He didn’t know what else to do, so he tried her bonbons. She took off her cardigan, then her shirt.

Her bra was sheer, simple lace netting, with no decoration on it. She had fine stretch marks at the top of her chest. She had goose bumps on her hairless arms. There were other smells now, among the ammoniac and dusty smell of glue guns, tar sealant, Sheetrock dust. There was some smell coming off her, her smell—he thought of chickpeas and deodorant. Most of the gutted first floor was dark behind her, and she backed up. Looking directly at him, she undid her skirt, which opened like a kilt, and dropped it. She came forward in the loafers and knee socks and underwear. She seemed huge now, making goo-goo eyes. She was the biggest girl who’d ever made goo-goo eyes at him. She reached out and pulled on his nuts, which hurt.

He took off her bra. Her tits—fell down. He tried to raise one up to normal height, where it had been in the bra, and then he tried the other. Bloop. Like deflated bags of water, hanging to the waistband of her undies, cold, the consistency of chunky soup. She looked at him, her sad eyes smiling, her sad mouth looking for its tongue, her sad tongue looking for a crack in her lower lip to lick.

What was this?

She asked him if he was nervous. He wasn’t nervous.

She examined and squeezed his behind. His hand slid across her stomach and felt soft, pillowy fat. And then she stepped back and lifted one leg and then the other, humming quietly, and he realized she was dancing.

She owned the one and only building he was building. Her father owned the other project Rich’s company was in the process of constructing, a $125 million deal about a mile from here involving forty subcontractors from around the country—a job so huge Rich had been relegated to underground utilities and landscaping. He wasn’t in any position to push her away. He could feel the vast inexperience of a woman of complete fragility, shielded by her wealth, with a lot of power, reacting to his withdrawal.

“I’m getting married in three days and you are disgusting” was what he wanted to say. “Haven’t you ever just goofed around a little? Why don’t you put your clothes back on?”

He had to get out of here because he had to be at the airport by eleven tonight so he could fly to France to get married on Saturday.

“My darling,” she said to him, and pulled his head to her chest.

A LITTLE LATER, he was caught in a kind of eternal now—an eternally present moment—adrift, but where? They were on the floor, she was mostly on the concrete, he was mostly in the dirt, trying to breathe through the top of his head.