“Go ahead, please,” he said, and she read a line or two in a throaty voice before she began to laugh. It was a giggle, really, a sound only Annie Chase could make, and its rippling, ringing tone was a surprise given the huskiness of her voice. Everyone in the theater turned to look at her, their own faces slowly breaking into grins. Paul smiled himself. He glanced at Harry, who was nearly laughing.

“Do you want to try that again, Miss Chase?”

“Sure.” She read again, this time making it nearly to the end of her soliloquy before the giggles got her, and although she seemed like a young girl clearly out of control, and although the reading itself had not been anything outstanding, Paul was not surprised when Harry cast her in the role. Neither was he displeased.

“She’ll grab the audience,” Harry said, speaking to Paul as though he were a colleague. “She’ll grab them and she won’t let go. We just have to get her—and that hair—under a little bit of control without taking the life out of her.”

Harry needn’t have worried about that. It was impossible to sap the life out of Annie Chase. She sparkled, she bubbled, she drew people to her like a minstrel on a busy street.

He fell in love on that stage at Boston College. Annie came late to rehearsals and no one seemed to mind. It was as if they were all waiting, holding their breath for her arrival, letting the smiles spread across their faces when she finally bounded onto the stage.

He had to kiss her. It was in the script, and for several nights before the first time, he lay awake imagining that kiss. He wished he didn’t have to do it in front of Harry Saunders and the rest of the cast. He wanted to kiss her in private.

When the afternoon of the kiss finally arrived, he made it quick and light.

“Again,” Harry said from the front row. “Longer this time, Macelli.”

He kissed her longer, trying to keep his wits about him, and when he pulled away from her she was grinning.

“You’re not supposed to smile, Annie,” Harry said. “You’re supposed to look seductive.”

She giggled. “Sorry.”

“You two better practice on your own till you get it right.” Harry gave Paul a knowing nod.

So they practiced. They met in his dorm room or hers, reading their lines, working up to the kiss and away from it, the rest of their lines anticlimactic. When they had finished rehearsing for the day, he would read her his poetry if they were in his room, or look at the jewelry she was making if they were in hers. She’d form gold and silver into intricate shapes for earrings and pendants and bracelets. He loved watching her work. She’d tie her hair back in a leather strap which was rarely up to the task, and her long red tresses would spill out bit by bit as she worked with the glittering metal.

Paul felt the addiction taking hold of him. He’d known her for just a few weeks, but she was constantly on his mind. He’d call her, ostensibly to read through their lines, but they wound up talking about other things, and he treasured every word he got from her, playing their conversations over and over again in his mind as he lay in bed.

Then the gifts began. On opening night, she surprised him with a gold bracelet she’d made for him. The following day, he found a basket of pine cones outside his door, and the day after that, she arrived in his room carrying a macramé belt.

“I stayed up all night making this for you,” she said.

She pulled the belt he was wearing out of the loops of his jeans and began fitting the new belt through. It was slightly too wide, and the pressure of her fingers as she worked with the belt made him hard in an instant. He turned away from her, embarrassed.

She looked up at him from her seat on his bed.

“Paul,” she said, her dark blue eyes big and sad. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want me?”

He looked down at her, startled. “I…yes. But I didn’t think you…”

She groaned, curling her fingers into the pockets of his jeans. “God, Paul, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to make you fall in love with me.”

“I’ve been in love with you for weeks,” he said. “Here. I can prove it.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and handed her a poem, one of many he’d written about her in the past few weeks. It made her cry.

She stood up to kiss him, a far longer, far steamier kiss than the one they’d shared on stage. Then she walked over to his door and turned the lock. He felt his knees start to buckle and wondered how he would get through this. “I’ve never made love before,” he admitted, leaning awkwardly against his desk. He’d had a number of girlfriends in high school, two in particular, who were drawn to his sensitivity and his poems, but he was still very much a virgin.

Annie, however, was not.

