The air, through the open windows of the car, is damp and loamy. An infinite variety of green floods Eve’s eyes. She’s acutely aware that every in-breath she takes here, as they find their way on back roads into a forgotten rural pocket of Long Island, is the out-breath of plants. Micajah is driving; on the seat behind them is the instrument in its case, which they are taking to Yann. Micajah phoned; Yann agreed to look at it.
Eve is beginning to think of it as a talisman: beautiful and fragile, its gashed back like the gash of years between them.
The car is a 1990s Chevy Nova, in a dated shade of green. It’s in good condition, but not what a car guy would call cherry. Certainly not pimped. Old rather than vintage. Entirely lacking in glamour. Not at all the car that Eve would have imagined Micajah buying with his new-fledged rock-star money.
He told her about it that morning as they lay in his bed, as now and then a diesel truck rumbled by on the Brooklyn street below. He was buying it, he said, because when he becomes Yann’s apprentice he can’t carry instruments and tools back and forth on a Vespa.
He’s more excited about this, Eve senses, than about becoming a rock star. Talent and teenage dreams have brought him there, but she’s coming to see that, in fact, he’s dreading it.
“Want to come get the car with me? We can go exploring.”
We again.
She felt stained by that look from the trainee survivalist. What are you doing with him? it said. Cougar. She dreaded being stabbed again by the judgment of strangers.
“I have to get home,” she said apologetically. “I’m on a deadline. The planting diagram for a new courthouse complex.”
The presentation was actually nearly three weeks away, but her words weren’t entirely a lie. Eve makes deadlines for every stage of the bid process; a design deadline allows time for budgeting.
“How about next weekend? We can take the instrument to Yann.”
“Promise he won’t swear at me again.”
“Promise.”
She smiles. He’s forgiven.
“He lives on Long Island, near my friend Barbara’s house. We can stay the night with her.”
In a shared room, obviously. Publicly, a couple. We.
Her chest constricts. She forces herself to breathe.
“Since we’re driving, I’ll come pick you up.”
“It’s in the opposite direction,” she said.
“So what?” he said. “It’s my new car. It needs some miles on it.”
She gave him her address unwillingly, afraid that his mysterious sheen might be tarnished by her mundane New Jersey world. Still, she didn’t want to make a drama out of arranging to meet him somewhere else. So when he called to let her know that he hadn’t been able to collect the car yet and wouldn’t be picking her up, she felt a tidal wave of gratitude to whoever or whatever had thrown his plan out of whack.
“What happened?” she asked. “I thought you were going to get it right after I left.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, taking care with his words. “Something came up. An emergency. It took a while.”
Obviously, he didn’t want to tell her what had happened, nor did he want to lie. Eve is not someone who asks questions, who prods and probes. What they have is delicate. It needs protecting.
“Is everyone okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s over now.”
She let his evasiveness rest.
She picked him up in her Ford SUV and they drove to an Irish neighborhood in Queens. Once he had his car, they’d convoy to a train station, where she would leave hers. She hoped he’d be quick, but he did a walk-around of the Nova, making sure there were no new nicks or scratches in the olive-green paintwork. She began to feel trapped, waiting behind the steering wheel, so she got out, but stayed near her car, feeling less exposed that way.
“You love it, right?” said Micajah to Eve, running a finger along the thin chrome trim. “You’re jealous.”
The seller, a middle-aged man in a loose T-shirt, scanned Eve up and down with doggy enthusiasm. His folded arms rested on an almost horizontal shelf of belly.
“Your son’s a smart lad,” he said. His voice had a natural boom to it. “Fine vehicle. Got another ten years in it, easy.”
“She’s not my mother,” Micajah said quickly.
“What is she, then?” said the man. He’s the kind of guy, Eve thought, who puts up his fists at the first sniff of a fight.
Micajah looked back at her. He’d have no shame in saying it, she knew. But he knew how tender she felt.
“I’m his lover,” said Eve, staring the man down.
The man looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. Micajah turned his face away to hide his grin, and flattened the paperwork on the Nova’s hood. Quickly, the man signed, took what was his, and disappeared back inside his house.
“That was awesome,” Micajah said as he fetched his license plate and a screwdriver from a bag on the back seat of her car. “I never thought you’d say it.”
“Me neither,” Eve replied, and collapsed in laughter.
