“What does?” he asked. As he felt her power encircle him, his cock, like a general to a diplomat, was offering hawkish advice.

She was coming toward him now, unwrapping the towel and allowing her hair to fall in wanton ringlets.

“This doesn’t make any sense—y’know that,” he said as she sank to her knees and slid his pants down his thighs, which trembled from the force of the hot blood rushing through them on their way to his groin. Her palm was warm against his cock, her tongue was wet against his tender balls, which she lapped, masturbating him slowly, urging his veins to show themselves beneath the skin.

“You don’t love me and I don’t love you,” she said as she bundled her slip around her waist so he could see her parted ass. “Sex is all we have. Let’s enjoy it to the fullest. We tried for more before and hurt ourselves. This is simpler now.” She began to lash him with her tongue again.

“You’re right,” he said, removing his shirt, thrusting deep inside her mouth. “I don’t love you. All that you can do for me is fuck me.”

She pushed him into the sheets and peeled his pants away, and stood over him, admiring his body—the wide chest, the narrow waist, the furrows which defined the muscles, forming rivers of sweat—and his cock, brown and rippled.

As she leaned over him to kiss him, she said, “If you tell me you love me I’ll believe you till it’s over. Make it sweet. Lie to me.”

“If you lie to me too,” he said, as he took her in his arms.

And they began to kiss, excited by the enigma of history, of how soon the old becomes deliciously exotic.

Fragile, desperate, clinging to the last of his self-control, Blanche’s body coming toward him in waves of flesh, Fire thought, Can this humping, this fucking, this struggle toward release, ever bring the kind of peace I need … the peace that I can’t bring myself whenever I’m alone?

As she rolled onto her back so he could dig until the source of life revealed itself, he heard himself say, “No.” And he ran downstairs through the door out into the rain and sacrificed his seed to earth, howling, then smiling as he collapsed in the mud because he had come close to losing but had won.

“You cannot stay,” he told her when he returned to the bedroom. “You must go.”

“You are a fool,” she said as she dressed herself.

“No, Blanche,” he replied. “I just don’t love you.”

chapter fourteen

The next day, when the telephone stirred Sylvia from her sleep, the apartment still smelled of smoke. It was two in the afternoon. Shit, how the heck did she sleep so late? She’d gone to bed as soon as she’d doused the fire, which was around one. It was the weed, she realized. Weed always knocked her out. That was one of the reasons she didn’t like to smoke.