For the longest time that was no time at all he just stared at her as she changed faces and shapes and coalesced with everything else in the room and everything beyond it too. Someone, somewhere, laughed. The fire snapped like human fingertips, flames were themselves, shadows became light and light shadows. He laughed aloud, he couldn’t help himself, laughed like Corey when he was four years old and they rode the Ferris wheel high into the sky together while the Fourth of July fireworks rent the night overhead, and then Tim was there, saying, You all right, Fitz? Everything good?, and he didn’t know how even to begin to answer and just laughed again, which told the whole story in itself, beginning to end. Tim dissolved. The candles exploded and fell back into themselves, over and over. There was nothing he could do but sink back into the pillows, crushed by all that sparking beauty, until he felt Joanie’s hand exploring his inner thigh like the warmest and best-adapted probe he could imagine, and then her mouth was on his and his hands were doing their own examination of her breasts that were right there front and center despite the dress, the slip, the rudely inconvenient conical lift-up bra that was alternately made of lead and silk, and they couldn’t do it here, could they, on the pillows in a dark corner of his professor’s house while everybody else was seething around them in spirit if not the flesh?

No, no they couldn’t, and Joanie grasped that before he did, rising silkily from the floor to the glassy accompaniment of Milt Jackson’s vibraphone to tug his hand as she’d tugged it when they came through the door just minutes or eons ago, so that he stood too, hard as a rock and tent-poling the fabric of his trousers, till they were flowing together in liquid grace up the dilating stairway to the first unoccupied bedroom they could find.