SHE'D LEFT without waking me. Both candelabra were gone. I sat up. My alarm clock was flashing 12:00 so I knew the power was back on, or Whizzer was back and he'd fired up a generator. My wristwatch said 7:15.

I lay back, head full of her, my bed still graced by her. I lifted the covers and let them fall back... loving her smell .... We didn't say a word the whole time she was with me. So powerful, her casting of spell. Talk could've been a clumsy mood breaker, a dropping down to a lower level of communication. Her body said everything. It wasn't making love to a woman, not like with all the others. Gaea took control of me, completely. Orgasm is similar, engaging of primal responses that run their course and you just ride. But it wasn't episodes. It all ran like a river. Calm waters and rapids, waterfalls and eddies, and calm waters, on and on and she's the sea. Again we'd merged spirits, soul to soul. Passion on slow burn, consuming.... And when the candle flames flickered low and we lay bare in their yellow haze, what in the world could be said that wouldn't clunk with anticlimax?

She knows my body better than I do. Erogenous zones, power points, she knows them all and she has magic. She dashed my ignorance of the sheer power of sex. I've seen sex drive people to humiliation and ruin, smoldering paths to destruction. But where it can lift you to....

And the cost? She took from me something essential, leaving an emptiness I couldn't live with. I was afraid of it before, but not any more because it was so simple: I'd have her, no matter what. How I'd work it I wasn't sure. I was willing to take my time, but she'd be mine. I knew that's what she wanted, to be mine. The first time she came to me I sensed she was trying to heal me, to save my life perhaps. I was desperate and she brought me back from the edge. This time I could feel she needed me as much as I needed her.

I got up and opened the curtains. Hailstones dazzled in sunshine. Ice was everywhere, glistening and rotting. Water chuckled in the downspout next to my window. I went over to pick up my pants, and saw wax on the floor. Six little stalagmites grown up from cool marble. I pulled on my pants and fastened my belt. I'd lost weight. I got my pocketknife, and carefully pried each of the wax stalagmites from the floor, then uncorked the empty Malvedos bottle on my dresser and dropped them in one at a time. And I bored a new hole in my belt.