“A three,” I said.

He raised a cocky brow and plucked one out of his hand. “Here you go.”

“Thank you.” Then I winced. Since we’d agreed not to have double turns, even if we got a matched card from our opponent, it was already his turn again.

“Ten,” he said.

I exhaled and handed my ten of hearts over. “Okay, Brent, give me a king.”

“No king. Sorry, sugarplum.” He shook his head with feigned sadness. “Go fish.”

I blindly grabbed a card, then pointed my index finger at him. “And I want the jeans, too.”

A laugh erupted from him. “Okay. Now you’re getting into the spirit of things.” Then he very deliberately unfastened his belt, his eyes never leaving my face, and he slid them off, taking the right sneaker with them. He tossed the jeans over to me and retied his remaining sneaker as I watched. The distorted shape of his white briefs boasted full arousal.

I felt the room temperature spike. Boy, that sauna was really working.

“My turn, Ellie.” His voice was even lower now and even more seductive. I felt a chill of excitement despite the heat. “Do you have a five for me?”

“No,” I whispered.

He paused, waiting.

“Go fish,” I said finally.

He grabbed a card from the pile and winked. “Bra.”

My jaw dropped. “I — uh — ”

“Don’t back out on me now.”

“Umm…” Oh, what the hell. I shrugged and unhooked the back clasp. So much for full coverage.

“I’ll take that,” he whispered.

I handed the bra to him and crossed my arms.

“No fair.”

“Tough,” I said.

“Your turn,” he reminded me.

“Yeah. That’s right. And I want an ace.” The kind of ace that would get him back good.

He shook his head. “No ace, baby doll. You know what to do.” His grinned dared me. “Go fish.”

I drew a card, leaned toward him and said, “Your briefs, please. Now.”

His look was jubilant, not embarrassed. Brent knew what he was doing. He pulled the briefs off and dangled them on his finger. I, of course, wasn’t really focused on the underwear. Brent had been fortunate in the endowment department, and it was a pleasure to observe the length and firmness of him. So much so that I’d forgotten to keep my arms crossed.

“Finish the game?” he asked, his tone amused.

“S-Sure.”

“A nine, then.”

I didn’t bother looking down at my hand. I knew I didn’t have it. “Go fish.”

He put his cards on the tile floor. “I want the rest of your clothing.”

“Okay,” I heard myself say. “Likewise.”

We shucked whatever we were still wearing, and Brent swept the cards aside. He pressed his body against mine and his lips swooped in to taste my mouth. To consume it.

I felt like a kid sneaking chocolate bars on Halloween night. How after a busy evening of trick-or-treating, when we’d already eaten our allotment of sweets, I’d tiptoe out of bed and into the kitchen, find my stash and secretly devour another Snickers or Milky Way. It was bad for me. I knew I didn’t need it. It kind of made my stomach roil. But the temptation was too strong for me to ignore. Brent Sullivan was just like that candy.

“I want you,” he whispered. “I’m crazy about you. Be my girlfriend, Ellie.”

I nodded and hoped, rather than believed, he was sincere in his intentions.

He didn’t waste time trying to convince me further with words after that. He just used his hands and his mouth and his hips and his…well, let’s just say that Brent had come prepared for safe sex, and what followed wasn’t at all mediocre. My body was euphoric. My heart less so.

Brent nibbled on my neck in that rare, tranquil moment of afterglow. “We’ve gotta return the key by midnight,” he said between nips. “That gives us only another fifteen, twenty minutes. Anything special you wanna do?”

“Can we just talk?”

He shrugged and withdrew his teeth from my neck. “Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

“Our relationship.”

His eyes grew wide, but he glanced away — to keep me from reading his expression, I figured.

I sat up.

“Yeah?” he said.

I picked through the clothes until I found my bra and panties. I slipped those back on, fast. “So, when you said you wanted me to be your girlfriend, did you mean just for tonight? Or were you thinking longer term? Like that we’d be, you know, exclusively dating now?”

He met my eye and beamed a bright smile at me. “The second option, Ellie.”

Thank God.

“Oh, fine,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I was just checking.”

