“Sometimes,” he said, “I sit here, right here on this couch, and watch the skiers all day long.” His hand began to play with the hair at the back of my neck. I could feel my temperature rising. “And on the holidays, at night, all the ski patrol people go up to the top and ski down with torches. They come down in a line, and crisscross, and ski different patterns, all holding up these flames in the black night against the white snow.” He kissed behind my ear. I wanted to see the torch skiers. I wanted to see them so much that I almost could; I could almost pluck them right from his memory and see them in my mind’s eye.

He took my glass and set it on the coffee table, then brought me closer to him. His embrace was nothing like Cap’s, or Lewis’s. He was lean and hard, and my skin ached to be next to his.

He must have heard my thought, for he unbut­toned his shirt and pulled my blouse up from my jeans and with a hand on my lower back, pressed my exposed belly skin to his. The contact was zinged with an electric vibration. I felt the quiver run through us both, and our breathing stopped for a moment. Then he pulled away and looked deeply at me. Slowly he began to unbutton my blouse while I sat there, gazing at his face, remembering the details, and he began to talk again.

“There’s something magic about skiing fast. Ski­ing so fast down the slopes that you’re afraid to fall.” His feather touch did away with my blouse quickly as the intensity of his passion grew. “It’s so exhilarating that you can’t stop, don’t want to stop, don’t want to fall.” His face began to change and his fingers became harder in his excitement. “Because if you fall, the ice crystals just might slice you to pieces. What a way to go, huh, Angelina? In a burst of orgasmic glory, a red smear on the slide of your favorite ski run.”

He was working on his own clothes now, my blouse off and jeans undone. We were leaning our way toward a horizontal position on the couch, incongru­ously warm with the huge cold eye of a window right in front of us, showing us winter in all its attendant splendor.

Suddenly he pinched me hard, bringing a bruise on my waist, then he lay me down on the couch and with one hand pulled my jeans to my knees, and his finger, hot and dry, probed into me and I cried out with the suddenness of it. He hesitated a moment, smiling at me with heat, then stood and shed the rest of his clothes, pulled the jeans from my legs, then scooped me up and carried me the length of the living room and into the bedroom beyond.