'Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore, Non feci mai male ad anima viva!' (I lived for art, I lived for love, I never harmed a living soul!)

Tosca's most famous aria floated around Morse, weaving a spell around him. But a spell whose potency had now lost much of its charms, despite his eagerness to listen to the voice he had thought vanished in the mists of his memories, as buying another recording had proved near impossible.

Why? he asked himself, unable to shake his unease. Pondering that unwelcome mystery, he settled more comfortably in the armchair, crossing his legs and slipping a pillow beneath his back to ease the sore. Was it that he could no longer separate the dead woman who sang so persuasively from the cold-blooded murderess planning in such punctilious details the demise of two innocent people? Had he invested in her all the qualities and frailties of the opera heroines she sang so beautifully?

He shook his head with derision at his train of thoughts, and rotated the bottle of lager between his fingers. The diffused light of a nearby lamp reflected on the glass, lightening its colour and making it glint with the same dark copper as Morse's hair.

At arm's reach, Rosalind Calloway's LP sleeve was propped on the turntable side, her liquid brown eyes seemingly watching him with a faintly interrogative expression. He returned her gaze but the printed lips went on smiling, their Mona Lisa smile an enigma whose key would escape his scrutiny forever. With an involuntary sigh, Morse gazed away from that ethereal loveliness, now marred in his mind's eyes with the flabbergasted accusation stamped on Mrs. Stromming's face as he had escorted her from the stage to the care of the coppers waiting for her in the wings. After that last look, she had refused to meet his eyes, and it still stung, years later.

If he had been guilty of blending the fictional opera singer Floria Tosca with her flesh and blood performer, it was a common enough mistake, yet an enduring one, he mused. Most opera enthusiasts somehow infused the qualities of their roles onto the singers. In real life, few tenors were as heroic as the characters they portrayed; few sopranos, as lovely and endearingly helpless. But the illusion still clung to them, nurtured by starry-eyed aficionados.

There was nothing pure, soft or passive about Rosalind Calloway. There wasn't either in Floria Tosca, if one reflected on it. Both women were consummate musicians, and both ended up murderesses, the woman even more cunning than her fictional avatar.

'Vissi d'arte,' Floria Tosca's aria of despair and longing for a serene past, would be followed by the frantic murdering of Scarpia who had entrapped her: her only escape from her giving herself to the Roman Chief of Police. The price Tosca had to pay for the freedom of Mario Cavaradossi, her lover and Scarpia's political prisoner, about to be executed. Her stabbing Scarpia after agreeing to the bargain was as much an impulsive act as a desperate bid to free the man she loved and to gain both their freedom. Alas, as in many nineteenth century operas, the lovers were doomed: Cavaradossi's execution wasn't a sham one and Tosca would commit suicide when she'd realize he had really been shot.

Rosalind Calloway committed suicide, too. And she also fought for her love.

Morse's nape fell back on the back rest of his armchair. He closed his eyes, the darkness beneath his lids a makeshift backdrop for a scene of horror he had never managed to entirely banish from his mind.

Her slack, supple body under his frantic hands; her rolling head; her unseeing, unblinking eyes, moisture still falling from their corners. And that pale red gaping mouth, from which strings of notes would never issue ever again. Neither would her lies and dissembling.

Her singing breath had saved his life. His could not redeem hers.

How his—his heroine had played him! Using his heart, his nerves, his soul, his ears, his desire, to further her own agenda. Seeing through his infatuation—his stupid, ingenuous, ludicrous love for her—his wretched memories of the grey, cold, unforgiving limbo of years spent with Cyril and Gwen, made barely bearable by the beauty she embodied.

Morse snorted disbelievingly. He had unwittingly given her all the snares—with string to spare!—to trap him in her lies; to blind him with the aura of her public persona; to persuade him that her life as a Don's wife—a happy, fulfilled life—was the reality, and not another theatrical illusion…

Was it any wonder, then, that the spell of her performance fell now short, the arrows falling back to the ground, pulled down by reality before they reached his heart? Would he ever be able to guide them back to him—a willing quarry to their piercing tips?

Had the intervening weeks—weeks where the lure of her voice was suddenly missing—brought such a change in his perceptions?