Micajah glanced at the man’s house. “Do you think he’s watching us?”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Old guys like him,” said Micajah, once he’d stopped laughing enough to speak, “they make their wives compete with younger women and they don’t even know they’re doing it. Well, guess what, my friend. You have to compete with guys like me.”
As they drive east along Long Island in the Nova, the scene replays itself in Eve’s mind. Micajah had been very quick, even angry, in telling the man that Eve wasn’t his mother. She wonders about his mother. He’s never mentioned her. She senses a wound there. Perhaps one day the subject will come up, and he will tell her what happened. She would like to know.
Micajah turns down a dirt lane, overhanging branches forming a leafy tunnel. It dead-ends at a clapboard farmhouse surrounded by ancient apple trees. Behind it is a barn, white paint weathered, weathervane on the roof ridge mangled by decades of winters.
In the open doorway, an enormous gray dog lies like a rug in the sun. Micajah bends down to stroke him.
“Hello, Seamus.” He scratches the dog behind the ears. Seamus grunts and pants up at him. “This is Eve,” he says, “she’s with me.”
Stepping between the dog’s forepaws, he enters the barn. Eve follows.
A burly man with wild hair and a raveling sweater bends over a workbench, making tiny taps with a miniature mallet and chisel. He looks up from his work, nods to Micajah, barely glances at Eve, and returns to his focused concentration.
“Eve, this is Yann, the person I admire most in the world.”
“That is only because he is young and does not know many people yet.”
No “Hello,” no “Nice to meet you.” Yann’s voice is deep and rough, almost a growl, with an indeterminate accent that might be Celtic, or Slavic. There’s the hint of a lilt in it, as if this bearish man forms music inside him and releases it into the air as he exhales. Eve wonders if he might be autistic, or somewhere on the spectrum. His speech, despite its lilt, seems oddly careful. He barely glanced at her, directing his words to his tools; he didn’t even smile at Micajah.
The barn is a treasure house. Its walls are hung with instruments, above ranged cabinets and shelves packed with books and also with animal bones and skulls. Feathers and flags hang on the uprights, along with old leather bags and pouches, strange objects of painted metal, long ropes and bundles of strings. The wood-plank floor is strewn with intricately patterned Persian rugs, faded and frayed. Ratty plaid blankets cover a sofa and two armchairs. A calico cat is curled in one, asleep in the warm shade.
Clerestory windows circle the room below the vaulted ceiling, overhung by the eaves of the roof, so that the light is diffused and even. Only the shaft of sun flooding through the open doorway casts a shadow: Eve and Micajah, intertwined.
“Look, Mick. It came from Yemen, last week. A primitive tambur.”
Micajah moves over to the workbench, his dark head close to Yann’s matted gray hair. Their absorption is beautiful. Eve would rather watch them than have them make small talk for her sake.
She loves the smell of this room, a mixture of wax and sawdust and dog and the patch of wild mint outside the door. Her gaze drifts across the instruments on the walls: some barbarically rough, others diabolically complex, from three ropelike strings to what might be a hundred or more fine golden filaments. Some are strange hybrids: part guitar and part banjo, part keyboard and part string. She is fascinated by the giraffe-like necks, the round vegetable bellies, the strange protrusions and carvings that suggest fish and angels and monsters of myth. One, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, Scheherazade might have played; another, dark and fierce, might have driven dervishes whirling to their deaths.
When Yann straightens up, Micajah lifts Eve’s case onto a table.
“We’ve brought you something.”
Little crooning sounds come from Yann as he lifts the instrument free of the moth-eaten lining. She watches his fingers move across the wood, as if he is physically sensing the sound it would make. As he runs them along the back, he winces. It seems to take an effort of will for him to turn it over and see the damage with his eyes.
“I found it in a junk shop,” Eve says. “I couldn’t bear to leave it.”
“Like the emergency services,” says Yann, probing the edges of the gash. “Never give up, even after the patient is dead.”
Eve’s heart sinks. His tone is hard to interpret. It sounds closer to sarcasm than hope.
“Can you do something?” asks Micajah.
“That is a nonsense of a question, my boy. I can do many things. I can juggle. I can climb that tree out there. I can roast a lamb whole.”
Micajah laughs. “Can you fix it?”