She smiled. “So that’s it,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Well, I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

Her words shocked him at first. Disappointed him. But then he felt relieved, because as she began kissing him, touching him, it was quickly obvious that she did indeed know what she was doing.

“You are to do absolutely nothing,” she said. She undressed him to his boxer shorts and rolled him onto his stomach. Then she straddled him and began a long, deep massage, her hands soft and cool at first, heating up as she worked them over his skin. She rolled him onto his back and took off her T-shirt and bra. Paul reached up to touch the creamy white skin of her breasts, but she caught his hand and set it back down at his side.

“You may look but you may not touch,” she said. “I told you, you have to just lie here. Tonight is entirely for you.”

She made love to him the way she did everything in her life—generously, putting his pleasure ahead of her own.

In the weeks that followed, he realized that she could give endlessly, but she could not take. When he’d try to touch her during their lovemaking, she’d brush his hand away. “You don’t need to do that,” she’d say, and he soon realized that she meant it, that she’d be overcome with discomfort, thrown completely out of equilibrium, when he tried to turn the tables and give to her, in bed or out.

He bought her flowers once, for no particular reason, and her smile faded when he gave them to her. “These are way too pretty for me,” she said, her cheeks crimson. Later that day, she gave the roses to another girl in the dorm who had admired them.

He bought her a scarf for her birthday, and the next day she took it back, slipping the twelve dollar refund into the pocket of his jeans. “Don’t spend your money on me,” she said, and she would not listen to his protests. Yet her gifts to him kept coming, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable accepting them.

One day he and Annie were eating lunch in the cafeteria when they were joined by a pretty brunette Annie had known in elementary school. “You were the nicest girl at Egan Day School,” she said to Annie. Then she turned to Paul. “She was by far the most popular kid in the entire school. She was one of those girls you wanted to hate because she was so popular that she left no room at all for the competition, but she was so nice you just couldn’t help but like her.”

That night Annie lay next to him in his bed and told him how she had earned her popularity. “I have an enormous allowance,” she said, her voice oddly subdued, almost flat. “I bought the other kids candy and toys. It worked.”

He pulled her closer. “Didn’t you think you were likable just as you were?”

“No. I thought I was an ugly little girl with terrible red hair. My mother fussed with my hair every morning, and she’d say how horrible it was, how bad I looked. I’d end up crying practically every day on my way to school.”

“You’re so beautiful. How could she do that to you?”

“Oh, well.” Annie swept her arm through the air. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. She just…I guess she has her own problems. Anyhow, I really panicked when I got to high school and there were zillions of new kids to meet. I knew candy and toys weren’t going to work anymore. I had to find some other way to get people to like me.”

“Did you find a way?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I found a way to get the boys to like me, anyhow.”

“Oh, Annie.”

“Don’t hate me.”

He stroked her cheek. “I love you. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve got me.”

“I know.” She snuggled close. “Hold me tighter, Paul.”

He did, loving that she would confide in him, and he thought the time was right to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the first time they’d made love.

“Something bothers me, Annie,” he said. “Do you ever come when we’re making love?”

He felt her shrug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content just to be close to you and see you enjoying yourself.”

He was disappointed. Embarrassed. “I must be doing something wrong.”

“It’s not you, Paul. I never have.”

He leaned away so that he could look at her. “You’ve made love since you were fifteen and you’ve never…?”

“I truly don’t care. It’s never been important to me. I’d see a guy and want to hold him, to feel good that way, warm and loved. If sex was what I had to do to get that, so be it.”

He pulled her close again. “If you really want to make me happy, Annie, then let me make you feel good for a change.”

“You do,” she said. “You make me feel wonderful.”

“You know what I mean.”

She shrank away from him. “I figure it must not be possible for me,” she said. “I think it would have happened by now.”

He was unwilling to talk to his friends about something so personal, so he spent the next afternoon in the library hunting for a solution to Annie’s dilemma. He found a book filled with advice and illustrations which he couldn’t bring himself to check out from the wizened old gentleman behind the desk. So he sat in a secluded corner and read it, from cover to cover.