This aria of sorrow and loss, how it had blinded him to her reality! For she was more a Tosca than a Violetta Valery—a Traviata—her other signature role. Rosalind Calloway had pursued her own ends with a will of steel, devising without flinching the method of her final curtain call…

Tosca fell willingly to her death from the parapet of the Castel Sant'Angelo. He, Morse, had been falling for a long time into the mesmerising beauty of Miss Calloway's voice—for a minute, he had also fallen for the woman, and he cringed, remembering that aborted kiss she had so gracefully avoided. But, in those depths—like Tosca finally had when she had plummeted to the ground—, he had found merely a terrifying emptiness, something akin to death.

For wasn't the defeat of the heart far worse than bodily demise?

Morse's fingers tightened wish a shudder on the rotund glass. Strained tendons recalled the bottle to him and he put it down, with shaking fingers, onto the armrest, hearing the next aria without really listening to it.

Rosalind Calloway's ageless voice ended Violetta's 'Sempre libera' with a soaring flourish: Traviata was relishing her freedom and a last stunning appoggiatura, scorning the madness of love. Poveretta! (Poor thing!) She would repent of it soon enough.

Nasca il giorno, o il giorno muoia, (As each day dawns, or as the day dies,)
sempre lieta ne' ritrovi, (Always gay, I turn)
a diletti sempre nuovi (to the always renewed delights)
dee volare il mio pensier… (which make my spirit soar.)

With a detached, almost blasé restraint, Morse's lips tightened. The stunning, penultimate E-flat sounded shallow now to his critical ears. Far from the previous joyous release of the ending coloraturas, now it merely suggested egotistical onanism to him, not the previous exhilarating quest for pleasure and riches that came from a courtesan's life.

Had he so projected his own feelings onto Rosalind Calloway's singing, instead of listening to it? Had she been so tainted from the start, her inner corruption masked by the beauty of her eyes, the sensitivity of her mouth, the glory of her musical gifts? Or had it crept on surreptitiously, each day bringing on more rot, like his own drinking as it grew on?

The music stopped. In the tiny lapse of silence heralding the next track—and the next miseries of various opera heroines—, Morse made out the far away sound of the telly. Some sort of commercial, obviously. Strange must still be downstairs, then, watching God knew what.

'Addio, del passato' was the following aria. A farewell, to love, to life, to…hope, yet hoping despite despair to be welcomed in the After-life.

Paradise, Morse knew first hand, didn't exist. Neither did Shangri-la, Arcadia or heavenly kingdoms. Not on this plane, definitely; and not on the other, presumably. Life had soon cured him of his childish hopes; helplessly watching his mother waste away, then praying that she'd be spared had put a final stop to all this nonsense.

He had found other opiates: literature, art, music, opera. Beer. The pleasures of the mind, the relishes of the body. But what he shared with Alices and Carols was a mutual assuaging of the flesh, no more.

Unbeknownst to him, the curves of his lips turned wistful, and he closed his eyes once more, a more curvaceous figure taking the lead in the theatre of his mind.

Despite all his hardening cynicism, he had searched for a woman who might retain some spark of innocence, of freshness, of…honesty.

A sprightly eagerness. A pristine heart within a fresh, curious mind and a lively intelligence.

A fresh start. A wellspring where he could cleanse away the dirtiness and weariness of his life.

Thus he had fallen for a girl who had no outstanding, aristocratic beauty—no Wendy, she—nor exceptional intellectual brilliance or cultured tastes. Deceptively common was she, for 'she walked in beauty, like the night', with a dancing energy and firm purpose disguised by her mischievous softness.

'And all that's best of dark and bright met in her aspect and her eyes'.

Miss Thursday. Joan, as he had never dared to call her aloud.

She was fragile, too, despite her determination. He couldn't shake the image of her form delineated by the sheets of the hospital bed. So still, so unmoving that she might as well have been a carved-out figure for a marble recumbent effigy. Her brow had felt as cold under his lips, and the princess had not awoken from her cursed sleep.

Although being so different from the singing goddesses he admired from afar, the fictional figures that had populated his dreams, it was Miss Thursday whom he desired. Joan who haunted his nights and fed his hopes for a shared future.

She was real, for one thing. And her frailty was reassuring in a way. Surely, she wouldn't look too askance at him, now that she had tasted the pitfalls of being human? That tie between them, forged in common plight and fear; that hard-wearing, silken bond, would it finally knot them together?

Surely it meant something, this insistence of hers? Her intent, searching look as she told him 'don't forget tomorrow night—flat warming?'

