Often afterwards he would remember details of this hour (her shorts and underpants in one sweep; her gleaming eye-whites; his sense of her slithering into the space above his head like a silken kite, like an angel crammed into an upper corner of a Sienese Nativity) and regret his lack of the boldness that would have let him linger with her gift of herself, and taste it, and let her continue undoing his pants. But his nerves had poisoned their privacy. Naked or not, she was a person, and now a frightened one. His retreat was cowardly but he felt brave and cool, successfully managing the maneuver. He started the engine—thank God, it started, drowning out all those other sounds—and backed down the overgrown road by the wan glow of the back-up lights while branches scraped metal and Elsie scrambled into her clothes. He would have backed up right onto the paved road, not bothering to roll back the boulder, but she said in a voice whose calmness sounded stern, “Owen. We should put it back the way we found it.”

Her father’s precious land. This had been her show, he realized. He got out angrily and in the glare of his own headlights heaved the rock back into place, for the next trespassers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said when the Chevy was safely running down the highway, to the village, Brechstown, where she lived. “I chickened out.”

Elsie said, after lighting a cigarette (rare for her, but girls in Willow smoked, and he had taught her), “You’re more citified than I am. Woods don’t frighten me. My father and uncle hunt in the fall. There are no bears or anything, not even bobcats any more. I felt safe.”

“You should have told me that while we were in there.”

“I tried to distract you, to keep you interested.”

“You did, you were stunning. I loved it. You.”

She was silent, putting his jerky speech together.

He told her, “It’s just as well. We might have fucked.”

Not a word they used, with others or between themselves: it was a kind of offering. But she held her silence. It occurred to him, his face heating in a blush, that he hadn’t been prepared even physically, with one of these rubber things he had seen years ago up by the abandoned Dairy Queen. Don’t touch it!

She at last spoke: “I wouldn’t have let you, Owen. I intend to be a virgin for my husband. It was just, like I said, I wanted you to know me, to see me as I see myself.”

“You were beautiful. Are beautiful, Elsie.”

Was she crying? “Thank you, Owen,” she brought out. “You’re a nice person.”

Too nice, was the implication. Still, he couldn’t blame himself. Her body like that of a slithering cool flexible fish in his arms had been a revelation, but it had been revelation enough for one night.