She was asleep. He’d just wakened from one of his old-man dreams, another vivid one in which a crowd of people were inside his courtyard painting. Now he ran his fingers down Bianka’s smooth naked back. How alive the flesh was, the veins like buried rivers—ah, the body like a landscape—a fleshscape. He could try a painting from that angle.

“Mmmmm,” Bianka said.

“You’d better get back to your own room,” he said. “After all, the wedding’s today. At least we won’t have to sneak around any more.” “Mmmmm.” She wiggled with sleepy seductiveness, not at all worried. In fact, she wanted to laugh out loud, but she didn’t dare. “No more worries after today,” she said. “Can’t you just imagine Jonathan’s face if he caught us, even now?”

“Ugh. Come, come, get up then. Hurry, into your own room.”

She stood up slowly, stretching, arching her body in the particular way that always excited him. “I suppose I should. Yes, I’ll hurry.”

God, she was magnificent. His flesh warmed. His penis started a delicious ache. Yet to be caught, to antagonize the family at the last minute, after all their tortured sneaking about—“Ahh, they’d let you sleep late the day of your wedding, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t call you yet?”

She turned. “Oh, no, I’d better go. There’s my hair to do and I have to help Mama. There’s extra butter to churn, though maybe I’ll get out of that. Besides, if Jonathan caught us now—”

He groaned happily, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back down on the bed, while she looked tempted and willing, and confused and partially unwilling all at once.

She closed her eyes, groaning herself. She loved him and she loved the game. Oh, Josef! Again she wanted to laugh because the whole family knew what was going on. How did he possibly think that they could hide all that—her careful tiptoeing through the hallway from her room to his—his sly, barefooted rush to his door, ear glued to the wood, afraid someone was spying? “What should we do?” he’d say. “I’ll hide under the bed,” she’d say—

All that, to add spice to it; to give him his excitement. And after the wedding, sometime when it all seemed quite usual, she’d think of something else. An imaginary lover? No, he’d be likely to kill anyone he suspected. Her thoughts stopped. She let herself go in great emotional rhythms that were all bound up with their flesh—his and hers.