“A lot of dangerous people around here,” she tells him. “Better not to be alone.”

He’s got a corner suite on the floor above hers, all windows and exposed concrete where he’s rolled back the rugs and set a canvas taller than Maeve against a wall. She presses her back to it, catching her breath—but he’s waiting for her to come to him.

“I never do this,” she says, almost to herself. The space between them taut as a highwire.

“Never?”

There is no moon or the moon is hidden. Outside there is nothing but snow and more snow and silence and Maeve walks around the whole space and shows him every place she wants him to fuck her.

Here, with her hands and breasts pressed against the cold window glass, and here, up on the counter with her legs high and spread in a V, toes pointed like a good ballerina, and here, where the bedclothes have been thrown down in a corner, this time Maeve holding him hard to the ground and her small body looming over him, the duvet a cushion for her knees.

She cannot risk injury, she tells him. They must think of her knees.

“Don’t you have anything you want to do?” she says. “No weird artist stuff? You don’t want to dip me in paint and press me up against your sheets or something?”

He says he wants to put his tongue inside her, and he doesn’t like the taste of paint.

The room is dark. When she peels her clothes off, he switches on the light.

“What’s this?” he says, rising to meet her. She is naked; his fingers trace the scar at her center that cuts her in two. She hesitates, her hand with its own scar unconsciously closing and drawing away from him. Then:

“C-section,” Maeve says.

He takes that in silence but spreads a hand over her belly, cradling it. “I thought it might be some crazy stage accident. You have a baby, baby?”

“I have kids. Two.”

“Huh. Married?”

“He’s dead,” Maeve says.

She turns out the light.

Later—it’s very late, so late it’s early, if it weren’t for the time of year and the heavy snow, there would be light in the sky, Maeve thinks—they wind themselves in the bedclothes and rest.

“Do you not sleep in bed at all,” she says—they are still on the floor—“or are you a sort of fantastic slob?”

“I like the floor. Especially here. It feels like I’m camping.”

From where they are lying, all they can see is the night sky, heavy with snowfall. In the near distance, the eastern ridge. They are surrounded by frozen ridges, as though at the center of some fortress. Nothing but high walls on every side.

He lights a cigarette and holds it out to her. “Don’t tell Karo I smoke in here. Verboten.”