A flock of crows, six or eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an oak on the edge of the square of sky. The heavenly invasion made his heart race; he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.

Faye took him in hand. He slipped in. He became an adulterer. He went for the last inch. She grunted, at her own revelation. His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze. It was soon over. He could not help himself, he was so excited, proud, and nervous. When he was done, he opened his eyes, and saw this stranger’s face an inch from his, seemingly asleep, the closed eyelids showing a thin pulse, her long lips curved self-lullingly. “Sorry, sorry,” Owen apologized. “You never had a chance. Next time I’ll do better. If you’ll give me a next time.”

“You were lovely, silly,” she said. “So intense.”

“I was?” She could compare; she had had other men, he knew from the practiced way she had managed this meeting.

“Yes.” Now she was feeling her nakedness as vulnerability; her mouth made its little deprecating crimp, and her eyes moved from side to side, taking in their green, breeze-rippled surroundings.

But he felt in no hurry to get off her. “Tell me about it,” he idly demanded, in a soft growl that rubbed his throat like a purr. “About my coming.”

“It tells me that this is important to you.”

“Isn’t it to every man?”

Faye frowned, perhaps at his weight still being there, upon her. “No,” she said. “To some …” She shrugged and didn’t finish. Owen guessed that Jock was one of the some.

She told him things. She saw him as living an unnaturally proper and aloof life with Phyllis, and needing instruction. “You should drink more,” she once told him, as if his moderation were a diet deficiency. She wanted him to join her on the muddy earth, to be more like Jock. Yet she appreciated that he was not like Jock. She told him, later, of this day, that, after dropping him off on the parking lot in front of Ames, as she drove around in her Mercedes with its uneaten picnic lunch and then home she cried to think that she could never have him, except for a time in this illicit, doomed fashion.