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Page 62.
 They stood between high walls of pine and gray, split rock, looking over an expanse about thirty feet in diameter and oval shaped. A shallow pond of still and moss-green water lay with mirror surface on a depression worn by eons on the rock shelf. Water from high rocks, fed from the highest land, trickled in a steady waist-thick stream down into the edges of the pool. The smooth stone around the pool was covered with old leaves and blooming moss in thick patches.
“I wonder if anyone knows about this place?” she said.
He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Maybe it is a mirage,” she ventured.
“More likely it’s a well-kept secret of the people living near here. Look.” He pointed to a cache of empty beer cans tucked under a rock ledge. The cans were filled with tobacco-brown rainwater and had been there for some time.
“We should have brought our picnic along,” she said.
“Do you think I’m going to climb down to get it?” he said watching her sit down, take off her shoe, and shake twigs and dirt out.
She squinted in the half-light between the pines and the tall stones. “I wonder if anyone will blunder up here.”
“We’ll hear them coming for a mile.” He walked in fascination around the rock pool. Water dribbled loudly down into the edge of the wide pond. Green surface scum pushed away by dropping water maintained a thick pressing circle around the waterfall.
“It trickles away through a split in the rocks at this other end,” he told her, watching the overflow gurgle away.
“Until the owners of those beer cans return,” she said, finished tying her shoelaces and sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Emma?”
“Ummh?”
“What you said back there. About us, I mean. It’s true.”
“I know,” she said, glancing at him briefly, then continuing her study of the tree tops and sky. As she did so, she unpacked the lunch she’d made. They had cold coffee, eggsalad on rolls with lettuce and tomato, and for desert a couple of eclairs.
They ate slowly, amid this unexpected privacy.
He looked in the same direction, squinting in the sunlight and chewing on a grass blade. “I’m not trying to use you.”
She shook her head. “I know that.” She paused. “What dopes you men are, with your fifteen-pound egos inside three-ounce brains.”
“What do you mean?”
She grinned and rubbed her hand along his neck. “I didn’t mean anything nasty. It’s just…well, did it ever occur to you I might be using you?”
He shrugged. “It occurred to me in one way or another.” The panic from before threatened inside again.
She lay down on her side and elbow facing him. “Silly, we’re both using each other. So what? People always use each other. It’s not always malicious. People need each other.”
He looked out over the still pond. “Why do I feel this desire for you? It’s like fire. You know what scares me? That I may not be able to control it.”
“That scares me too sometimes. Not being able to walk away smiling.”
“You at least seem to be able to laugh and cry at the same time.”
“Not an easy trick for me,” she said, undoing her bracelet. “This is from a ritzy store near the Place Vendôme,” she said, throwing it. Green slime absorbed it without a splash as it sank, a golden, twirling treasure in clear water underneath.
“Why did you do that?”
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