Melissa shook her head. She still felt light-headed. "They're glad if you come in, instead of getting pregnant. They know everybody fucks." She took Emily's arm. It always startled her, how tiny and fragile Emily was: bird bones.

"Did you, like, feel you had to? You think the guy won't look at you if you don't do him. Besides, sometimes it just breaks the ice. Sometimes it makes it worse." Emily squeezed her arm back in a gesture of affection. "Are you going to keep going out with him? I mean, your parents really will have shit fits."

"I don't know, Em. But I'm not the least bit sorry. I mean, I had a real orgasm. I used to wonder what the fuss was about." She still viewed it as something monumental, a divide in her life with a before and after.

"It just means that he's not a complete klutz like Jonah. Really!"

"I don't know. It's like fate. The wheel stopped spinning and there he was."

"Duh. I think you're in for a big letdown."

She remembered him saying, while he was still inside her, "I'm only taking what's mine." She had no idea what he meant, but it resonated. It had felt like fate to her right then. She wasn't about to tell that to Emily. It was too private.

Besides, she'd have to admit she hadn't the foggiest notion what he meant. "Don't tell Ronnie, okay? Nothing will come of it, probably. I don't want her teasing me about Blake or being nosy."

"Did you tell Fern?"

"I will if anything comes of it."

IT RAINED for two days, so it was not until Saturday that he took her back to their clearing. The evening before, they had supper together, Italian in town. She felt a great relief. They were to go on seeing each other. It was real. With both of them living in dormitories, it wasn't too easy to grab privacy to make love. She thought that after a couple more weeks, maybe she could ask Fern to go study at the library for an hour and give them the room.

They made love in a slower, more sensual way. She felt she had in some way grown up, because suddenly she could enjoy sex. She had always thought of it as a guy thing. Women put out and put up with it. But now she wanted it too. His skin was sleek and warm and almost hairless, like flesh formed of warm honey, of amber, except for his wiry pubic hair. They kissed until she had to draw back to catch her breath, and then they kissed again. He coiled against her, partly around her, lean and supple, rocking against her. She felt her skin, her flesh, her breasts and belly awaken wherever he caressed, wherever her skin brushed his, catching desire from him and burning, liquefying under his touch. She felt as if her body had changed its substance into something radiant. If she could see them, her body would glow from within like a lantern. This was so much more than what she had known previously as sex-those hurried, fumbled encounters, poking through clothing, awkward collisions of bone on bone-that it should have a different name. Maybe it did. Maybe this was love. Again she had an orgasm. It was magical. She felt as if she belonged with him. This was what she had always dreamed of without being able to define it, a man who would really hold her, who would want to please her, who would have the skill and knowledge to touch her and bring her all the way alive.

"I saw Florette looking at me," she said. "I guess she doesn't approve of your going out with me."

"A lot I do they don't approve of. I don't let it get to me. I'm my own man. I walk my own path."

"But you like a little company?"

"Our path is together. Don't you know that yet?"

"I hope so," she said very softly. "But how do you know so fast?"

"I know." He smiled, that inturned smile that never seemed quite a smile but something else, not like his usual grin or open smile. When he looked that way, she felt as if he knew a secret he wasn't yet willing to share with her. She did not mind that. She felt important to him, something that had never happened to her before.

He leaned toward her as if sharing a secret. "The truth is, I started hanging out with the brothers because I like some of them. In high school, most of my friends were white. I don't know what I am."

"You don't know the race of your parents?"

"I don't know anything about my biological parents. My adoptive parents, Si and Nadine Ackerman, never knew. I wasn't adopted through an agency. He's a lawyer and he came across an abandoned baby. That was me. I don't know what my parents were-Indian, Filipino, African-American, Malaysian, Polynesian-I'll never know."

"In a way, I almost envy that. Oh, I mean I understand it has to trouble you. Like you have no idea if high blood pressure or diabetes or sickle cell anemia runs in your biological family. You don't know who you came from, you can't put faces or names to your mother and your father. But you're free too."

"Free to define myself. Yes. You do see."

