His impression grew that he was looking down at someone somehow slain. The weak moon-shadows of window muntins cast a net over her white form. Her sunken eyes seemed unseeing. His poor prick, so hard it ached, emitted an anxious little stink. Then a white hand drifted from her side and lightly grazed his glans and shaft, testing. She lifted her knees, assuming the exact pose of the drawing gouged into the back of the playground shed, and as if idly, with cool fingertips, she guided him in. He met an obstacle, and pushed through it. What he had not expected, it hurt him as well as her. He finished, and it was not clear that she had even begun. Her mucous warmth had seared him. As if back in the bed of his adolescence, he had had a sensation of his inner world somersaulting, the sensation less pure and violent than when produced with his left hand. Phyllis had submitted, and that was a start. All tension had fled his muscles, and he marvelled at how many times ahead of them they would do this together, each time better, the two of them both less clumsy and shy.

In the bathroom, a resiny salt scent pressed against the window screen; trees were growing right here, live breathing things, scrub oak and bayberry bushes as well as the pitch pines. He washed his genitals of blood and semen and called in from the lit bathroom into the dark, “What shall we do about the sheet?”

“Didn’t you notice? I put a towel under my hips.”

“Oh my God, I didn’t,” he said, stricken with tenderness, as if this proof of her calm prudence and foresight opened Phyllis to him wider than fucking her had. He rushed to return to her, to see the towel with his eyes, to make some kind of relic of it. Others—Hank, Jake—would have coveted such a relic. She still assumed the position of the drawing on the shed, the obscene M-shape, looking back at the moon. Perhaps herself dazed, she lifted her hips enough for him to ease the stained towel away; he kissed the terrycloth, pressed his face into it, its receding clash of flesh and blood.

“Owen, really,” she said. She swung her naked legs past him and set her feet on the floor, taking the white towel with her into the bathroom. “I’ll wash everything up,” she announced. When she came out she was wearing a dotted wool nightie and he was still naked, kneeling at the bedside, pressing his face into the pocket of leftover heat where she had become his woman, deflowered. She made him feel foolish, theatrical, trying to make something religious of this moment. Under her nightie she was wearing, he discovered, underpants, with a pad at the crotch.