When she knocked, it dawned on him that it was only the third time he’d been alone with her. It seemed he’d known her much longer. It had, in fact, only been a few weeks. They didn’t speak; they kissed. Maybe it was all the fear and the tension, but he felt that he’d never been more excited or more in need of a woman’s touch. You want to possess Beatrice. She’d been on his mind constantly since the moment he’d left her at the lake.

He held her tightly, felt her sweaty skin slip to the grab of his hands. He kissed her neck and tasted salt. He started to speak, but she didn’t let him. She covered his mouth with a kiss. He saw her tennis racket’s black case drop at her feet. He kicked it away from her, and reached under her blouse.

She seemed to come completely unglued, as if she’d not been fondled or kissed in years. As if he were shocking her body with his hand. He felt her ass move herky-jerky under his palm.

“I thought about you all last night,” she whispered. There were noises outside the door. Men’s husky voices. “I kept waking up and thinking how much I needed you.” He felt her kissing his hand as he looked into the hotel room. He stopped for a second. He heard the voices pass in the corridor outside. She dropped to her knees and undid his pants. He heard the jingle of his belt buckle. “I dreamt I’d been doing this to you.” He felt his pants come down, the awkwardness of it. Her hand on him there suddenly.

“Are you afraid of him? Afraid it’s Carlos?” she asked, looking up at him, her face still flushed. She pulled her blouse off and looked at him, her expression somehow managing to be angelic, her eyes two jolts of blue. She seemed so out of place here in the tropics, her white skin, her English girl’s voice. She began to fondle him as he listened to the voices of the men outside the door. He looked down and watched her. It was like a dream, better than a dream, but with the extra intensity of a dream. She stroked him. He became erect. He heard her laugh and then the sound of that kind of lovemaking. He wanted to stop her and kiss her, but he didn’t. The voices outside got louder, very masculine voices coming back towards them. Suddenly laughing too, then they stopped, and it was very quiet again.

He suddenly felt the heat and the country in the room. No rain, his mind said. He’d been covering the drought that week in the Petén. He closed his eyes and saw the empty roadway in the jungle, the broken corn withered and blown down.

“Oh god, fuck.” He said it without thinking. She began to move his hips with her hands. The word lost came to him, with the vision of the road in the jungle as he watched Beatrice’s face. She stopped, looked up at him, and smiled. There was something so extremely intimate about the way she was looking at him. He was embarrassed. It was as if she weren’t the woman he thought she was. She was losing herself too, he realized. She was losing herself in the sex and the fear of what they were doing.

“Are you frightened?” she asked again. She had a look, happy, excited too. He was sweating now. He could feel the sweat trickling down his armpits. (He’d forgotten to have the bellboy turn on the air conditioning.) The men outside in the corridor started to move away from the door. He heard a cell phone ring and someone out there answer. Who were they?

“Are you?” she asked. He couldn’t speak. “I love to see you like this,” she said. “I do, but I could stop if you’re afraid.” She was teasing him, he realized.

“No,” he managed to say. He tried not to sound stupid. But it sounded stupid, as if he were a high school boy. He was too excited to joke. He just wanted her to keep doing it, and he wanted to watch her do it.

“No what?” she said, her voice garbled.

“No…I’m not frightened,” he said, desperate for her to go on. They both started to laugh. She began again. He wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into, but he couldn’t stop or think. Nothing about her let him think straight, nothing. The way she made love, the way she looked, the way she moved. She had a regal, efficient, animal quality. The way she spoke English. The way she called him and the way she sounded on the phone when she called him. It felt as if his erection started all the way back in the middle of his head.

He looked down at her. Female, crystalline pure, somehow all pure blonde power refined down to this girl/woman thing giving him a blowjob on the floor of this hotel room at three in the afternoon in an antique city.

He wanted to come now, but didn’t want to come. Each time they met he was lost in a slightly new way. He’d never been lost psychologically like this, unbalanced, and it was getting worse. God I want to come. He was unable to see things the way they should be seen, he knew that. He was on this boat moving away from the dock of rationality, and he was glad of it. I’ve always been in control. I’d come to Guatemala to lose myself in that detached way, but I’d stayed in control all the while. Until now. I was the most in-control person you could imagine. I want to come. But she’d made him cede control.

Even today. He’d left work. He’d driven to Antigua when he knew he shouldn’t have. He’d called her cell phone to see if she’d arrived at the hotel. He’d spoken to her on the tennis court. All these things he knew he shouldn’t do, but did anyway. Then he was leaning against the wall on the two lane jungle/sex road, trying to hold back from giving longer thrusts in the warm room. Her mouth warm. She stopped and stroked him.

“I’m going to come,” he said. Please. Did she ask him if he was afraid again? He started to shudder, the climax starting from the middle of his head going down his throat, down to his navel, his hips. He heard himself cry out. Her blue eyes looked up at him, bemused. The sudden silence of the darkened room in the aftermath of sexual gratification, their hands clutching each other. He didn’t even realize he’d been holding her hand so tightly until he finally let it go. He’d gone somewhere very far away and come back. She had possessed him completely. She owned him. She wiped her face, grinning at him.

“He may kill us both,” she said. “We can’t really be safe. That’s what I’ve decided. We can’t be. He knows too many people. Where could we really go? I don’t care—”

She was right, of course. Carlos would find out. How could he not find out? “Make love to me,” she said. And he would kill them, he decided, falling down beside her. He had never felt so free as at that moment, holding her, feeling her body as he laid her down on the carpet and moved her legs apart, pulling her panties down, kissing her there, feeling the sun between her legs.

“I didn’t care, darling,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t care.” She picked up her hips and pushed.

He’d told the desk clerk that he would bring his passport down later. Of course he couldn’t, he thought, picking up his tie. Why should he cooperate with any of the systems? He felt outside all systems now. He had to protect them.

They were getting dressed. Beatrice was in the bathroom, the door open. He felt strangely alive, as if he could walk through walls. She’d given him a kind of bizarre strength. He decided, walking to the mirror, that he would find the Red Jaguar and take her away from Carlos. He could do it. He would find the Red Jaguar if it killed him. He had to, now. He had to have money to get her away from this place.

“He bought it for me,” she said, stepping out of the bathroom. “I own it. The club.” Her hair was wet. It had turned honey-colored again.

He wanted to know. He wanted to know why her husband would let her carry on the way she did, so he’d asked her.

“Yes, but I still don’t understand. Doesn’t he mind you being there?”

“Why do you have to understand?” she said. “It’s between him and me.” She said it in that very proper-sounding English manner/tone she could muster, which could freeze boiling water. She was just in her bra. She leaned forward and pulled on her panties, moving her hips.