“There's some stuff of yours on a shelf in there. I put it away in a box. You can take it with you tomorrow.”

Ruth watched me as I undressed and put on the extra robe. I was trying to be casual about it, but I kept remembering that she didn't come and touch me and interfere. I was conscious of my prick dangling down there, and I was conscious of my hairiness, and I put on the robe as quickly as I could. Ruth didn't say anything. She just watched me, and when I had the robe on and went to the closet to hang up my things she started to take her own clothes off. They were very wet, and everything clung to her so even when she had her slip on I could see almost every line of her body. I gave her a towel, and I should have gotten out of the room while I was still able to control what I was doing, but for some reason I didn't. I stayed and watched her rubbing her skin pink.

She looked just the same; her body seemingly slim, but with wide hips and heavy tits that jiggled with her ass when she walked or when she moved suddenly; her belly dark with a streak of hair down through the center of it. I looked at her cunt and the black froth of hair that grew around it. She was just the same, all as I remembered her. She looked up and saw me looking at her.

“Do you remember the first time I was here?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I wasn't a bit afraid. I was a virgin, too. But it was only afterward I was afraid. After you had fucked me and I forgot what it was going to do for my poetry and my soul and found out what a prick meant. Then, after a while, I was not afraid any more. And now I'm afraid again.”

There didn't seem to be any answer. Perhaps she didn't expect any. She lifted the towel above her head to dry her hair, and the movement pulled her tits up, making them flatter. They were colored from being rubbed with the towel, and the nipples stood out sharp and straight. She flung her hair back over her shoulders with a quick motion of her head, and then she hung up the towel. She stood in front of the bureau combing her hair with my comb, and I could remember a hundred times before when it had been just like that, with the two of us there, and everything almost the same as it was just then. She hadn't been away very long. Two months. Two thousand years.