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pursue the conversation. He drifted off when they were on the water, his mind going ahead in search of rock or wind.
    They ate on the shore and then walked the edge of the island. In the distance they could hear the bleating of an island ewe, anxiously calling back a wandering lamb. They walked to the top of the hill, past low bushes of sheep laurel, whose brilliant pink flowers looked innocent and enticing. “It’s also called lambkill,” Paul said, poking at a bush with his toe. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt this batch.” Another mother with her two lambs scampered off in front of them.
    “They probably don’t eat it unless there’s nothing else,” Mary said, her eyes straining ahead to pick out the gray sheep from the gray rocks that jutted out of the meadow. At the top of the hill they stood for a minute, looking down on the ocean below. Then Paul lay on his back, and she leaned on one elbow above him. His shirt was open, and she walked her fingers across his chest, lightly like a spider. She kissed the place where his neck hollowed into his shoulder and then ran her fingers around the edge of his mouth.
    “You are erotic,” she said. “You are the last entry on my list.”
    “Sure I am,” he said, lost again in his vision of her past. “Number 27.”
    “227,” she corrected him. “Do you take me for a slacker?”
    He smiled and unbuttoned her blouse. He pulled the sleevescarefully down off her shoulders, and then, impatient, he gave a yank so that the whole thing dangled around her waist. He unfastened her bra and pulled her breasts free.
    “I think I’ll just take you.”
    His own pants were off, and he put his hands under her skirt. She raised her hips, and he pulled the skirt up, a clutter of clothing wrapped around her waist, her top and bottom bare. He put his fingers in his mouth, moistening them with his tongue as she watched him, then he leaned over and kissed her, putting his wet fingers between her legs.
    His lips touched hers, his tongue sliding softly into her mouth so that as she inhaled she breathed him deep down inside her. His tongue in her mouth, the hardness of him pushing in between her legs, the spirit of him sliding deeper and deeper into her life.
    AU THOR’S NO TE
    I’ve read a great many mediocre novels where the author was desperate to present sex in a shocking light—jamming people into clothes closets, conference rooms, and company. Sex in odd places and sex with odd groupings seemed to me to be like aerobics, something people do when the flab sets in. Thinking about it, I decided it was not simply flesh on flesh that awakens desire; it is the pasts that people bring to each other and the hope with which they merge.

LEAPER
By Jenny Diski
    In contrast to the sensuous case of the familiar, presented with such spirited warmth by Susan Dooley, other stories in this book, of which “Leaper” is one, take a look at chance encounters. It is quite clear to me from the many submissions I read, though in itself hardly a new idea, that the element of “unknowingness”—of unfamiliarity with another body or its history—can strongly enhance the erotic quotient of a sexual episode, whether real or imagined. But Jenny Diski and every other writer selected for this collection who has taken the sexy-stranger theme has made it her own.
    Known for her daring, Diski here examines the coming together of two people whose needs and vulnerabilities match up for only a very brief moment.
    H e phoned at completely the wrong time, my lover. “Write me a story. A man and a woman, fucking. Keep it short and dirty.”
    “Fuck you,” I said. “If you want a story, speak to my agent. The going rate is five hundred pounds a thousand words. Ifyou want a fuck, speak to me. The going rate is … what is the going rate?”
    “Do as you’re told,” he said, just the tiniest bit menacing.
    “Fuck you,” I said and put the phone down.
    I’d spent the morning struggling with a