of being in love with him, she'd doubted some too. At the end she thought he was every doubt. But to be honest, most of the doubts were about herself, gallons of doubt that drowned out the taste of everything.

Did it still flavor all that she did? Was that the dominate ingredient of her life? She'd waited months for Steve to come back, but doubted she had the ability to make it work even given a chance. God knew she doubted her relationship with Missy. Maybe mid-life came with a twisted silver lining. The collapse of her marriage and F report card in parenting had eliminated some of her doubt about the collapse of things. Total collapse had been confirmed. Disaster had come out of the oven.

She turned to see if Max was ready to go, the evening sad now for her, too nostalgic to give her anything real, or maybe too real to give her even this moment of nostalgia.

He leaned closer, and she registered for a second that he was going to kiss her. She felt a pulse of panic and then Max so soft against her lips, along her jaw, down to the pulse point on her throat. She registered the question of it and felt her heart kick up a notch in answer.

"Hey, I... sorry."

Gwen stepped back, stared big-eyed at Max. She watched him turn, eyes narrowed at the interrupter.

A student gripped a camera bag, tried a smile, the kind designed to calm down a rabid dog. "Sorry, man."

"I'm flunking you, man."

"Not after you see these." He patted the bag like it held treasure.

Max laughed and tipped his head toward Gwen. "They can't be that good."

He'd taken her home after the kiss was cut short on the bridge. Hell, he'd had to drop her off at her dorm building. Not that he wasn't completely in control of himself, but he hadn't intended to kiss her and he did and wouldn't have stopped, maybe ever, if Dalton hadn't arrived in all his cluelessness. There were rules about interrupting a guy kissing a female that Dalton should know. The rules applied whether the guy was thirteen or a hundred and thirty. Who was educating these kids?

And he still felt restless Saturday afternoon. He hadn't been able to stand another minute in his house and found himself staring out his office window onto the empty campus. He'd kicked around the night before and kicked himself for thinking Gwen was someone he should even make eye contact with let alone lip contact with. In the first place, he shouldn't have followed her into Psych. There was a sign. Psych. But it had been so much fun sparring with her again. She still had that girl-quality that made her gullible but with a woman's edge that made her a match. A match. Hell. He had enough trouble without adding Gwen to it.

Every man was entitled to the woman who could tie up his whole world and make him crazy. But when it ended, and it would, and badly, he learned and never went back. You get measles once, and you're immune. That's how it was supposed to work. It did work. He was immune, just human, and he'd gone without sex for a long time, months, camel time in a man's world. He was being an idiot to even think it was anything more than that.

He grabbed his camera because there was nothing a couple of hours of shooting wouldn't cure. He left the office and headed down the hallway, but when he stepped outside the building, he could hear the muffled announcer at the football stadium. He'd do some all American photos. He never did those. He'd give himself an assignment. Capture the purity of the game, the true believers who worshipped there. No edge, no comment, no twist, no framing the beautiful through the gum encrusted bleacher bottoms. Just frame the world the way everyone else seemed to see it, full of softness and second chances.

Annie walked surprisingly fast given the diameter of her legs. Gwen had a hard time keeping up with her as they trekked across the campus with grocery bags. Annie had even taken the heavier ones out of consideration for Gwen's advanced age. That made her smile and consider there was a lot to the girl she'd once thought of as the gopher. She'd gotten Annie into the kitchen for a lesson early one morning, and they'd made tentative muffins because that was how Annie approached things, even baked goods.

They'd used the lavender sugar, and it proved to be both lovely and not easily overpowered. That's how she'd come to think of Annie. The girl possessed several strengths not apparent to the naked eye, not apparent, yet, to Annie herself. They'd talked, as much as interactions with Annie could be considered talking, about her family. Every one of them for several generations was a practicing attorney. Her parents had been the second round of a husband-wife team. Her grandparents took what some would say was the dubious honor of being the first.

It appeared that Annie's brother was the first to break the chain. He attended a private high school but was already given up on by the parents for reasons Gwen did not ask about and Annie probably wouldn't have said. That left all their lawyer eggs in one basket. It was up to Annie to keep the family chain letter going, and there might be dire consequences for breaking the tradition. Annie didn't seem up for the fight.

