Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle… The bedroom deepens into water and coolness. Somewhere the sun is going down. Just enough light to see the darker freckles on her back. In the parlor Mrs. Quoad is dreaming she’s back in the gardens at Bournemouth, among the rhododendrons, and a sudden rain, Austin crying Touch her throat, Majesty. Touch! and Yrjö—a pretender but the true king, for a very doubtful branch of the family usurped the throne in 1878 during the intrigues over Bessarabia—Yrjö in an old-fashioned frock coat with golden galloons shining at the sleeves, bending toward her in the rain to cure her forever of King’s Evil, looking exactly as he does in the rotogravure, his lovely Hrisoula a step or two behind kindly, seriously waiting, around them the rain thundering down, the King’s white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch the hollow of Mrs. Quoad’s throat, the miracle touch, gently… touch…

The lightning—

And Slothrop is yawning “What time is it?” and Darlene is swimming up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the concussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket’s rush comes swelling, elevated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop’s penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast, palms and fingers in fear’s pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong flickering on the shade, she’s begun to wonder… about the two together… but they’re fucking now, and what does it matter, but God’s sake why shouldn’t this stupid Blitz be good for something?

And who’s that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveillance, would you say the next one will fall?

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

The very first touch: he’d been saying something mean, a bit of the usual Mexico self-reproach—ah you don’t know me I’m really a bastard sort of thing—“No,” she went to put her fingers to his lips, “don’t say that… .” As she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist, moved her hand away, pure defense—but kept holding her, by the wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips and kissed it then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the front of his chest… “Ohh…” the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica’s soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly.