“Not unless they become a liability.” She turns inside his arms and begins to massage his shoulders and spine with the soap. Their lips meet, briefly. “Am I a liability, Oscar?”

“You’re not a pawn. A queen, maybe.” His penis—he’s forty and he hasn’t gone soft! Amazing!—pushes gently against the side of her thigh. “You understand the value of keeping secrets.” She wraps one hand around his balls, feeling them tighten as she strokes.

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” she says, before she can think to censor herself. Then she realizes something else. “Oh, that’s odd.”

“What is?” He’s instantly alert, sensitive to her perturbation.

“I’m not supposed to be able to talk about it.” She leans against him and kisses him greedily to shut him up, covering her faux pas. But it’s too much fun; one thing leads to another and she moans and bites his shoulder as he slides inside her again. Blood. But it tastes wrong. There’s nothing sexy about Oscar’s circulatory fluid. He’s biting her now, then pulling away, disappointed. They continue to fuck, but the magic is leaking out of it, swirling down the shower drain with a thin red trail of soap suds. It’s just ordinary mammalian humping, enjoyable but nothing to set her hair on fire and make her scream until the windows explode. And Oscar feels it, too, because after a minute he stops and slides away, slowly detumescing.

Back in the bedroom, Mhari rummages through the discarded bedding for her handbag. The four remaining sample tubes are fine: she pulls a couple and holds one out to Oscar. As he takes it she pops the lid on her own and raises it. “Your—hang on, this is skunked.” Her nose wrinkles in disgust. She examines the tube closely: “It smells wrong.”

Oscar unseals his and takes a sip. His expression of distaste speaks volumes. “Want to try the others?”

It takes Mhari less than a minute to determine that all the other sample tubes are spoiled. Not clotted or rotten: whatever previously made the contents so enticing has vanished, leaving only rancid red meat-juice behind. “This hasn’t happened before,” she observes.

“Well, we’ll just have to hit room service, won’t we?” Oscar towels himself dry. “For food and drink.” He watches with detached amusement as Mhari collects her scattered clothes. “Unless you’d like to dine out?”

“I didn’t bring my glad rags; room service will do just fine.” She goes in search of the room service directory as Oscar begins to dress.

Later, over Kobe steaks flown in from Osaka that morning (with discreet tubes of blood donated by the bellhop as a digestif), Oscar asks her the question she’s been worrying about. “What exactly aren’t you supposed to talk about?” he asks.