“I met you,” she said, removing her bulky sweater and revealing a creamy silk camisole. Her breasts were small and pert, a girl’s breasts. She was sitting up now, staring across the bed at him with real frankness. A black widow, he thought, waiting in her web to catch unwitting male flies. He must leave. He was absolutely leaving.

She leaned forward and reached between his legs, her hand not quite touching, as if she were warming her hand over a stove, or casting a spell. He felt helpless, leaden, and faintly sick. She had a box of condoms under the bed.

Her sex was stripped hairless as a child’s. Nipples pink as tea roses. Her belly was fleshy, springy. She mewed when he touched her, eyes closed like a new kitten. He felt repelled by his desire for her. He wished he could spread the condom over his head, his whole body, to shield himself from this experience. Yet he was having it, oh, he was having it! Faithful for eighteen years, he was gobbling up a disturbed American pet store clerk at two in the afternoon, and he was doing it fervently, desperately, hungrily. He, Ciaran Fox, and no one else on earth, was doing this!

Afterward, he lay there, staring at the ceiling in blank disbelief.

“Will you come visit me in America?” she asked, her voice higher now than he remembered it. An icy feeling of panic washed over him. He sat up and thrust his hands deep into the bedding, his fingers scrabbling for his briefs.

“No,” he said, seizing them at last, “I won’t.” She was sitting naked on the bed, her firm, plump belly creased at the waist, big legs flung out at odd angles, as if she were the doll of a giant. Her round face was getting blotchy, a film of tears dulling her lemur eyes.

He was hopping on one foot, pulling on his rumpled woolen trousers. “I’m sorry, but—that is unrealistic. If you’re going to get better,” he said, reaching absurdly for a therapeutic tone, “you need to learn to see things as they are.”

“Why did you say that, then?” she asked petulantly.

“Say what?” he said.

“About how you wouldn’t be getting me a pet.”

“What are you—”

“I said most people turn pets into little people they can control, and you said, ‘I won’t be buying you a pet, in that case.’” She was angry now, and tugged her leggings on forcefully.

“I was joking! I was flirting!”

“I wouldn’t have slept with you if you hadn’t implied we had a future!”

“That’s—” He began to say “crazy,” then stopped himself.

“You know how you feel about me,” she said, dressed now, and calmer. Her voice had gone soft and assured. “You just can’t admit it to yourself.” She was smiling slightly, gazing at him with tenderness and—was it pity?