A Stolen Summer. Allegra Huston

across the bony points of her ankles, along the tops of her feet. Gone.

      As he straightens up, he grins mischievously. The feeling of her own smile makes her think of running on the beach with Allan when he was four, chasing the waves.

      “You are beautiful,” he says.

      “So are you.”

      “I’m young,” he says, dismissing it. “That’s all.”

      His hands are under her shirt again. He presses on the lowest rib, then the one above it, moving from the outside to the center, then away, up and out to the far edge of the next rib. She longs to lean back and lie open to his hands, to let him play music on her, but there is nothing behind her: only the gap between the crenellations, thin air, thirty stories above the ground. She hooks her hands tight on his shoulders.

      “You’re safe,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

      He wraps one long arm around her back, cradling her, and with the other hand strokes her inner thigh, caressing it open. She closes her eyes and feels him touching her, finding how they fit together.

      “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let go.”

      Her head is full of sparks, all conscious thought disjointed. The vertigo of the empty air behind her, though she can’t see it; the blaze of him etching a path of fire inside her, the granite hard against her tailbone, the lean muscles of his shoulders moving under her grip, his hand cupping her breast, thumb on her nipple. I’m holding on for dear life, she thinks. If I let go, he will fuck me so hard I will fall and die.

      He stops moving, buried deep inside her. “Look, Eve,” he says, “look where we are.”

      She knows it’s there, the sheer drop behind her, but seeing it—the treetops, the cars, the horse-drawn carriages—and feeling Micajah’s arms holding her above the precipice sends a rush of blood to her head so fierce it makes her vision swim. She looks up, to the distant skyscrapers of Midtown gleaming pink against the indigo sky. She wonders if there’s anyone behind those windows watching them—admiring them, envying them.

      He starts moving again, faster, branding the blaze of pleasure deeper into her. Her whole body is concentrated in that furrow, the intensity unbearable, until she cries out and it dissolves into a new delicious heat flooding through her, out to her hips, her legs, up to her heart, her breasts, her throat, the cavities of her face. She shudders in his arms. He runs his finger up her spine.

      Eventually, she opens her eyes, finds his. “What about you?”

      “What about me?” he says lightly.

      “But . . . are you sure?”

      “But what?” he says. He smooths her eyes closed and kisses her eyelids. “Fun, right?”

      What can she say? Yes, it’s fun, it’s beyond fun, it’s not fun at all. It’s crazy serious. Her body tenses up, even while the honey of orgasm flows through her.

      She drops down from the parapet and slips on her sandals. He sees her eyes go to her underwear, lying on the gritty surface of the roof. He shakes it clean and holds it for her.

      “I can’t do this,” she says, stepping into her underwear, allowing him to pull it up into place.

      “I know,” he says.

      And again she sees that look in his eyes that dissolves the space between them.

4

      On the PATH train back to New Jersey, Eve’s mind and body wage exhausting war. Her limbs feel too heavy to move, as if she’s been hypnotized, while thoughts crash around in her head, charging and hiding like guerrilla fighters at the crux of a battle. The thoughts wear labels, “wrong” and “right,” but even so she isn’t sure which side they’re on. She feels hunted, her camouflage ripped away. Caught in the crossfire.

      When she looked down from that rooftop, Micajah holding her tight onto him, she saw, hundreds of feet below, the Alice in Wonderland garden: the Caterpillar on a mushroom, the Mad Hatter pouring tea. What happened to her was the opposite of what happened to Alice: she had been spirited up to that high place, to a new reality above the trappings and troubles of her life, where she could bask in the rosy, unobstructed sun.

      Now, heading home, she feels like she’s being carried toward some monster’s den. A place of torment and silently shrieking souls—hers, and Larry’s too. It’s suddenly clear to her how unhappy he is. And how dead to feeling she had become.

      Recently she has begun to think, with the dispassion of a scientist observing a specimen, that she no longer knows what joy feels like—that sense of soaring delight in being alive that is more than mere happiness, which she came to define as merely the absence of sadness, so that she could occasionally claim it and keep her life on its tracks. If she had been asked, she would have said she was content, but now she recognizes that featureless condition for what it is: all sensation blurred into the same narcotic fog. With Micajah, she broke free of it, but here on the train, she feels it creeping over her again. Only extremes penetrate it, and they come as aggressions: so many fellow passengers that she feels as if worms are crawling over her. The platform lights so bright they hurt her eyes. A chilly wind, when she gets off, that blows her nerves to rags. The raucous laughter of a tipsy claque hopped up for a night in the city. As she drives home from the station, cars rage past her on the highway, too fast, too close.

      As the garage door closes behind her, a rogue thought snipes into her brain: I could leave the engine on. For some seconds, she searches out the sweet smell of the exhaust. She imagines the atoms of her body pulling apart, the tendons and ligaments unhitching, her very self floating away. A good way to go, she thinks: a vanishing.

      She snaps back to herself, clicking off the ignition. Larry’s Acura is in the garage, but that doesn’t mean he’s home; he took a cab to the airport. There are no lights on downstairs, so if he is home he’s already retreated to his room. Good—she will have some breathing space. She needs to put the day away, in a locked drawer. She’ll take it out and fondle it now and then, when she’s alone, but what happened today will not happen again.

      She walks through the dark house to the staircase without turning on lights. A day like this should fade out, not assert its presence into the night hours.

      Once, in the past, Eve thought of being unfaithful. It was nothing to do with Larry, and not much to do with the other man. It was just that the opportunity presented itself and she allowed herself to entertain the possibility.

      It happened nine years ago, when Allan was a teenager. She was working in a client’s garden, and her client’s husband emerged from the house. The spring day was warm and she was wearing a sleeveless top. His hand on her upper arm, as he offered to help her dig, felt firm yet tentative: a seductive combination. The fact that the man was married—his wife and children had gone swimming for the day—was in his favor. This would be no more than a secret flirtation. He had commitments; she had no desire to jeopardize her marriage. Of course, she knew that married men—and married women—abandon their commitments all the time, but that fact seemed irrelevant. She was playing in her imagination. In the real world, it would lead nowhere.

      She knew her line of logic was morally suspect, but on that day, that month, that year, she was prepared to give herself the slack. This is how other people live, she thought, people with more exciting lives than mine.

      He knelt a little too close to her and allowed his hand to brush hers as they patted the soil into place around the newly planted wisteria. If I turn my face to him now, she thought, he will kiss me and I will fall back and we will be lying on the ground, and that will not be okay. So she finished her patting and quickly stood up, brushing the earth off her hands in a manner she hoped looked professional, standing there to assess her work, which did not need assessing, instead of moving away to fetch the hose. As he got to his feet, she turned to him in a nonchalant fashion, which could easily be explained away as a prelude to conversation—if there would ever