Michael did not wash up in the bathroom, or even strip off his clothes. He reclined on the strange bed with grudging, certain he could feel a dusting of dead skin sifted down through the top layer of the quilted comforter. The fine particles did not quite rise to the level of aromatics, but he knew only half of what was there was hers. He watched the jack-o-lantern crackle like a campfire against the black window and prayed it would be spell enough to keep dark forces at bay. The sputtering light dipped momentarily in his incantation, tugging his anxiety down into the high lapping shadows.

She spoke out of the dull edge of it with an echo. “Will you be able to sleep?”

Dozing, Michael’s head cleared the pillow to hear the thrum of a second match. The earth-orange glow of the relit jack-o-lantern radiated off the back of the commode through the adjoining bathroom, setting off her silhouette against glinted avocado tile. She was in a different, dressier dress. “Am I already asleep?” he asked.

She did not turn around. “Do I look like a dream?”

His thoughts were scattered over the bed; he waited for one or two to find him. “Yes,” he said.

It was only in the candle’s confident intrusion he realized a chair was propped under the doorknob.

“That,” she explained, “is to make you my prisoner. So you don’t go wandering off to get eaten by deer.”

Her satin evening dress and pinned-up hair were as dark as her skin was fair, leading him to think she had been carved, like scrimshaw, in flat relief. There was austere belle époque grandeur to her look reminiscent of Sargent’s portrait of Madame X. The painter was unable to disentangle her from the atmospherics until a tilt forward at the footboard offered up an eyeful of cleavage.

“We can pretend the world outside is gone,” she said, “and there’s no tomorrow.”

Michael could not fathom her game of roulette, or her logic. How could a girl oriented toward the future have no tomorrow?

The vanilla scent of the candle wafted warmly down the length of the bed in advance of her approaching where he lay. Turning to face the door, she flowed down to the edge of the mattress like inky black sand in an hourglass. “Will you unhook me, please?”

He tried not to think much beyond each moment as it was presented to him, and with each action being an end in itself and requiring no other action. The silence bearing down on the wood-frame house was as visceral as the shrouded woods through the windows, leaving them both exposed in candlelight. Unlike her bedroom back in town, no stuffed collection of doe-eyed giraffes or puppy dogs were on hand to partake in the deflowering, yet he could not vouch for what creatures peered in through the mirror-polished panes. Regardless what the view was from outside, there was hardly enough illumination for him to negotiate the half-seen pieces of the black gown’s antique fasteners, or to blur the boundary between his ill-defined adulthood and her ill-defined adolescence. Still, he wanted to believe the amber light was resin enough to buy into her notion of “no tomorrow.”

On feeling the stiff gown give, Emma rose to let the satin slither down over her buttery white skin. By the time the garment found the floor, only barely-there panties and a figment of a powder blue bra were left to blunt the full impact of her. The spatial roundness of the beautiful girl was difficult to absorb: a whole that could not be appreciated for its parts. His eye kept skipping off her like a stone on a pond, with each glancing blow of an angle only anticipating the next blow, the next angle. Emma bent down in the elongated shadows to un-snag the dress.

She called back to him on kicking off the heels. “Will you get the garters in the back?”

Michael fiddled with more antique hooks, grazing nylon with fingers and, more dangerously, bare skin with thumbs; the hosiery cascaded like smoke to her feet.

Emma did not turn to face him, but maintained her semblance of a screen as she leaned forward to grab a string of pearls from a crystal goblet on the night table. The necklace was carefully looped twice around her long neck before she turned back. “Don’t you want to get out of your clothes?” she asked.

“My clothes?” he asked innocently.

“I will only have to iron them tomorrow if you don’t.”

“But there is no tomorrow,” he bleated.

She grinned at his reply; his cleverness had bought him a reprieve.

The pearls were gnashed in the folds of the bedding as she slid in, and one was placed in his fingers with a serenely unclouded smile. The gem was fat and opulent, and like its companions, imperfectly round. Its lustrous color shifted between custardy yellow and pale lavender as he rolled it between thumb and finger. No two pearls were alike, and as he inched up the strand to mark the subtle differences, he was being drawn into her skin. After a few minutes his tense body sank into a bog, and perceiving this, she lifted the clutch and turned away, whereupon the necklace was allowed to dribble down over her back like beads of oil. He was at last comfortable in rubbing the pearls against her smooth shoulders, and when he arrived at the base of her neck, she reached back to remove the abalone comb from her hair. Dark fragrant locks fell down and into his fingers, and the nacreous strand, having served its purpose, was eased out of the picture with a gentle tug.

“I have something that will help you fall asleep?” she whispered.

Her provocative words skimmed his limpid surface without raising an audible ripple.

Reaching back once more, she pulled away the mass of hair. A solicitous nudge was made in his direction. “It’s like counting sheep,” she explained, “to connect the freckles on my back until you fall asleep.”

