Boundaries Tested Pt. 01

Every summer it was the same table.

The café was called, with no imagination at all, Le Contrescarpe, and it sat on the corner of the little square at the top of rue Mouffetard with its awning out and its name in gold on the glass, and it was not the kind of place two students should have been able to afford: a proper Left Bank café of the old kind, with a long zinc bar in the middle of the room and banquettes along the walls, and waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons who had been there since before either of them was born. But they went in the early afternoon, in the dead hours after lunch when the lunch crowd had gone back to work and the square outside was white with heat and the plane trees round the fountain were the only shade in the fifth, and in the dead hours the place was theirs. The table along the wall nearest the window. A demi for him, a citron pressé for her and later, as the summers went on, a kir for her too, and her Marlboro Lights on the table between them, one lit and mostly forgotten between questions. The waiters knew them. The waiters, Sophie said, had opinions about them. They never kept their voices down. That was the whole problem, and the whole point.

They had known each other since they were thirteen. Same school, the Lycée Franklin, over in the sixteenth, same 63 bus along the river every morning, same four hundred people who had decided by the end of the first term who everyone was going to be. Sophie was the one everyone liked. Not the prettiest, not the loudest, not the one the boys fought over. The one who was glad to see you. She came from a good family, old Left Bank, sixth arrondissement for three generations, the kind of family that had a flat on rue de Tournon and a certain way of doing things, and she was friendly in a way that had nothing to do with wanting anything from you. A ray of sunshine, people said, and for once people were right. She laughed at everything. She was kind to the people nobody was kind to, which was how she'd ended up next to Francesco in the first week, and she had never once, in five years of school, had a boyfriend.

Not because nobody would have. Because, he suspected, she had no idea anyone would. She was pretty and did not believe it. She was warm and funny and surrounded by friends and had somehow concluded, in the way you can at fifteen with no evidence at all, that she was not the kind of girl boys wanted, and so she had never learnt how any of that worked, and so it had never happened, and so she had gone on believing it. He recognised the mechanism. He had the same one. The difference was that she had turned hers outward and made it into sunshine, and he had turned his inward and made it into a drawer.

He had been in love with her since roughly the second Tuesday.

If he had to name the moment it became hopeless, it was the talent show in troisième, the year they were fifteen, when a music teacher with a long Breton name had made him get up in the school hall and play "Your Song" by Elton John to four hundred people who did not want to hear it. He had been fifteen and sweating through his shirt and he had looked up once, halfway through, because it was that or stop, and there in the third row was Sophie, singing along. The only one. Not loudly, not to be noticed. Just singing, because she knew the words and it was her friend up there. He had never forgotten it. He would remember it, exactly, the row and the light and the shape of her mouth on the chorus, for the rest of his life. She, when he mentioned it years later, would not remember it at all. That was the other thing about the two of them, the running joke: he had the iron memory, and she had none. He kept everything. She let it go and smiled.

He had never told her. He was the Italian one, the boy whose father had been posted to UNESCO when he was eleven and who had grown up Roman in a flat in the seventh, and he was a good boy from a good Roman family and she was a good girl from a good Parisian one and the two kinds of good turned out to be nearly the same thing: you did not. You waited. You were reserved, in the particular way that is not prudishness exactly but something closer to privacy, a sense that the body was yours and not for showing, and that wanting was a thing you kept in a drawer. He had kept it in a drawer for five years. He had sat next to her on the bus and helped her with maths and taken her to the cinema in a group of eight and he had never once said it, and then school had ended and she had stayed in Paris for Sciences Po and he had gone to London to read economics at the LSE, and he had assumed, in the way you do at eighteen, that it was over.

It wasn't over. It just moved to the Contrescarpe.

