fix us a couple of drinks while I went alone into the bedroom. There I hastily threw my clothes into the closet, made the bed, and opened the window to the cool night air.
“Okay,” I said to the empty room, waiting for my barista to materialize. When he did, I handed him the remote. “You find something to watch.”
I headed into the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold, then soaked and lightly wrung out three washcloths. I could hear Terrance flipping channels. Where he stopped would, I realized, tell me more about him as a person than anything we’d done so far. I heard a game, then symphonic strains, then news, then the roar of a stadium crowd, then someone speaking quickly in Spanish, then a husky British voice excitedly narrating some documentary.
It was the documentary’s light that bathed the bedroom when I reentered. A program on birds. We lay side by side against the pillows, the TV angled awkwardly on top of the dresser, the entire room anti-Feng shui.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said, hiking up my skirt. “But it burns.”
“I’m glad you feel comfortable around me,” he said.
“Feel free to do the same,” I said, another attempt to reciprocate. He just laughed then turned up the volume.
I placed one wet washcloth against my left inner thigh, another on my right, and the third I folded in half and lay across the middle.
“Better?” he asked.
“You have no idea,” I said.
We watched sea birds flying into their cliff nests, fish in their beaks. We watched the Osprey with a fish in its talons, the narrator remarking on how the female Osprey is much larger than its male counterpart. We watched as I felt the cold water drip down me and pool into the hollow of my immaculate anus.
Yes, girlfriends, what a Friday night.
The sad thing is that Friday nights before Terrance were hardly any better. Most of my friends were still married and had kids, and that meant our relationships existed mostly on the phone and online.
After a half hour I felt myself nodding off. I could imagine David Attenborough’s breath-heavy narrative style as he hunched beside my dresser, addressing a camera I couldn’t see,
Yes
, he said,
the waxed anus has an incredible display, one of the finest of all birds
. “What?” I said, coming around. I sat up. Terrance didn’t move, his eyes fixed on an ibis in flight there on my TV. I shifted. Despite the washcloths and the aspirin, I was
still
uncomfortable.
“Let me refresh you,” Terrance said, looking over at me. He peeled off the towels. I handed him the one in the middle. It was warm.
“None of that,” I said, as his face moved closer.
“Promise,” he said, “Just checking your skin.” He took my towels into the kitchen. I heard the sink run, then the fridge door open. No, the freezer. I heard him rummaging in the ice. He was gone for at least five minutes, but when he came back, oh, I can still remember the feel of the barely frozen washcloths against my thighs. And there, at the front, Terrance even buckled the fabric so the cold wouldn’t touch anywhere near my clit. I mentally kicked myself for not having left a
T
of hair there just for him. He deserved it. Terrance had also brought in a bowl of ice and proceeded to place one chip of ice on each washcloth until they almost melted, replacing them with another. Never before had a woman been turned so deliciously, delightfully frigid. This was about the nicest thing any man had ever done for me. And then the documentary was over and Terrance kissed me on the forehead and climbed from bed.
“Tomorrow?” he asked. “Olivia told me you have the weekend free.”
“I have to work,” I said, still on the bed. “Maybe. I’ll have to see.”
He bowed from the doorway, and I closed my eyes and heard the front door open, then shut, heard his soft footfalls on the stairs, then the sound of the gravel and then, from far off through the open window, the rasp of his bicycle until he’d
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