"The notes came first. They were Lily's idea, grown out of the impossible state of her body, its languidness, its inconceivable separate heartbeat. It had been late afternoon. She had been asleep, and it began to rain. The rain on the shop roof was like something rising and building to a heightened pitch, the sound of it hollow and metallic. It woke her, and its thrumming made her lonely. She felt slighted by the condition of her body, as if it no longer had any other use than the one that now occupied it without her permission. She came around from the back of the rows of shelving and found Jamie with his cigarette at the counter. He gave her a look and then glanced over at Geri, moping on one of the ladders, her fingers flaying her hair.

I like that big head of hair, he said. I want to put my hands in it.

Lily tore a piece of the computer printout. She wrote this down with one of the pencils, in cursive script. Put it in a bin on her list, she said.

Add something else, he told her, grinning.

Lily wrote what she believed Jamie would want from Geri, what he wanted to do to her. I can't keep this a secret, she wrote. I am overcome with lust.

Jamie stubbed out his cigarette. He looked over Geri's abandoned list, and took off down the aisles. She didn't find the note at first. They watched her, waiting. They went off with their own lists, keeping an eye on her. Lily climbed to the top of a ladder and found the heat had collected there. She took the bin down to the floor and spent the afternoon counting and losing track and recounting three hundred and twenty feeder nuts, finally placing them in piles of twenty-five on the brick floor. At the end of the day lining up to punch out, they noticed Geri's face, flushed, distracted. Tendrils of her hair stuck to her forehead. She said nothing about a note. But Lily saw her eyes take in the fine sheen on Orlando's dark skin, the way Matthew's pants had slid down on his hips. She saw them sweep across the broad space between Jamie's shoulder blades. Lily saw her wonder what his back looked like without his shirt. In her eyes was lit a kind of startled heat."