He undid the buttons, the skirt slid down, and then, with the faintest gust of genital scent, the silk underpants, paler than her bra. They slid down, as with Elsie, but that was in the deep dark and this moment was awash in daylight. Revelations were coming too fast to take in, like presents at a speeded-up birthday party. Faye’s pubic hair was scanter than Phyllis’s; two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount. He wanted to see her face, to watch her watching his face as for the first time he saw this essence of her, this crux of her femininity; however long or short their future stretched from this moment, there would never be another such first time. Her face looked sleepy, complacent, her eyes halfway lidded, as if she were drinking in with him the sight of her, the top of her cleft visible through the scant reddish hair; she was drinking in the sight of him drinking her in, her expression proud and skeptical both. He loved her for her innocent lewd vanity. Faye enjoyed, he was discovering, being naked, even here in this precarious open, while his ears strained for a broken twig or a suppressed rustle in the forest around them. Her skin was a blinding pelt, not quite hairless and pricked by stray pink dots and threadlike capillaries. Bare but for her barrettes and loafers and a ring or two, she knelt to unzip him, his wits too slowed by listening for forest sounds to assist. He recovered his manners enough to ease his unbelted corduroys and Jockey shorts around his prick, already thumpingly erect. She gazed down at it as if into a baby’s face, touching it with the same fingertips that had gently rested on his wrist at the other end of summer. “Sweet,” she said. “Scary.”

He was average, he had always supposed, from what he saw in locker rooms and, at MIT, stag movies. There was now a new roominess in his and Faye’s relationship, space into which he expanded. His voice had grown husky and murmurous, a seducer’s. “You can handle it, I think. But”—in more his own voice, too light and tentative—“do you want to? You don’t have to. We’ve already done a lot, for a first date.”

“Owen,” she scolded, “I want you to make love to me. I’ll be very angry if you don’t.”

“O.K., wonderful. I brought this for us.” He rummaged, so awkwardly he began to blush, in the pocket of the corduroys, still rumpled and caught around his knees. In a square foil packet, brought from the bathroom cabinet at home, where one wouldn’t be missed from the box of them.

“Oh, darling. I’m on the Pill, isn’t Phyllis? No wonder you two keep making babies.”