The first summer back she had called the house within a day. "You're home? Come to the Contrescarpe, I'm bored out of my mind." And that was that. Every summer after, the same thing. He'd come over from London in June and she'd be there, browner, her hair longer or shorter, her laugh exactly the same, and they would sit at the table by the window from two in the afternoon until the light changed and the apéro crowd began to drift in and the waiters started looking at them, and then he'd put her on the back of the Vespa, the little 50 he'd had since he was sixteen, and ride her the ten minutes home to rue de Tournon, and she'd kiss him on both cheeks and go in through the heavy green door with the code, and he'd ride back through the warm streets with the smell of her hair on his shirt and tell himself it was enough.

The questions started the summer of 1999.

He couldn't have said what changed. She'd started seeing someone that spring, a boy from her course, serious, polite, "very platonic," she said, rolling her eyes at herself, "we've been out six times and he's held my hand twice." Maybe it was that. Maybe it was simply that she was twenty-one and curious and had nobody else to ask. Her girlfriends were as reserved as she was, and her mother, God. So she asked him.

The first one came out of nowhere, over the second demi, on an afternoon when the square was baking and the only other customer was a woman in pearls three tables down reading *Le Figaro*.

"Checco. Can I ask you something? As a friend. You have to answer properly."

"Go on."

"Do guys like girls who shave their vagina?"

He had nearly laughed, and then seen her face, and understood she actually wanted to know. So he answered her. Properly, as a friend, the way he'd have wanted someone to answer him. Some did, he said. It was becoming a thing. But a lot of what boys said they wanted was what they'd seen in magazines, and what they actually wanted when they were alone with a girl was usually different and usually simpler. And she had listened with her chin on her hand like it was a lecture she'd paid for, and nodded, and said "okay," and filed it away.

After that there was no stopping her.

It became the thing they did. She'd arrive with a question she'd obviously been carrying round all week, and she'd lead up to it with ten minutes of nothing, and then she'd lean in and drop it on the table between the glasses like something she'd found on the pavement.

"Does it turn a guy on when two girls kiss? Honestly? Or is that just something boys say."

"If a guy wanted a threesome, would he rather have one girl and two guys, or two girls?"

"Do guys like the idea of anal sex? Like, really, or just because it's forbidden?"

"Does a guy like a girl to undress for him? Or does he prefer to undress her himself, with his hands?"

And he'd take a breath and answer, honestly, carefully, like it was the most natural thing in the world to be explaining to Sophie, in the Contrescarpe, at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, the precise difference between what a man said he wanted and what actually made him lose his mind. The undressing one he'd thought about for a long time before answering. "Both," he'd said finally. "But they're different things. Undressing her is wanting. Her undressing for him is being wanted. If you asked most boys which they'd remember for the rest of their lives, they'd say the second one, and they'd be lying if they said anything else."

She'd looked at him a moment, and said, "Okay," and written nothing down and forgotten nothing.

Then there was the afternoon of the practical questions, which he would never entirely recover from.

"How do you do it? For a guy, I mean. With your hand. Is there a technique? Because I've obviously never, and if I'm ever, you know, with someone, I don't want to be a disaster."

He had explained. Carefully, in words, with his hands flat on the table, while the waiter in the long apron polished a glass at the bar with enormous concentration.

"And when it comes out. The, the semen. What's that like? Is it a lot? Does it just, I don't know, appear?"

He had explained that too. Her eyes had gone very round.

"And the orgasm itself. For a guy. How long does it last? Like seconds? And what does it feel like, actually? Because for a girl, I mean, from what I've, from what people say, it's different, it goes on, and I always wondered if for a guy it's just, boom, finished."

"Not boom," he'd said, and then had to stop and think, because nobody had ever asked him to describe it and he found he wanted to get it right for her. "Maybe eight seconds. Ten. But they're not normal seconds. It's like everything in you goes to one place and then lets go. You stop being able to think. For a few seconds you're not a person, you're just the thing that's happening." He'd shrugged, a bit helpless. "It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't seen it."

"Okay," she'd said, slowly, and looked at him for a second longer than usual, and he had no idea, then, what she was filing that one under.

