She kneels straddling his ankles, and he can feel her warmth and slickness as she slides up his shins, slowly working herself over the hump of his knees, along his thighs, up the entire length of his body. Not until she reaches his eyes does he close them. They are still closed when she lies back beside him and whispers, “I want you to carry away the smell of me.” That’s how she says goodbye. Outside, her scent lingers as if it emanates as much from the misty night as from his skin—a scent already a secret, already a chill. He doesn’t look up at the dark window from which, on other nights, she’s watched him, her naked body wound in the drape. Tonight, a fine rain with the glitter of mica has paved the parking lot of the apartment complex where she lives, her mailbox and doorbell under a name other than her own. Above each doorway, the little orange bulbs beneath enameled hoods are blurred. Just last week this watery air would have crystallized into a late, last blizzard. Wet, weighty flakes would have coated the haloed orange lamps, the parked cars and empty streets in a luminescent white. Just weeks ago, he was content to be immersed in winter, still the man he appeared to be, a man with his mind on weather as he waded out at night away from the bluish eye of a TV, carrying a sack of garbage through the lucid cold toward a trash can half-buried in a snow bank. He hadn’t met her yet. Vestal Review #34 24 Headlights smoke. He drives surrounded by her scent, back toward the clarity of an unlit house still miles away, where a prior life waits patiently for his presence like a body awaiting its shadow, like a dream awaiting a dreamer, like a pew awaiting a penitent. Fog drifts across the lake highway. Wipers can’t sweep it aside. He wishes that he could vanish into it like red taillights.