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Page 28.
 On a shadowy second-story landing, she fumbled with more keys. The smell of her hair and skin drove away a musty carpet odor. Someone had a cat. The rain-dribbled window crawled with plant shadows. A door creaked, a shaft of light fell out, her sharp heels pounded over polished wood floors. Quickly she kicked her shoes off. For the first time that day she was a lot shorter than he. She swung the door shut. “Here we are. Make yourself at home. I’ll get some tea water boiling.”
He was on his own. It was a spacious apartment. The doorway led into a small vestibule crowded with coats and umbrellas. A door led to a bathroom, another door to the bedroom, another door to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen, Marc found himself in the living room. Plants hung from the ceilings, a poster glowered in black and white on the wall, low and fluffy furniture glowered in the light from the kitchen. Books, a stereo, posters, plants, a chandelier, scattered rugs, a pile of record albums, a casually flung nylon stocking, his first impression. Multiple identical windows in a row looked black and curtainless, dappled with raindrops. A clockwork encased in brass chimed. It was ten o’clock.
“Don’t turn on any more lights,” Emma said.
“You haven’t needed curtains,” he commented.
She regarded the black windows, “No, not until now.”
You’ve been a modest girl, but that could change.
He sat on a black leather ottoman and brushed the stereo with his fingertips.
“How do you like your tea?” she asked.
He turned. Sitting before the stereo, he could reach out and touch her ankles. Which he did, feeling nylon over skin and bone.
She sank down and embraced him on the shaggy rug.
He kissed her while his hand explored the exact shape of her. He started to touch a button on her shirt.
She pulled away. “I’d better turn off the tea water and shut off the kitchen light.”
She looked tall, walking into the halo of kitchen light while he lay on the thick carpet while someone else’s (the other man’s?) stereo glowed, and he pressed the off-switch. Be gone, Jérôme.
Her shoes clattered on the hardwood floors until she kicked them off. Her footfalls were as quiet and pattersome on bare planks as raindrops outside.
The lights out, he heard the swish of clothes being removed. When a woman has long legs it takes longer for her to remove her underclothes—so he guessed.
She pattered on bare feet, closer. He watched her figure undulate in gloom for him.
“Do you like me?” she asked, echoing her own unanswered question about tea.
“Turn around slowly,” he said.
Silvery moonlight burnished the glossy wood floor. Her pale figure, singed with a bluish light from street light strained by budding tree branches, turned in a white archway.
She turned slowly on long, naked legs and the moonlight was egg-pale on oval buttocks, round breasts, her smile…
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