Gently, Yann lays the instrument along the sofa’s edge, fitting its bridge and strings into the cavity between the frame and the cushions. His fingers slip inside the hollow. Then he buries his face in the gash, as if searching for a sign of life.
He doesn’t seem to care, or even notice, that Eve’s eyes are fixed on him. If only the force of her will could make him say yes, he can fix it, and yes, he will.
As if he finds it too hard to watch Yann’s process of diagnosis, Micajah picks up a violin and softly starts playing. He holds it in a way Eve has never seen: not jammed under his chin but almost upside down, its end resting in the crook between his bicep and the curving muscle of his shoulder. His eyes lose focus, as if he’s seeing only the music inside his head.
Eve recognizes the melody immediately. She’s been trying to recapture it since that night when she first heard it, trying to haul its notes out of a dark well in her mind. She went to play it again right after she saw the words “For Eve” and felt the blood pound in her ears, but the link had vanished. She searched her computer and could find no sign that the message, or the file, had ever existed. In the weeks since, it has become as insubstantial as a dream.
The tune, as Micajah plays it now, has the feeling of a traveler following an intermittent light in the fog. Searching; hope; joy at the prospect of deliverance; loss; searching again. Music has never spoken to her so directly before, never conjured up such clear emotions. She relaxes, letting it take her on its journey. Yann will answer what he answers; she cannot influence him.
She feels Micajah look over at her and glances up from her drifting state. As their eyes meet, she sees a shadow come over him.
He stops mid-phrase and takes up a different instrument, something Eve can’t name. He drops into a low chair and rests its base on his lap, the neck rising high above his head. He saws the bow roughly across the strings. The search is no longer a tender quest. It’s desperate.
Yann’s hands stop exploring the gash. He looks at Eve, accusingly. Whatever this torment is in Micajah’s heart, Yann believes she is to blame.
When the melody ends, Micajah hangs the strange instrument back on the wall and goes outside without looking at Eve. Yann puts a hand on her arm, not holding her back but telling her silently, firmly, not to go.
“You are the woman who called me,” he says. “Wanting to sell this.”
“Yes.”
For a millisecond, Eve wonders if she should have lied. No—it would be pointless, even if she was a good liar, which she isn’t. A lie would offend Yann far more than the truth.
“I should make you eat it instead.”
Eve feels that she is being tested. No response comes to her, so she just waits for him to continue.
“You said a lot more on the telephone than you say now,” he says. “Plans and intentions and prescriptions for what in your mind I must do. Are they there still?”
Eve takes a moment before she replies. She has not changed her mind about selling the instrument, but she is not as certain of it as she was.
“Yes,” she says. “They’re possibilities. Not a definite plan.”
Yann nods approvingly.
“A plan is an absurdity. The future cannot be commanded like a square of soldiers.”
Again, no reply comes to Eve. She’s surprised to realize that’s not a failing. The usual social requirement to bat the ball of conversation back over the net does not hold with Yann.
“Still, we must have possibilities. Without them we are dumb beasts. You have others now too.”
I could give the instrument to Micajah. The thought jumps into Eve’s mind, but she’s unwilling to speak it aloud. It would be a hostage to fortune, a marker put down on a future she’s been telling herself repeatedly is impossible. Does Yann want her to promise that?
“What are you?” he asks her, his stare hard.
Though Eve can’t articulate his meaning to herself, he has driven deep into her uncertainties. The question exposes the hole at the center of her self, the place where purpose lies. Yann is the judge, she the accused, yet she has no words to be a witness in her own defense. Later, Micajah will tell her that this was how she earned Yann’s respect: with her rooted, honest silence.
“You are not a musician,” Yann says. She feels the chill dissipate.
“No.” On this score, she has nothing to hide.
“I am not either.”
For the first time, she sees him smile—not at her, but at Micajah, behind her. She hears him step across Seamus in the doorway.
“I will try,” he says to Micajah and, glancingly, to Eve.
Eve expected to feel relief. The satisfaction of success. Gratitude. What she feels instead is something impersonal—like the gears of fate turning.
“How much do you charge?” Eve is tentative about bringing up the subject of money, but feels she must.
“Raising the dead is a miracle,” Yann says. “Not a purchase.”