They walked over the bridge in silence, Annie because that was her natural state and Gwen because she'd been kissed there recently. The truth was that not kissing anyone but her husband for twenty years, and not even him that often, was her natural state.

And Max of all people. She tried to concentrate as they left the bridge and encountered the spill-over crowd from the tailgate parties nearby. The music and voices already rocked half of the campus. Max, of all the people in a world of people, was the last person she should have kissed. Well, to be fair, she hadn't really kissed him. She wasn't using that as an excuse, she'd just been too stunned to technically kiss him back, and his lips had quickly made tracks down her neck to the... shit, she felt the edge of real trouble.

Another couple of seconds and she might have gotten over his taser effect on her and gone crazy, been unleashed, taken him like a-- She jumped when Annie knocked her shin with a grocery bag.

Annie stood, rooted on the path. Gwen took in her startled face then looked ahead and saw the boys running towards them. They had a field to go, and they had some speed, but also they didn't want to spill their drinks, so she had a minute.

She set down her bag, put her hand on Annie's back to help support it. The poor girl really did spook easily. "That's a sight. Bunch of big guys charging." She considered that maybe Annie didn't spook easily so much as spook with good reason. "You know, they remind me of the jerks in high school, that pack of mean jock boys. They were the ones who did things the principal called practical jokes. But they weren't either practical or funny were they?"

Annie shook her head.

Gwen hoped that whatever had happened to the girl had been bruising and not scarring. "A couple of them in my high school liked to make up names, but they weren't that great. We could come up with better ones." She glanced at Annie, eyes still straight ahead. Hayden was down now and took out Bryan and Jason in a pile of blue and silver athletic gear. Jason lost his hat, and Gwen realized she'd never seen him without it. He really did look like a high school boy.

"And they did, one of those boys, maybe, to some girl... do something lots worse."

Annie lifted her head, lowered it. "My friend, Marianne."

Gwen felt relieved that the story wasn't Annie's and then guilty like she'd wished it on a girl she didn't know. "I'm sorry, Annie."

She could see the boys were on their feet now and running again, although at a slower clip. She only had a couple of seconds. "Annie, listen, you go on toward the dorm. I'll get rid of them and catch up." But Annie stood her ground even though Gwen felt her shift a couple of inches closer. Strength. "If it helps, think of them as overgrown puppies."

Annie tried to smile at her.

"They all are until thirty." She thought of Max, too jaded and worldly to ever be called a puppy, but still undomesticated. "Then they're wolves."

Two hot dogs in less than twenty-four hours, it was a good thing she'd bought vegetables at the store. She was in the decade when cholesterol numbers meant something.

Annie seemed surprisingly relaxed, drinking her full-sugar soda, the lucky girl. She watched the boys closely but with more amusement than the discomfort she'd shown at first. They'd tucked their grocery bags in the cooler and found themselves pre-game partying with the fraternal order of Chi Omikron. Gwen's plan was to finish her processed meat and white bun, nurse her diet soda for the thirty minutes until kick-off, and head back to the dorm.

Meanwhile she watched the boys in action, and it was clear they were freshmen running with a pack of bigger dogs. The upperclassmen had earned a bit of their swagger, and the girls responded accordingly. She felt a twinge of something for the boys trying to make their way in a much bigger arena than high school. She'd not fully appreciated how difficult it must be to be a young male in the world.

Had some of Max's push to be free been him trying to stand out in a world of older, higher ranking men? Back then she'd wanted something too, something she couldn't name. It had been Max and more than Max. She'd not even been close to figuring that out when she'd been shaken up. There'd been eighteen months of pure joy and then running wild with Max had gone from bliss to disaster. She'd been flying and discovered that when she really needed it, her chute didn't open, wouldn't open, couldn't open with him. She had to give Steve credit there. Whatever the usual disappointments found in marriage, and the colossal disappointments found in divorce, he'd always plodded on solid ground. She'd thought she did too.

Hayden came up to them with dessert. There had to be a hundred cookies in the box and it was only half full. The first hundred must be sitting in Chi Omikron bellies, already soaking up alcohol and mixing with grilled meats in probably some bad ways. "Thank you." She took two and handed one to Annie. Her impulse to fatten the girl up a bit she wouldn't categorize as maternal. It was friendly, not caretaking.

