Outside the window was a nearly full moon in a jet-black sky. The window was open, and warm air, hinting of summer nights, filled the room. He could hear the shrill sounds of tree frogs and somewhere a cricket.

Then the door opened quietly and Annabel walked in. He turned to look at her. She was barefoot, dressed in a white robe. Her hair had been pulled back and was tied behind her head, framing her face. She was lovely. He felt tense, frightened. “What do you want?” he said.

“I wanted to make love the way I did before. I thought you would be asleep.” Each word came to him as if it had been spoken for him before, as if he had thought it just before she said it. Déjà vu. He shook his head, trying to shake it off.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want that right now.”

“I know,” she said. She took off her robe and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think we ought to start where we left off yesterday.”

He stared at her as she lay back, naked, against a pillow. “I don’t know if I can…”%

“Yes, you can,” she said. “That was only a barrier for us. We’ve crossed it now.”

“I was thinking something like that myself,” he said. He came over and sat beside her on the bed.

“Sure you were,” she said. “We’re really very much alike. We think the same things.”

He slipped off his sandals. “You’re really something,” he said.

“So are you,” she said.

***

She was right. The barrier or whatever it was had fallen. The fear had subsided. The pleasure of lovemaking was different from what it had been before for him, with other women he had had. It was very inward, very intense. He hardly looked at her.

When he climaxed something seemed to open up inside him. There was a sense of release in a secret part of himself, at the center of his aching and suicidal life. His eyes were shut and he heard himself laughing, immersing himself in himself.

He lay back afterward, spent and blissful. They did not speak, nor did they look at one another. He stared at the moon outside the window, the early summer moon, as cold and luminous and clear in the black sky as was his soul within himself.

***

They slept together that night for the first time. Not touching, but naked together in the same bed, each turned to the right in a nearly fetal position, like a pair of twins.

In the morning they awoke silently together and silently drank coffee, sitting side by side in bed. There seemed to be no need to speak.

And then, as they were drinking their second cup of coffee, she began looking at something on the other side of him and he saw that it was the chessboard, still set up from the night before. She was looking at it intently and her eyes began to widen.