Two lovers in bed, laughing, feeling their way through morning. It is not their first time, and the details are unlikely to bore a permanent home in their memories. But it is close enough that the process is of confounding discovery, hesitation, the fleeting pleasure of synchronization.

He is a university student, a classics major, and he sometimes reads to her in Latin, as a joke, because he adores the enthralled way she watches. She is a student in a local secondary school, sixteen and very close to beautiful. In three months, she‘ll walk from her house and men will be unable to look away from her. But for these next weeks, she can move about surreptitiously. She thinks she is falling in love, and he is certain he is not. In an hour, they will both be about the city, into separate days which fall away from them in luminous, strangely enraptured hours so that the autumnal city seems flecked in gold.

In six months, they will be nothing to the other. But for the time, ripe fall light is pouring into his apartment and the window is open so the sounds of the city pandiculating lope casually, and inertly, around their bodies. They are naked and sweating despite the air being sharp, portending winter’s harshness.

They are not yet full of the uncertainties that will dog them their whole lives, in unexpected moments of remembrance: did she find him satisfactory, or was she blinded by inexperience? did he ever feel a deeper affection for her, an equal share of sorts, or did he always regard her lightly, almost as a child that he might break if he were too hard with her?

“No, no,” she says, beginning to assert herself. “Slower.”