tied pink kimono, on a lawn in a pearly sunrise, especially when tearful. Because Lucerne was attractive. Simply from a visual point of view, she was very attractive. Even if whining, which was the way Toby saw her mostly.
Lucerne had wafted across the lawn, aware of her bare feet on the damp cool grass, aware of the brush of fabric across her thighs, aware of the tightness around her waist and the looseness below her collarbone. Billowing, like waves. She’d stopped in front of Zeb, who’d been watching her come towards him as if he’d been a sailor dumped into the ocean by mistake and she’d been either a mermaid or a shark. (Toby supplied these images: Lucerne said Fate.) They were both just so aware, she told Toby; she’d always been aware of other peoples’ awareness, she was like a cat, or, or … she had that talent, or was it a curse — that was how she knew. So she could feel from the inside what Zeb was feeling as he watched her. That was overwhelming!
It was impossible to explain this in words, she’d say, as if nothing of the sort could ever have happened to Toby herself.
Anyway, there they stood, though they’d already foreseen what was about to happen — what had to happen. Fear and lust pushed them together and held them apart, equally.
Lucerne did not call it lust. She called it longing.
At this point, Toby would have an image of the set of salt and pepper shakers that used to be on the kitchen table in her long-ago childhood home: a little china hen, a little china rooster. The hen had been the salt, the rooster had been the pepper. Salty Lucerne had stood there in front of peppery Zeb, smiling and looking up, and she’d asked him a simple question — how many rose bushes would there be or something, she couldn’t remember, so mesmerized was she by Zeb’s … (Here Toby would turn off her attention because she didn’t want to hear about the biceps, triceps, and other muscular attractions of Zeb. Was she herself immune to them? No. Was she therefore jealous of this part of the story? Yes. We must be mindful of our own animal-nature tendencies and biases at all times, said Adam One.)
And then, Lucerne would say, hooking Toby back into her story — and then a strange thing had happened: she’d recognized Zeb.
“I’ve seen you before,” she’d said. “Didn’t you used to be at HelthWyzer? But you weren’t working on the grounds then! You were — ”
“Mistaken identity,” said Zeb. And then he’d kissed her. That kiss had gone right into her like a knife, and she’d crumpled into his arms like — like a dead fish — no — like a petticoat — no — like damp tissue paper! And then he’d picked her up and laid her down on the lawn, right where anyone could have seen, which was an unbelievable turn-on, and then he’d undone her kimono and pulled the petals off the roses he was holding and scattered them all over her body, and then the two of them … It was like a high-speed collision, said Lucerne, and she’d thought, How can I survive this, I’m going to die right here and now! And she could tell he felt the same.
Later — quite a lot later, after they were living together — he’d told her she’d been right. Yes, he’d been at HelthWyzer, but for reasons he wouldn’t go into he’d had to leave in a hurry, and he trusted her not to mention that earlier time and place he’d once inhabited, not to anybody. Which she hadn’t mentioned. Or not very much. Except right now, to Toby.
Back then, though, during her Spa sojourn — thank god she hadn’t been having any skin procedure that would have made her scabby, she’d just been there for a tuneup — back then, they’d had several more appetizer-sized helpings of each other, locked into one of the showers in the Spa pool’s changeroom, and after that she was stuck to Zeb like a wet leaf. As he was to her, she added. They couldn’t get enough of each other.
And then, after her Spa sessions were over and she was back at her so-called home, she’d slip out of the Compound on one pretext or another — shopping errands, mostly, the things you could buy in the Compound were so predictable — and they’d met secretly in