We were still smiling in our room, when we stepped into the bathroom naked and discovered the shower was a room itself, walled by glass, with four stone seats and two large, square showerheads: we sat down side by side to slowly wash away the sweat, wondering how much water this desert might hold.

She asked me to go get my phone. I left the clean heat of the shower, slipped on a soft white robe, went into the bedroom for the phone, switched it to airplane mode, set it up on the sink against the toiletry bag, and turned on the camera. Then I took off the robe, stepped inside and we started making love in the shower, on the seat. She was into it, didn’t kiss me, or kissed me a little and then stopped.

I often got the feeling from Barbara that what was happening between us wasn’t intimate. So I won’t talk about our limbs; I won’t talk about heat; I won’t talk about sweat. Like I wrote before, a good way to understand my situation is to think of Eleonora as my life partner, and to think of Barbara as my lover. She once told me she enjoyed it that I didn’t fuck her like a boyfriend, and that evening in the shower, on our first long trip together in quite a while, it really felt as if she were fucking me like a stranger, with no intimacy, and so she liked it that I wasn’t feigning tenderness. Now that there was no Eleonora, Barbara’s disengagement interested me more; previously it had felt like the punishment of a woman who somehow knew I wasn’t hers. I was hers, now, and she was fucking me like I was someone she’d picked up at a bar, someone happy to satisfy her without expecting any warmth in return.

The water off, we got into our robes, then into bed, and we watched our video before we started making love again and I held back from saying I loved her. Later, when she was nearly asleep, I told her: “I love you so much.”

“Oh, me too.”

And it sounded like it looks here on the page, inexplicable, lacking subtext.

When we turned off the lamps to go to sleep, she held on to me and said: “What a lovely trip.”