"You're a man of mystery." She gave a short laugh to indicate she knew what she had just said was too silly.

"To myself, also. But we're all mysterious. We come out of the void, we sink into the void, and in between half the time we don't know what we're doing or why. Events come out of the clouds and knock us off our feet. We're always rewriting our lives because everything keeps changing. Your life can be rolling along feeling normal, and then lightning strikes. A crack in the world. And after that, nothing is ever the same."

"I don't think anything that mattered changed for me until I met you." Immediately she felt her face growing hot.

"That may well be true," he said with mock solemnity. "It's shaped like a thigh, this hill." He was sitting up, his clothes buttoned loosely, put back together after their lovemaking. He liked to wear earth tones, tans and browns and olives, khaki and beige. He didn't wear sweats or superbaggy ghetto pants. Other times he affected all black. "We're on the thigh of a sleeping giant. If we make too much noise, he could wake up."

"But he wouldn't hurt us. We make him feel good."

"That's his food. Couples making love create vibrations he feeds on."

"He's a love giant." It was pure silliness, reminding her of childhood games with Billy, games in which they were astronauts or aliens or spies. "My younger brother and me, we used to play like this together-I don't mean sex, I mean pretending things. Making up little worlds."

"What kind did you like best?"

She frowned, remembering. "I guess when we were spies."

"What kind of spies?"

"We'd go sneaking around the governor's mansion into places we weren't supposed to go and we'd move papers around or read things. We'd pretend to be taking pictures from our tiny wrist cameras of sensitive documents. It felt scary sometimes. Because we really were where we weren't supposed to be."

"It sounds as if it would still be fun." He placed his hand on her belly. "Where do you imagine living, if you could choose anyplace?"

"Not Washington. California, maybe. Seattle. Or London. We all went to England and France and Italy and Spain when Merilee graduated from Penn. Once we went with my father to Tokyo on a trade mission. Have you ever gone out of the country?"

"Sure. I hitched around Europe last summer. I wrote about it for class. You know, an event that made you understand yourself better. A travel piece."

"You mean, you just went on your own? Your parents let you?"

"Well, I'd been before. And they were in France. My father talks about the death penalty-he's an opponent-"

"So am I."

"I'm glad to hear that. Thought I might have to tussle with you about it, being as your daddy is so hot and heavy into executions."

"It's sickening. I don't agree with him."

"I'm surprised your parents didn't travel more. Your father comes from money."

"He comes from old money, but they spent it before he was born. His father lives on a farm up in Vermont and raises cows. Honest." She wasn't about to describe Rosemary's clever investing. Rosemary had her own financial advisor, Stan Wolverton, who had been coaching her for the last fifteen years. Rosemary considered him her real father and doted on him. He was a red-faced man who looked like an ex-athlete, but Melissa had never heard one thing about his past. Yet in the time she had seen him coming to closet himself with Rosemary, he had gone through three wives and was working on number four.

"What about your mother's family?"

"Just lower middle class. Baptists from Youngstown, Ohio. I like them, actually, much better than my other grandfather, but we hardly see them anymore. They embarrass Rosemary. And I think they're scared of her."

"How come?"

"My mother is very smart. Much smarter than my father. They're both insanely ambitious-you shouldn't imagine she pushed him into politics or anything. I think he recognized right away that she could really help him."

"So at least he's smart enough to like smart women."

It was clouding over. A chill wind had sprung up and she shivered. "I think the weather's changing."

"We can only use this as our private place when it's warm and it won't be warm much longer. We'll have to start using my room." He stood up, extending a hand for her. She thought that he had a natural courtesy which was extremely unusual among guys. There was something princely about him. She was already spinning fantasies about his unknown and unknowable parentage. She had loved fairy tales when she was little. Emily had not been permitted to read fairy tales, for her parents thought they supported regressive values, but the nannies who had taken care of Billy and her had provided fairy tales along with daily vitamins. Blake was the son of a king, a prince in exile from some mythical golden kingdom. He was her prince who had wakened her not exactly with a kiss but in that general direction. "If we use your room, what about your roommate?"

