But absent that, there was this—Anita’s eyes widening as she slid each hoop through her bare earlobes and fingered them as though surprised they still fit. Then she was leaning over, her palms taking my head with surprising force, pressing me to her chest, as she whispered thank you, more than once, so I was sure she was not only speaking about the earrings.

“I need you, Neil,” she said. “Will you do it? Will you help?”

I brought my hands to her wrists and pressed them against the back of her couch. I nodded then, my cheek moving against her braless breasts, and I breathed, hot and hard, on the poke of her left nipple through the cotton, then the right. I looked up to see her eyes closed, her own mouth open. I didn’t know what private dreamscapes passed behind her lids, and yet I had a sense of the pattern, a collage of what had been lost, and what she craved.

“Yeah,” I said. I brushed my lips on her neck, still pressing her wrists into the sofa, as though we’d done this a thousand times before. “Yeah. I’ll do it. I have some terms, though.”

Her eyes opened. I loosened my grip on her wrists. “You want some,” she said.

I thought about hiding my need, but I couldn’t. “Yes,” I said into her skin.

“I gathered,” she said, husky but measured. “I need her covered first.”

“You must want some, too, right?”

“Oh, Neil,” she said. “I can’t—”

But I hardly heard the rest, because my mouth had reached her earlobe. I felt against my lips the cool shape of the old gold hoops. “I like them on you,” I said.

“They’re familiar,” she whispered back, and then I was upon her, and her lips were at first surprisingly clumsy, but endearingly, flatteringly so—was she nervous?