There was a point, Alma remembered, where she was taking her bra off. It must have been right at the start of it. She remembered how light she felt. How freeing it was to know you had nothing to do in the world but what you were told. It was late. He’d had that little dinner party and he told them to stay after, just the two of them. They helped him straighten up. That had to have been where it started. She remembered his couch, sitting on the end of it, Maya on the floor with her hair hanging down. Both of them wine-drunk. Her bra strap coming off, pulling her right tit out, wishing Maya would lift her head back up and look. She felt that proud of herself.

It was hard to keep a timeline straight, but it seemed like things evolved pretty fast after that. Nathan having just started at RISD was in Providence most of the week, and she was alone too much at night and drinking and feeling sorry for herself; and they got into the easy habit, the three of them, of just hanging out together evenings in that too-little-furniture living room of hers. She scarcely had any memory of them there where she and Maya weren’t naked. Not like she’d started going around the house routinely nude or anything. It was just kind of their deal, Drew came over, clothes came off. She couldn’t remember it ever even prompting comment.

They had this shared intellectual crush on him. Drew was a star in their little world, like the graduate equivalent of a high school quarterback. He ran that critical-theory reading group that people, non-members sat in on like it was a seminar. They were just first-years, and it was beyond flattering to think you’d been able to capture his attention. And to know there wasn’t anything sexual about it. In a way their being naked with him was a confirmation of that. It was a spiritual thing, it was about trust and exploration and self-acceptance. He never laid a hand on either of them. He never got naked himself. His modesty gave him almost a kind of priestly aura; it seemed to her like a way of offering them space, like he was keeping clothed precisely so that they wouldn’t have to.

She could hear Drew’s voice saying the phrase ecstatic nakedness in her head. He actually had a lot to say about nakedness at the time. She remembered watching a shaft of late sunlight crawl across that ratty old oval rug Nathan had reclaimed. Chilly, mid-autumn, maybe one of those times Drew came over to make dinner. She was curled up in Maya’s lap on the couch, just letting him discourse. Her hair was longer then. Maya was stroking her fingers through it with one hand while she rested the other on Alma’s thigh. She remembered how small and cozy she felt there, her head on Maya’s shoulder, her breasts against Maya’s breasts, how peaceful it was just to drift in the waning light and not be responsible for anything, not even for listening: trusting whatever of Drew’s talk that needed to stick with her would, whether she paid attention or no.