Annie pointed into the crowd, the steady stream of people that made their way from tailgates to ticket gates. "Isn't that Guy?"

Gwen waved and was rewarded with a huge grin. That boy may not be able to communicate with words, but he had a joy that was apparent. He stopped in front of them, lowered his head to Gwen, then Annie, and Gwen put her hand out to stop Annie from falling out of her lawn chair. "Cookie, Guy?"

He smiled again, took two, and pulled up a lawn chair, sitting with great deliberation as if he were fully engaged in something even that small. She remembered seeing him with the TV remote and the same sense of purpose.

Jason came over, shrugged with male casualness. "Guy."

Guy smiled back, and Jason handed him a soda.

Well, men apparently did know how to host a party.

Bryan, a foam finger claiming victory, pointed his regular hand at the stadium, reconsidered, and aimed the giant one. "Game's starting. We'll see you at half-time?"

Gwen smiled, "Probably not but thanks for the lunch." Bryan waved the foam finger, rallying the boys to head in. Guy stayed, looked around, and seemed to determine where he'd have the best view. He settled on facing away from the mob and toward the river. Motioning for her and Annie to join him, they all turned their chairs around. It did have a superior view, and the three of them sat with their backs to the parking lot and stadium just past it. It was the most relaxing moment she'd had in so long, it felt foreign. Lovely and foreign.

She sipped her soda, enjoyed the cool sweet of it, diet and all. Behind them beat music and yelling, and the occasional hiss of a grill flare up, but it all accompanied the view in wonderful relief.

She wanted to hold it like a living picture, the grassy field in front of them, straw-colored with the growth of summer past. Sections of it remained beaten down from the pep rally the night before. There were a few cups and bottles missed in the clean-up, but by March the grass would spring up fresh and green again.

Across the way, she could see the bridge. Even without the up-close beauty of the wood, it still impressed her with its spidery rust red structure spun over the river. From a distance, the water, low and dark, didn't even seem to move but stood a dark blue stroke of water color in the tan of river banks.

And beyond the river, the brick back of the grocery store followed a line of mixed stucco and aluminum-sided stores until the buildings passed out of sight and dark roads branched and disappeared into city blocks. Above it all, around them all, a rim of mountain range. It showed dark blue from the distance, even though gray rock and evergreens and soil couldn't add up to the color good mountains always wore. And the peaks, still free of snow, would know the next season soon enough. By October some edges wouldn't have escaped a dusting of white.

She felt herself melt into the back of the lawn chair, let her head fall back, eyes open to the sky where a wisp of cloud lay like a woman's scarf thrown across the blue. She heard the click everyone else missed and tried not to move. She'd learned that much in the time she'd been with Max. Never react to the camera. Just be and let it capture the moment, your moment just as it is.

But it changed things, the click. It meant he was there and watched her in that impersonal yet deeply personal way he could with a camera in his hand. She lifted her head and met the eye of the camera. Silence.

She waited for the click, but Max didn't move. The confusion must have shown on her face, and he lowered the camera, fussing with it around his neck. She'd not seen him conscious of his camera since the first day he'd carried one and never seen him use it to distract himself. Or her, maybe.

He waved vaguely toward the stadium. "Taking some shots of the game."

She sat, watched him, and felt something shift in who was and wasn't comfortable. She could be the cool one for a change, the one who, oh-so-casually, just kept on being relaxed. "Better get going. Game's starting."

He nodded. "Yeah, I'm taking some shots of the game."

"That's what you said." It was so fun to see him flustered. She didn't know why he was, but she should figure it out and do it more often.

"I did?"

And it would be fun to poke him a little bit, not mean so much as mildly zinging. "And you'll take dark ones too... the cheerleader caught looking pissy, a section of bored or crazed fans. You'll be shooting underneath the bleachers because you always had a fondness for the gum on the underbelly of mankind."

He looked like he might try to defend himself, and she felt a little guilty and held up her hand. "I'm sorry. You do brilliant work. Everyone always said so, and I've seen it myself." Not that she'd set out to see his work. She might be a little guilty of paying attention to photo credits in magazines but didn't everybody?

