HE COMES TO her flat on Boxing Day. It is sunny, and the snow has started to thaw. They undress quickly and do not speak. She pulls herself on top of him and makes him stay still, watching him, moving very slowly. When she comes she cries out. And when he comes she leans down and takes his lip in hers and sucks it, feeling him judder and fall still.

“Melissa,” he says to her afterwards, his hand tracing the curve of her hip, “of the Melissae. The guardians of the honey.”

She leans in and kisses him, and it is true—with him her core is molten and sweet.

When the evening comes she finds she is ravenous, and he stays in the flat while she goes out to the local grocery store and buys food: noodles and vegetables and beer.

She cooks for him—she is hungry: for food, for sex, for life, and this hunger is beautiful, voluptuous. They eat noodles and drink the cold beer and she watches him eat, loving to watch this man eating this food she has prepared for him, listening to the low resonant hum of his voice. She reaches across for his wrist, catches it, kisses him there.

“Are you happy?” he asks her.

“Do you mean now? Or generally?”

“Both. Now.”

“Now, yes.”

“And generally?”

She shrugs. “Is anyone? Are you?”

He looks at her. “How come you don’t have a lover?” he says.

“I do,” she says, watching the complexity of the emotions on his face.

“I mean—you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know.” She pushes her plate away. Outside it is dark already. “It’s harder than it looks, finding a good man. So many are so disappointing.”

“That’s sad.”

“It’s true.”

“I always hated Declan,” he says.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “He was a bastard. You were right.”

“I’ve boycotted his films on principle.”

She laughs.

“I’m loyal,” he says. And the way he says it makes her stomach contract.

“Thank you,” she says, although she knows he is not. For if he was, he wouldn’t be here at all.

“You never wanted kids?” he says softly.

She looks up at the ceiling. “Not with him.” She levels her gaze with his and she feels it—loosened, filling the room, leaving space for nothing else. If they were to go back to bed now, she knows, if they did not use protection, she knows in her body that she would conceive—that this is how children are made, this desire, this drenched desire.

“You could stay the night,” she says. “No one would know.” She watches his face, sees the struggle there.

“It’s worse,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“For Hannah. Me staying. It feels—worse somehow.”

“Really?” she says. “Worse than us fucking?”

He flinches.

“Hannah doesn’t know,” she says softly. “Hannah doesn’t have to know.”