She made a sound that was not refusal and was not enthusiasm and was the specific, involuntary sound of a woman feeling herself opened by someone else's decision.
He looked at what was between them.
At the white panty, the dark hair pressing through it, the string cut pulled deep where her body had been generating heat for the past hour.
He looked at her face.
The embarrassment on it. The ceiling she was studying with great intensity.
He unbuttoned his shirt.
Slowly. The top button first. Then the second. The third.
He stopped at halfway.
Reached for the salad.
She turned her head.
Watched him take an apple from the fruit arrangement beside the salad bowl — green, small, the kind of apple that is sweet rather than sharp — and hold it between two fingers.
He looked at her chest.
At the specific, flat landscape of her sternum between her breasts, the bra's center panel resting there, the full weight of her breasts on either side.
