081413 #worm First to respond to his invitation was his old arch-nemesis: the powerful pull that the crowd, the other, the exotic, had had on her. He recalled the desperation with which he had struggled psychically to protect his claim on the perfection of her breasts. He remembered the astonishing lustful howl that thrust out of his soul when that claim was again and again denied. He remembered, with the inebriating clarity of shame, how ineptly he had acted against his own predilection for solitude, for understatement, for retreat, in order to will himself to become the kind of natural force he knew she would not choose to resist. Such acting was always just that--acting--and every time, he saw her see through it. His guts atwitter with the precariousness of these memories, he tried to picture his imminent reunion with her.