It was never erotic. That was the strange and wonderful thing about it. It was two friends talking, with the words getting filthier and the feeling staying exactly the same: warm, careful, funny. She laughed until she had to put her sunglasses back on. He laughed because she did. And they had a running joke, which was that the people at the next table kept leaving. The woman in pearls, the two men in suits, the elderly couple with the little dog: they'd sit down, order, catch three sentences of what Sophie was saying in her clear, well-brought-up voice, and quietly pay and go, and she'd watch them cross the square and say, deadpan, "Was it something I said?" and he'd lose it.

"Checco. Serious question."

"They're all serious questions."

"Serious serious. Do boys," and she lowered her voice to a level that could still be heard at the bar, "like it when a girl sucks on his balls? As well as. You know. The rest."

The waiter put down the glass he was polishing.

He had looked at her for a long second. The friendliest girl at Franklin, in a yellow summer dress with thin straps, her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, asking him that with her eyebrows up and her chin on her hand.

"Yes," he said. "Very much. But it's not the same as the rest. It's softer. You have to be gentle, and most girls don't bother, and the ones who do, you remember."

"Softer," she repeated, nodding, as if he'd told her how to hold a pencil. "Okay. Good to know."

And the two men in suits got up and left, and she put her face in her hands and shook, and he loved her so much he thought it might actually show.

The confession was hers first, that summer. Not his. He would think about that afterwards, that she had said the unsayable thing a whole month before he did.

It was late for them, nearly six, the light in the square gone gold, the first of the apéro people at the bar. They had got back round to the shaving question, because she'd clearly been thinking about his answer, and she'd gone quiet for a moment and turned her glass on the table and then said it, looking at the glass and not at him, in the careful voice she used when a question was really about her.

"Well, in my case, I don't shave. I mean, I trim the sides a bit, so it's neat. But I have a thick patch of hair on my vagina. I just don't like the idea of shaving it." She glanced up. "But would that bother a guy? As in, do they like to look at pubic hair? And then, if a guy, you know, decides to go down on me." She stopped. Her colour was up. She went on anyway, because she was Sophie and she had decided to ask. "And I have to admit, I love the idea of a guy licking my pussy. Sticking his tongue inside me. I've never had it. I just imagine it. And I worry that a guy wouldn't want to give me oral sex because of the hair."

He had to put his glass down, because his hand had gone unreliable, and he had to sit very still, because under the table he was so hard it was painful.

Because this was the thing. The one thing. He had never told anyone, not a soul, not the girls in London, not the friend from his course who told him everything. It was the specific, private, embarrassing truth of what he wanted, and the whole world had decided in the last five years that it was wrong, and here was Sophie across the table telling him, with her chin up and her face burning, that she had exactly what he had never dared to hope for, and that what she wanted done to it was the thing he wanted most in the world to do. He could feel it. That was the trouble. Sitting there in the Contrescarpe with the waiter ten feet away he could feel the thick soft hair of her against his mouth, his nose in it, his tongue inside her, and he wanted to know what she tasted like so badly that for a second the room went out of focus.

"No," he said. His voice came out lower than he meant. "A boy wouldn't mind."

"You're being kind."

"I'm not." He made himself hold her eyes. "I think it's beautiful. I think a boy who'd turn that down is a boy who's frightened of women. And no, it wouldn't get in the way. If anything." He stopped, because the honest end of that sentence was not one he could say at a table. "It wouldn't get in the way. That's an honest answer. You asked for an honest answer."

She had looked at him for a moment in a way he couldn't read. Then she'd smiled, slow, and said "Okay," and that was that, and he had ridden her home with her arms round his waist and her chin on his shoulder, and when she went in through the green door on rue de Tournon he sat on the Vespa for five full minutes with the engine off because he didn't trust himself to drive.

---

His came two weeks later, and it went wrong.

