"He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the knife." She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he'd given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms. "I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? 'If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.' I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom. "Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings. "And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then, standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at the blood crusted on his face." Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. "I almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He liked it when I... rode... his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second. "Only for a second. "And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that made him angry. So I left. "Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?" she said, and flapped her wings lazily. She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with yellows and umbers. He did, but he didn't. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he'd glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling. "I don't think I do," he said at last. "I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later." She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple. "Will you sit with me?" she said. He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness. She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover's arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt. "Alan?" she murmured into his chest.