The tangy smells of sedge and salt mingle with the scented steam rising from a mug of fresh thyme tea, which Eve cups in both hands, enjoying the heat soaking into her palms. A bowl of ripe figs sits on the table in front of her. The walls of Barbara’s kitchen are a pale robin’s-egg blue that merges with the sky; Eve imagines that on other days, when the clouds are low and misty, the room blurs into the ocean. The cabinets are made of weathered driftwood, which Barbara collected herself, she told Eve—the remains of wrecked whaling ships and fishing boats, whose sailor ghosts she talks to sometimes.
On the drive to Long Island, Micajah told Eve that he was half in love with Barbara. You’ll see, he said; you will love her too. Eve fought off her jealousy, telling herself that if Barbara was a rival, he would not be bringing her there.
Barbara is beautiful, with loose silvery hair and a wide mouth, lines etched in her skin by years of sun and wind, emotion and thought and laughter. It’s not jealousy Eve feels, but envy. This, she thinks, is who I want to be when I grow up.
“Falling in love! Such a ridiculous idea! Like falling into a pit with sharp stakes at the bottom. And what do you catch when you want someone to fall in love with you? A Heffalump.”
Barbara sautés mushrooms while Micajah slices tomatoes, freshly picked from a small fenced garden, crowded with flowers and vegetables, to one side of the door.
“It took a while, but I finally learned to run away at top speed from any man who was falling in love with me,” Barbara says. “Or me with him. Who wants to fall? So much better to climb into love.”
She pulls a few silver-green leaves of sage from a pot on the windowsill and adds them to the pan.
“The great thing about being seventy-six is that you can aspire to a post-sexual state. Love everybody, but nobody in particular. The secret of happiness. But you have to earn it.”
“With blood and tears?” Micajah asks.
“No, my dear boy. Just with time. By aging. By paying your dues. You must have loved deeply and truly, at least once. Without an agenda, and absolutely without a list of things that need fixing. Have you, Eve? I won’t even ask Micajah, he’s much too young.”
“No. I haven’t.” She gave up wishing Larry was different not out of love, but out of fatigue.
“I hear women talk, and it’s all about what’s wrong with their men. Basically, they’re remedial projects. Like a house. It’s never done. Once you’ve changed the knobs on the kitchen cabinets, the roof is leaking and the plaster has to be patched. And by then you’ve fallen out of love with the bathroom. The problem is this absurd idea that we’re supposed to be monogamous for a lifetime. We’re not penguins! Or is it grebes. How old are you, Eve?”
“Forty-nine in September.”
“Forty-eight,” says Micajah almost simultaneously. Eve and Barbara share a smile. He’s young enough that a year matters.
“Really, you two are perfect,” Barbara adds. “Take the normal arrangement: a fifty-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman, rotten with agendas. He wants the arm candy, the massage of his ego, the tight ass in his bed. She wants the status, the security, the dress, the money. But reverse it, and it’s the ideal love affair. Neither of you wants to reproduce, and neither of you wants to settle down—I’m sure you have no desire to pick up another man’s socks, Eve, so soon after being released from the socks of your husband.”
As she places an iron trivet on the table and sets the pan of mushrooms on it, she asks Eve, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
Eve thinks for a moment: back to meeting Larry, meeting Micajah.
“I’m not sure. Should I?”
“God, no!” says Barbara. “How can you love someone you don’t know? That’s just an endorphin release, like jogging. I loathe seeing people lit up like pinball machines and calling it love.”
Eve watches Micajah mixing the salad. Is this love, this feeling I have for him? It does not overwhelm her, hijack her sense and her senses. She does not stare at the phone waiting for it to ring, as she did when she was young. Whole hours of the day go by during which she does not think of Micajah at all; she works, she cooks, she ferrets out items for Deborah’s shop, all with a new, expansive ease. She does not have to think about Larry’s dinner, Larry’s laundry, Larry’s opinions. She does not have to think about Micajah’s either.
She’d thought it was impossible that loving Micajah could bring her happiness; she’s been afraid of it, of him, even as the reckless moments took her. But during the course of the evening, without her quite noticing it, the fear quietly slips away.
“If I love a man, I love watching him eat,” Barbara says, with a funny growl.
“That’s the sound of everything Barbara loves rolled into one,” says Micajah fondly. “Ocean air, oysters, and good-looking men.”
He prompts her to tell her stories: the married handyman she slept with every Friday for two years, and how she danced naked for him wearing only a headdress of egret feathers left over from her Vassar cotillion; the husband who ignored her to chase skinny women.
