She thought, for about the hundredth time, about the way he took his time when they got into bed, not rushing at her but thinking about her. Sometimes he would play with the last curls in her hair and then move them between his fingers, and then he would take his hand and move under the mass of her hair with his fingertips on the back of her neck and then her scalp, and then his hand would be lifting up her heavy hair and taking all of her head in his grasp. Then he would stop and he might say something, and since it was dark, and his voice was low, this was another time Mourad affected her. He might say, “You know, I thought about the way your hair cannot stay up when you put the pins in it. The way it falls down in parts, and you try to pin it back up. I thought about that at work today, and I even asked Tom if his wife had hair that could not stay up. And he said his wife did too, and we talked about how amazing it was that hair so soft could be so hard to control.” And then he would say, “It’s a beautiful thing about you, Heather.”

In the old days, she would have taken his cock in her mouth right there because that was about as good as it was ever going to get, and it would all be embarrassment and missed chances from there out, someone taking her nipple in his mouth in a way that made her feel like a nursing bottle, or someone sticking a finger up her to check if she was wet, and even if she wasn’t, it was like they had to make sure you had a pussy. And on the whole it was much easier when you knew they didn’t have the slightest idea who you were, and didn’t have any need to know; it was just a big relief to everyone if you took care of the business that was pressing.