If she breached the chasm between them and beckoned to him, he would move forwards, too.

At the risk of falling again.

A tremor shook him as it possessed his imagination.

As if he were still standing on that fateful rooftop, his silhouette framed between golden-tipped flame-vase finial and threatening darkness, he felt the pull of the earth threatening his balance, angling him towards free-fall and oblivion, and his heartbeat sped up. At the time, he had gone home, his ears still full of Gull's rants, trying to fill them with his Governor's advice.

And he had put on 'his best record'. The very one he was listening to.

But the darkness still pressed on, even if Rosalind Calloway's honey voice lilted, full of buoyant expectation for 'the beautiful day' that wouldn't come ever again, heralding the return of love. Either for Madame Butterfly or for her.

The rim of the bottle felt ice cold as Morse brought it to his lips.

Downstairs, Jim Strange sighed for the umpteenth time and wondered when this caterwauling would stop at last.

A fresh start. Indeed, Miss Thursday would be getting a fresh start.

Morse's mouth twisted in a quick spasm, as bile rose threateningly in his throat. Nonetheless a sham smile stayed stuck on his face as he forced his way among a cluster of Joan Thursday's guests and until he stood outside, the fresh night air a welcome relief on his flushed face.

Without him, that is.

He paused on the front steps of the house, shouldering into his coat with a jerk.

Twilight was slowing fading into dusk, and the street lights were spreading into their full glow. The sunset's soft pinks, which had given Miss Thursday's face such an infuriating softness even as she had carelessly trampled his hopes, caressed the white façades lining the street.

It was empty, safe for a couple standing beneath the nearest lamppost, a few feet away. As Morse shoved his hands in his pockets, the young woman slapped the man with an efficient economy of gesture. His attention caught by the unexpected clatter, Morse turned his head towards them, in time to see the man step back in anger.

Morse hastened his stride, just in case the girl needed some assistance. But she stayed put, unfazed, muttering with anger, 'Ce connard a pris mes allumettes. (This asshole kept my matches.)'

Nothing to involve himself with, then.

Yet, as he passed her by, she asked with a curiously smooth noticeable gesture of her hand, stopping his progress in mid-stride, 'Do you have a light?'

Morse stopped. Perplexed blue eyes met bold chocolate ones. They bluntly pierced him, with a direct, swift, unashamed appraisal that made him reappraise her in his turn.

There was nothing insecure or coy in the French girl's assessment, just a frank enjoyment of the present, and of herself. Silently, she raised the hand holding her cigarette, in an inquiring intimation.

Morse's hand found his lighter—always a commodity to have, as smoking often helped witnesses to unwind—and he offered her the light she craved. She closed her eyes with naked delight, putting the cigarette at her lips.

The snapping closed of his lighter woke him from his reverie, as the little flame illuminated a profile noted not for its beauty but for its arresting liveliness. In the twilight, her sparrow-like face, with its little flat nose, high cheekbones and too wide mouth, sparkled with playfulness and an unsaid question which kindled something wild in Morse's gut.

The girl tilted her head back, dragging sensuously on her cigarette, and said, 'Thank you' with the same French accent. Abruptly, her smile held promises as seductive as the questions she didn't utter previously.

But Morse understood her perfectly.

Morse's lighter found its way back into his pocket, the girl's eyes focusing not on his hands but on his lips.

His smile stretched slowly, sensuously, mirroring hers. It reached their eyes, as they went away together, walking in the same pace, her navy jacket brushing against his beige coat.

It was exquisite to be wanted, for a change.

It was morning when Morse walked home, bone tired from that delicious fatigue which came from a night spent in other arms than Morpheus'. Walking in the streets, he remembered their disjointed talk at the White Horse then their adjoining in Claudine's bedsit—for Claudine was her name.

How many chances did he have to meet the photo journalist out of pure hazard? He didn't know. But he relished the fierce irony of having been pulled by the very same 'pretty—and French' girl with whom Miss Thursday had tried to match him.

A pungent irony of fate even more delicious when Claudine told him that, at the last moment, she had reneged on her promise to go to a flat warming. 'She wanted me to hitch me with some fella. Probably a dead bore, so I went the hell out of here before I even reached the door!' she had confessed with a modicum of chortling indignation.

So what else could he do than embrace Fortune's jest fully and go along with it—and the girl, right where she wanted him, in her bed? And a welcoming bed it had been…

When he reached his present abode, dawn was already getting old, replaced by a chilly morning.

