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forefinger to the side of her nose. “Exactly.”
    He gave the enterprise some thought.
    “Operation Friday Night Friction,” he said.
    She shook her head. “Too crass. Who do you think I am?”
    He thought some more. “Operation Class Not Crass.”
    “Better. Getting warmer.” She shifted her weight from one stocking foot to the other. “This is such a sweet mix of wrong-right.”
    He nodded. “Sour and sweet.”
    “It’s good right here. The threshold. I want to hold on to this moment.”
    “Not me,” he said.
    “I want to know things about you,” she said. “This is just part of it for me.”
    “Absolutely,” he said. “Me too.” And then, because he didn’t feel like he had convinced her, he added, “The fact is that I would say just about anything right now to keep this night going—full confession. But just reminding you, underlining it, so you know—this didn’t start tonight, for me. And because of that, it won’t end tonight. No matter what happens.”
    She nodded, taking his words to heart. “We intersect, but don’t disappear—deal?”
    He puzzled over her words as she leaned her shoulder against the doorway. “Fucking profound,” he said. “Where’d you get that from? That’s good.”
    She said, “Are we going to stay here, or do you maybe have a bedroom?”
    “I have a bedroom,” he said.
    In they went. Everything else disappeared. It was quiet and they were serious. They were locked in on each other.
    No artificial light in the room, just the city night through the open window blinds. Whispers and slow, careful movements, each one watching the other.
    Intensity built. Caresses became squeezing, rhythm became thrust.
    “Goddamn, Gersten,” said Fisk—as at once she went from supine to straddling him.
    The fucking became frantic, even rough. Her gym-hard body on him, her hair brushing against his face. His hands gripping her hips. Almost like a fight, except that there had to be two winners.
    He watched Gersten’s face in the shadow of the city night. He felt her fingertips chewing into the tops of his shoulders. He watched her lose herself, lose all inhibition, moaning. It ended with the headboard banging into the wall . . . and then silence.
    A siren four floors down on East Fifty-fifth woke him, not the sunlight. He squinted and found her sitting on the floor against the wall near the door, wearing a pair of his gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt, checking her phone. Her hair hung over her eyes and her legs were crossed. A glass of water stood on the floor next to her.
    They were both hungover and elated simultaneously: the sour and the sweet.
    Junk TV became their focus that day, as neither one wanted to be the first to delve into a critical conversation.
    “You have anything today?” Fisk asked her.
    She studied the television, curled up sitting on his sofa now, a throw pillow beneath her bent left leg, chin on her bare knee. “Yeah,” she said, though her eyes didn’t sell it. “Actually there are some things I could do . . .”
    “I wasn’t asking so you’d go,” he told her. “In fact, I was hoping maybe you could stay.”
    She took her chin off her knee and looked at him. Profiling him for sincerity.
    “Know this,” she said to him, “I swore to myself I’d never get involved with another cop. And I never have. Never.”
    Fisk shrugged. “What makes you think we’re involved?”
    Her eyes narrowed, taking the joke as intended. Fisk noticed the small gold detective’s shield replica, about the size of a nickel, dangling from a plain dog-tag chain around Gersten’s neck.
    “Your father’s?” he asked.
    She nodded, touching it with her forefinger. “His badge number. Four six three two. My mother gave it to me when I graduated from the academy. I take off everything else but this.”
    Fisk tugged the pillow slowly out from beneath her bent leg. “Prove it,” he said.
    “M iss me?” he asked now, many months later, speaking on the secure