“If he wanted anorexic,” she says, “he shouldn’t have married me.”
As they clean up after dinner, the classical playlist streaming through Barbara’s stereo kicks up a Strauss waltz. Micajah grabs a dishtowel to dry his hands and pulls Barbara to her feet. She is a better dancer than he is, but it doesn’t matter. He whirls her around the kitchen, into the living room, and back again, spinning first one way and then the other so that they don’t get dizzy. The waltz speeds up, faster and faster; they’re laughing as they try not to bang into furniture and door frames and walls.
Watching them, as the evening light filters through the leaves outside, Eve imagines the love that Barbara described as a tree that she can climb and lie cradled in its sheltering branches. Micajah has grown a tree like that for Barbara. Perhaps one will grow for the two of them.
She looks more closely at the objects Barbara has chosen to keep, on tables and windowsills. She picks up a piece of whale ivory cracked by the years, one end carved into a rose.
“What does that look like to you, Eve?” Barbara asks as she collapses into an armchair, breathless and glowing.
Eve laughs.
“A dildo, wouldn’t you say?”
“Is that what it is?”
“I have no idea! But don’t you wish it was? What a lovely idea, that you could feel the work of your man’s hands inside you when he’s away, or dead, and in those days you might not have known the difference for years. Haven’t you ever wondered what all that scrimshaw was for?”
Eve laughs again. “Flowers are rare, though. Usually it’s just patterns. Like kids’ drawings.”
“Well,” says Barbara with a shrug, “not everyone is a lover. Or an artist.”
Out on the deck of Barbara’s house after dinner, in the deep indigo of late evening, Micajah drapes his long arms over Eve’s shoulders, his hands crossed on her stomach, his fingers playing with her navel through the thin fabric of her dress. The railings are twined with jasmine, its blossoms opened to the night air. Eve breathes in the sweetness and leans back into Micajah. There’s a strange glow in the distance, as if the earth is brighter than the sliver of moon. The glow undulates, in the familiar movement of waves.
“What’s happening? I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Bioluminescence. Tiny sea creatures that generate their own light. Nobody knows why it happens, that there’s a sudden shoal like this.”
He kisses her neck, then unwraps himself from around her. “Let’s go swimming.”
They descend the dog-leg stairs and follow the walkway through the dunes. The wood slats are still warm from the afternoon sun. The drifts of sand are softly gritty under Eve’s bare feet. As they crest the last dune, they stop, entranced by the sight: a gleaming, otherworldly tide.
“It’s incredible,” she says in a whisper.
Not just the sight, but the luck of everything that has happened in the last month, bringing her here. She cannot tear her eyes away from the ocean: in her mind, she is already swimming in this alchemical bath, feeling it transform her.
She hears the soft drop of Micajah’s clothes on the sand.
“Race you!”
He takes off at a run. Eve pulls off her clothes, runs a few steps, then slows to a walk. Running will rob her of seconds of drinking in this unfathomable beauty.
Micajah dives into the waves, leaving a swirling nebula behind him. When his head breaks the surface, he gleams like a science fiction creature. Far above him, the five bright stars of Cassiopeia form a scrawled M in the sky.
Eve lets the lacy edge of the waves play over her feet, savoring its first touch on her skin. Out in the deeper water, Micajah sends up splashes of blue stars.
“Come on! Come in!”
Eve is hit by a dark pang of self-consciousness as she stands there naked: her breasts lower than they used to be, her hips wider, the flesh of her stomach slack. She sinks into the waves and swims out to Micajah.
Luminescence plays along the contours of his face. He twines around her, holding her close while he treads water. The seawater makes their skin cling where it touches.
With the palm of his hand he pushes the water up between her legs, again and again: the ocean, fucking her. She curls her feet against his hips to hold herself steady and open herself to the waves that Micajah is making for her. Glistening droplets of water run over his broad shoulders and down his biceps.
The stars are a reflection of the glittering sea. The longer she gazes up at them, the more pinpricks she sees in the fabric of space.
She wraps her legs around Micajah’s chest and slides down, moving against him. She leans in to kiss his beautiful mouth.
“Let’s go in.”