It happened at one in the morning, on the phone, which was where the questions had started going when the afternoons weren't enough. That summer they both had Nokias, and she had discovered that she could ask him things from bed that she could not quite ask across a table, even that table. The phone would buzz on his bedside table at midnight, the little screen glowing green in the dark. *Checco. Awake?* And then a question, split over two or three messages because a hundred and sixty characters was never enough for Sophie. The late-night ones were different from the café ones. No waiter, no sunglasses, no joke about the next table. Just the two of them in the dark in separate rooms with a river between them, typing with their thumbs, and the questions got quieter and closer and the gaps between them got longer.

That night she had asked whether boys thought about girls they actually knew when they did it, or whether it was always actresses. He had told her the truth. *Girls they know. Always. The actresses are for people with no imagination.* And she had sent back, with the little smiley she used when she was pushing her luck, *So who do you think about then?*

He lay there and looked at it.

He had promised himself he would never say it. He had lived for six years on the strength of not saying it. But it was one in the morning, and he had been answering her honestly for three summers, and she had just asked, and the green screen was waiting.

He typed it. *You. I've wanted to see you naked since I was fifteen.* He read it back. Twenty-one years of being told what he was and wasn't allowed to want moved his thumb to the delete key, and the sentence went, letter by letter, and he typed *Not telling :)* instead, and looked at that, and it was already dead on the screen. He deleted that too. He typed the true one again, exactly as before, and this time he did not read it back. He pressed send, and the phone made its small sound, and it was gone.

The screen went dark.

A minute. Two. He watched the phone the way you watch a door. Then it lit.

*Oh.*

Nothing else. He typed *I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. Forget it.* and sent it, and waited, and the dark went on for so long that he thought she had gone to sleep, and then:

*No it's fine. I just didn't know you thought about me like that.*

*I think about you every way there is,* he sent, because it was true and because he had already jumped.

The phone stayed dark for a long time. Then it buzzed once.

*It's late. Bonne nuit Checco.*

No bisous. She always put bisous.

She didn't text the next day. He sent one ordinary message the next evening, something about nothing, and the answer came the following morning, polite, short, a full stop at the end of it. She didn't call for ten days. He went to the Contrescarpe twice at two o'clock and sat at the table by the window by himself and drank a demi and felt the waiter not asking. He understood. He had taken the one good thing he had, the only table in Paris where he was wanted, and set fire to it for a sentence on a screen. He was not angry with her. She had done the correct thing. He was the one who had been raised to keep it in the drawer, and he'd opened the drawer at one in the morning with his thumb, and that was what happened: you lost the thing. He had always known that. She was the optimist; he was the one who knew how things went. He was not the type of boy to whom the other thing happened. He had made his peace with that at fifteen, and now he made it again, at twenty-one, sitting alone in the Contrescarpe while the waiter polished glasses and his phone lay dark on the table beside the demi.

On the eleventh day the phone rang. Not a message. A call.

"My parents have gone down to the house in Normandy till Sunday," she said, with no hello, in exactly her old voice. "I'm home alone and I'm bored and I've rented a film. Get a pizza from the Italian place on rue Mouffetard, the one with the real margherita, you'll know. Eight o'clock. Don't be late, you're always early." A pause. "Allez, Checco. Viens."

---

Sophie had spent those ten days doing something she had never done, which was think about her own body on purpose.

He had written it so plainly. That was what she couldn't get past. Not a joke, not a line, not the way the boys at Sciences Po said things, sideways, so they could take them back. Eleven words on a green screen at one in the morning, with no smiley on the end and nowhere to hide. He had written it like he said everything at that table: honestly, as a friend, because she had asked him to always answer honestly and he always had. *I've wanted to see you naked since I was fifteen.* She had read it in bed with the phone an inch from her face, and her first feeling had been a kind of fright, the fright of a girl who had spent twenty-one years being everyone's friend, finding out that the person who knew her best had been looking at her, the whole time, as a body.