As Morse turned away from the peg on which he had hung his coat, he surprised Strange's faintly jealous stare. 'Filling out his dance card', as the other Sergeant had called it, couldn't go unnoticed for that long when house sharing.

'Good night?' asked Strange, with a slight sardonic note.

Morse was spared having to answer as the phone rang with a shrill demand. He picked up the receiver. On the other side of the line, Fancy's voice announced tensely, 'It's George. The lorry hijack. That market trader came through. He's gonna let me have four cases of Kilorran whisky for 20 nicker.'

The news chased any remaining fogginess from Morse's brain. 'Where are you picking it up?'

'Lockup on Pike Street.'

'Ten minutes?'

'Okay.'

Morse slammed the receiver down and his eyes met Strange's, who was hovering not far away.

'Pike Street. Ten minutes.'

'Alright.'

Hurriedly, both men grabbed their coats.

But they were already too late.

Fancy's panicky 'Ambulance! Ambulance!' reached Morse's ears as soon as the Jag turned into the parking lot. He pressed his feet on the gas pedal and brought it to a hurried stop near the blue van they had been on the lookout for.

He exited the car running; just behind him, Thursday mirrored his movement, leaping from the passenger seat. Still standing before one of the lockup storage stalls, Fancy beckoned to them and then rushed into the opened storage area.

On the concrete floor of a lockup, the prone shape of Lloyd Collins made an ugly coloured spot, his yellow and blue stripped shirt a stark contrast with the greyness of his concrete backdrop; the red stripes, a grisly reminder of the blood issuing from the corner of his mouth and his nose.

Raising the flap door to let daylight in, Morse moved forward and crouched next to the injured man. 'Who did this?'

Collins' half-closed eyes opened slightly wider and settled on him with a nebulous focus. Seeing that he was losing his attention, Morse repeated with more urgency, 'Who did this?'

'Cromwell Ames' was the raspy answer. The man's belly shook with his haphazard breathing.

All of a sudden, there was an awful gurgling, and the Jamaican's head rolled on the side before freezing, its unseeing eyes fixing some horror Morse could not be expected to see.

At his back, Fancy looked at Thursday, a question in his eyes that was answered soon enough by Thursday's grim face and Morse's hopeless movement: slipping his fingers around Collins' neck and feeling for his pulse, it was soon apparent that there was none. Morse withdrew his arm slowly, and Fancy's lowered eyes saw what the Sergeant had just noticed: a headless black cockerel, its legs ominously stiffened.

The young DC's guilt wasn't even relieved by Thursday's later matter-of-fact explanation, 'Somebody probably saw him talking to you. Took him for a nark', and Trewlove's heart went out to him. They were standing near the blue van, while a stretcher bearing the unfortunate Collins cautiously crossed the empty space before them.

'Anything on this Cromwell Ames?' asked Strange.

'Nothing on file according to the Information Room. But the deceased has a fair bit of form. Receiving mostly,' explained Trewlove.

Doctor DeBryn moved closer and that line of enquiry was dropped as he told them that the info about 'the killer blow' would be forthcoming at two o'clock. The scene he left to their imaginings wasn't a comfortable one.

Morse broke the silence surrounding his departing footsteps with a nod towards the van. 'There's no Kilorran on board. But the rear offside tyre is a mismatch.'

'Which puts it at the Waddington Junction hijack,' went on Trewlove, thankful for a change of topic despite her poise.

They got busy investigating the lockups. Most were empty except for Collins' one, full to bursting with various goods. Orphaned drawers disclosed coffee makers and lampshades, lamp bases, toolkits and brass candlesticks. Shelves held books and records. A trestle supported a brand-new sewing machine, various clocks and delicately engraved crystal decanters. Trinkets and curio overflowed from crates, but instead, Thursday's eyes followed Morse's cautious gestures while he inserted the dead bird in an evidence bag, with exaggerated delicacy and not a little disgust.

He ventured at last, 'What do you think the bird's about?'

Folding the hanky he had used to hold the dead bird, Morse replied, 'I know what it looks like, but I hope I'm wrong.' He raised troubled eyes to the older man. 'The black cockerel is a pretty potent voodoo symbol.'

Thursday kept it mundane, 'That rules out Eddie Nero.'