Max smiled.

Damn. She could see she'd made a tactical error when he quickly recovered his god-given state of sure of himself-ness. Just like that, one minute she was on top and then wham she was on the bottom. That didn't sound right. She needed to defend herself. "I didn't follow your career or anything. I've never yahooed you."

"Googled. And I will believe your denial about anything internet related now that you've said yahooed. Thank you for the clarification. I feel safer knowing you couldn't find me via satellite."

"I don't have to. You're everywhere I am."

"It's a small campus."

"Not that small."

"And I am too going to capture the purity of Americana during this game."

She snorted.

"You could do better?"

"I couldn't take better pictures, but I could capture American purity." She laughed. "A hell of a lot better than you could. You wouldn't know nice, lovely humanity if it bit you on the ass."

He arched an eyebrow, so sure of himself she wanted to kick him in the shin. "If humanity bit my ass it wouldn't be the nice and lovely humans doing it." He got the wolfy look on his face again. "Although if a centerfold was an ass-biter, she'd be lovely by trade, and it might be nice--"

"You're making my very point." She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes as if she were relaxed. Maybe power would revert back to her if she were cool enough, like in tennis when it advances from love to fifteen all. They were tied, but with her superior calm, she'd be deuce. Wait, deuce wasn't winning, was it? It was just another tie but with a higher score?

She felt Max grab her hand and pull her to her feet. She tried to sputter some sense of outrage, but he pulled the camera strap over his head and pushed it into her hands. "You get the first half of the game. I take the second. And the winner..."

"Winner what?" Damn. She needed to stop talking altogether. It didn't matter what spin he could possible put on taking her down. It was still down. And she for one wasn't going to-- "Winner takes all."

She felt him try to tug her along toward the stadium, but she pulled back. "Not so fast, mister. Some of us find it critical to set the parameters of a bet before we rush into anything."

"Not a gambler. I knew that."

"I have gambled plenty." She tried to get her hand back, but he didn't release it, and she didn't want to make a scene in front of Guy and Annie, although they were still studying the mountains with Zen-like concentration. "I've been to Vegas."

"With a bunch of girlfriends, I'm thinking. You got blitzed on a nice merlot and threw it all away on nickel slots. Am I right?"

"Please. There were shots of serious alcohol and poker and, uh, craps. Nude show girls. I mean, not one of them had their tops on. And there was a--"

He laughed. "You went with your mother."

She didn't have to admit anything, and so what if she'd been forced to go because no one wanted to be the Bunco group's designated driver?

Max tugged her a couple of steps toward the stadium as if they both hadn't noticed they were moving. "The winner gets one day."

"One day doing what? Exactly."

"Whatever the other person wants. Exactly."

"So I could get you to wax my car or do my psychology homework?" Not that she hadn't done her psychology homework so far ahead she'd probably already reached the end of the semester.

He dismissed the difficulty of that with a wave. "Please."

"Drive two hours and clean out my mother's basement?"

"Does she keep any bodies down there?"

"Winner takes all, doesn't she?"

"Yes, he does, and the longer you stand here, the greater your odds of missing the kickoff, which, as you know, is the summit of man's goodwill."

"I don't know..." She motioned to Annie and Guy who appeared to have mastered relaxation to the millionth degree. "Annie, are you okay if I go to the game 'cause I don't have to. We can head back to the dorm or..."

Annie waved her on.

Well, maybe she would go, but there ought to be more rules. Max just couldn't be allowed free rein. She couldn't risk that, even though the picture she had in her head wasn't them from twenty years before but the two of them on the bridge the night before. She rushed on. "Nobody can ask the other person to do anything that the other person feels is inappropriate or otherwise deeply unwise or could potentially complicate what shouldn't be complicated at all but may be even though it's not, and I know that you and I, well I don't know and wouldn't know because there's nothing of, you know, any..." She took a breath. "Why did you kiss me?"

Max didn't even blink. "I don't know."

He must have thought about it too if he could answer so quickly and without any insight. No one could have insight about the kiss because it was plainly and simply wrong. "It shouldn't happen again."

He hesitated but nodded in agreement. "Now, are you gonna get in there and shoot some niceness, or are we gonna stand here while you lose?"