“Hello, Peter,” she said as I walked over. “Fancy running into you like this.” She touched her face, found the cream, grimaced, and tried to rub it off with her sleeve. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled my face down for a kiss.

“You must think me perfectly demented,” she said as we broke.

“Pretty demented,” I said.

She pulled my head down again and asked me in a whisper whether I was free that afternoon. “You left me alone all yesterday,” she said. “I think you owe me an afternoon of carnal pursuits at the very least.”

Given that it was that or several hours of door-to-door canvassing, I didn’t really have to work that hard. Simone laughed, slipped her arm through mine, and led me up the street. I waved a hand at the Patisserie Valerie. “What about your bill?” I asked.

“You mustn’t worry about the patisserie,” she said. “I have an account.”

IT STARTED raining sometime after lunch. I woke up in Simone’s big bed to find the room filled with gray light and rain drumming against the window. Simone was pressed warmly up against me, her cheek against my shoulder, one arm flung possessively across my chest. After some maneuvering I managed to check my watch and found that it was past two o’clock. Simone’s arm tightened around me, her eyes opened, and she gave me a sly look before kissing the hollow of my neck. I decided that it was too wet for doing door-to-door anyway, and that I would compensate by doing all that boring data entry as soon as I got back to the Folly. My schedule suitably modified, I rolled Simone over on her back and set to seeing how worked up I could get her without using my hands. She sighed as my lips found her nipple, which wasn’t the effect I was going for, and gently stroked my head.

“Come up here,” she said and tugged at my shoulders, pulling me up and between her legs so that I slipped in without even trying and then, when she had me arranged to her satisfaction, she held me there, a look of contentment on her face.

My hips twitched.

“Wait,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” I said.

“If you could just restrain yourself a moment,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

We stayed locked together. I felt a strange vibration in my chest and belly, which I realized was Simone humming deep in her diaphragm, or whatever it is singers use. I couldn’t quite make out the tune, but it made me think of smoky cafés and women in padded jackets and pillbox hats.

“Nobody makes me feel like you,” she said.

“I thought I was the first,” I said.

“Hypothetically,” she said. “If there had been others, none of them would have made me feel the way you do.”