He discovered in himself the capacity to be cool in sex, cold even, watching their sweating bodies from a distance, freezing his own orgasmic curve with deliberately unsexual pictures—a calm Caribbean harbor at sunset, or a smartly executed double play. When Alissa reached her inner divide, and the summit within her was irreversibly attained, he could give her what he had been effortfully holding back; he could steady her ass with two hands and sock it to her upwards without thought of delicacy or mercy. Her whimper, coming from the territory beyond her own climax, renewed itself in the higher register; he wondered, amid his own sullen blood-thump of release, if she might faint. Then her hand on his shoulder blade slowly ceased fluttering and she covered his face with weak kisses.

Her gratitude for his learning to make love to her, in the deep but narrow furrow of stimuli that her nerves accepted, included a license for him to ask of her what he would—but, again, within limits. Rapt fellatrice though she was, Alissa did not want him to come in her mouth, “like men do with prostitutes,” and if an impulsive flutter of her tongue brought him too far she took his ejaculation on her chin or chest, where his gob gleamed embarrassingly. But fucking her a second time on days with a few extra minutes to the tryst, as she knelt on the bed or floor, was allowed: an image that lingered long after she was no longer available to him was the gleam of her coccyx, a bit of hard tailbone catching the light just above the creamy spread of her buttocks. From his vantage, at the other end of the spine cleaving her back into two plump and golden halves, her cervical vertebrae peeped touchingly from beneath fluffy tufts of her snuff-brown hair, cut short in her style. This is the neck, Owen thought, the executioner sees. On the day of this thought the light fell from the single high factory window, sifted through grime and reinforcing wire. His cell at E-O, with its oily scent of former industry and its walled-off hum of many-bodied intellectual activity, excited them both to a breathless, whispering shamelessness, a fascination with their bodies as thorough, perhaps, as that which hospital patients receive and bestow in the days before death.

But he, too, had a squeamish side, a limit. He couldn’t suppress his surprise and disgust when, in a stolen half-hour in a parked car, his exploring finger came out from under her skirt bloody, the thin redness of such blood like a medicinal coating and abhorrent to him. He resented her failing to warn him that she was having her period—it seemed a betrayal of decorum even worse than his semen puddled above her breast like an explosion of snot.