“Right.”

“You think I’m joking, don’t you?”

“Of course you’re joking,” she said.

“Well, what are you going to do when you see me sitting on your doorstep?”

He was laughing. So was she. Then she suddenly became silent.

“You have company, I gather,” Fire said.

“Yes,” she replied, trying to sound businesslike. “Can I get back to you on that? … Okay, bye.”

Virgil had entered her office in a huff. Shit, she thought. That whole thing with the receipts again. She had to get them in tomorrow morning, he said, or there would be trouble.

Unfortunately, she didn’t know where to find them.

Sylvia got up the next morning and continued the frantic search that had begun the night before. Her apartment was a mess. Desk drawers were out and their innards scattered widely. Books covered the living room like pebbles on a beach. Sitting on the coffee table in her white pajamas, she covered her face with her hands and tried her best to remember. Where were they? Where could they be?

It was 8:15 and … Shit, she realized. She needed the 8:00 A.M. train because she had a meeting at … Shit, she needed an earlier train at like quarter of to catch an 8:30 meeting.

Picking her way over the rubble she dashed in and out of the shower and scrambled to get dressed in the bedroom—she slipped on some slacks and jumped into some shoes and hauled on a top without any consideration, then shot out the door.

As she closed it, though, she remembered. She’d left her portfolio inside. She bolted back inside to grab it, but it wasn’t where she thought she’d left it. In the hall room. By her computer. Where was it? By the time she’d decided that she had to leave it, it was 8:30. What to do? What to do? Better call the office. But where was the phone? Not where it was supposed to be. Hadn’t she just seen it when she was looking for her portfolio? She thought so. But she hadn’t been looking for the phone then, so she wasn’t quite sure.

She couldn’t believe she had allowed herself to come to this—to be so out of control. In the first place she should’ve filed the receipts a while ago. But to have the place a mess like this was completely unforgivable. A part of her wanted to smile when she thought of the reason, the force that had exploded within her, creating this shambles in which she was standing now, this outward expression of her state of mind.

He made me come, she was thinking … with words … over the phone … from a distance. He made me let go. Made me feel okay to step outside myself. Made me feel feelings that I’d locked away since Syd.

For most of her life she had accepted that it was her, she was thinking now, and her baggage. And although Sylvia had stopped faking orgasms a few years ago, she still had a sense of being incomplete, and felt awkward about touching herself in the presence of a lover. She’d been disappointed every time that she had tried. A lot of men felt it was a form of castration. Others thought it was a show and pulled away to watch. Then there were those like Lewis, who tried but simply didn’t know what to do … no matter how many times and in how many ways she’d tried to show him. So she usually did it alone. Fire … Fire … Fire. She was hearing his voice now. How is it that you just know?