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it is the parents who teach the child that tantrums are not the way to get what you want.”
    I nodded. I felt odd, woozy from having told this stranger so much. Much more than I’d ever shared with anyone since moving to France.
    “It’s nice,” Didier said, “getting to hear about you.”
    I laughed. “Really? I must sound like such a mess.”
    “Everyone is a mess. If you and I are meant to make love, I wouldn’t want to do that without trying to understand you first.”
    “I thought this would be way different.”
    “That I’d be some object?” he asked.
    “Kind of. Just that it’d be all about appearances. I mean, I figured the women who come to see you are looking for the fantasy, the illusion. Like a place where they don’t have to worry about sharing anything personal.”
    “I suppose some whores offer that.”
    It gave me pause, hearing him use that word. An ugly, blunt word, though his heavy accent made it less a cinderblock than a strong shot of liquor.
    “For me,” he went on, “I think the experience is better for everyone when there is a connection. And you cannot connect to someone if you know nothing about them aside from their body. A woman could have a scar across her throat, and I cannot help it—I want to know, was that from an assault? A surgery? A cycling accident? I’m curious. Every woman goes beyond a body and a collection of kinks, even a personality. Each woman is like a landscape to me, and I want know the history, not just the placement of the rocks and trees.”
    “That’s rather poetic.”
    Didier grinned, that smile that makes my middle melt.
    “Would you like to kiss?” he asked.
    My stomach gave a flip. I hadn’t expected him to initiate anything, but he must know as well as I do, I need coaxing if I’m ever to get anywhere. “I’d like to try that.”
    He lowered his leg and turned onto his hip, leaning one arm on the back of the couch. I scooted closer and did the same, pulse speeding.
    “Do you like to kiss, or be kissed?” he asked.
    “Somewhere in the middle.”
    “I will kiss you first. As I would if we were coming to the end of a very good first date.”
    “That sounds nice.”
    Annoying worries clustered in my brain—I would hate the way he kissed and my attraction would die, tossed into the mass grave alongside so many others.
    “Close your eyes,” he said, pushing aside all the buzzing thoughts.
    I did. I held my breath as his large palm cupped my jaw. He spoke and his words warmed my lips. “I want this very much.”
    “So do I.”
    His lips brushed mine, and suddenly, this was a date. This was my fantasy, one I rarely let myself indulge, a scenario that actually included me. I’d had a date with the best-looking man I’d ever seen, and he wanted me as much as I wanted him. And it occurred to me then…I’d kissed perhaps a dozen guys in my life. But I’d never before this moment kissed a man .
    And I’d never before felt like a woman, doing this. Always a girl.
    Another graze of his lips, the faintest drag of skin. Tight, urgent heat spread from my mouth down my neck, through my chest and belly and down between my thighs. Eyes still closed, I found his throat with my palm. The skin I’d watched him bathe felt as clean as it smelled from his olive oil soap. He took my lower lip between his, then the top. I slid my hand back to feel his damp hair, the heat of his neck. He cocked his head, the kiss still closed-mouth but promising more, soon.
    I let myself imagine the acts he’d mentioned doing with others, and though they’d thrilled me before, now I couldn’t picture such things. In this moment he was my cautious first date, my maybe-a-boyfriend. He was no other woman’s, and he’d never kissed any girl and made her feel this way before. His body was far from innocent, but I fantasized that his heart was as untouched and virginal as mine.
    As with everything else about Didier, he did not kiss as I’d expected. There was no showing