Lexicon

been seniors, anyway, not far from graduation. He knew this because Brontë had given him her words. A yellowed envelope, curling from use, and inside were dozens of slips of paper, each bearing a word.
    “Use them,” she said. The lights were off so they would be able to detect anyone approaching by the shadows thrown beneath her door. But he could see her face clearly enough. “I want you to compromise me.”
    He couldn’t remember his own response. He might have tried to talk her out of it. Might have not. He’d thought a lot of things and it was too long ago to tell the difference between choices real and imagined. Almost all of his memory was about her: the way she lay back on the bed, her bare shoulders gleaming. Her face as he whispered the first words. He’d been clumsy, that first time. It had taken him a while to find the place between awareness and compromise, the sub-lucid state of low consciousness that laid the body open to suggestion. When he put her under too far, her face would slacken; when he brought her too close to the surface, her eyes would focus and she would tell him to do more. He touched her breasts and her nipples felt hard and urgent against his palm. Her hips rose from the bed. “Fuck me,” she said. “I want you to
fuck me
.” She whimpered and growled like an animal. He worried about the noise, said, “Quiet,” and she began to hiss, a kind of noise he hadn’t heard anyone make before. Goose bumps undulated across her skin. Waves followed the touch of his fingers. Her hips rose and fell, and when he touched her there she issued a high, barely audible keen, like escaping steam. He worried he’d broken her, and brought her up, and desperation flashed across her face and she begged him to take her down again. When he did, she gave a long sigh of satisfaction, a noise of complete unself-consciousness that signaled he was very close to the core of her. He moved his hand between her legs and into the wetness he found there. “In me,” she said, the words becoming a chant, gasped into his ear over and over as her fingers clawed at his back, and he was unable to stop himself. He unbuttoned his pants. He entered her and the instant he did so, her body turned to iron, a thing made of hot steel. He climaxed within moments.
    They lay together for hours. He knew he should leave before dawn, lest someone see him slinking from her room, but he couldn’t bear to part with her. He held her as she gently rose toward full consciousness. They kissed. When light began to leak into the sky and he couldn’t put it off any longer, he rose from the bed. She walked him to the door—her naked body in the moonlight, he would never forget that—and said, “Next time, I do you.”
    A cockatoo screeched from a nearby tree. He drew breath, exhaled. This was not a time for reminiscing. He would not be calling Brontë. It was ancient history. And it had ended badly. Or perhaps not badly, but not well. Then they had graduated and gone to different parts of the organization and that had been that. He had no idea whether she thought about that time anymore, whether she did so with shame or regret. It was impossible to tell. Impossible to ask, without exposing himself.
    One day, I’ll kiss her again.
The corners of his mouth twitched.
One more kiss.
What a thought. Ludicrous. Still. There was no harm in fantasy. Not if he recognized it as such. He would let himself keep this one, he decided. It was a nice thought to have.
    • • •
    Two hours later, he heard tires crawl across dirt. A white sedan nosed around the corner. It was driving very slowly and stopped as soon as it saw him. The windshield was a solid sheet of sunlight. The engine died. The door opened. Woolf emerged. Emily. She was thinner.
    He said, “I appreciate you stopping.”
    She raised a hand to her eyes and turned in a circle, scanning the terrain. She was wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Possibly the word was tucked into her waist, although it didn’t seem like it. Had she left it in the car? Maybe she already realized it was over.
    “How did you cross the Pacific?” he said. “I ask because there’s a pool going.”
    “Container ship.”
    “We searched a lot of those.”
    “You searched mine.”
    He nodded. “Fairly pointless, when people can’t be trusted to report when they find you. It’s why you’re shoot-on-sight now.”
    She looked at him. Her expression was very measured, very controlled. If she’d been