The diffuse light revealed no freckles, and in the low contrast her shallow back offered few ledges. Regardless, the young woman had shrunk down to become something manageable in his imagination: a blank, supple canvas.

Michael brought his fingers up to where the pearls dabbled her downy neck and began to draw. Owing to the lengthy preamble, his touch was no longer self-conscious; and with her facing away, the anonymity afforded him resembled solitude. He articulated each vertebrate in turn, with occasional excursions to scoop out a dimple or reshape a tendon. With so much time and pliable skin on his side of the bed, his mind was bound to drift into analogy. The flatness of the substratum reminded him particularly of the art nouveau painter, Gustav Klimt.

Klimt’s lovers, with eyes clinched and souls subsumed by desire, required little in the way of round, pictorial space. Their sensuality was better conveyed on a two-dimensional plane: one studded with pattern and decorated with symbols half-in and half-out of the world. Hands were needed to navigate it, which Klimt ably and meticulously supplied down to the last knuckle. To Michael’s thinking (and perhaps even to Klimt), it was the wandering eye alone that invented space. But the hand, forever blind in its needs, is inescapably one with its object.

The artist eventually reached the precipice of Emma’s tailbone. It resided under the covers out of sight, if not out of reach. The toothy lace of the thong panty was a provisionary border, although what it divided was more in him than her. The candle in the bathroom convulsed in his moment of indecision and dropped down a stair step; the artist’s fingers followed the shadow’s lengthening stride to circle where an exposed buttock folded below the last vertebrae. The pleasing fullness of the form did not bring more analogy to mind but contradiction. Emma’s flesh was both warm and cool to the touch, both powder puff and durable hide. Yet this was the part of the female anatomy that, like an archetypal wellspring, lay behind every impulse his male psyche had willed into the world under the banner of art.

Having uncovered her unconsciously on the bed, the emboldened topographer was determined to finish what he started. He was impervious to all that came before—even the black windows. The tapering line of Emma’s thigh slid down to become the concaved bend of a knee, and the rough of a shinbone too quickly ended on the high-buffed finish of her glossy toenails. Having reached a cul-de-sac, Michael looked back over the covered terrain. In his book of lines and plotted curves, the rest of her, the halcyon girl twirling in grass under a blue sky, seemed more fairytale than anything connected to her body. Retracing the contours would not so much be like sewing up loose ends as pulling out the first of many tentative stitches. Resultantly, he was more hurried with his map in reverse, and, given his fatigue, even a little impatient. Before he slipped into complete incoherence, he rallied to draw the covers back over his shivering and compliant map. He was not admitting defeat, only bedding down in a little corner of his labyrinth for a nap.

The blanket was once again shoved down around her knees, only now she was facing him. With her dark head nestled on his pillow, and skulls touching at the brow, he could feel her teeth clattering; the reverberation of bone against bone pulsed with telepathic thoughts.

What had been a pared-down neo-classical view of her from the back was more intrusively baroque from the front. The gap between their bodies created an odd foreshortened perspective, one the painter had never encountered in art or anatomy books. Emma’s shoulders loomed over snout-like breasts, while the remainder of her resembled distant, jagged buttes. From the oblique angle, she appeared both bulbous and angular, as if the two halves of her had been extruded from different molds and slapped together in committee. The view was not at first glance erotic, more like some unfinished aspect of Nature’s seduction not completely worked out on paper. But it was an agreeable geometry after a short while: half Dali landscape and half Proustian maze. Regardless, these perspectives were only splitting the difference between ideal and object; and it was the object, most particularly, that was muscling its way up through the pretty scenery.

Emma’s warm breath was musky on his face: sweet and sour. Even allowing for the dimness, the close quarters made her skin explode with follicles and pores. Little chinks emerged in the porcelain veneer: a pimple here, a welt there. The unexpected earthiness of her hovered somewhere between a clinical examination and a primer on fetishes. Love was barely a beginning to any of it.

She detected a bat of his eye. “Are you asleep?”

His head rolled ambiguously on the pillow.

A finger grazed his cheek with a gentle reprimand. “You forgot to draw on my arms.”

Michael’s heavy fingers skated up to find a round shoulder. From there, gravity dragged his fingertips down over slender bones to a slenderer wrist. And it was here, at her most vulnerable point, where he found a seeming end to his maze: scar tissue, as soft as an infant’s lips, puckered under his thumb.

Her fingers balled to make a weak fist, but she made no attempt to pull away. “In the tenth grade,” came the confession.

“Why…?”

She seemed as puzzled by the razor scar as was he.

Michael was stuck for what to say next. Another dimension had planted itself in the gap between them, although this one suggested no clear direction on the bed. “Do you not want to talk about it?” he muttered.

“I don’t dwell on past.”

“But if you have no tomorrow, then where are you?”

Her smile was a deepening pool. “Stuck in the present with you.”

