Who do you want to sleep with? is often the same question as Who haven’t you slept with?
Anais appears to be impossible to impress.
But Mary still remembers every nuanced detail of her own first impression.
Not quite so accidental as her superstition makes it out to be, but distance and the passage of wasted time will turn the impression from ash to stone.
She’d dropped in on Aquinas, to drop off a tape or pick one up (which exactly it was will vary according to whom it is she eventually tells the tale) and found him hors du chateau.
Anais, though.
In full studio roar.
In hiking boots and G.I. boxer shorts and sunglasses warlike as a welder’s goggles.
Topless (and beautiful) and with a loaded grease gun in one hand, beer bottle in the other.
Standing before an empty canvas twice her size, casting no shadow.
Turning to Mary she lowered the dripping gun, lifted the glass and muttered.
-I’m thinking of launching a new movement … the School of Incinerate and Destroy.
Was that the time they made love?
Did Mary’s lips redden as her tongue soaked up, spongelike, the pearl-linked ribbons of sweat from Anais’s breasts?
Did they kiss each other on the mouth before, during, or after?
No.
A simple no for now.