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himself from the couch and lifted her, sweeping her legs up over his forearms.
    She brushed his ear. “Where are you taking me?”
    “I’m going to make love to you in the clouds.”
    She allowed him to carry her to the bathroom, where Bruce’s foot lightly kicked open the door. Without turning on the light, he set her down gently on the rug. Her toes settled into the soft, pale threads. She watched the stretch of his biceps, chiseled and thick but not bulky. He laid a folded towel over the toilet seat, then draped a large, white towel over that and lit the candles. The scent of sulphured heat drifted from the flames, and they flickered with the air currents of Bruce’s movements.
    He turned the faucet on the bathtub and twisted the lid off a bottle of her bubble bath, emptying it into the steaming clear water.
    She bit her lip. “You do realize you don’t need quite that much, don’t you.”
    “Shh.” He put a finger to her mouth. “Now where were we?”
    He slid her blouse from her shoulders and draped it over the mirror, then did the same with his own shirt. “There. Safe from the candy stripes.”
    She laughed, eyeing the tub as it began to billow with replica cumulonimbus.
Heady vapors of mint and verbena drifted from the tub, caressing her face.
    “We’ll never fit—”
    His mouth covered hers before she could finish the thought. His arms held her to him, strong and warm and conveying their promise, lifting her to her toes. She smelled the pinched purity of his skin, and curled her fingers up from the nape of his neck to his hair, tugging roughly.
    They discarded their clothing, draping garments one by one over the towel bar. The room filled with steam and he closed off the faucet and dipped his hands into the water, smoothing it across the curves of her body. She drew in her breath. He picked her up again and then sat on the folded towel at the commode, settling her across his knees, hands warm and caressing.
    The tub billowed and the rug and towels illuminated in pale drifts despite the darkness of the room. The candles twinkled like stars, casting their waltzing light across the broad plain of his shoulders. She loved the vastness of those shoulders. If she brought her elbows up and out sideways with her knuckles together, the length of her arms elbow-to-elbow matched the length of his chest shoulderto-shoulder.
    “What gave you the idea to make love to me in the clouds,” she whispered, her fingers grazing each of his muscles in turn.
    “It’s where we belong together. In the heavens.”
    She closed her eyes with a sleepy smile, though her body twinged with something far from drowsiness. She felt the hairs of her skin rise in pointed anticipation.
    She wanted to breathe him in, drink him in, take him in. She wanted to absorb every ion of his being and saturate herself in his energy.
    The frothing bathtub crackled softly in waiting, like the reel of an old black-and-white movie. He pressed his face into her hair, and then searched beyond, his lips at her collarbone, his mouth tracing wet bows down her skin. “Without you, I don’t exist.”
    She replied with a vocalization that remained buried within her throat, pressing her body to him, moving first her hip and then her leg so that she faced him.
    Their fingers, mouths, and ankles locked, and the fit seemed to
transcend beyond their bodies. She laid back her head at the shock of his skin, so searing and so alive. So intrinsic to her being. Sounds escaped from her throat and poured upward with the scented vapors. Her hair tumbled back past her waist and grazed his leg.
    They gripped each other, each muscle taut and clamping, as if they could lock for a span of forever.

3
    NEW YORK
    ENERVATA WAS LOSING PATIENCE for Sileny’s melodrama, but he allowed her to speak. “What is it?”
    In his natural Macul form, with thick bronze skin and wiry hair that covered much of the lower half of his body to the tip of his tail, he slumped into the armchair.