I invite him to follow me to my bedroom. The air is heavier in here than it was in the kitchen. It is weighed down by the nights I have spent in this bed—the dreams I have dreamed. I take off the rest of my clothes and ask Eugene to do the same.

When we are both naked, I look at him for a long time. His body is even more beautiful without clothes. It is a great privilege for me to have access to all this perfection, but I can’t allow myself to feel grateful. The last time I had sexual intercourse there was an imbalance of power. This time I am determined that there shouldn’t be. Besides, gratitude is not sexy.

I am thinking too much.

I close my eyes and think about the furnace again—about lighting a spark and rekindling that furnace. About heating up the cold, dead ashes. About a warm glow and a slowly rising heat. About quickening and swelling and lengthening and expanding.

Sexual energy is a tangible force. When I open my eyes, I know Eugene can feel it in the room with us. He is becoming aroused. I move towards him and let the energy take over. Touching, tasting, stroking, licking. Our movements become clumsy and urgent. I want this to last, but I also want it over quickly.

The needs driving me are exigent, bold, powerful. But they are also fragile, weak, ephemeral. One wrong word, one impatient look, could banish them forever. The longer this takes, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.

I push the pace along, driving us forward with a momentum that won’t be denied. I want the moment of penetration to be frantic and mindless. I want to be out of my head and in my body when it happens. I don’t want to think about what it means.

Pressure is building inside me, a wave of tension that begs for release. I look down the length of my body and see that it has already happened. Penetration has occurred, and Eugene is inside me.

Disequilibrium strikes. All is fear and force. Seawater rushes in and extinguishes the furnace in a wave of disappointment. The ashes are not merely cold now, they are a swill—rainwater in an ashtray on a damp Sunday afternoon.

Eugene stops moving. He breathes, and I breathe, but he doesn’t withdraw. I tighten the ring of my vaginal muscles around his rubber-sheathed penis, feeling the three-dimensionality of it. It doesn’t hurt. I am hugging it into my body rather than being stabbed by it. Carefully, deliberately, I welcome it into me. I am the genial hostess, not the terrified victim of a home invasion.