Graeme Simsion

“You always have to compromise,”

I have heard the word stunning used to describe women, but this was the first time I had actually been stunned by one. It was not just the costume or the jewelry or any individual characteristic of Rosie herself: it was their combined effect.

“Just a friend,” said Rosie.
If she knew how many friends I had, she might have realized what a great compliment she had paid me.

“Since when do women discuss anything explicitly?” said Gene.

“I haven’t really noticed,” I told the most beautiful woman in the world.

“How was it?” asked Rosie, as we walked back to the hotel.
“The best day of my adult life,” I said. Rosie seemed so happy with my response that I decided not to finish the sentence: “excluding the Museum of Natural History.”

Then, in this vanishingly small moment in the history of the universe, she took my hand, and held it all the way to the subway.

“The watch,” she said. “I say ‘I need a minute’ and you start timing. Don is not dead.”

“How can you be so organized at one thing and so disorganized at everything else?” I’d asked Rosie, following her installation of the incorrect driver for her printer.
“It’s because I’m concentrating on my thesis, I don’t worry about other stuff. Nobody asks if Freud checked the use-by date on the milk.”
“They didn’t have use-by dates in the early twentieth century.”
It was incredible that two such dissimilar people had become a successful couple.