[His eyes may be closed but she cannot hide herself in the darkness behind his eyelids: still Achilles can hear the playful song of her bangles jangling together, and when he breathes in he catches her scent, which beneath the tangy salt of her sweat teases like the bobbing heads of flowers in full bloom and thick with pollen. Still her cheek is warm and smooth against his palm. Whether or not he can see her, he can feel her presence, like the moon, which beckons the seas to rise and fall even on those nights when the sky is tucked away behind clouds.

First comes the caress of the cloth, and then the heat of her lips permeating through it. She will see the changing emotions that dapple his features as sunlight that falls through the canopies of trees to dance upon the ground: surprise, confusion, delight.

Achilles can guess the game she plays: he has spent time enough with Odysseus, the man of many turns, to sense the truth that stands naked behind such tricks. She will claim that it is not truly a kiss that she grants him, for their lips do not touch one another, and thus it cannot be said that she has given herself up to him.

Still, the warmth held between their lips is not nothing, and so swells his desire to have her. He presses a kiss against her with the same deliberateness of a farmer pushing his seeds into the furrowed soil that his crops may sprout and then flourish. He makes her linger with him through a second languid kiss before his lips still.

His eyes open to drink her in before she can reel back into the shelter of her shyness. With his face still a breath away from hers, and the scarf still screening her from him, he speaks low and sweet.]

Such a clever girl you are, lovely-haired Olivia. Never have I delighted so much in chasing after one's heart as I do now with yours.

[For never has he had to try very hard to make women love him or lie with him. Just as he finds thrill in testing the wide boundaries of his physical strength, now he finds pleasure in this new challenge.]