Morse huffed a sigh, his attention diverted by Fancy issuing from the storage area, carrying a crate. 'Didn't we have a consignment of toasters take a walk off Burridges' loading bay last month?' he asked.

'It's like Ali Baba's cave,' muttered Thursday. He crouched suddenly, picking up a broken bottle still sporting its label. 'Kilorran.'

'Someone's got a sweet tooth,' remarked Trewlove, opening a box and holding out for their inspection a pack of Gidbury's delicacies.

'There was a case of that on Hobbs' manifest. Bound for Richardson's,' said Strange.

Fancy divested himself of another crate, settling it near the others. There was now a row of similar ones holding groceries and tin cans near the entrance of the lockup. 'Plenty of crates back there,' he gestured. 'All sorts. Food, antiques; an entire library, even.'

Following the wave of Fancy's arm, Morse entered farther into the lockup. A confusing mess of items met his puzzled eyes. There was no apparent order or filing method to find the stolen goods. Sorting out the lawful owners of the miscellaneous objects would take time and effort, but still, Morse didn't begrudge them that. In addition to his own picky sense of justice, he knew first-hand what it felt to have a prized possession torn away from one. Loss, the story of his life.

The records stored in several crates lining the walls drew his scrutiny, and Morse turned his eyes away with a conscious effort. They flitted over the orphaned goods when something red attracted his notice. He came closer and saw a pair of shoes. They looked brand new. Stuck on its soles, a label proclaimed proudly its place of provenance, Alice's Marmalade Cat. His brow creased with indecision.

Could they be Frances Porter's shoes? Mercer left her at the roundabout. May she have thumbed a lift to Kings Oak Station from Hobbs? So, upset from her row with Mercer, she gets out of Hobbs' lorry and he's on his way before she realises she's left them behind. Or she…

Turning absently the shoes in his hands, Morse focused on their bright redness as if they could tell him what had gone on. Maybe…

His train of thought was cut off by Fancy's voice, close to his ear. 'Ain't it yours?'

In his hand was a private recording of 'Die Zauberflöte' conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The cream and beige label advertised proudly on the black boxset 'Rare Opera Editions,' but this outward show of quality didn't appease Morse.

'How did you know?' Morse snapped at him. 'You weren't even in Oxford then!' His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Taken aback, Fancy took a step back, stammering, 'I—I… People talked.'

'You'd better focus on the case!'

Morse placed the red shoes back on the trestle and scowled at Strange who had hastened inside to see what the ruckus was all about, venting, 'Talk about adding insult to injury. That's the worst recording of "The Magic Flute" ever made!'

He tore the record set from Fancy's hand, considering it with some acrimony. 'I wouldn't allow it in my house!' he added, before putting it, none to gently, next to the pair of shoes.

'He meant well, matey,' Strange said in a placating voice. With a slight nod, he sent Fancy on his way. The young man was too happy to obey.

'Maybe, but does he pause to think? No, he doesn't.'

'Some of your stuff's probably in there. Records, more like. He wanted to help.'

Morse's baffled gaze prompted him to elaborate. 'It was Collins who sold your records to Shirley.'

'Did he?' Swiftly, Morse reached out behind the table where stashed crates full of records were, and browsed through them. A minute later, a sample of LPs had joined Toscanini's 'Magic Flute' before him.

Deftly, Morse slipped an inner cover out of the records sleeve, and pointed to the corner. 'See? I've labelled all my records.'

'Pencil markings?'

'You can't imagine that I would damage them?' Dismay was back in Morse's voice, and Strange understood that he had lost this battle.

He'd have to find a way to show Fancy off to advantage.

Despite some of his blunders, the young DC was good police material. Not imaginative, no! Or prone to flashes of brilliance, but he could be moulded into a good officer, if he could be steered on a right course… Yeah, maybe he could suggest something to Thursday… Morse was way too harsh to the fella.

At his side, a morose Morse was muttering something about evidence lockers and the time it would take him before being allowed to bring back home part of his collection.

With a pang, Strange was hit with a less than happy thought: he was in for more evenings of that bloody hooting.

Unless Morse had more sleepovers in the future… Now, that was a happy prospective.

As he had been prepared to get out of her bed definitively, out of her house, out of her life, and to offer his thanks—or whatever else was appropriate—or to receive hers—after all, she had drawn him into her arms, hadn't she?—, the French woman had smiled up at him and said, 'you won't forget the way to here?'

