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hooted over it, and one night I had done just that, and we had ended up making love on the floor of the tiny vestibule that served the Collier Hills house as a foyer. I had had the striations of the diamond-shaped tiles on my back for days.
    “Well, she’s right, it works,” Tee had said, panting.
    Having tried and discarded the Frederick’s of Hollywood ensemble as simply too sleazy to stretch over middle-aged flesh, I had remembered the Saran Wrap and done it again that night. For good measure, I had added a jumbo red velvet bow that had adorned our Christmas wreath, pulling it tautly over the worst of the weals and scratches on my bum. I was bathed, oiled, powdered, and shot all over with Sung, and my heart was galloping nearly as hard as it had on the first night Tee and I had ever gone to bed. When he began to laugh, I jumped, crackling and rattling, out of bed and ran to him and threw my arms around him. I pressed myself against him and rubbed as suggestively as I knew how; I kissed him all over his face and put my tongue in his ear. I felt his arms go around me, hard, and threw my head back and laughed aloud with joy. My clean hair swung into both our faces.
    “You don’ like me, I got a seester,” I growled low in my throat.
    Tee buried his head in my neck and scrubbed it back and forth, back and forth. He still did not speak, but I could hear his breathing thicken and deepen. I could feel him harden against my stomach, too, a ludicrous feeling muffled in plastic wrap.

    UP ISLAND / 35
    “Wanna see if it still works?” I whispered into his hair.
    I ripped the plastic wrap off and pulled him down on top of me on the bed. On the way down I reached over and clicked the light switch, sending the lamp rocking on its base.
    I gave him no quarter. I took him in my hand and guided him into me, clamping my legs around his waist and holding on as if I were in danger of falling off the rim of the world.
    He drove hard and deep, still not speaking, and I did not, either. Later for that. In the morning. Pancakes and sausage and Vivaldi and talk, sweet, slow hours of it. In the morning.
    When we’d first made love, I was so nervous that my voice shot up an octave and I trembled all over, as if I were freezing. He was nervous, too, and half drunk; it was in our last year of school, after a Chi Phi party, in the apartment he shared with Charlie. Charlie was in Atlanta at Carrie’s house; he was almost never in Athens on weekends that year. I remember that I closed my eyes and whimpered, and Tee, trying to soothe me, had whispered over and over, “It’s gonna be good. It’s gonna be so good, baby.”
    And to my immense surprise, it had been. It was so good that even before we found our rhythm, even before that first deepening and ripening, we both laughed aloud with surprise and pleasure. We were so exactly the same height and build that we fit as if we had been designed to illustrate one of the better sex manuals. There was not an inch of me, inside or out, that he did not cover exactly, fill perfectly. There was not an inch of him that I could not enclose. That had never changed, not in twenty-seven years.
    And it didn’t change this night. It was as good as 36 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    ever. If anything, it was deeper, warmer, faster, more urgent than ever before. When we finally lay gasping aloud and tangled together, coated with sweat even in the stale chill of the air-conditioning, we still had not spoken a word. I felt as if we had passed far beyond words, into a new place where, forever after, communion would be through our skin, through our mingled heartbeats, through the very blood that pulsed in our necks and wrists and throats. I lay steeped in moonlight, pinned to the bed with the sweet, sweaty weight of him, listening to his breath soften and slow in my ear. I felt his slack mouth on my neck. I felt invincible, boneless and weightless and young. I thought it would be fine simply never to move out from under