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Before she realized she was speaking aloud, she said, “My God. I love you.”

He said, “I love you, Emily,” and he was releasing her again, her body riding down onto his cock, the feeling of being split and filled now dizzyingly like being loved, being met at the point of her greatest need. And she was riding him, rising and falling on his dick and moaning with a mingled gratitude and need. Even the feeling of effort, the muscles in her thighs tensing and releasing, was a sensual pleasure; his big shoulders under her hands were a delirious pleasure. When she began to come, it was at first a snaking heat that drove into her with his cock, and then a broadening wave that came out of her as she rose on him. The orgasm grew, held, and he was pounding into it, beating more intensity into it as he now began to fuck her hard from beneath. The first orgasm had barely slackened when the second one began, still deeper inside her. It mounted into a blaze of helpless rapture that blinded her as he, too, came, driving hard inside her. His hands gripped her hips and drove her onto him as his cock twitched in orgasm. She bent down and kissed him then, still blind, still fainting and lost. And he held her against him, his mouth meeting hers in ferocious love. She felt his heart beating against her, her heart beating against the slowing beat of her coming.
I love you, I love you,
she was thinking without thinking. Everything had returned to a point of perfect rest; she had let herself go and she had fallen here, to this man and this moment.
I love you.

At last she sat back to look at his face. There were tears in her eyes and she was smiling helplessly, probably idiotically. She said, “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He was searching her face for a moment; then he, too, began to smile with a desperate happiness that made her laugh.

She said, “I guess that wasn’t what you intended? Or was it?”

“No!” He laughed. “What a fool I was. I wanted to have a sensible talk.”

“Well, luckily you can have both.”

“I don’t know how sensible I feel now.” He stroked her cheek. “I do . . . I feel as if I do love you. It’s crazy.”

“It’s crazy.” She leaned into his hand, rubbing her cheek against his palm gently. “But maybe this is how it’s supposed to be.”

“You don’t know?” His smile became mischievous. “I would have thought you’d been in love dozens of times.”

Emily shut her eyes and tried to think. There was Evan. When she was in that relationship, it had eclipsed all her early boyfriends; she thought she would die when Evan left her. But even so, every time she’d told him she loved him, she felt a cold qualm. It was like a voice deep within her admonishing stuffily,
Now, Emily, you know that isn’t true.
Opening her eyes, she saw Ralph looking at her lovingly. She said, “I was in love once, about a tenth as much as I’m in love with you now.”

He smiled. “You know what’s really crazy? That just made me jealous.”

They both laughed, and she leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Now that we’ve gotten crazy out of the way—what’s the sensible?”

A weariness stole over his face. “Let me hold you. I want to lie down with you in my arms before I say this.”

“Because it will be for the last time?” she said, trying to make her voice light.

The weariness turned into grimness. “God, I hope not. You know, until I came here, I thought I would be able to let you go. Now . . .” He shook his head. “Just hold me.”

She shifted off him and they stretched out on the sofa face-to-face, his arms around her. They kissed again for a luxurious minute of kinship. Emily felt as if she could sense his emotions through his skin, as if his emotions were flowing into her without any barrier, and hers were flowing back into him. She longed to tell him that nothing else mattered, to stop him from saying whatever nonsense it could be that would interfere with this, the only necessary thing in the world. But she made herself pull back and say, “All right. What is it?”

“I knew I owed you an explanation. But it’s something that I’ve never told anyone before. Or no one but my mother.”

She laughed. “Your mother?” Her mind tried to sketch dark secrets that you would only tell your mother, of all people. She froze suddenly. “You’re not—sick?”

“No, no! It’s nothing like that.” He kissed her on the cheek. “But bless you for being scared. No, it’s just . . . I wanted you to know that I’m not embarrassed by you because of what you do. I would never give you up if it was my decision. And it
will
be my decision. I just have to figure out . . . But I’m not telling you, am I?”

“You’re trying,” Emily said loyally.

“It’s this. When I was twenty years old, I got a girl pregnant.”

Emily caught her breath. “You mean, you’re married?”

