The first time is a transgression. The second is a strategy

Poker Chips ©Amol Tyagi (source)

 
Sometimes she deliberately lays money on a horse the men have said is lame or sick in the head, or on a jockey they’d seen drinking rum with young women the night before. When she loses those races she feels a sense of power she never gets from winning, because losing proves the accuracy of her judgment.
(p. 18*)

Back home they kiss for a long time until Lee leans back and looks at her softly and lets his hands rest on her arms. He waits a moment. This part of lovemaking Muriel finds stifling and inelegant, though she could not say exactly why. She does not know if he wants her consent or her desire but either way she wants to refuse him, simply because he asked.
(p. 20*)

Muriel has never learned polite talk. Her mother knew that people walked into the conversations you left open for them, that a small silence could change the course of a life. Never ask a man about his day, she often said. And because she never did, men told her all manner of other things, their secrets, their terrible fears.
(p. 53*)

In the absence of anyone dear, each stranger is a vessel for his anticipation.
(p. 140*)

The fear of this moment is mixed with the anticipation of it, so much so that it feels almost wanted.
(p. 200*)

“Here’s a lesson for you, and maybe it seems like an obvious one,” her mother said. “People in love want a mirror held up to them, and someone has to be the mirror. It’s too easy to let love narrow down to just two people staring across at each other and trying to see themselves. So you have to figure out the difference, which one is really you and which isn’t, which one is just you reflected in someone else. Then you’ll know if it’s love or not.”
(p. 227*)

He feels now as he felt then, that the declaration of love is a gift offered only to the missing. No wives or girlfriends he knew, nor mothers or fathers, would have said aloud the words they wrote to those sons.
(p. 239*)

*according to my reader

 

Shannon Pufahl - On Swift Horses (Riverhead Books, 2019)