"Don't have one. I did, but he bailed in the third week. College was too much for him. He was praying all the time, scared, out of his element. He went back to Oklahoma."

"Do you mind? I might be lonely in a single."

"I'm used to being alone. In one way, I've always been alone. Besides, you'll see, I have a lot of valuable computer equipment I don't want some wiseass monkeying with."

She wondered why he had not brought her to his room already, but then she answered her own question. He was intensely private and his impulse was to carry her away, to go off with her apart from other students, away from the college and classes and daily life.

He mounted his bike and she climbed up behind him, clinging. The sky had turned a dark greenish grey and the wind was strong as he rode the curves down from the hill. She squinted her eyes shut and held tight. There was a scent on the wind that made her think of things dying as if it were bringing a frost, and the scent of what had already gone under blew in with it. She had become much more aware of weather and temperature, wind and rain since she had begun seeing Blake. She thought she was more aware of everything. All her senses were keener, quicker. Girls talked of losing baby fat; she had lost a baby sheathing on her nerves. She felt more alive, from the soles of her feet to the top of her head, where he often rested his hand-reminding her that, gangly as she had always felt, she was smaller than Blake, who must be six two.

Sunday they studied together, their knees touching under a table in the library in a high room lit by tall windows the sun poured through from Andrus Field. Since she arrived, she had done just about everything with Emily. She felt a small nagging of guilt that she so much preferred being with Blake. Emily was her best friend. Em had that group from the mixer. She ate with them or with Fern or Ronnie when Melissa was eating with Blake. Emily liked the group, but only so-so. She had already run through what's his name. Melissa wished Em would meet people she liked better, so that she wouldn't feel she ought to be doing things with her or Fern, when she only wanted to be with Blake. She must be sure not to abandon her friend; that would be sleazy.

She got an e-mail from Billy, all about breaking up with Cheryl because she was just too demanding, and about bruising his knee in hockey practice. She couldn't decide whether to tell him about Blake. Finally she decided she would keep Blake to herself. It was almost superstitious, the feeling that if anyone in her family, even Billy, knew, it might weaken the new relationship, might alert her mother so that Rosemary would be galvanized into action to prevent something so "unsuitable." Finally she wrote Billy the kind of answer she usually did, focused on him, minimal stuff about herself. He wouldn't notice.

Rosemary sent a kind of round-robin e-mail to all her children every Friday, bringing them up to date on Dick's activities and accomplishments, the advice and help of his friends and allies, the dark plots of his enemies.

Your father is going to cosponsor legislation with the senator from North Dakota to strengthen and increase the list of crimes to which the federal death penalty can apply in order to bring more stability to our country. He is thrilled that the President is hosting a brunch for the new Republican senators, and of course Dick will be meeting the President then in a more intimate setting. Naturally, when they met during the campaign, it was rather hurried, and while we were delighted he came to Rich's wedding, it was hardly a face-to-face situation. This will be an opportunity for your father to demonstrate his unique charisma and his breadth of vision to the President.

To each report, Rosemary would append comments and queries specific to that offspring.

Are you making friends? Good contacts?

For what?

I am getting to know some very nice girls in the dorm and in my classes. Yes, I go to bed by eleven most nights.

That was a lie, but so what? Nobody in the dorm went to bed that early. It was too noisy for one thing, with everybody's TV or CD player booming, and they all had classwork. She caught up on sleep weekends.

In general I have enough clothes.

After all, she wasn't a clotheshorse like Rosemary.

What I really could use is a leather jacket. They're very in this year.

She wanted one as much like Blake's as possible. She would love that.

I think I'm doing well in my classes. I like most of them. No, I haven't picked a major yet. My advisor says I have plenty of time. I don't know when I might get to Washington.

She could not even write the lying word home. I am still adjusting to college and think sticking around here and catching up on classwork is a better idea. I want to do well in school.

It's important to me to use my time well.