Claudine smiled wider then, and a dimple appeared on the left corner of her mouth. It looked as if she expected that he'd mar the moment with awkward male boorishness, so he said nothing, merely smiled back; and that was that.

So, a few evenings later, Morse had taken his chance and gone back to her. She had welcomed him back, in her arms, in her bed, with no questions asked, no expectations stated. Merely the hours shared between them; mingled breaths, entangled limbs, sweating skins as close as it was humanly possible, and maybe, just maybe, a common goal. Undoubtedly pleasure, if not a meeting of souls.

So he had stayed the night. And he came back. Again. Until he slept more with her than in his ghosts-filled room.

Her laugh was as luminous and sunny as the bright yellow of the walls of her bedsit. Her embrace, as relaxed and revitalizing as the flowered chintz cushion scattered on her bed. Her teasing 'Get up, sleepy head!', as welcome as the respite she provided between his bouts of misery.

Her teeth flashed white when she laughed at him, at life, at adventure. For every day was a welcomed exploration for her; and little by little, he let himself be infected with her relish of life, her savouring of everyday gestures—be it making coffee with a battered Moka pot or grilling toasts for their shared breakfasts—and her flashes of fancies—for debate, for exploring a way of life he had merely taken from granted, for the unexpected and the pretty, for the ugly and the complicated, for interrogations to be asked and answers to be questioned with her eyes.

For Claudine had a passion for the vagaries of human life she could freeze into sense with her camera, and an eagerness for his touch. So Morse lost himself in her and hoped she was, by reciprocal eagerness as well as by contagion, also losing herself in him.

Because she was elusive—despite her Latin touchy tendency, he became clingier. To his surprise, he found himself embracing her in the streets, craving her touch—a brush of her hips while they walked side by side; a brush of her arm, as she raised her camera to her eye; a turn of her head, flinging her hair on his neck; a brush of her lips, as if to capture the meaning of her words.

Still, she never spoke of her feelings, and neither did he. But he hoped–how he hoped!—that love hovered between them. She liked him enough, anyway, for the games they devised when they had shed away all their outward disguises, leaving only their skins and their past to shelter their nakedness.

One morning, as she went to and fro in the room, between hotplate and table, wearing only his wrinkled shirt and humming a tune, she sang under her breath part of the lyrics, 'Il faut bien que le corps exulte (The body has to rejoice)' and he raised his eyebrow, his half-hidden face emerging from pillows and folded arm, his puzzlement making her laugh out loud.

So she sang the entire verse then, playfully, meaning it like an actress would when held in thrall by the words she intoned; not guessing that he understood every word, every sentence; that they pierced his heart and that this 'Song of the old lovers' getting old companionably gave rise to unreasonable expectations in his breast.

So it was that his records stayed unheard in his unused, taciturn bedchamber. The room he only went to for a change of clothes. The solitary room which was on the first floor of the house he shared with Strange. The room he never slept in from now onwards.

And Rosalind Calloway's voice grew silent, almost forgotten, buried in his memories, waiting patiently to be heard again, as were all the other voices which had given him succour, drowning in beauty and fictional ills all the sores of his life.

But he didn't lose sleep over it. She—it belonged to the past; a past where his infatuation for a voice had had no more substance, really, than her reality in his life; a ghost, a spirit of illusive beauties.

And so was the other girl, the one he had tried to save despite herself. The one that got away, accepting only his money, not his love.

She, too, was a ghost. Closing his eyes, inhaling Claudine's perfume before nibbling at her neck, he almost convinced himself that Joan had never quite really existed. Not as he pictured her, anyway.

So he tried to let her go, reaching instead for the girl who laughed with him, and talked with a slight accent, and looked at him and at Oxford with a zest for life that made him feel as if he were truly living, too.

Maybe it was time to bid a definite goodbye to the past. Addio al passato.

Morse embraced Claudine tighter and she stretched alongside him, tilting her neck and allowing him better access, while his lips left a trail of kisses on her skin.

The End

Notes:

Ma gratitude extends also to AstridContraMundum who Beta'ed the last pages of this chapter.

Jacques Brel's La Chanson des vieux amants (Song of old Lovers) Lyrics are translated on 'Rob Kent blog. Bits, bytes, agenbite of inwit". It was recorded in 1967 and you can hear it on YouTube.

I hope you'll like this introspective piece. Comments would make me the happiest fic author alive!