it on top of his backpack, out of range of the cold water that is puddling around them on the planks, dripping.
The Velcro of his shorts rips as he opens them; those perfect diagonal muscles at his waist create an arrow: Go south. Dan has only to put his legs together for his shorts to drop down his straight hips.
Once, in their first year of dating, when Dr. Pinter flew Chloe home from Tarifa for Christmas, she had crept into her father’s attic library, pulled his Gray’s Anatomy from the shelves under the eaves, and studied the muscular man. What was the name of the part she missed most about Dan? She puzzled over the drawing—was it the iliopsoas, the top of his iliac crest, or the bottom of his rectus abdominus that made up the perfect angled shelf of muscles at the top of his hips? Perhaps it was not a muscle after all, but the inguinal ligament? Without Dan there to compare with the text, it was impossible to tell. To cover her bases, she had sent Dan this brief e-mail from her father’s computer:
I miss your iliopsoas and rectus abdominus. XO Chloe
The e-mail that he sent back from the Internet café, which her father printed out and left on her Amish-quilted bed, read:
I don’t know what that means, but I miss your tits and ass. Come back!
Dan
NOW DAN STANDS IN front of her in the periwinkle twilight, a form to be sculpted, to be worshipped, hands casually at his sides, as the icy hose runs in hers.
“Your turn,” he says again, this time with the Abercrombie and Fitch model half-smile.
Chloe glances toward the main house—through the open lanai, just a few feet away, she can hear kitchen sounds, the clank of a drawer being opened, a pot being placed over flame. Anyone could see them.
“Do something for me?” Dan smiles.
“Anything,” she says, and she means it. This day, other than her windsurfing lesson, has been magic. Dan is back.
“Take your clothes off.” Dan throws down the gauntlet.
Chloe drops the hose, peels off her cold wet T-shirt, her silver bikini top, shimmies out of her shorts and bottoms.
Dan swallows. “Let’s go.” He turns off the spigot, and they run the length of the narrow catwalk, Dan’s white butt cheeks winking in the light from the main house windows as they dash past, Chloe’s hands cupping her bare breasts.
Dan pulls the tree-house door closed behind them and jerks back the blankets, diving under the covers. Shivering, Chloe follows.
“Here—” He tugs the blankets up to her neck. He runs his hands, jagged windsurfing calluses at the crest of his palms, over her body to create heat. “You’re freezing.”
Under the shimmering white mosquito netting, the woven cotton blanket and faded quilt, her chattering teeth still. Dan takes her face in his hands.
“Better?” he asks, and she nods.
“Good. I want you to be good. To be happy, here.”
“I am,” Chloe says, lying only a little. There are so many layers, implications, in this spare conversation of fragments.
“So I was thinking, while I was on the beach,” she begins. “When I get back, about making a proposal to Judith. See if she’d be interested in me running a domestic program out of Maui, a branch of the agency.”
“Really?” Dan smiles at her, cupping her elbows in his palms like they are something so precious, the eggs of a rare bird. He kisses her cheeks. “That’d be great. Or when things really take off with the kiteboarding thing, you can run the shop part-time too.”
“I’d have to stay in Portland through the spring, see out a few adoptions, train a replacement.”
“No worries. That would give me time to get things set up here too, no distractions.” Dan’s kisses move from her cheeks to her throat.
“It might take me a while to get our house emptied, a sublessor,” she says, and the words fall like litter around them, tumbling off the bed to the floor, but really, which does she want more?
IN THE MORNING, CHLOE wakes to the sound of her cell phone ringing. It takes a moment to orient herself to the tree house, an azure anole scampering across the magical mosquito netting above them.
“Hello?” she whispers so as not to wake Dan. It is Beverly, from work.
“Your birth mother Heather just went into labor. She says you’re on her birth plan as her labor coach.”
“I’m her backup, if her mom can’t.” Chloe is already out of bed, throwing clothes in her rolling suitcase.