“Don’t apologize you did something nice.”

He didn’t say anything. She laid the dress on the chair and unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. She turned sideways to him and lifted the bunched dress over her head. The chemise top lifted to show her stomach, the small perfect shadow of her navel on her belly-rise. The sunlight was enough so he could see the rest of her through her underwear. Then she brought the dress down over her head and fitted it onto her shoulders and hips with her hands. Came to the bed and turned for him to button the back and then turned back to face him, her hands still smoothing it. She said, “How’s it look?”

‘“Good.”

“I never owned a yellow dress.” Then, “How’d you size it right?”

Without even thinking he raised his hands off the bed and once more described her to the air.

She put her right hand flat up over her mouth and stood looking at him a long moment, her eyes bright on him. He sat and looked back at her, feeling as if his face could peel from him and fly through the air onto her. Without taking her eyes from him she reached behind her and unbuttoned the dress and stepped out of it and laid it over the chair. She stepped toward where he sat. “How come,” she said as she pulled the chemise over her head, “it seems like you’ve got so much more clothes on than me?” And sat beside him on the bed a moment and then lay back and said, “Take them off. Take my bottoms off.”

Sweat-slick he took his weight up onto his elbows. Her neck to her breasts was mottled pink and white, the spray of blue veins like something grown under the sea. He stepped off the bed and went to the window and stood looking down at the street and smoked. It was afternoon, sometime. He couldn’t say better than that. When he turned she was as he’d left her, sprawled and open on the bed. One of her hands was down light between her legs.

“Jesus Christ.”

“You never saw a naked woman before, have you?”

“Not rightly.”

“This your first time, idn’t it?”

“You know better than that.”

“I’m not talking about whatever you did with that old woman the other day. I’m talking about proper right loving.”

“Well, I guess so.”

“Lord look at you.”

“Sometimes it just won’t go down.”

“Come over here.” And reached for him.