I touch my lips to hers, and the tip of her tongue feels soft and flirtatious. I embrace my bride and whisper into her ear that I know some spots along this steep coast where nobody but diving black-backed gulls will be able to see us.

We seek out a smooth, flat, warm stone. Eddie half lies, half leans against it and opens her sun-kissed legs to me. I turn my back to the sea. The sun is shining warmly on my shoulders and the back of my neck. And then I’m fully inside her, so deeply that I can no longer feel where her body begins and mine ends. I taste salt and the thirst comes. I lean forward to kiss Eddie, and she holds me tightly inside her. She’s soft and warm and slippery, and I begin to make love to her in time to the waves breaking against the cliffs below us, firmly and not too fast.

“I love you,” I say to her open eyes. “I love you and I want you forever and beyond, in this life and every other.”

She merely gazes at me as if it were not me taking her, but she taking me. She takes me, takes me in, takes me into her life and molds it around me. She pulls me into her and receives me, and it feels as if my entire soul is streaming into her.

As I release myself into her, I suddenly sense a great, cold wall looming behind me, and then the shadow comes crashing down on me like a giant hand, swiping me into the sea.

I’m falling, I’m being washed away, lights and colors and voices envelop me. I’m sliding down a pipe, I’m dissolving, I’m falling ever faster. I’m falling and . . .

DAY THIRTY-NINE

Eddie

Henri!

I awake as the final ripples of the orgasm shake my body. I’m lying on my back, my hands up beside my head. Arousal built up slowly in me like an invisible wave gliding along the bottom of the sea and then rising gradually to the surface, up and up, before something exploded in my body. I don’t know what it was—it’s the only orgasm I’ve ever had while I’ve been asleep. I’m forty-four and for the first time ever I’ve fallen out of an erotic dream into reality.

Wilder is lying alongside me. He’s sleeping, while between my legs a soft fist of desire is clenching and relaxing, clenching and relaxing. The muscles of my upper thighs are taut. I can taste salt on my lips. I’ve been making love with Henri. That’s what my body tells me, and it also says, “This isn’t a dream. This is real.” I can still feel Henri’s weight on me and inside me. I feel loved.

Is Wilder still sleeping, or did I wake him?