As she reaches the beach, he grabs her ankle and pulls himself on top of her, burying his face in her neck and letting the waves wash over them. She thinks of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the Hawaiian sand: gray shapes in fake moonlight, the membranes of bathing suits keeping the censors happy. If this was the 1950s, Eve thinks, I would not have a young lover. I would not be swimming naked with him. I’d be living in black-and-white, scolded by censors, half alive.
She wants Micajah, wants to fuse with him, to not know where she stops and he begins. Her nipples flame as the tide sucks the sand from beneath her, sharp granules of pulverized coral and bones and shells. She wriggles away and runs up the beach to the shower that’s rigged up on a slatted deck beside the wooden walkway. With the fresh water running through her hair, she waits for him.
His arms swing loosely from the horizontal frame of his shoulders as he climbs the sloping sand. This is the picture of him she will always remember: striding toward her, long and lean, otherworldly, silhouetted against the gleaming ocean.
She gives up the shower to him. As she dries herself with a towel from a covered shelf, she watches his magical skin wash away. He turns off the shower and folds her into his arms.
“You’re making me wet again,” she says.
“Good.”
She feels him pressing against her, a thick vertical line against her belly. She reaches her arms around his narrow hips, her hands drifting up the insides of his thighs to find the smooth unfolded skin between his legs—so mysterious to a woman’s fingers. She never touched Larry there.
“Eve.” With each breath, he moans or says her name. His teeth pull gently at her ear. His tongue finds the divot behind the lobe.
Pleasure bends her fingers into claws. For a moment, she’s afraid that she’s hurt him, dug her nails into that tender place. But there’s no pain in the sounds he’s making. He reminds her of a cat purring. As lightly as she can, she scratches with two fingers of her left hand, in a rhythm syncopated to the rise and fall of his chest.
He leans his head back, tangles his fingers tight in her hair. His collarbones rise in ridges under his young skin. She buries her tongue in the hollow space between them.
Beside them is a chaise longue the width of a double bed. A tufted cushion is tied to it with lavish bows. They sink onto it. His skin glows a deep, dark gold against the paleness of her skin, whitened by the moonlight.
“Tie me down,” he says, tugging at a bow, wrapping the ribbon around his wrist.
“You like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve never done it? Really?”
In Eve’s mind, Micajah knows everything about sex.
“I’m not lying, Eve. I won’t ever lie to you.”
The suppressed fierceness in his voice sounds like a warning: don’t ask questions to which you don’t want to know the answers.
She leans over to tie the loose ribbons around his right wrist. Her breasts brush against his face. He pulls her nipple into his mouth and bites her, hard enough to sting.
“Is that good?”
Yes or no? Her nerves dance along the verge between pain and pleasure. Her nipples are rigid as iron.
“Yes.”
Her fingers fumble, her concentration and coordination shot. He has let his arm go limp. All his energy is focused in the tireless, tormenting caresses of his mouth.
Finally, she manages to tie a bow that won’t come undone. She turns to his left wrist. His mouth moves to her right breast.
The second bow is tied now. Eve runs her tongue up his inner arm and along the ridge at the front of his armpit, learning more closely the geography of his body. The moonlight throws a shadow into the hollow at the base of his throat. Her tongue found it; now her eyes mark its identity, as an explorer names the features of a new land.
She draws a line of slow kisses down his smooth chest to the nipple. She bites it, sharply, the way he bit hers.
He moans, his body twisting like an eel’s.
“Is that good?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer.
A fine line of hair starts at his navel and leads down to the dark thatch with that startlingly naked shape rising hungrily from it. It seems almost a separate creature as she curves her hands around it, then her lips, moving the skin that clothes it up and down, learning with her tongue the conical shape of the tip, following the jagged seam of the vein underneath down to the base where, like a vein of ore, it disappears into the depths of his body.
She hovers over him, drawing out the moment between finding the perfect angle for him to penetrate her and the sensation of him rising up inside her. She feels the breeze shift, moving from the land to the sea, carrying the scent of jasmine.
She pulls at the ribbons, wanting to feel his hands on her skin. Yet when he does—holding the weight of her breasts, following the swell of her stomach, curving his palms onto the width of her hips—she feels too big, too soft, too old.
“Shh,” he says, feeling her unspoken self-judgment pulling her away from him. “You’re a queen. Not some skinny little princess. You contain multitudes.”
He smiles at the bafflement on her face.
“You’re generous,” he says. “You’re spacious.”
She laughs. “A little too spacious.” But the edge of her judgment is gone.