That was the first night. By the third night the feeling had changed, because by the third night she had worked out what the fright actually was.

It wasn't that he'd looked. It was that she had never once believed anyone did. She was the friendly one. She was the one the boys talked to about the girls they wanted. She had decided at fifteen, on no evidence whatsoever, that she was not that kind of girl, and she had built her whole self round it, the sunshine, the kindness, the never-minding, and it had worked so well that she had never had to find out whether it was true. And now Checco, of all people, careful, decent Checco, who had never once tried anything with anyone, had lain in the dark on the other side of the river and typed, with his thumb, that he had wanted her for six years. Not liked. Wanted. Her. The body she walked around in and didn't think about.

She had gone and stood in front of the long mirror in her bedroom with the door locked and looked at herself with that sentence in her head, and it was like looking at someone she'd been introduced to.

And then there was the business of his memory. He remembered everything about her. It was a joke between them, the iron memory, but lying there in the dark it stopped being funny. He remembered what she'd worn to things. He remembered things she'd said at fourteen that she had no recollection of saying. He had told her once, half embarrassed, that she had sung along when he played at the talent show, and she had laughed and said she didn't remember him playing at any talent show, and he had gone quiet in a way she'd put down to nothing. She understood it now. You did not remember a person like that unless you had been paying a particular kind of attention, for years, and he had been, and she had never once asked herself why.

And then there was the other thing, the thing she had told him. She had sat in her yellow dress in the Contrescarpe and told him she was hairy between her legs and that she dreamt of a boy's tongue inside her, and he had looked her in the eye and said *beautiful*, and said a boy who turned that down was frightened of women, and she had believed him, because he had never once lied to her at that table. She had gone home that night and lain in the dark and put her own hand there, into the thick soft hair, and thought the word. Beautiful. She had never once thought it about that part of her. She had thought: private. She had thought: mine. And he had put a different word on it and the word had stayed.

He had asked her everything, that summer. No. She had asked him everything, and he had given her every answer, straight, and never once made her feel stupid or dirty or small. She had made him describe what it felt like to come, for God's sake, in a bar, with a waiter listening, and he had done it, carefully, so that she would understand. And then he had asked for one thing. One. And she had typed *Bonne nuit Checco* without the bisous, and switched the phone off, and lain there in the dark feeling like a nun.

By the seventh night she knew what she wanted to do, and it frightened her more than his sentence had, because it was hers.

She did not want him to touch her. That was clear, and it was important. She was Sophie; she did not do that, and she wasn't going to start in her parents' flat with her grandmother's crucifix in the hall. But he hadn't asked to touch her. That was the thing she kept coming back to, lying awake in the heat with the shutters open. He had asked to *see*. And she found, when she was honest with herself, which the summer had taught her to be, that she wanted to be seen. By him. Specifically him, the boy who answered properly, who said *beautiful* and meant it, who had carried the thing for six years and never once put it on her. She remembered what he'd said about undressing. *Her undressing for him is being wanted.* She wanted, once, to be wanted. She wanted him to look at her and she wanted to be looking at him while he did it. She wanted to give him the thing he had asked for in the only way she could bear to, which was as if it were nothing. As if it were an accident. As if she had simply forgotten to shut a door.

She didn't shave. She thought about it, and didn't. If he was going to see her, he was going to see her.

She rang him on the eleventh day because by then she couldn't not.

---

The flat on rue de Tournon was the kind he had been in a hundred times and never alone. The big entrance hall first, herringbone parquet underfoot, a console table with the family's post on it and her grandmother's crucifix above, and then the drawing room straight ahead, all of it done in the heavy old Parisian way, boiseries and gilt mirrors and dark wood, portraits, a chandelier nobody had turned on in years because the lamps were kinder. Off the hall to the right ran the corridor to the bedrooms, parquet, a long rug, her door at the end. With the parents gone the whole place felt enormous and oddly loud, every footstep echoing down the corridor. She met him at the door in a pale blue summer dress and bare feet and took the pizza box out of his hands and said, "You're on time, that's a first," and kissed him on both cheeks, and he felt the second cheek land like a verdict reversed.

