You were in the trunk while they —”This time, Gentry closed his eyes.“Please. I’m going to have flashbacks. I don’t want flashbacks.”Sophie couldn’t contain their amusement any longer and broke out into laughter.“Odette, you naughty girl!”“I didn’t know he was back there!” She didn’t turn around. Odette didn’t want to see the look on Sophie’s face.“If I did, I wouldn’t have climbed into Keahi’s lap in the first place!”“Okay!,” Gentry said. “I don’t need visuals, either.

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

He had danced with fair maidens before, but Odette was different. She was graceful and beautiful, but there was something in her eyes and in the things she said, an intelligence and a boldness that belied her quiet demeanor.