Slowly, she placed her palm on his. He let it rest there. She watched as his eyes changed from suns into moons and his face assumed the gravity of evening. Things were happening inside him that she didn’t understand, things that she suspected had to do with her, things that made her nervous—for they were things she’d like to do with him. In her head she heard a poem that she’d written the week before, “Dreaming of Mango”:

Sunshine on some full-smack lips,
mango dripping on the chest,
sweeter at the raisin tips
that look out darkly from the breasts.

“I think we should go before we get in trouble,” she said.

He smiled. She hoisted herself onto the workstation, and let the sight of his mouth suck her in.

“Why am I doing this?” she asked. “Getting myself in trouble. Jeopardizing something I already have. Something … I don’t know what to call it. But something …”

“That you don’t want to lose.”

“Right.”

“What would you do if it suddenly left you? Would you chase after it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not,” she said slowly.

“Maybe yes?”

“Maybe,” she said. She saw his lips now as through a microscope. The wrinkles and ridges that trapped his saliva. “One part of me would want to, and the other part would not. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Think about that before you call me.”

He gripped her hand. And she blinked. And when she opened her eyes, thinking she was about to tell him to let her go, something rushed from his direction. This thing, this exploding ball of wetness, shorted for an instant her memory and will, so that she didn’t realize at first that it was she who had kissed him and not the other way around, and further, that it was she now—or a stranger who was misusing her body—who was opening her legs so that the body of this man whom she was pulling toward her for motives she didn’t understand, but which she realized she must now resist, could press itself against her, reconfirming her as soft by the hard truth of its intent. His waist was at her knees now, rushing toward her dampened groin. His lips were beginning to part now, and she could see their underside, where terra-cotta became wet clay.

She had less than a second to act. And as she jerked her head to the side and closed her eyes, preparing for the adventure of impact, her involvement with Lewis, faced with its mortality, projected its history inside her head. She’d met him on the grass courts at a friend’s house in Martha’s Vineyard. He was sitting on the sidelines, shirtless, his muscles filmed with sweat, a strikingly handsome man. At first she thought he was a model, but as she learned when they met again at a dinner party, he’d grown up in Baltimore, the son of a shop clerk and a mechanic, and had become a millionaire through hard work, good schools, and a little bit of luck. He was unmarried, without children, respected by his peers and well connected, as evidenced by the people who made it their duty to say hello—filmmakers, congressmen, musicians, and bankers. And at some point in the evening, she asked him to write an investment feature for Umbra. The piece, which was never done, because he could never find the time, became the pretext for twice-weekly phone calls, which gave way to long lunches at good restaurants, then dinners and weekends, then … this.