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just begun to grow it. He rubbed it now, a scratchy sound. “Not all that hot, no."
    "No?"
    He clutched his brow, and she came closer to where he sat, and, smiling, put a hand on his knee. “I'll tell you something,” he said. “When I moved out of the city. After you ... well. The day I moved out. I made myself a promise. That I'd give up on love."
    Still smiling, she shook her head: don't get it.
    "I thought I'd had enough,” he said. “After you. I mean enough in both senses. Enough to last me; and as much as I could take."
    "Wow,” she said. “Dumb idea."
    He nodded. But it was true: he had thought that all that had happened between the two of them was enough to fill a soul to overflowing, and if time ever emptied his, new wine could not, surely should not, be poured in.
    "So, what,” she said. “You were going to join a monastery?"
    "No no,” he said. “I wasn't going that far. I'm not the monastic type. I was just going to. To keep my fancy free."
    "Really."
    "Really."
    "Don't tell me,” she said, profoundly tickled. “It didn't work out."
    He hung his head.
    "Jeez, Pierce,” she said. “You never go to the movies? Read a book? Don't you know what happens to people who make promises like that?"
    He did, he had known very well, but those were only stories after all, and because they were, the end or final capitulation to Love in effect came first in them; the initial vow of abnegation was just a means to it, and all the chastening errors and humiliations that lay in between were nothing, nothing at all, the confusions of a night, everybody already knew, even the suffering fool himself seemed to know from the beginning, because he was after all in a story: so you laughed, for him and with him.
    "So who was she,” Charis asked with a sigh: let's get started.
    "Her name was Rose."
    "Huh.” She seemed not quite to believe this. “And what was she like?"
    What was she like. Pierce for a moment couldn't answer. He had been lately experiencing a sort of intermittent catatonia, a division of consciousness when certain questions were put to him, wherein lengthy explanations or ponderings occurred within him even as his mouth opened and his jaw lifted and dropped saying things other than the things he thought, or nothing. What was she like? She was like him: he had once in bed told her that, though he didn't really believe it. He had told her that he knew what it was like to be her, her on the inside; but he never knew if she believed him. Really, nothing that he knew about her or that she had said about herself accounted for her, just as it might be said to him, Here is a night-blooming orchid that awakens only once a year and smells of flesh—all that could be said about it was that if it didn't, then there would be no such bloom. The same for Rose.
    "And so what happened?"
    He stopped again, chin wagging for a moment like a ventriloquist's dummy whose partner has fallen silent. He thought to say he had got lost in a haunted wood, because he thought he saw her go that way, or simply because he lost the right way. The thorn trees there bled when he cut them with his sword. He had met himself—right hand raised, in strange clothes, coming toward him, about to speak a warning, ask an unanswerable question. But he turned away, and went on. He was tricked into binding and whipping his beloved, and only discovered his mistake (that it wasn't his beloved, or his blows weren't kisses) too late.
    "Ooh. She liked that stuff?"
    "She did."
    "Do you?"
    "I did. Because she did."
    She waited.
    "It was,” Pierce said. “It was um. It was actually a lot of fun. I have to admit.” He saw reflected in her face the whiskery skull-grin he was making, and ceased.
    "Nobody's ever gonna hit me ,” she said.
    "No,” he said, sure of it.
    "I mean sometimes a little spank,” she said. “On the behind. Sometimes it feels good. Right on that hole."
    Her level cool eyes. Never complain, never explain: her motto, she always said. In