Free Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant

problem? Not used to the competition, eh?”
    â€œDon’t flatter yourself.”
    She looked around the room. In the darkness the tiled floor was like a skating rink, an expanse of ice with a pale mist lying on top of it. It looks so cool, she thought, so inviting. But it isn’t. This is how people drown. They mistake exhilaration for safety.
    He stood up and made a move to walk away.
    â€œNo.” She put out a hand to stop him. “Don’t go.”
    â€œI’m tired, Anna,” he said softly. “I want to sleep and I want you to come and sleep next to me.”
    When was the last time she had lain next to a man she wanted to wake up with? A lifetime ago. Certainly too long ago to remember. “I can’t come yet. I don’t know how to cross the floor.”
    If he found the remark oblique he didn’t show it. Maybe he understood it. He sat down at her feet again, this time laying his head on her lap, his hair cold and wet against the heat of her legs and stomach. She put a hand on the top of his head and stroked him slowly; then she leaned forward, draping her body over his. They stayed like that for a long time. The air around them began to change, the darkness breaking up with the first hint of a summer dawn. She slid her hands under the back of the bathrobe, massaging, caressing downward until she reached the cleft in his buttocks. She pushed further, sliding a finger across the crack of his anus. He moaned at her touch, then twisted himself up and around to meet her. As they met he pushed his bathrobe open and pulled her to him inside.
    â€œCome to bed.”
    â€œOkay. But we mustn’t sleep.”
    He laughed. “I think there’s very little chance of that. I tell you what. We’ll be like an old married couple. I’ll put on an alarm.”
    Afterward, they slept curled away from each other, their bodies disentangling in search of more familiar spaces alone. Or maybe it was the heat.
    At dawn he got up quietly and closed the outer shutters to keep out the sun. The room descended into black. She slept on. At 6:37 A.M. too many Florentines got up at once and the local generating station hiccuped into a moment’s power cut. The radio alarm by the bed flashed off, then on again, all previous instructions wiped from memory, the numbers randomly rearranged. It beeped a sad electronic apology. There was no one awake to hear it.

Home—Saturday A.M .
    I ’ VE ALWAYS FOUND it easy to mock the police. When you’re young they reek of authority, upholding laws that you’re breaking, breaking ones that you uphold; then, as you grow older, they get younger and you mistrust them for that, too. But when something bad happens in your life, when you need help and there is no one else, the chances are that the policemen you get will not be the corrupt ones they make the TV documentaries about, but the other, everyday lot: job, life, troubles, and venial sins, just like your own. Like the two smooth-faced young men who came to Anna’s door that morning, sweating slightly in their heavy uniforms, their helmets tucked under their arms and a halo of community policing around their heads.
    Paul wasn’t at his best by then, and neither was I. We had both begun the day on too little sleep. I had heard so many cars pulling up during the night that I could no longer tell which were dreams and which reality, but when I woke with a start to hear sounds in the kitchen I was careful not to be disappointed to find that it was only Paul. Against the odds Lily was still asleep.
    He was sitting at the table with a pot of coffee and the telephone directory in front of him, and I could feel a new tension about him, as if somewhere in the night fear had overwhelmed hope, and he was worried now that we had done the wrong thing in waiting. It’s possible that he saw the same thing in me, because his hand moved toward the phone as soon as our eyes met. Before he