They ate in the drawing room on the good sofa, which she said her mother would have had a stroke about, with the box between them and the video on, *Sliding Doors*, which she'd rented from the video shop on rue Monge because, she said, "you'll hate it and I'll enjoy that," and it was almost normal. She laughed in the right places. She stole the crust off his slice. She sat with her feet tucked under her and the dress riding a little up her thighs and he looked at Gwyneth Paltrow with great concentration. Neither of them mentioned the Contrescarpe, or the ten days, or the sentence. It sat in the room with them, polite, and waited.

Halfway through the film she stretched, both arms over her head, and said, "God, it's hot. I'm sticky. I'm going to have a quick shower."

"Sure."

She stood up. She looked down at him. And then she said, in a voice that was almost but not completely her ordinary one, "Bring me my Coke in a couple of minutes, will you? Just put it on the dresser in my room. I'll leave everything open." A beat. "I don't mind."

And she walked out of the drawing room, across the hall, and he heard her bare feet go down the corridor to the right, and her bedroom door not close, and then, further off, the click of the bathroom light.

He sat on the sofa. Someone on the screen missed a train. He did not hear it. His whole body had gone very still and very hot and his heart was doing something in his throat that he could feel in his teeth. *I'll leave everything open. I don't mind.* It was nothing. It was a girl asking for a drink. It was also the most precisely engineered sentence anyone had ever said to him, and he knew it, and he knew she knew it, and the knowing went down his spine like a hand.

He sat there for what he would later estimate at two minutes and remember as an hour.

Then he picked up the glass of Coke from the table, because she had asked him to, and stood up.

The corridor was long and dim, the only light the blue flicker of the television behind him and, at the far end, the yellow spill from her open bedroom door. He walked down it slowly on the rug, the glass cold in his hand and the ice in it making a small sound with every step, and he thought: she chose this. She grew up in this corridor. She knows exactly how far the sound carries. He reached her door and went in.

Her bedroom was as he'd always known it from the doorway and never from inside. The single bed with the white cover, the desk with the Sciences Po reading, the long mirror on the wardrobe, a lamp on by the bed and the shutters closed against the street. And on the far wall the door to her bathroom, wide open, the light on, white tiles, a basin with a mirror over it, a bath with a glass screen, and Sophie standing in the middle of it with her back to him, reaching up behind her neck for the zip of the dress.

He set the glass down on the dresser. It touched the wood with a small, definite sound.

She heard it. He saw her hear it: a tiny pause in her hands, a quarter of a second, and then they went on. She did not turn round. She found the zip and drew it down, slowly, all the way to the small of her back, and the pale blue cotton loosened and slid off her shoulders and she let it go, and it fell round her feet in a ring, and she stepped out of it and bent to pick it up and fold it and lay it on the chair by the basin, and she was in her underwear, plain white, the kind her mother bought her, and he had to put a hand on the dresser.

He could see her face in the mirror over the basin. She was looking at herself. She was not looking at the door. Her colour was up, high on her cheeks and down her throat, and her lips were parted, and she was breathing like someone who has just come up a flight of stairs.

Inside, Sophie had heard the glass, and the sound of it had gone through her like a dropped step.

So he was there. He had come. He had done what she'd asked, brought the drink and put it on the dresser like a friend, and now he was either standing in her bedroom looking through the open door, or he had turned, like the decent boy he was, and gone back to the film. She didn't know which. The mirror gave her only herself and, behind her, the bright rectangle of the doorway and the dim room beyond it, lamplight and shadow, and she would not let herself look into the shadow to find out. If she looked, it was a thing she was doing. If she didn't look, it was a thing that was happening. She stood there in her underwear in her own bathroom with her oldest friend maybe ten feet behind her and found that the not knowing was not a problem to be solved. It was the thing itself. It was the hottest thing she had ever felt in her life.