“I don’t hide out in the sauna with just anyone. I really, really like you.” He paused and his look turned serious. “You feel that way about me, too, right? You’re not just using me to get your jollies, are you, El?”

“Of course not. You’re smart and funny and very, very sexy. I really like you, too.”

He exhaled heavily. “Well, that’s a relief. I don’t wanna play those kind of games. You know, where one person is in it only for the sex. Somebody always gets hurt then.”

I nodded, seeing new depths in this guy that I’d missed during our bantering sessions at the front desk. My heart started to relax a little and marriage, suddenly, didn’t seem quite so much of a long shot. I mean, there we were — both twenty-two — legal and nearly self-supporting adults. Within a year and a half we’d be all set to live responsible, grown-up lives. We could realistically get married within a few weeks of grad school graduation. In a matter of seconds, I had our lives planned out until retirement.

Brent gave me an affectionate peck on the cheek. “Yeah, let’s be exclusive,” he said, almost to himself. Then, apparently deciding to go commando, he zipped up his jeans and expertly tucked his white briefs into his waistband. He covered it up with his jersey and slipped on his sneakers. “I’m ready to get outta here whenever you are.”

I finished getting dressed and we left the sauna holding hands and grinning at each other.

I thought it was the start of a beautiful relationship.

As usual, I thought wrong.

With the exception of enjoying a couple blissful months of hot sex, life went on much as it always had.

In the light of day, and with my full conscious mind open to her again, Jane, of course, tried to advise me.

She cautioned, There is, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.

She counseled, Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason.

She said, hopefully, You are too sensible a girl to fall in love merely because you are warned against it.

But I wasn’t sensible. I was a fool. And I let her words of wisdom float in and out of my lust-crazed brain, until one afternoon when I went to visit my friend Erica in another dorm.

Erica was an undergrad, a senior, but only a year younger than me and in one of the lit classes that could be taken by both grads and undergrads.

Like me, she was an English geek.

Unlike me, she’d set her sights on a somewhat more illustrious career path than that of a high-school librarian. She wanted to become a famous poet and — for income until the fame kicked in — a professor at a Big Ten university. When we got together we liked to talk Classics.

That day, with the help of passages from a variety of mournful poets, we were discussing her feelings toward her high-school boyfriend Dylan, who died in a tragic car accident back then.

“I don’t think it’s wrong for those memories to dim, Erica. I doubt Dylan would want you to stop living. To still be thinking only of him.”

“I know he wouldn’t. But I feel odd about letting go completely. It’s as though I’m losing a sensitivity I’d had. I’m afraid if I really put my love for Dylan in the past, then I’m not feeling enough somehow. That a real poet would never recover. Do you know what I mean?” She squinted at me.

I squinted back and nodded. “I think so. That someone else might think you don’t have the heart of a poet or that you’re incapable of really getting literature if you move on from this tragedy that shaped your youth.”

“Yes!” She paced the dorm-room floor. “And that’s a stupid, selfish motive, I know.” She paused. “Do you think I’m repressing things?”

At this I laughed. “Nobody I know dissects thoughts and emotions like you do. If you’re suddenly repressing your grief, you’d need someone a whole lot more skilled in psychotherapy than I am to figure it out. I think maybe you’re just finally healing.”

“But so soon?”

“Soon? It’s been six years.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah.”

As my friend took this in, I thought about what I’d lost in high school. True, not a literal death, but the demise of an innocence, a hopefulness. And, yeah, my virginity, too, but who was counting?

Okay, so it was clichéd.

All of it.

I wasn’t a completely unaware idiot despite this latest lapse into melodrama. But — I had to say it — being with Brent, despite Jane’s disapproval, was bringing me back to life.

“Did you ever read — ” Erica said as she riffled through one of her lit texts. Most of our conversations began with that phrase. “Oh. Here it is. This passage by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?” She handed me the book, and I’d just begun skimming the lines she pointed to, when Erica’s door banged open and her roommate waltzed in.

Disappointment surged through me. “Hey, Rochelle, how are you?” I said, striving for friendly but detached. I hoped the dopey senior would grab a granola bar and leave again, but she dropped down beside us and exhaled breathily.