A squirming purple bunny in his long, elegant fingers. He looked up at her, astonished. ‘How did you do that?’ he demanded.

The room was slowly filling with purple mist, and she wondered whether it could escape through the cracks in the ill-fitting windows. Even if it could she didn’t need to worry. It was late – no one would be around to notice puffs of purple mist drifting from their unremarkable little house.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, nervous. ‘I don’t think I could do it again if I tried.’

‘Good,’ he said, setting the bunny down on the counter as it flowed back into the nightgown. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you have hang-ups about sex?’

She could feel the color flood her face, feel the tingling grow stronger in her body. ‘Charles has no complaints,’ she said, defiant.

‘Charles wouldn’t notice.’ Elric dismissed him. ‘I think you need…’ He stopped talking, abruptly, almost as if he’d said too much.

‘What do I need?’ It came out as not much more than a whisper, but it was one of the bravest things she’d ever said.

He stared down at her for a long, thoughtful moment, and she could get lost in his eyes, she thought. He could kiss her again, and wrap her in purple silk, and those long elegant fingers could touch her, soothe her, teach her…

‘You need to sleep,’ he said.

And everything went black.

About the same time that Elric was drawing circles on Lizzie’s floor, Crash was climbing the trellis outside Lizzie’s workroom. The ancient lattice on the closed-in sun porch at the back of the O’Briens’ beat-up little Carpenter Gothic house was as rickety as ever, possibly more rickety than it had been five years earlier, but Mare would be stretched out on the porch roof outside her bedroom window, Crash was sure of it, so he put two Dairy Queen hot fudge sundaes on the low edge of the roof and climbed up the wooden frame, just like old times, holding his breath as he got to the top and the lattice shook harder.

She was there, stretched out on the shingles with her hands behind her head, the cords from her iPod lanyard tangled in her silky hair as her head bobbed to whatever she was listening to, the shadows from the tossing branches making the moonlight dance across her white overalls. Py, her tiger cat, raised his head and fixed him in his yellow gaze as Crash climbed onto the roof. Then Py put his head down on her thigh and watched Crash pick up the sundaes and walk across the roof and sit down beside her. Crash wasn’t sure of his welcome since Mare had said, ‘Tomorrow,’ but there was only so much a man could do when the woman he loved was this close and susceptible to DQ hot fudge.

She rolled her head on her hands as he eased himself down beside her, her eyes pale in the moonlight, almost as pale as her smooth skin, white against her blue-black hair. She pulled the iPod buds from her ears and he heard Kim Richey faintly singing ‘Here I Go Again before she clicked it off and said, ‘Took you long enough,’ and he relaxed and held one of the sundae cups out to her. She sat up and he watched the curves of her body, the plumpness of her breasts and the arch of her back, strong and graceful in everything she did. She was Queen of the Universe, and he wanted her so much he ached with it.

Slow, he thought, and Py raised his head and watched him as if he knew what Crash was thinking.

Well, he was a male cat, he probably did.

She cracked the plastic lid off and said, ‘Spoon?’ and he pulled one out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her and then took the lid off his own cup.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How’s things with the universe?’

‘It’s screwing me over.’ Mare scooped up some ice cream and fudge, and then closed her eyes as if savoring it for a moment before she swallowed.

Crash looked down the front of her overalls while her eyes were closed, all that blue lace and round flesh, the shadow of her cleavage, probably damp with sweat and-

Mare opened her eyes. ‘I asked it for a choice in my life, and it sent me two I can’t take and didn’t offer me the one I need. It’s just cruel.’

‘One of them’s me, right?’ Crash started on his ice cream.

‘Yes.’

‘Why can’t you take me?’

‘I can’t leave Dee and Lizzie.’

Crash almost said, Bring them along, until he remembered Dee hated him. ‘You’re going to have to leave them sometime. You’re not going to live together forever until you rot and die, right?’ What a waste of all that heat and flesh and-

‘It’s complicated,’ Mare said. ‘But basically, I can’t come to Italy with you. I’d have liked it a lot, but I can’t. Sorry.’

Crash nodded, and thought, Maybe. If family was the only thing keeping her back-

It couldn’t be just that. Nobody refused to get married because she couldn’t leave her sisters. It must be something else, the damn secret she could never tell him, the reason he could never stay the night, never climb inside her bedroom. Whatever it was, he didn’t care. He still wasn’t sure how he’d ended up back in Salem’s Fork, but he was growing more and more positive that he wasn’t leaving without Mare.

‘What kind of cat is Py?’ he said, spooning up more ice cream.

‘Tiger cat,’ Mare said.

‘Where’d you get him?’

‘Lizzie found him at the zoo.’

‘You had that cat the whole time I knew you, and I never asked you anything about him,’ Crash said, carefully building his argument, which wasn’t easy with so little blood in his brain.

Mare blinked up at him, beautiful and hot in the moonlight. ‘Well, you know. He’s a cat. You weren’t a cat person.’

‘I’m not a cat person now, but now I want to know because he’s yours. I’ll pay attention this time. Whatever you get from your sisters, whatever you need, I’ll give it to you, I swear. I’ll give you more. You can trust me. You can leave them. I’ll give you what you need.’ I’ll give it to you right now, swear to God.

‘You can’t.’ Mare leaned against his shoulder as she worked on her ice cream, and he closed his eyes because she was finally touching him. ‘You’re a good guy, Crash, the best, but you can’t make this work.’

Oh, yeah, I can. ‘I can make anything work. Wait’ll you see this little town I’m living in. You’d love it there. The whole town comes through the shop sooner or later, all of them, grandmas and little kids, too, everybody, because they all love the bikes because the bikes are so beautiful. Ducatis and Moto Guzzis and-’

Below, someone kicked a motorcycle into gear, and he stopped to listen, and she said, ‘What?’

‘Triumph TR6.’ He listened as the sound faded into the distance. ‘Who do you know has a classic Triumph TR6?’

‘It must have been Danny James,’ she said. ‘Dee’s guy’

‘Dee’s dating? Good for her.’ Maybe Dee would get married. That’d be one down. ‘My mom heard that Lizzie’s engaged to Charles Conway.’

‘That’s off,’ Mare said around her ice cream. ‘He went to Alaska. She has a new guy, though, and I think he’s a keeper’

‘Well, if they’re getting married, you can,’ Crash said, the Voice of Reason.

‘They’re not getting married.’ Mare sighed. ‘So tell me more about the bike business.’

They sat in the moonlight and finished off their ice cream while he told her about the business and the bikes and his partner Leo and Leo’s wife Amelie and their baby and the little house he owned there – ‘Does it have a red tile roof?’ she asked, and when he said, ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Oh,’ and he couldn’t tell if that was good or bad – and the sun and the heat and the thousand things he loved about it, and when he was done, they put their cups down for Py to lick and then sat silent in the moonlight. Beneath them, the roof throbbed as if music were playing below, something with a strong bass, but it was quiet down there, just a silent pulsing with a drift of purple smoke around the windows every now and then that Mare said came up from the river, which didn’t make sense. Crash didn’t care, although the throb under him made it hard to concentrate on Italy and almost impossible not to touch Mare.