She reached behind her and unhooked the bra.

She did it slowly, because her hands were not quite hers, and because some part of her that was not the friendly one wanted it slow. The straps slid down her arms. She held the cups against herself for one last second, a girl's reflex, and then let it go, and her breasts came free, full and soft and heavier than the dress had let on, the nipples dark and already tight, and she watched them in the mirror and thought, with a shock that went straight between her legs: he is seeing this. Maybe. He might be seeing this right now.

She hooked her thumbs into the white cotton and pushed it down over her hips and let it drop and stepped out of it, and stood up straight, and she was naked.

In the bedroom Francesco stopped breathing.

Six years. He had not let himself picture it, not properly, not the way other boys did, because picturing it had felt like a theft. And now it was simply there, under the bathroom light, in the flat where he had eaten a hundred Sunday lunches: Sophie, the friendliest girl at Franklin, naked in the mirror, the long pale line of her back, the curve where it went in at the waist and out again, her arse round and high and marked faintly pink where the elastic had been, and, as she half turned to reach for a hair tie, the front of her. Her breasts, lifting as she raised her arms. Her belly, soft, with the little dip of her navel. And between her thighs, exactly as she had told him across the table and exactly as he had never dared to hope, a full dark triangle of hair, thick and soft-looking, neatened at the sides where it met her thighs and left as it was everywhere else. Untouched. Hers. The one thing in the world he had wanted and never said, and she had sat in the Contrescarpe and confessed it to him and then brought him here and shown it to him, and he had been right, it was beautiful, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he was so hard inside his jeans that it hurt.

She put her hair up. Arms raised, the tie in her teeth, her whole body stretched and on display in the glass, and she took her time about it, and when it was done she lowered her arms and put both hands flat on the edge of the basin and leant forward and looked at herself.

And then she lifted her eyes, in the mirror, to the doorway, and past it, into the dim room, and found him.

It took her a second. The lamp was behind him and he was mostly shadow. But she found the shape of him, standing by the dresser with one hand on it, and he saw her find it, saw her eyes go wide and dark and her mouth open, and for one second the friendly girl was back and he thought she would grab for a towel.

She didn't.

She looked at him in the mirror, naked, with her hands on the basin, and the colour went all the way down her chest, and her eyes dropped once, quick, to the front of his jeans, and came back up, and something in her face settled. Then she turned round. Slowly. All the way. And stood in the middle of her bathroom in the full light facing the open door with her arms at her sides and let him look.

"You said you wanted to see," she said. Her voice was not quite steady. "So look, Checco."

He stepped forward, out of the shadow, to the bathroom door, and stopped there, and looked. He could not have done anything else. He stood in the doorway of Sophie's bathroom and looked at her, all of her, lit, in front of him, and she stood there and let him, and her nipples were hard and her breath was going and between her legs the dark hair was thick and soft and he could see, where it thinned at the top of her thighs, that she was wet. The hair there was damp with it. She was wet from this. From being looked at. By him.

"Beautiful," he said, because it was the only word he had, and because he had promised to always answer honestly.

Her eyes closed for a second. When they opened she had decided something else.

"Stay there," she said. "Don't come in. Just. Stay there."

And she turned and stepped into the bath and slid the glass screen only halfway, so it hid nothing, and turned the water on.

She did not pretend it was a shower, not for long. She tipped her head back under the water for a moment and let it run over her face and her hair, and then she turned, deliberately, to face him, with the water sheeting down her front, over her breasts and her belly and through the hair between her legs, darkening it, flattening it against her, and she looked at him through the open half of the screen and put her hands on herself.

