It was, as they say, a beautiful spring day when Duncan first recorded his utter surrender. Outside, the willow trees breathed gently from side to side under a merciful sun, and street vendors danced joyously in anticipation of Duncan’s ardor, and the birds stopped in midair to witness the innocence that was Duncan’s lust, and the gray caps came aboveground to gift all citizens of the city with garlands of sweet-smelling fungus, and I must stop before I make myself sick. (I’m already sick. This whole section will make me sick, I think.)

Inside the Academy, Duncan breathed gently on the neck of the woman child (she was already twenty-one!) he had kept after class for “further instruction”:

Today Mary wore a white blouse, and as I pointed out a relevant passage in Tonsure’s journal, she stood next to me, our clothes just touching. I felt a pressure between us, as if she held me up or I held her up, and if the tension was broken, one of us would fall. I turned my head into the blindness of that endless white as she stood beside me, and every inch of my body knew the certainty of her generous hips where the blouse disappeared into her skirt and the reckless knowledge of her soft neck above the blouse, the face shining above the neck. All of these elements destroyed me more than what I saw, which was just the blouse, filled with her. The stitching on the blouse. The texture of the fabric itself. The soft curving caress of her breast beneath. So near. The nearness of her made me tremble. The smell of her, the smell of clean, firm skin. All I would have had to do was incline my head forward a fraction of an inch and my lips would have kissed her through the fabric. Time was extinguished by the tension between giving in, feeling her breast against my mouth for what might be only a second before her mutiny, and staying in position, forever teased by the possibility. Teetering on the edge of an abyss, where to fall was to fall was to fall into bliss, bliss, bliss; but torment, too … And yet what if the action met not with outrage or rejection, but with a sigh of acceptance? Would that not be worth the risk? Would it not be worth the cost to remove the torment by attempting to consume it? To extinguish the flame by joining it?

For all of his wretched fumbling for words—I hope he didn’t fumble that way with her bra strap!—I could have defined his condition for him with one word: lust. Why, I had become a world-renowned expert on lust by then, seeing the problem firsthand from several dozen different positions. I could have helped Duncan, except he didn’t ask my advice; instead, he wrote it all down in his journal. (Not fair. I knew you would have advised me against it, and this I could not bear the thought of. I must say—I do appreciate you baring my soul in your afterword.)