Into that one kiss and the fuck that followed. And it was a fuck too, led by her. She drew Henry up over her, and when he was where she wanted him, she ran her hands through his chest hair and down until they circled his penis. She circled it as though she were meeting it and mastering it at the same time. She guided it into her, and only then did she let Henry take over. He started slowly, gingerly. He dipped in and out of her, bringing up still more of her juices. Then as he began, tentatively, to venture deeper, she took the lead again. She dug her palms into his backside, pressed her hands into it, and brought him close, she brought him so far into her that he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know if he was inside her or she was inside him. Their crotches were joined, soaked; electric.

She came first. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes and let out a long, slow sound whose pitch rose and rose. He too closed his eyes. He was aware of her trembling again, not on the outside this time but, it seemed, at the innermost center of herself. Her trembling, her orgasm, brought him to his, with a rapid heart and a flash of sweat that glazed his entire body.

They did not speak for maybe ten minutes. Finally she said, “I don’t know what that was.”

“I’m not sure I do either.”

To both of them sleep seemed like the easiest path forward.

Costanza slept with her hair spread out over her pillow like the petals of an exotic flower. That was the association that came to Henry when he woke up at three a.m., groggy and disoriented. Slowly his eyes adapted to the dim bluish light, and he took a deliberate inhalation of dried sweat and semen mingled with soap and perfume, and then he understood: he was in bed with Costanza. He had gone to bed with her some hours earlier, and now the whole city was wound down; surely all of the pensione (including Andrew, he thought in passing) was unconscious. But not Henry. Henry was conscious. He hoped he wasn’t going to be awake until morning. He could not endure one of his hyperaware insomniac spells on this night of all nights.

When he looked over at the face on the pillow next to him, he thought, Is this really possible? It was possible. In his stomach, his balls, and his wildly speeding brain, Henry felt a kind of hope about his life that he had not felt since Judith left. No, before that. Way before that. Since he and Judith began.