The windows were black, Wilson Drive outside was clean of traffic, it was late on Sunday night. They were, in a sense, alone, but, then, Owen half-saw, the world, all those atoms and neutrinos and electrons, is always with us. Her clever hand had found the fly of his boxer shorts and the little limp sleeping thing was in the open and then in her warm soft mouth. He felt himself begin to harden, and said, “No.”

“No?” she repeated in puzzlement; her mouth, backed up an inch or two, was still shaped, it seemed, by what had been in it, being wetly warmed. She was a different generation, Owen thought from a distance, and this was less of a deal for her. Cocksucking was just friendly. The smell of her damp horsey hair swelled in his nostrils. “Because of old Phyllis?” she asked.

“And Ed,” he pleaded. “Think of Ed, we can’t do this to him. To Phyllis either. She needs your friendship, Stacey; she really can’t talk to these other women around here. The only time I see her relax is when she’s over here with the three of us. She likes you a lot.”

“Really?” His prick, not listening to him, had woken up and was getting harder. Stacey saw this and said, “Look at that dear friendly jimmy. Faye used to sing his praises to her girlfriends, they do tell me.”

He found this hard to picture and stopped trying. “We don’t want to make a mess of things,” he insisted. “E-O Data and all that.”

Rebuffed, sitting back on her bare heels, Stacey began to explain herself: “Owen, I just felt so fond of you, like you were going to waste—it must have been the pot.”

He had talked himself out of a pretty good deal, he saw, sickeningly. He was wilting, listing to one side. “You could do a little more if you wanted,” he suggested, “it’s just that in the long run—”

“Oh, no, darling. You put him right back,” she said, and floppily pushed herself to her feet, tugging down the miniskirt to ease out the wrinkles, rocking back and forth for balance on her long brown feet and staring angrily around at her own room, as if the walls had been witnesses to her rejection. Her mouth had shocked him with its warmth; now he felt a chill.

“Listen,” he began, “that was terrific but—”

“Owen, you are one hundred percent right, I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

“You were feeling sorry for me,” he reminded her.

“Or something like that. But, honey, you shouldn’t tease a girl. We are going to be friends. And whenever I get a tingling in my pussy I am going to tell it, You shut your big mouth.”

He laughed, working his disheartened penis back into his resistant pants, and zipped. “You’re sounding more and more Texan,” he told her.

“I try to keep it down, it embarrasses Ed. He’s very insecure.”