I got out first, toweling dry as I pulled off my shower cap, shaking out my hair. I shivered as water evaporated off my skin, then slipped under the crumpled sheets to get warm and catch my breath.

Several minutes later, he entered the room stark naked and eyed me in the bed.

“I’m just resting,” I told him. “I’m spent. At least, for a couple of hours.”

He picked up the watch on his nightstand, then slipped it on his wrist—still nude but now he could tell time. “Hungry?”

I sat up, letting the sheet fall from my breasts. “Actually, I am.”

His topaz eyes were still on my body. But he said, “I’ll get dressed then.”

He was one of those lucky people who looked great in or out of clothing, and I enjoyed watching him move. He opened a door to a tiny closet, his shirts hanging neatly inside. He stared at the array for almost a minute—something a woman would do—then picked out two shirts to show me. One was lilac, the other was tomato red.

“What color pants?” I asked.

“Black.”

I thought a moment. “The red.”

He placed the lilac shirt back in the closet. “Red to match your hair.”

“Then you’d need orange.”

He slipped the shirt on. “Not orange. The shirt would be the color of a sunset—brilliant and fiery with copper—and even that wouldn’t capture it.”

I stared at him shocked. “That was beautiful.”

He beamed. “Thank you. It took me twenty minutes to get the words right.”

I threw a pillow at him. He blocked it with an elbow. “Isn’t it the thought that counts?”

“Yes, that is worth something.”

“Worth a lot. I used a thesaurus. English isn’t my native language.”

“Don’t give me that. You’re totally fluent.”

He put on Jockeys, then slid into a pair of black jeans. “Now that is a very good compliment.”

His face was dead serious. I had hit something important. “How’d you learn?”

“I learned at first in Ethiopia, more in Israel, but mostly from my stepmother.” He buttoned his shirt. “She is English speaking … from Canada. I make her speak the language to me because I want to speak real English. I saw America as my ticket to freedom. I think my vocabulary is pretty good.”

“It’s excellent, Koby.” I got up and started to dress. “I have Ivy League friends who don’t sound nearly as educated as you do.”

“Thank you, that means very much to me because I work very hard on it. Now I must work on my spelling. Other than medical terms, my English spelling is absolutely atrocious.”

“My spelling is atrocious and English is my native language.”

He smiled. “That is nice for you to say. English is the third alphabet I learned. There is little in common between Amharic and Hebrew, although both are Semitic languages, and English is totally different. When I first get here, I could speak and understand quite well, but I couldn’t read much except medical texts and that is only because the medical language in Hebrew is borrowed from English. There is an expression in Hebrew—to break your teeth, meaning to do a hard thing. I used to break my teeth reading the newspapers. Now I can read the words, but I still cannot spell them. That is the next hurdle.”