She said, “Did I sleep on the plane?” I said yes. She turned toward me exhaling. “This’ll be us someday.”

“What?”

“You and me.”

Phylida and I were on the verge of something. Picture us picturing ourselves as next in line for our own wedding weekend. (We’d already talked about what kind of ring I would get her—the stone, the setting.) Picture us wondering: Why does this feel like nothing? Picture us thinking the same thing separately and not talking about it and coming up empty. She was trying to be nice, waiting for that fucking ring now for months and months; she did this imitation of an adoring girlfriend, holding my Coke in the car, but it made her furious and we both wanted to get this over with.

I went for her chest, unbuttoning as fast as I could, opening up her bra. She looked in my eyes and waited.

I ran my hands all over her body. Phylida let out a breath and smiled. Her flaxen hair fell in a spiral shape across a pillow. I kissed her nipples. She liked that. She did a noise with her tongue against her teeth—tchk—as I moved my hands around her silky cream mountains. I’d always been attracted to her, although sometimes she walked down the street like John Wayne with his dungarees shoved up his ass in Stagecoach.

“They’re yours,” she said.

“What is?”

“This is the last pair of tits you’ll ever squeeze,” she said, and giggled.

“Why do you have to talk as if you just got out of an insane asylum?” I said. She smiled. Why didn’t I understand where she was going with any particular thought?

I licked her ribs. She took her dress off. She had a face that held all the mysteries of Ireland. She had a single blond hair coming out of her chin I never saw before. She wore old blue cotton panties with just a slight fume of musk and salt. She let me pull them all the way down. She had a twat. It was pink and twat-shaped and smelled like roses. What else? She had a mother and a father. Her mother was the garden-variety kind, antihistamines, uppers, soda can in the hand, surprising cotton-ball-white pageboy hairdo. Her father left the family every year on Christmas; he mailed us refrigerator-size boxes of furniture out of guilt. She made a bubble noise in her sleep. She lived for running late; she drove fast, ran people over in crosswalks. She smelled like saddle soap. She had a cowlick on her forehead. She had microscribbled blue capillaries beneath the furry softness on the back of her neck. Her hair looked like corn silk. Her lips were a cornfield. She lay between the rows of corn on the bedspread and let me touch her and wanted more.

“I like that,” she said, pulling at me.