Only the moon is touching them now. Someone's dog barks. Then nothing. Maybe some quick animal cutting through the night behind someone's house.
Everything is dark but the skin of the pond and their skin, their shapes highlighted in pale gold, as if the moon were sculpting them into being, as if they were brand new creatures born with invented memories of each other.
"What if all our memories were false?" he says.
He's kneeling between her widely planted feet, spine straight, his own knees parted as he slowly slips his hand back and forth along the swollen shaft between his legs.
Her hands rest on her knees like they'd spring shut if she let them go. Breasts rise and fall with breath just shy of heaving.
"If you remember it, it's real," she says. "If you remember me, I'm real."
He takes it in. The sound of her voice and the rolling shapes that taper and converge across the terrain of her body. His eyes settle on the diminutive pout of her hairless pussy. Even half in shadow it's a delicate collision of tiny perfections. The scent of her strain rises into his skull.
"No. I don't know," he says. "I saw this movie once where this guy wakes up with a different wife and kids. They planted memories in his head of their lives ... like everything was business as usual. The kids called him Dad and the wife called him Darling. He knew their birthdays and middle names. He knew where the garden tools were stashed. But something was off."
He stops talking and watches her watching his face. Waiting to hear what else. His hand is still moving along his cock as he works to keep the motion of his arm a secret. His mind and body are in two different rooms.
"What happened in the end?"
"He found his way home. But all this stuff blew up along the way."
Her lips curl into half a smile. It does this thing to her cheekbones that make him want to be inside her. His life hangs in a tortuous suspension of desire.
"They always gotta blow stuff up," she says.
"Oh yeah."
His eyes drift back to her pussy. He backs up from the edge of the bed and stands.
"Can you move to face the window?"
Her face registers nothing. She simply moves, angling herself sideways across the bed into the same position, but the moon lighting her pussy the way he wants it. She is all the offering she needs to make.
Now her slit is more or less visible and he backs toward the wall beside the window. His hand is back at his cock again.
"Jesus. I'd blow stuff up, too. If it were you."
"You're just saying that because your dick is hard.
"No. My dick is hard because I'm saying it. There's a difference."
"No stroking," she says.
"You promised," she says.