She cupped her breasts, lifted them, let her thumbs drag across her nipples, and he saw her mouth open at it, saw her watch his face while she did it. One hand went down. Slow, over her stomach, into the wet dark hair, and her fingers combed through it and parted it and found herself, and her knees went a little, and the sound she made was small and real and went through him like a blade. She had never, he understood, done this in front of anyone. She had never had a boy's mouth on her, she'd told him so, had only imagined it, and now she was standing in the shower with her own fingers where she'd imagined his tongue and her eyes on him, and he could see in her face the exact moment she realised she was going to let him see all of it.

She lifted one foot and set it on the edge of the bath.

It opened her. The thick wet hair parted and there she was, pink and swollen and glistening under the water, and she looked down at herself and then up at him and did not close her legs. She spread herself with two fingers so he could see, properly, everything, the thing she'd told him at the table she dreamt of a boy tasting, and she said, in a voice he had never heard from her, "Is this what you wanted to see?"

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

She turned round then, slowly, and put both hands on the tiles and bent forward a little and looked back at him over her shoulder, and showed him that too: the round weight of her arse, the dark hair between her thighs from behind, everything a good girl from a good family kept for a husband she didn't have, offered to the boy in the doorway with the water running down her back. Then she turned to face him again and her hand went back between her legs and this time she didn't stop.

"Checco," she said. Just that. His name, in the voice from the table, the one that had asked him everything.

He had his jeans open. He didn't remember doing it. He had himself in his hand, hard and aching, standing in the doorway of her bathroom, and she saw, and her eyes went to it and stayed, and she made a noise in her throat and her fingers sped up, and he thought he would die.

"Show me," she said. "Fair's fair. You've seen mine." And then, with a breathless, shaking edge of the old café laugh in it: "You explained it. Now I want to see."

He showed her. He stood square in the doorway and stroked himself and let her look, and she looked, hungry, her lips parted, two fingers inside herself now and the heel of her hand grinding, her hips pushing into it, her other hand gripping the edge of the screen. The two of them a few feet apart and not touching, never touching, watching each other, the water going, her breath going, his going. It built. He watched it build in her, saw her thighs begin to shake, saw her put her forehead against the glass and keep her eyes on him through it, saw the moment she stopped caring what she looked like, and she came with her eyes open, looking at him, a long broken sound that echoed off the white tiles, her body locking and then shuddering under the spray, her hand still moving between her legs as if she couldn't make it stop. He went a second after her, hard, helplessly, against the doorframe of her bathroom, and she watched that too, every second of it, watched it come out of him and his face go and his whole body lock the way he'd told her it did, and did not look away.

The water ran. She stood under it with her hands flat on the tiles and her head down, breathing. He leant on the frame and breathed. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Then she reached out, not looking, and turned off the tap, and the silence was enormous.

"That was longer than eight seconds," she said, to the tiles.

He laughed. It came out of him like something breaking.

"Pass me the towel," she said. "The big one. Behind you."

He passed her the towel. She wrapped herself in it, slowly, and tucked it at her chest, and stepped out of the bath, and walked past him into her bedroom, close enough that her wet shoulder brushed his arm, and picked up the Coke from the dresser and drank half of it, and looked at him over the glass with her hair dripping on the parquet.

"You missed the best part of the film," she said.

She smiled, the slow one, the one from the evening she'd told him about the hair, and went past him and down the corridor ahead of him to the drawing room, and he followed her, and on the screen John Hannah was still being charming at someone, and she sat down on her mother's good sofa in her towel with her wet feet tucked under her and patted the cushion beside her, and he sat.

They watched the end of the film. Neither of them said a word about it. When it finished she walked him across the hall to the door in the towel and kissed him on both cheeks, and held the second one a moment longer than usual, and said, "The Contrescarpe. Tomorrow. Two o'clock. I've got questions."

He rode home on the Vespa along the river at midnight with the smell of her shampoo on his shoulder and the little engine making the only sound on the quai, and he was twenty-one years old, and he had been wrong about himself, completely and gloriously wrong, and he could not stop laughing, and somewhere under the engine, in the third row of his iron memory, a girl was singing along.