He just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as glacier milk...

Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us.

I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.