He burst out laughing. “Should I let you guess everything it’s not? We could do this by elimination.”

“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it really is sweet. But it’s not that I married her. I couldn’t marry her,” he said with a cold misery in his voice. “She was fifteen.”

“Oh.” Despite herself, Emily was shocked. Of course, it had been a long time ago. Twenty wasn’t that much older than fifteen. Still, it conjured up horrible memories from her own early youth of drunken men trying to pick her up in the street—a certain kind of man who went after teenage girls. She said, “But . . . you were going out with a fifteen-year-old girl?”

“No, I didn’t even know her. I didn’t know she was fifteen, if that’s what you’re thinking. If I’d known, I don’t think it would ever have happened. Not that that did her any good.”

“She didn’t have an abortion,” Emily said. “Oh, I’m guessing again.”

“This time your guess is right. My daughter, Ilana, is thirteen years old now.”

“But my researchers told me you didn’t have children.”

“No one knows.”

“Except your mother.”

“Yes, my mother can keep a secret,” he said wryly.

“But why? Why would you keep it a secret?”

“The girl was fifteen. That’s statutory rape, you know.”

“But it’s so long ago. Surely . . .”

He sighed. “In the beginning, I didn’t want her to tell anybody. But thirteen years is a long time. Things change. People change. Sometimes people become bitter.” He smiled. “I sound very portentous, don’t I? Well, let’s just say Ilana’s mother hates me. She still blames me for ruining her life.”

Emily imagined a woman with a ruined life, a sad, lonely single mother living in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere—Newark, maybe. She would have a drinking problem. She would be either overweight or haggard, the kind of woman who started fights in line at the supermarket. “But you must give her money?”

“Of course. That’s not the problem. The problem was that I didn’t love her. It’s not as if Valerie was in love with me, or not at first. To tell you the truth, I can’t even wonder anymore what it was all about. Over the years, I’ve learned to accept that, somehow, I did ruin her life.”

“But you didn’t know! She could have gotten an abortion. Or if she didn’t believe in that, isn’t it enough that you supported her?”

“It’s not that simple.”

Ralph began to tell the story, haltingly at first, then with a growing passionate sadness. How Valerie had gotten his name out of the phone book, five months after their one-night stand, and told him the news in tears. Her mother had thrown her out, and she needed a place to stay. He was living with three friends then, and he decided he couldn’t tell them. He was too afraid of going to prison. So he moved out with no explanation, first to a hotel, and then to a one-bedroom apartment, where he lived with Valerie until the baby was born.

The trouble was, Valerie hated him. She hated him for refusing to buy her an engagement ring, for refusing to promise they would marry when she was sixteen. She hated him for continuing to see his ex-girlfriend. Part of her hostility was probably teenage angst; she would rage at him because he cared what people thought, or because he was scared of prison. “I would go to prison for someone I loved. I would
die
for someone I loved,” she would say. Part of it was insecurity and fear of what was happening to her. Every few days, she would collapse into a fury of tears and say she was going to kill herself and the baby. Then he would have to talk her down somehow, insisting that he loved her, that she was a wonderful person with a great future, that she would be happy as soon as the baby was born.

They weren’t having sex, although they often shared a bed. She would creep in beside him when he was asleep, and hold him like a teddy bear. Once he got to know her, he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen how young she was. She seemed young even for fifteen. Her family had obviously been a nightmare, and she often seemed like an abused child to him—an eight-year-old possessed by rage and pathetic need. Her growing belly seemed like a further abuse visited on her, and he couldn’t look at her without being stricken by guilt. Living with her, he not only didn’t desire her—he lost all desire for sex.

That was another reason she hated him. At the time, he was too young and naive to understand it, but she was being tormented by the formless and overwhelming lust of a fifteen-year-old girl. She always wanted him to hold her, to kiss her. Because she never tried to initiate sex, he assumed that she didn’t want it, that kissing was enough. But she typically went from kissing him to raging at him and threatening to kill herself, without transition.

