Tonight, she’s wearing a sheer emerald green peignoir over a black garter belt and hose and has high freaking heels on. She turns around slowly, to let him enjoy every angle of her, and then he gets up and takes her in his arms. He knows that now she wants him to take over.

He knows you don’t “have sex” with Donna; you make love to her-slowly, carefully, finding each little pleasure spot on her amazing body and lingering there. And she’s a dancer-she wants it to be a dance, so she glides over him with a dancer’s grace and eroticism, using her breasts, her hands, her mouth, her hair on him, undressing him and making him hard. Then he lays her down on the bed and moves down her long frame and pushes up the peignoir, and she’s dotted perfume on her thighs, but she doesn’t need any perfume there, Frank thinks.

He takes his time. There’s no hurry and his own need can wait, wants to wait, because it will be all the better for the waiting.

It’s like the ocean, he thinks later, like a wave coming in and then receding. Again and again, and then building like an ocean swell, thick and heavy and picking up speed. He likes to look at her face when he’s making love to her, likes to see her green eyes brighten and the smile on her elegant lips, and, tonight, hear the sound of the rain pelting the window glass.

They lie there for a long time afterward, listening to the rain.

“That was beautiful,” he says.

“Always.”

“You okay?”

Frank, the working guy, always checking his work.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “You?”

“That was me screaming,” he says.

He’s lying there politely, considerately, but she knows that he’s already restless. It’s fine with her; she’s not that much of a cuddler, and anyway, morning comes early and she sleeps better alone. So she gives the standard cue: “I’m going to wash up a little.”

Which means that he can get dressed while she’s in the bathroom, and when she comes out, they can go through the comfortable ritual: