How I’d love to do something taboo and appropriate the body of a real person! There’s a doctor in the center of the room who’s about my height. He has strawberry-blond sideburns, and I spot the mark of an old injury—a scar at the top of his throat. Yet his body is so full of vivacity, blood, and nonchalance. Free of pain! If I could only borrow his body for a while, if I could only bend over Eddie’s sleeping face and cover her lips with mine, taste the soft expanse of her mouth. At first she would still be dazed by night, but then she’d respond.

I’d feel her breath, then her hands running over the fabric of my trousers to grasp my hips. Her quiet, purposeful hands would undress, admire, and touch me. Skin, life, skin, warmth.

I long to feel warmth and moisture, the patter of water on skin. Eddie’s skin and her whole body pressing against mine. An urgency in my abdomen, liquefying and hardening. Caresses, the heat between her legs, the softness of her breasts against my chest, my mouth closing first on one nipple and then the other.

Molding my palms to the contours of her upper arms and elbows, the swell of her backside, the curve of her thighs.

The changing texture of her skin as I approach her center.

Kissing every inch of her.

Hearing her moan.

Seeing her eyes gazing up at me, the laughter in them as her lips remain delicately parted and she says, “Taste me.”

I become absorbed with the idea of borrowing and inhabiting the young body of the doctor on the far side of that screen. Just briefly, for a short time, so I can touch my darling.

Would she see me inside that other body? Would she know I was paying thanks and homage to every inch of her being? The moles on her left breast, her rangy limbs, the swirl of hair at the back of her neck, those delightful laughter lines at the corners of her mouth, those eyes that contain the sea, life, dreams, eternity, everything.

“My summer’s day, my wintry sea, my home,” I whisper.

A wave of calm and peace ripples out from her and mingles with my vibrating senses. Tentatively, my thoughts venture into this peace. I have to think hard to know which direction to take.