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succeeded she would go limp in his arms for a few seconds, catching her breath and trembling. He would hold her there, giving her the illusion of relaxing the tension, but not enough time to calm down. Then he would slowly begin again, awakening her feelings once more, finding a different way to arouse her. He knew that her sensations were cumulative, so that each time he began, she was still reverberating from the last time, and from the time before that, all the way to the first. It was like climbing to a height, step by step.
    Finally, he knew that she was reaching her limit. This time, it took only a touch, a signal to her that he was beginning once more. She gasped, then gave a high, ascending moan. “You can’t,” she whispered,then said aloud, half-pleading, half in wonder, “You can’t keep doing this to me.” The sound, her own voice unfamiliar to her, and the words—the admission of her complete surrender to his touch—pushed her over the edge once more. “No,” she said, and then more urgently, “Please don’t stop.” He began to bring it to a very consciously gauged end. He knew that the best way to let her know how much he had been enjoying her, how much he liked her, and how glad he was that she was alive was simply to show her—to sincerely abandon himself at last to the sexual excitement.
    When it was over, they lay quietly side by side on the bed for a few minutes, then she rolled over onto his chest. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”
    “The pleasure was all—or mostly all—mine,” he said. They lay in silence for another few seconds before he added, “I hope it was the right thing to do.”
    She raised her head so she could look into his eyes. “It was absolutely right. I did it with the wrong man for the wrong reasons, and it was the very best ever.” She rolled over onto her back. “Another bit of hard evidence that most of what they say is nonsense. As if anybody needed more evidence.”
    “You know what I meant,” he said. “Long-term.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I do. What you’re forgetting is that long-term and short-term are the same. There were any number of ways we could have spent the time, and I picked the right one for us: the winning choice. Most of the time, people pick wrong.” She sat up abruptly.
    “You know, I’m starting to get hungry.”
    “Now that you mention it, so am I,” said Mallon. “Let’s go to a restaurant. I know just the place.”
    She shook her head. “I can’t. Nothing to wear.”
    “I can drive you to your hotel and you can change.”
    She lay back down. “No. I didn’t bring any good clothes. Just a change and a makeup bag.”
    “Nobody left anything in my guest room that will do?”
    “I’m not going anywhere in a thong and a sunshade.”
    “All right,” he said. “I’ll get us something and bring it back. Do you like Italian food? If you don’t like Italian, there’s also—”
    “I do. I like Italian,” she interrupted. “Thanks.”
    As Mallon drove to La Cucina, he reflected on the sheer peculiarity of the universe. The day had begun without even the subtlest sign that a change was about to take place. Now it was seven in the evening, and he had lived through a series of cataclysms, a succession of vivid sights and sounds and emotions that seemed to him enough to fill years. He began to allow himself to hear other thoughts waiting in the back of his mind. It was still true that he was probably twenty, maybe even twenty-five years older than she was. But she had said … what had she said? “That’s always been a great deterrent to men in the past.” What she had been saying was that an age difference had never kept women from getting into relationships, either. It wasn’t a quirk of male behavior; it was a quirk of human behavior.
    It bothered him that she still had not told him her name. After the first refusal, he had determined to let her bring it up again, but she had not. He consoled