He hadn’t been living for them anyway, certainly not the last several months. He had been playing around on the edges of his mind with the girl in his lap, though he had never gone so far as touching her, even when she often touched him.
This is a good place to mention the no-man’s-land of adultery that Rayford is in from the start of the book. He would be a more interesting character if he was actually having an affair with Hattie, and then had to wrestle with that guilt for the rest of the book, knowing that he could never apologize to his wife. But the authors feel that the audience either would not relate to-, or would never support an adulterous main character. So, this is a situation of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want a main character who’s flawed, and obviously sinful enough to not get raptured, but not so flawed that he draws the ire of the conservative reader. What we’re left with is an incredibly dull character with no consequential flaws. He wants to have an affair, but he’s too boring to actually do it.
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