He inhaled her hot breath at his chin, unable to escape it.

Without further exposition, she pressed into him to with an earnest, practiced kiss. Her dusky face curved away from the tip of his nose like a moonscape thrust under a fish-eyed lens. Moist lips slid to define one set of boundaries, while another (that of their pillows) dissolved into the murky depths beneath their heads. Regardless, the makings of such intimate physical contact required subtle negotiations, with bodies dragging behind and even getting in the way. Michael, only half-seduced in the suddenness of it, squinted through fluttering eyelashes to contemplate the evolving logistics. The planes of Emma’s features were curved and straight at the same time. Her flesh blurred, but never fully disappeared as a barrier. There were the admitted bones of her, with knees and forearms jutting and grazing him at different pressure points; but she was everywhere and nowhere on the bed. He considered the thickness of her eyelids, the gauge and stiffness of her eyebrows, and the smooth, velvety cleft of her mouth. Still, for all these parts, she was intact and turning over on his tongue like blissful candy. It was all a devious slight of hand, contrived in the mind with delicate fingers and executed imperfectly with mittens. Every aspiration was misjudged as an action, but both lovers were content with error and mark alike.

Invariably the muscles in their faces began to tire, and Emma, not wanting to relinquish the ambry mesh that bound them together, cradled his cheek against hers. Strands of her flowing hair cascaded over his face. The sensation was one of looking up through a dark cathedral, and in the only direction unobstructed by her: to the ceiling.

She yanked the ends of his shirt out of his pants and whimpered, “I want to feel your skin.”

As her hand lit on his belt buckle, his hand lit gently on hers. If it was half in his mind to dissuade her, his touch became an encouraging caress. Emma, impatient, grasped his noncommittal hand and redirected it up along her side: one knuckle for each groove of rib. His thumb was slipped down into her negligible brasserie, whereupon the lace peeled away to surrender the node of a hardening nipple. Her lips scuffed his ear with little puffs of banking air, cooing wordless directive. His fingers acquiesced to cup the full, round breast, and were at once pushed away to the neutral terrain of her stomach. The candlelight faltered with the rebuke, indicating by its bleary-eyed wink that the flame was down to skittering over a puddle of wax. Michael glanced up at the wall to see his shadow crumbling in smoke, yet diffusion placed it further from the bed than it should have been, as though it belonged to an intruder taking advantage of the distraction to skulk for heirlooms. His eye darted edgewise across the pillowcase to catch their tussle in a windowpane, but no one else was seen in the room. The flame buckled once more in a draft.

Was a backdoor open? he thought.

Emma guided her lover’s hand down over the hard crest of her hip before tucking it into the lining of her panties. But his fingers were so tightly smashed in hers they served no useful purpose. Only his wrist grazed silk and fine stubble in the twist. Her face sank into the pillow they shared, blocking any view of the door. A guttural groan radiated out from the delicate muscles of her neck.

Had an axe-wielding fiancé moved the chair from the door? Was he watching them from the dark hall?

Emma began to scream with abandon. “YES…! YES…! YES…!”

It tingled in the clinch, and lasted mere seconds. His hand was then ejected from the briefs with a pop of elastic and returned to him. The young woman smiled salaciously through a fan of hair, biting his cheek with a kiss and a purr. “I knew you would have your way with me.” With this proclamation, she turned away in an unexcited tone. “Now go to sleep, you naughty boy.”

The man was left, like a hit-and-run-victim, where he collided with pavement.

The young woman pulled the covers back over her shoulders, having shrunk from the scale of demanding Amazon to that of atomized child in a blink. What had been two wills that became one was rudely two again; and what had been a canvas that became a door was now a wall. Michael’s brain hummed; his heart sloshed about in dull ears still ringing from her piercing screech. He had been whittled him down to the rudimentary reflexes of a headless male mantis left half-eaten so it could still copulate, but his lover had bored of her seduction to drop down through a trapdoor. Her exit had been cavalier, and her orgasm, unconvincing. Yet she had lined his side of the bed with barbed spurs, like little dependent clauses he could artfully arrange in his next poem for her.

He had traveled a thousand miles in a thousand hours with another man’s lover and was thoroughly exhausted by the journey. All the masks she had shown him were doubtless true, though he knew the complexity he supposed in the masquerade was more in his mind than of her willful creation. And therein lay the single greatest obstacle to his forming a union with a woman of Emma’s age: Her impetuousness would hatch a hundred-and-one possible interpretations in his imagination, and loving her, by necessity of who he was, would be a fulltime job. In short, her life, no matter how ultimately frivolous or dear to him, would effectively become their life together. This is why he needed to be the other man: to be compartmentalized by her and spared the guilt of needing to compartmentalize her.

The failing candlelight twitched to send the disembodied shadow into a drunkard’s spin. It whirled and thumped the chest of drawers before at last impaling itself on the flame.