“Neither,” he replied. “It’s the reflection of hope.”

“It was nice to have met you, Fire,” she said, repeating the words they’d said to each other before meeting again at the gallery.

“It was nice to have met you too, Sylvia.”

“We can’t just end like this,” she said as he held her and rocked her and called her sweet names. “We can’t just end like this, Fire. We must not end this way. Is there somewhere we could go,” she asked, “and have a last dance?”

As he led her across the common, beyond the driver’s feeble torch into the womb of darkness, they held each other closer, snuggled into each other’s crevices like twins unborn. Breaching the last of the vehicles on the field, leaving the sounds of the town behind, the blood rushing to the surface of their skin, they began to feel a heightened sense of each other and their surroundings, as the spirit of their passion, dead before, rose again and struck them down to lie in the middle of the open field, on a bed of grass, their sheets the sky.

As Fire’s kisses fell against her face like melting candle wax Sylvia pulled up her dress to her neck and undid her bra so he could kiss her belly. She felt her body crest and fall like a wave, his fingers hook her panty-crotch, and the wind coming low and cool across the moss-laden stone that hid the spring that trickled out, enriched with natural salts, from the secret cave within her. With the stretch of his entry she gasped, and felt the greater heat of his mouth on hers. He’d kept his pants on but opened his shirt so she could feel the sweat-slicked ridges on his belly slide and tighten as he led her in a dance to a rhythm so primal as to be nameless, the rhythm of tides, of seasons, of phases of the moon. She felt herself becoming one with the earth beneath her and she looked up at him, as her soul left her body and returned, in that brief moment of death in which she screamed and called him “Dada” as she trembled.

They lay together, panting, dazed, bonded like survivors of an earthquake.

“I will love you forever,” she said, running her thumb down the dip in his back.

“Just love me today,” he said. “You know I’m afraid of promises. Promises frighten me. As I told you when we left the concert in New York, I don’t deal with disappointment very well.”

“I won’t disappoint you, Fire. I won’t.”

“Promise me you won’t,” he said, hearing his voice thinning out to the one he possessed as a boy.

“Will you write me in St. Lucia?”

He didn’t answer. He thought of the letter he’d written to her, the one that Ian had found, the one over which they argued, the one that led indirectly to this moment. Feeling overcome by the burden of free will, he began to retreat to the comfort of his belief in fate.