She enjoyed lying to her mother. She had begun doing so around twelve, usually to shelter Billy from the consequences of something he had done or not done. With protecting herself, usually it was not so much a matter of avoiding punishment as of denying visibility. She protected her desires, her true interests, her feelings by pretending they didn't exist. It was one of the ways she felt she was real: because she had secrets. Because she hid a picture of her most recent crush under the paper that lined her drawers. Because she hid sexy books Emily lent her. Other girls went around talking about their rock or movie stars, the hunks on TV they adored. She kept her fantasies to herself. Once in a while she had confided a little crush to Emily, who was blatant about her adorations. Emily had always kept lists: first it was, Men I would marry; then it was, Men I would lose my virginity with; then it was, Men I would go to bed with. Emily had really been into Chandler, who played in a local white rap band, for a couple of months. Melissa could barely call up Jonah's face now. He seemed so callow and crude next to Blake. Still, it was good to have some kind of past, no matter how pitiful.

Sometimes Melissa made such lists, but always she erased them at once, for fear someone might see them. It felt hot and dangerous even to write down who she really liked or desired. Perhaps the core of herself lay in secrets she tried to shelter, to nurture. Blake was her biggest secret now. Her parents would try to break them up the moment they saw Blake. Emily would never tell on her, for she had protected Em's adventures from everyone-family, school-for years. That no one in her family could know about Blake made him even more her own. Except for Emily, this was the first time since Floppy disappeared that she had something of her own, a being she passionately cared for.

* CHAPTER SIX *.

Melissa followed Blake into his room, at the end of the dormitory hall. His bed was covered with a southwestern print spread. His desk was laden with computer equipment-a desktop and a laptop, speakers, a scanner, two printers, various zip drives-that overflowed onto the stripped bed of his departed roommate, the top of his chest of drawers and a card table set up making an L with the desk. "You're really into computers."

"They're a tool," he said defensively, placing his leather jacket over the back of his desk chair.

"I wasn't criticizing." She wanted to wander around his room examining everything, looking at his comb, his toothpaste, his clothes-put away far more neatly than hers, she noticed. The major mess was caused by connecting cables stretched here and there. She must be careful not to trip on them and bring down some delicate pricey computer thing.

"I got tired of being called a nerd in high school. If you put time into your computer, you get results. You put time into people, the results are mixed."

"You're not in a good mood."

"I'm in a fine mood. I'm just being honest."

She drifted over to his desk, crammed with machines. "What's this?" She picked up a gadget.

"Don't touch that!"

She snapped her hand back. "If you didn't want me to touch anything, you shouldn't have brought me up here."

"Maybe I shouldn't have. Would you like me to go rummaging through your drawers?"

"I wasn't rummaging! But I can't be in a place where I can't touch anything. Blake, we kiss each other, we fuck all the time. We exchange bodily fluids. Isn't that a little more intimate than looking at your computer equipment?"

"I don't think it is. One is just physical. The other is really personal."

"Oh, it isn't personal to fuck? It is for me."

"I didn't mean that. Of course it's personal. I'm just not used to anyone else in my space."

"What's with you? You invited me here. It's cold outside now, and I have a roommate. If you didn't mean it, you shouldn't have brought me here."

"I just don't like anybody else handling equipment. You don't know what you're doing."

"I sure don't know what I'm doing with you, the way you're treating me." She went to the door and opened it. "I can't stay here like this. If you want me here, then decide you really do, and act accordingly." She paused, but he didn't look up at her. "See you in class!"

She hoped he would come after her, but he didn't. At the end of the corridor she stood waiting for him to appear, but after she had loitered there long enough for various occupants of the floor to pass and look her over, she ran down the stairs. She wasn't sure if they had just broken up. She kept herself from bursting into tears on the way across to her dorm by biting the insides of her cheeks, by inhaling sharply. Then she stopped at Emily's room and motioned her to come away. They went into the stairwell to talk, and at once, she started to cry.

"I told you," Emily said. "He's just too weird." She stroked Melissa's hair and shoulder. "Don't cry over him. He's an asshole. We're surrounded by men here. He isn't your only choice."

"I screwed up, Emily. I screwed up my best chance. I fucked up a relationship with the most attractive man I've ever seen and the only man who ever made me feel anything. I love him, Em!"

"You just met him!"