“Isn’t this fun?” Mel yelled.

“Are you going to be able to steer us back to shore?”

“What do you think this is?” He had his hand on the rudder. “C’mon, take the helm for a while.” He pointed out the telltale flag, showed me how to gauge wind direction. I steered watching the tip of the mainsail, and he said, “No, no, keep an eye on the coast. That’s the only way to really tell how you’re doing. Wanna see something cool?” He handed me his sunglasses and then clambered over to the prow. I watched him ease himself over the right pontoon and, leading with his chest, grip onto it with both arms and then both legs, making himself an extension of the boat. The catamaran listed violently and I instinctively leaned back hard, to correct it. The waves washed over Mel’s head, drenching his hair, and he blinked saltwater at me, grinning. The drops made his lashes starry. “Now you try it,” he called.

“Are you crazy?”

“C’mon, darling.”

“No way.”

“I saw those biceps, honey. I know you’re strong enough. I dare you.”

He wriggled back onto the body of the boat and made his way back to the tiller. I gulped a deep breath and went forward and tried to do exactly as he had done. Once I got my arms in the water I was nearly swept away by the force of it, and then and only then did I realize how fast we were actually going. I kept on, sliding inch by inch over the slick surface. I could see the headline in the St. Pete Times: “Ex-Crazy-House Inmate Drowns in Freak Gulf Accident.” There was spray in my mouth, in my eyes. The muscles on the insides of my thighs, my forearms, had a life of their own, they were in a state of permanent contraction.

“You look like a figurehead.”

“I don’t give a shit what I look like.” My Derby Lane cap spun off my head and was lost forever, and then I could feel the knot of hair at my nape loosening. I was damned if I’d let go to do anything about it. “Can you slow this thing down so I can get off?”

I heard him laughing, as if that were the funniest thing I had said so far. “Okay, now one arm and one leg.”

“I’d like to live, if that’s okay with you.”

“Oh, Sal,” he said, still laughing. “Oh, honey.”

The boat guy reneged and charged us the price of a full afternoon.

“What the fuck?” Mel asked him.

“It’s the stannard rate,” the boat guy said, not looking at us. He was chewing gum, a kid, about the same height as Mel but thinner.

“We had an agreement,” Mel said reasonably, but with a trace of threat, a tone I’d noticed that men used often and women almost never.

“You took out a Hobie Cat. That’s thirty-five.”

“You said eighteen, you little prick.”

I was digging in the pocket of my shorts. “Just pay him,” I whispered. “He’s a jerk, but what can we do? We’re not even supposed to be on this beach anyway.” I passed him a ten and at first I thought he was going to bat it away but then, with an effort it seemed, he opened up his fist.

“Thanks, honey.”

The boat guy smirked. Mel threw the money at him.

“You’re still seven dollars short.”

“So sue me.”

As we walked away toward the Don Ce Sar I could hear the boat guy swearing at us and I had to exert pressure on Mel’s arm so he wouldn’t run back and pummel the punk’s head into the sand.

Before we hit the road we stopped at a Dairy Queen and bought synthetic-looking sundaes in plastic cups. I offered Mel a taste of mine, which was chocolate on chocolate. He took a bite from my spoon and winced. “Jesus, that’s sweet.”

“Something I think you might need,” I said. He was still mad at the boat guy.

“I hate that you had to pay.”

“You don’t have to be so macho. You paid for the ice cream.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, sounding crabby, but when I looked at him he was grinning.

It turned out he was staying at a friend of his mother’s, who was away visiting her family up north. Her place was more than an hour away—actually closer to Ft. Myers than to St. Pete. Mel kept punching the radio buttons impatiently. “Christ. What do people listen to here? Isn’t there a college station or something?” Finally we settled on classical: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring, which suited me fine. In fact, I was so warm and relaxed I slept most of the way.

The friend lived in a development of condominiums with an old glassy lagoon out front where canoes and little power boats were moored. It seemed no one was around but us. It was stuffy inside the house, and Mel went around opening windows. “Sorry about the mess. I just dumped my stuff here and headed up to your relatives’. I didn’t even stop to take a shower.”

Sitting on the sofa, we drank the Cokes in glass bottles we’d bought for an unheard-of fifteen cents each from a rattling machine at the gas station down the road. The Cokes were so small that we’d gotten three apiece. Mel propped his bony shins up on the coffee table. His legs were impossibly lean, the mahogany color of sunburned skin beginning to tan, covered with dark hairs, darker than Carey’s. I couldn’t stop staring at them. He had his arm around me and I didn’t dare look at his face: the sharp angles, the narrow chin, the deep-set watchful eyes. A face that was hard to memorize, probably excruciating to draw, because it changed drastically with every passing mood. Of course I knew what was going to happen, had known the moment he got out of the car in my aunt’s driveway.

I felt his fingers tickling the back of my neck, undoing the few bobby pins that were left. My hair fell down in a damp salt-smelling mass, and he pushed it back over my shoulders and away from my face. Then he slipped off my earrings one at a time and studied them cupped in his palm. They were my favorite, silver dangling fans from Carey, each pleat carved with a character in Persian. “Beautiful,” he whispered, and laid them carefully on the coffee table, where they made a sweet little clack.

When he started to kiss me I thought: this is what’s responsible for the propagation of the species, there’s no way in hell of resisting this. He felt for my tongue with his, but slowly, without urgency. Then he stopped, pulled back, looked in my eyes.

“You like that, honey?”

“What do you think?”

“I like to hear it.”

He slid his hand up my T-shirt and encountered my bathing suit, but that didn’t faze him, he didn’t rush, just stroked my nipples through the damp fabric. I shivered, although it was about 110 degrees in there. It had been way too long and I was feeling clumsy, like I might make a mistake, but we proceeded so slowly this was not a possibility. Every time he did anything new he’d ask, “Is this okay?” “Does this feel good, Sally?” It wasn’t only the way his breath smelled, it was his skin, pungent and sweet, still adolescent.

When I reached down to touch him he trapped my wrist against his thigh, the most erotic gesture of the afternoon so far. “No. Not this time.”

I was naked before he was. “You’re lovely,” he said. What did that mean? Was it part of his routine, what he said to all his girls the first time?

His fingertips brushed up on the inside of my thigh and then he slid himself down. I’d heard that there were some men who preferred this beyond all other acts of the flesh, and I was sure Mel was one of them, the way he slipped his hands under my ass and pressed his lips, his tongue to my other mouth with such expertise but also with an unexpected gentleness, almost a politeness. Getting to know you. Carey had done this rarely, and I didn’t know enough to ask.

So much pleasure, like so much pain, is hard to bear. My mind did a little hop-skip, like someone was changing the reels, and I began noticing outside things, like how the couch smelled of decrepit dog, the dust motes swirling like atoms in the tunnel of late-afternoon sun coming in through a small window at the end of the room.