“The most intimate aspect of skin is its temperature,” I stashed in the empty bowels of a Roman sarcophagus.

As I wade through the riverbed toward the rubble, “jejune,” “belletristic,” and “estuary” fly into the wind from my fingertips. They bleed in the water.

Seung Hun lies stretched out on a grassy knoll at the center of the amphitheater, still in his fuzzy slippers and kimono, but with the front flaps flung open and his genitals exposed to open air.

“How’s the novel coming, mate?” he asks. “Here, have some weed.”

“It’s fine,” I say and pluck the blunt from his fingers. “Slow.”

“What’s it about, anyway?” Liam chimes in, lounging between one of the rows of stone seats. For some reason, he has also taken off his pants. Word has gotten out, it seems, that I am writing the next great American novel set on the Turkish coast.

“It’s about a man looking back on the choice he made as a youth, which he now realizes has defined the rest of his life, between an older woman with a lot of sexual experience and a young girl who was just as naïve as he was.”

“What female does he pick?” Liam asks.

“Neither.”

“Sounds stupid,” Seung Hun replies, rolling over in the grass so his bare buttocks face the sun.

“Hey, I heard that Jørgen had sex with Maddy,” I offer.

“When?” Liam asks.

“Says who?” Seung Hun asks.

They both sit up.

If Maddy is fucking one of the backpackers, the most likely candidate would be Jørgen, a Norwegian Tantric sex instructor. At dawn, we’ve seen him walking through the ruins to the beach with yoga mat in tow, his stride so long we could leapfrog from footprint to footprint. He will meditate and stretch there for hours and return to instruct us with phrases like, “Ja, you must run toward your fear, my friends,” and “Your pain is your finest teacher,” or he will fondly reminisce about all the women he’s trained in the art of spiritual lovemaking. His mother raised him to the age of twelve in an ashram, where everyone communally swapped fluids in a room of dirty mattresses and then went outside to experiment with punching each other in the face. Now he’s the head of the Northern European committee on eco-villages, as well as a fuck god. He is blond-haired and blue-eyed, with muscles so defined I feel like I should take gravestone rubbings of them, and he has a pecker the size of a fjord, and I hate his oversized Scandinavian guts.

“That’s just the rumor,” I reply.

“You’re full of it,” Liam says, after a while. “Maddy wouldn’t do that to us.”

“She’s still not letting you near her tits, is she?” Seung Hun asks. If they knew the ways I had been intimate with Maddy in years past, they might be less inclined to pity me. We haven’t bothered to tell them—something about her nouveau earth-mother mystique has turned it into a secret.