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sliding between his questing fingers.
    “You keep searching,” one fine-fingered ivory hand pulled her hair aside, “and I’ll find a way to amuse you.”
    “Unless you’re acrobatic by nature I don’t quite see how to manage that,” Jamie said doubtfully.
    She cast a withering glance over one shoulder.
    “Music then?” he suggested humbly.
    “Left my harpsichord at home,” she said blithely, “and my singing voice is likely to be less than conducive to,” she paused delicately, “the mood.”
    “How are your Persian love sonnets?” He asked and she considered and then dismissed the idea that it was perhaps wrong to seduce a man so drunk.
    “The mind is willing, but the memory is weak. However I’ve a head filled to the cusp with blue Elizabethan ditties.”
    “What an interesting education you must have had,” he commented mildly, “perhaps you’d recite for me.”
    She accordingly cleared her throat, straightened her slim carriage and began:
    Mine’s the lance
To start the dance
Yours the lips
For Cupid’s pips.
Blushing melon
Makes a felon,
Sheathe the blade
Sweetling maid.
Push asunder
Nature’s thunder,
Maidenhead
Sweetly bled,
Honey mead
For the seed.
Turtledove,
Take my love.
    “Blue indeed,” Jamie said in admiration as she finished. “A-ha,” he held aloft an unraveled end with triumph akin to the first man to set foot in the New World.
    “What did they read to you as a child, precocious infant?” he asked as the unraveled end led into a labyrinth of tucks and folds.
    “Everything I could get my hands on, my father used to say I ate books rather than read them. But my favorite—”
    “Yes,” Jamie prompted, hands carefully navigating frontal delicacies.
    “Was The Velveteen Rabbit .”
    “Might I ask why?”
    “Because it’s a very true story, isn’t it?”
    Confronted with an alarming amount of bare flesh, Jamie wondered if it was wrong to sleep with a girl who believed in stuffed bunnies springing to life.
    “What I mean is,” she warmed to her topic, “that you aren’t real until someone loves you.”
    The crimson cloth, released at last, drifted then settled with a sigh around her hips.
    The air became pregnant with the lack of touch.
    “Is something the matter?” she turned around on the bed to face Jamie, who quickly cast his eyes heavenward.
    “How old are you?” he asked.
    “I’m legal,” she said calmly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    “I suppose that’s a relief,” he said a trifle grimly.
    “Is it your father?” She laid a gentle hand on his forearm, “My father used to say that sex and death are natural companions.”
    “Your father,” Jamie paused, “sounds eccentric.”
    She gave him a stern look, “He meant it was a way to deal with grief, the act itself is a reaffirmation of the living still to be done.”
    Jamie thought he’d never met such a terrifyingly pragmatic person.
    “Shall we get on with the business at hand then?” In one lithe movement, she had swung a knee over his lap and settled herself quite comfortably.
    “Um,” said Jamie inanely, “you have very nice skin.”
    “Youth,” she smiled and took one of his hands, “despite its various disadvantages has some rather nice compensations. Now do you think you could do something for me?”
    “Cross deserts barefoot? Slay dragons? Cut out my soul and hand you the knife?” Due to the placement of his hand, he was feeling increasingly giddy.
    She sighed. “Could you just, for a minute or two, be quiet?”
    Jamie, not surprisingly, found that he could.

    In the morning, upon awakening, Jamie felt like a fleeced lamb—naked, against the laws of nature and left to die on a green hillside. Alone as well. It took him a moment or two to work out that last bit but then he spied the crimson scarf hanging off the bedpost and thought clarity was a quality he could manage without. Ignorance, for this morning, would do quite nicely.
    He