The hair on his chest is damp under my cheek, his heartbeat still a rapid ka-thump ka-thump when he turns us so that we’re face-to-face. I can see him in the dim light of the bedside lamp—his mussed hair, flushed cheeks, the way he sucks in a breath when I spread my fingers over his belly. He wants me again, quite clearly. But there’s something else in him now, another change with age. We used to communicate about everything except sex. We were too young for that. Sex was sex and, frenzied as it was, untouchable with words. No more.

“Where did you learn all that?” he asks in a thick voice.

“You.”

“You never—”

I stop the thought with my fingertips. “Just you.”

He lets that stand for a minute, our heads sharing the pillow, his eyes holding mine. Then he circles my back to cinch me in. His voice vibrating against my cheek. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Not now. Don’t ruin now.”

I feel a ripple of frustration in him, but he accepts. Because he understands, as I knew he would. So, I hold reality off a little while longer. But reality is like the gun thrown into the ocean. Just because it disappears from sight doesn’t mean it’s gone. It is there, under however many fathoms, like the princess and the pea, which I used to read to Joy just as my mother read it to me.

“Three hours,” I murmur as sleep hovers. “Set your phone.”

He snorts. “I’m not setting any phone.”

“I’m serious, Jack. I can’t sleep here the whole night.”

“Why not?” In the next breath, he answers. “Huh. Joy. But Margo is with her.”

“I can’t, not the whole night.” I could talk of the responsibility Anne claims I lack, but I don’t want to go there. I could say that I have never spent a night away from Joy since she was born, but I don’t want to think of why I am now and where it goes from here.

I don’t look up. My decision is final.

“Five hours,” he bargains.

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Three point five.”

“Done,” he says and, wrenching away, is thundering down the stairs and back up with his phone, dropping it on the nightstand, turning off the light, and sliding his long, naked body against mine.

I fall asleep breathing him in. And for those few minutes—few hours—I feel whole.