He was too much of a coward to go with her to the hospital for the birth. Often he wondered if everything would have been different if he’d done that one thing; showed her that crucial piece of compassion. But no, he insisted that he would pick her up afterward, but he wouldn’t get out of the car, just in case someone recognized him. Even the tiny risk that someone he knew would pass the hospital at that moment was too much for him. Of course, by that time, he hated her almost as bitterly as she hated him. He hated her and pitied her and often woke from dreams in which she was dead and he was raising the baby on his own. The baby in these dreams was always terribly ill; he wasn’t going to be able to save it. Somehow the baby’s illness was all his fault.

Ilana was born healthy, though, after an eight-hour labor with no complications. By that time, Valerie’s mother was back in the picture. She was the one who called Ralph to tell him the news. On the phone, she said she would convince her daughter to come home. “It’s my granddaughter, after all. My kid can’t raise a child; she can’t boil an egg.”

So when he drove to the hospital and waited for an hour in vain, he assumed that was what had happened—the girl had gone home with her mother. He drove to a bar and drank all afternoon, with his cell phone on the bar in front of him. Every hour the cell phone didn’t ring, it became more likely that she was out of his life forever.

When he at last got home, he was drunk enough to assume that everything was going to turn out the way he wanted. Valerie would go back to school and forget about him. He would have a beautiful, happy daughter, and no responsibility for her. Over time, they would all become good friends. He could spend Christmas with them. As he went up to his apartment in the elevator, he was vaguely imagining the generous presents he would buy for his child, whom he visualized as a flaxen-haired eight-year-old, dashing to the door to meet him with delighted screams. His arms heaped with beautifully wrapped boxes. At his heels, a puppy with a ribbon around its neck.

He opened his door, stepped inside, and froze. Even though the apartment was dark, he felt convinced that someone was there; it gave him a creeping feeling down his neck. He called out Valerie’s name, but no one answered. When he turned on the light, there was no one in the living room. There was no sign that anyone had been here in his absence.

But when he went into the bedroom, just to be sure, he found his four-day-old daughter lying on the bed. A note beside her informed him that Valerie had gone to California, and that this was for the best.
My mother is an abusive freak. Don’t let my mother take Ilana or I’ll tell the police about you. Remember, I’ll find out everything you do.

“In a way, Valerie gave me everything that matters to me now,” Ralph said. “When she left Ilana with me, I had to give up school and get a job. Then I started my first business partly so that I could work from home.

“It was actually one of the happiest times of my life. When you’re twenty-one, it’s not such a big deal if you never sleep at all. And I don’t think I ever knew what it meant to love someone before Ilana. Seriously, one day my mother came over to look after her, and I had this distinct feeling of really loving my mother for the first time. Having Ilana changed me into a real person.”

But Valerie came back a year later. She wanted her daughter. Ralph wasn’t even listed as the father on her birth certificate—a direct result of his cowardice in not standing by Valerie when she gave birth. Legally, he had no right even to joint custody of his daughter. He could have hired lawyers, insisted on DNA tests, turned it into a war. But Valerie could still wield the old threat of pressing charges for statutory rape. They came to an arrangement—an arrangement that pushed Ralph into working all hours to support two households, to pay for Valerie’s move to New York City, then to move to New York himself to be near his daughter. By then, Valerie was passing Ilana off as her cousin; supposedly Valerie was godmother to the child, whose real mother had died in a tragic car crash. In those early years, Ralph supported Valerie in whatever scheme she came up with to improve her life. It seemed too crucial that somehow, someday, Ilana’s mother should be happy, even if that meant that he, too, could never acknowledge his child.

“I really didn’t have any friends. To tell the truth, I still don’t have any friends to speak of. I’d gotten used to working all the time, first to make the money I needed, and then to avoid thinking about my life. And every Sunday, I’d go to see Ilana and everything would stop. We’d go to the beach in all weather, or I’d just have her at home. She’s such a great kid. She could read when she was three. Until she started school, I don’t think I even believed there was anything wrong with my life. My mother thought there was something wrong.” He smiled sardonically. “She was very vocal on the subject.”