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1   It must have been around the same time she decided that she really was using all the hot yoga as a substitute for other kinds of self-harm – she always realised these things so late, out of touch with her Innerlichkeit, as the philosopher Georg Simmel would say, the intelligible forms of her understanding outstripping the inchoate flow of her consciousness – that the kid arrived on the scene Indeed his sudden obtrusion must have been around the same she decided she needed to scale back the stretching and instead punish herself for whatever she’d been punishing herself all her life by working on her dissertation and not, say, by pretending to sit in a small non-existent chair while her thighs burned and twitched or by standing for minutes with her leg pulled over her head like some kind of retarded Degas – she’d decided that she’d get to work, anyway, though she certainly hadn’t done anything about it And she wouldn’t for a while   Life was all about timing; she’d learned that from her studies: you have to learn something about plotting if you’re going to study literature So it didn’t quite surprise her that there he was, the kid on the neighbouring mat, a smattering of acne on his shoulders, the kind you get from exercise, not bad genes, wearing nothing but a t-shirt from the university supposedly about to confer her PhD and – heavens, the youth these days – Spandex capris   The kid was very good-looking, or at least young-looking She noticed because recently she’d been nourishing a youth fetish And not just a sad who-can-hope-to-avoid-it-in-a-youth-fetishising-culture kind of thing but a specific, personal jonesing for dewy boyflesh dating back to when she fucked that slab of junior varsity crew team beef, one of her own students, in her second year of graduate school That had been around the same time that she’d first read on a website that women in their early thirties were in their sexual prime   And whether or not she was suddenly hotter for it than ever she looked at this new kid for longer than