Dark Rivers of the Heart

the street.
        Roy had expected glamour. Disappointed, he reminded himself that Eve, though stunning, was but another woefully underpaid bureaucrat.
        As they waited in the Honda, in the driveway, for the automatic garage door to finish lifting out of the way, he said, "How did a woman like you wind up working in the agency?"
        "I wanted the job, and my father had the influence to make it happen," she said, driving into the garage.
        "Who's your father?"
        "He's a rotten sonofabitch," she said. "I hate him. Let's not go into all that, Roy, please. Don't ruin the mood."
        The last thing that he wanted to do was ruin the mood.
        Out of the car at the door between the ra and the house, as Eve fumbled in her purse for keys, she was suddenly nervous and clumsy.
        She turned to him, leaned close. "Oh, God, I can't stop thinking about it, how you did them, how you just walked up and did them. Such power in the way you did it."
        She was virtually smouldering with desire. He could feel the heat rolling off her, driving the February chill out of the garage.
        "You have so much to teach me," she said.
        A turning point in their relationship had arrived. Roy needed to explain one more thing about himself. He'd been delaying bringing it up, for fear she would not understand this one quirk as easily as she had absorbed and accepted what he'd had to say about the power of compassion.
        But he could delay no longer.
        As Eve returned her attention to her purse and at last extracted the ring of keys from it, Roy said, "I want to see you undressed."
        "Yes, darling, yes," she said, and the keys clinked noisily as she searched for the right one on the ring.
        He said, "I want to see you entirely nude."
        "Entirely, yes, all for you."
        "I have to know how much of the rest of you is as perfect as the perfect parts that I can already see."
        You're so sweet," she said, hastily inserting the correct key into the dead-bolt lock.
        "From the soles of your feet to the curve of your spine, to the backs of your ears, to the pores in the skin of your scalp. I want to see every inch of you, nothing hidden, nothing at all."
        Throwing open the unlocked door, rushing inside, switching on a kitchen light, she said, "Oh, you are too much, you are so strong.
        Every crevice, darling, every inch and fold and crevice."
        As she dropped her purse and keys on the kitchen table and began to strip out of her coat, he followed her inside and said, "But that doesn't mean I want to undress or… or anything."
        That stopped her. She blinked at him.
        He said, "I want to see. And touch you, but not much of that. just a little touching, when something looks perfect, to feel if the skin is as smooth and silky as it appears, to test the resilience, to feel if the muscle tension is as wonderful as it looks. You don't have to touch me at all." He hurried on, afraid that he was losing her. "I want to make love to you, to the perfect parts of you, make passionate love with my eyes, with a few quick touches, perhaps, but with nothing else. I don't want to spoil it by doing… what other people do.
        Don't want to debase it. Don't need that sort of thing."
        She stared at him so long that he almost turned and fled.
        Suddenly Eve squealed shrilly, and Roy took a step back, more than half afraid of her. Offended and humiliated, she might fling herself at him and claw his face, tear at his eyes.
        Then, to his astonishment, he realized that she was laughing, though not cruelly, not laughing at him. She was laughing with pure joy. She hugged herself and squealed as if she were a schoolgirl, and her sublime green eyes shone with delight.
        "My God," she said tremulously, "you're even better than you seemed, even better than I thought, better than I could ever hope.
        You're perfect, Roy, you're perfect, perfect."
        He smiled uncertainly. He was still not entirely free of the fear that she was going to claw him.
        Eve grabbed his right hand, pulled him through the kitchen, across a dining room, snapping on lights and talking as she went: "I was willing … if you wanted that. But that's not what I want, either, all that pawing and squeezing, all that sweating, it disgusts me, having another person's sweat all over me, all slick and sticky with another