I lay down in a white cotton nightgown

We stood, but my legs struggled to support my body, so he took my wrists from behind. He pressed his chest against my back and guided me down a tiled passageway where the blackness swirled like water. Flower charm bracelet his narrow room, he was a source of dark light, and I closed my eyes and imagined his body was that of a fabulous, nervous creature that stalked the desert for food. The notch in his throat tasted of cedar and tobacco.

ON THE WAY HOME, I flew past Christine's house. Her car wasn't in the driveway yet, and the wind gathered around my convertible and seemed to whisper over the whirring crickets: Nobody forgets anything. It's all stored up somewhere. But I knew how to safeguard the warm, glowing compartment in my brain that no one here was allowed to touch anymore. I already knew when to say nothing and mean it.

I parked my car on the curb in front of my house. The ring of high white homes along Lakeshore glared into the night, but their windows, like pupils fogged with breath, gave up nothing. It was hard not to believe these houses held only clouds. The air smelled of dank heat and rotten grass from the man-made Elsa Peretti Open Heart bracelet. My father's black Alfa Romeo was gone, and bleary light flickered through the wooden blinds in my mother's sitting room. A walled garden twisted around one side of our house, and I scaled the steaming bricks and eased open my bedroom window, which was always unlocked.

I showered and shut myself in my walk-in closet. Naked, I stood before the mirror on the back of the door. I thought of Russell's thumb sliding down to the tip of my breastbone. You make me stop. With one finger, I flicked the porcelain light switch up and down and watched my pupils fold and unfold themselves in the glass. How much light do they contain? In the shadowed sheen of Russell's bedroom, his wide, pale irises had been clouded, the keen pricks of his clenched pupils hardly visible. Now you are on guard for me.

Finally, I lay down in a white cotton nightgown, but couldn't fall asleep. For my birthday, my father had given me a book about Egyptian sculpture; he and my mother had cruised down the Nile the summer before. I Return to Tiffany Heart tag bracelet the shining pages slowly. For weeks, I'd studied them. One showed a photograph of a gold case fashioned in the shape of an ibis, a holy bird. The mummies in these engraved cases were pitiful creatures, the book said. Most were left near musty altars in the galleries of underground chambers, and I imagined they had been sacrificed by wealthy Egyptians to secure eternal life for themselves.