That night, the windows left open against a rising wave of heat, Emily’s dreams are torn through with images of blood dripping from beneath her nails. It is a slow leak, the blood heavy and thick, smearing her skin and her clothes, the doors, the tarnished silver handle of her spoon. It falls into her soup with heavy plops.

She awakens with a gasp, the sheets wound tight around her restless legs. Beside her, George is asleep. The dark heavy silence of the room rises and falls in the slow steady rhythm of his breath.

Emily’s heart flails against her ribs. It makes a meaty sound in her ears, a desperate knocking. She holds still in the bed and waits for the blood to lull in her veins. She parts her lips, takes deep breaths. When she feels the first teasing brush of sleep, she sits up and disentangles herself from the nest of bedclothes. The air inside the room hangs, drenched in the scents of salt and flowers. She gets up and pushes through it, naked, walking to the window with her skin moist and her hair in tangles, longing for the stillness of the air to break. She leans forward and rests her forearms on the sill. The terracotta roofs doze in the moonlight. The stars look smeared across the sky. The distant sea glitters.

Her bladder grows heavy. She walks on soft feet into the bathroom, dropping down onto the cold porcelain in the dark. The noise of rushing urine disturbs the silence in her mind. Her eyes close. She listens to the stream diminishing, lulled by it, cradled by the emptiness of the room. She starts to doze. The images creep in, soft as transparent wings against the vigilant corners of her consciousness. A pocket dream unfolds, nonsense made up of open water and skipping rope, and the slow shift of her flesh shoots her back up into ragged breath and the dark little bathroom. Thoughts of her dreams drift around in her mind. They’re fuzzy, indistinct, but she remembers the old smell of the blood, its thickness, how dark and viscous it was. Unable to stem its flow, she printed all of her existence with it, her skin, the rocks and the walls. Her shame and her inability to explain was worse than the bandages that soaked through and fell off, the clotting that wouldn’t come. She wandered through the rooms of her life, apologizing to the walls. She bathed herself and watched the ribbons of blood swallowed by the dark mouth of the drain. She found her face cradled in soft petals, her mind obliterated in sweet scent, her sight massaged to sleep by tenderness. She wept, her tears disappearing into the ruffled red mound of a carnation.

Emily pulls a handful of toilet paper off the roll.

She remembers George in the afternoon, a siesta spent engaged in vigorous fucking, the kind punctuated by pulled hair and pain. She rubbed up against his caginess, the slippery sense that something was off and he smothered her skin with his own. He pushed the pleasure up into the roof of her mouth with his body and stunting the words. He held her down, bent her back, inhaled the tremor of her tendons. Wet and raw, he smelled the changing weather of her breath. That white smile had lodged deep inside her. The light of it burrowed down deep into the softest layers, the most fragile, parts that disintegrate beneath the weight of a thought. It was a thorn buried in the tenderness of her lust.

A restless, diaphanous hour of sunlit sleep and he was out of bed, barefoot, prowling through the room. She fought to stay below, to skim along beneath the surface of sleep, but between the heat and the subdued wildness of his energy there was no use. She sat up in bed, wet with sweat, and she watched him as he looked out the windows, pacing from one to the other. He told her that he wanted to move on to Ponta Delgada. Ribeira Grande was too small, certain things would show up against such a provincial background. Ponta Delgada is bigger. There are things there that we can’t get here. It’s on the other side of the island. He looked at her and his eyes cut across her face, grazing like the leading edge of a blade. She shivered, hot and cold at the same time. He moved away from the windows.

Emily said she was tired, that she wanted the still sleep of the land for another night, her secret so deep that she couldn’t reveal it even to herself: a fantasy of eating at Francisco’s and sitting among the tiny fairy lights, shaded from the stars by the fuchsia drift of bougainvillea, her mouth full of something rich and delicious, looking up to see the flower-man, Jason walking by, wearing something like pale khaki trousers and one of the thin cotton shirts for sale in the market, loose and black and thin, falling over him the way night falls over the pale flanks of the desert, making shadows. She would see him, his profile like something weathered out of stone, his blue eyes flashing in her direction.

He would slow down, and his look would be a look to resurrect vague wishes. Then the smile of recognition moving across his face, a reaction of slow popping, sparks flying into the dark air, oh that smile, yes, like sunlight breaking across a virgin field of snow, ivory afloat on shifting red sands, pale flowers opening in the arms of the night. Jason’s smile, unbearable with its dangerous beauty. She would see him and he wouldn’t see her even as he did see her, because in a fantasy nothing is linear, he can be there and not there, smiling at her or not smiling at all, blind to her presence because it feels safe. She can have his awareness, because inside the awareness is something that wakes her blood. In such a fantasy she is free to see the smile that’s just for her. She is free to lift up the corners of time and peek at it. She can do it while digging up the veins of her confusion and scattering them, while blocking out the unfocused sense of violation; she can pull off the wings of his regard and cast them into her secret flame: a candle has been lit inside me, for which the sun is a moth.

Emily said that she was tired. It was the truth. She said she was hungry, and that was also the truth. Quieted by a meal cooked in the hotel kitchen, larded down with the richness of satiety, she reached out and made the noises to show her other hunger, the desire for him.

Her desire is real. Her hunger for George and her hunger for the fantasy are both living, but they are separate. Each dwells inside its own chamber at the center of her quickening heart.

Emily wipes herself. She glances at the paper, still white. She flushes the toilet. The pipes rattle inside the wall. Her mouth is dry, she wants a drink, but when she runs the tapwater it smells hard and full of sulfuric minerals.

In her bag there is a bottle of water. She rinses her hands, wipes them on a worn towel, and moves into the corner of the room.

“What are you doing?”

She squats down and pulls the mouth of the bag apart. “I’m getting something to drink.”

The springs creak. George sighs, his voice husky with sleep. “It’s hot in here.”

Emily twists off the white cap. “Yeah.”

He lifts his head and looks at her. “Any of that water left?”

Clean, tepid water floods her mouth. She swallows. “Yeah.”

“I want to move up the coast in the morning.”

Emily moves to the bed and sinks into her rumpled side of the mattress. Faint moonlight spills through the window and gleams on his sweat. She takes a long drink, handing over the bottle. “I know.”

He takes it from her and sits up. “There’s more to do in Ponta Delgada.” He sips. “I’m bored.”

“It’s a small village.” Emily shrugs. “There’s not much to do here.”

George drinks down the water. He flings the bottle onto the floor and pushes the sheet down around his waist. “First thing in the morning,” he says, settling into the pillow. He closes his eyes. “Be ready.”

Emily watches the wakefulness retreat from his face, relaxing into one wrinkle at a time. “I will.”