'Where would you take me?'
'On a cruise in a bathtub!' I said. 'A huge bathtub.'
'And would Siggy come with us?' said Gallen.
'Well,' I said, 'I don't know how to drive the motorcycle.'
'Here,' she said. 'See my neck? What you did is going away.'
But it was getting too dark to see; I turned her shoulders and pulled her back against me. Oh, she never would give me all her weight; a part of her sat up away from me when I kissed her.
'You'll make it come back, Graff.'
'Would you show me how your hair is when it's down and loose.' I said.
And she reached up to uncoil her braid; under my fingers I felt the long, hard line of her collarbones, squared up to her shoulders when she raised her arms.
'What a lot of bones you have, Gallen,' I said.
She brought her braid over her shoulder and undid the end knot. Then she tugged apart the thick-wound bands of her hair, combing her fingers through it, letting it crackle loose and dance like auburn milkweed in the spray gusts from the falls.
'There's nothing to cover my bones,' said Gallen. 'I haven't filled out in years.'
'Oh, it's ages since you were fat,' I said.
'Are you kissing or biting?' she asked.
'You're a little filled out,' I said, and I put my arms round her waist, touched my fingertips to her long little belly. She seemed to draw herself from under me; I felt I was falling inside her.
'You're scaring me, Graff,' she said. 'You just want to scare me.'
'I don't either.'
'And that old Siggy-friend of yours,' she said, 'he just wants to scare Auntie.'
'He does?'
'He did, and he meant to,' she said, 'because it's certainly not a bit true. And wouldn't I know it, if it were true of you?'
'Oh, you would,' I said.
Her hair was wrinkled from the braiding and left a bare place behind her ear. So I kissed her there, and she moved a little more away, and came a little back, and pressed my hands down flush to her sides. 'Feel the bones again,' she whispered.
She relaxed, and then she didn't; she jounced away from me and stood up. 'Oh, Graff,' she said. 'You mustn't think that I do anything I do on purpose. I don't know what I'm doing at all.'
'Don't be frightened of what I might think,' I said.
'Are you really pretty nice, Graff?' she asked. 'Even though you scare me a little, aren't you really pretty good?'
'Bright pink Graff,' I said, 'to you.'
And there were dramatic lightning flashes across the river, paling the yellows of the garden. The thunder was dry and splintery, far-off and in a world I didn't live in. Gallon's hair was bleached a brighter red in the lightning.
She skipped along the wall to the castle corner. When she got to the cornerstone, she let me come up to her; I put my arms round her waist again, and she leaned back into me. But she wouldn't turn; she just held my hands to her hips. 'Oh my, Graff,' she said.
'My, your bones,' I whispered.
We looked into the courtyard. The few night-lit windows threw the bright squares and crosshatches of their grates over the lawn. Against the crosshatching I saw Siggy's shadow, arms over his head.