She gives me a guilty smile. “Good night, Serenity.”

To my surprise, Tee gets to her feet. “Actually, Mrs. Cage, I think I’ll go up with you. It has been a long day.” She looks back at me. “And Penn needs a little time with Annie.”

My mother nods pointedly, and I know then that Serenity has scored a point with her.

“Good night, you guys,” I say wearily.

They turn and walk into the hall together, without Serenity giving me the slightest signal that I might see her later. I can’t believe she’s going to go to bed without hearing Quentin’s report of his meeting with Judge Elder. And that, I suddenly realize, was her signal. She knew she’d never slip a wink or an intimate wave past my mother.

She left it to me to figure out the obvious.

An hour later, I’m staring up into Tee’s eyes as she labors above me with quiet persistence. Then she closes them, which I regret, but this allows my own eyes free rein over her body, which is miraculously new and strange. Her skin is indeed the color of a paper bag, but her nipples and areolae are the color of Hershey’s Kisses.

“I—don’t—like—being—quiet,” she whispers with rhythmic frustration, working toward her second release. In the moment of cresting, her eyes flash open and find mine, and the urgency behind them pours into me, or rather, seems to pull something from me. Serenity’s orgasms, while long and powerful, seem not to satiate a deeper need that I feel within her, a hunger for connection that is only partly physical.

As she shudders above me, closing her eyes once more, then falling forward until her face is pressed into my neck, I think of all the places she’s been, the experiences she’s had, so many of which she described in her book. All that—a story known to hundreds of thousands of people—is contained within the mind and flesh of the woman molded against me now, breathing deeply in my ear.

“What is it?” she asks in a sleepy voice.

“What?”

“You want to ask me something.”

“No, I don’t.”

Her eyes open. “Liar.”

I feel such an eerie sense of having my mind read that I grasp desperately for any subject other than the one I was thinking of.

“I was just wondering,” I begin blindly, “why . . . you haven’t asked me if you’re the first black woman I’ve slept with.”

“Hah!” Serenity rolls onto her back and spits a sharp laugh at the ceiling. “Baby, please. I know I’m your first.”

She’s gone from somnolent to wide awake in less than a second. Boy, did I pick the wrong question. “How do you know?” I ask.