"Yes, I did," he admitted to her.
"That's a line from a song," she answered.
"That it is. But that didn't make it any less true," he explained to her.
She was disappointed in his lack of originality when it came to charming her. She had been enchanted by his words once upon a day. She acted like the woman she wanted to be, not the woman she was, when she was with him. In retrospect, her admiration for him had been the missing ingredient in a very lethal cocktail that had been brewing here for quite some time.
"And now?" she asked.
"Now?" he asked rhetorically and partially so that he could buy himself a moment to say what he was about to say. "Now? Now I'm dead in here, I think. At least a little bit," he said to her as he pointed with his index finger to the center of his chest, hitting himself a couple times to drive the point home.
"Is this my fault, Benjamin?" she inquired.
"No, Susan. But event that, even that right there, is our biggest enemy," he rose his voice a bit in frustration.
"What?" she asked.
"You were just always swimming upstream," he said.
And for the first time in her life, she understood him. She was no longer moving against his current. She was tired and ready to join Mr. Buckley on the lonely side of the Mississippi, in a Memphis channel with her name on it.
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