First Peach of the Season

Imaginary Authors First Peach of the Season smells like a peach you have to eat over the sink. Ripe, creamy and warm, with a thin bitter-orange edge that keeps the sweetness from turning into syrup. If you grew up anywhere near a 1990s bathroom shelf, the peach shampoo and body lotion come straight back. Behind the bottle sits the romance novel the perfume was built from. Agnes and Hollis meet in a reading group devoted to Jane Austen, the English novelist whose early 1800s romances run on glances and letters. He is the only man enrolled in the course. She has read about desire for years without getting round to it. Their story does have sex in it, the cheerful and funny kind, closer to a spring afternoon in a park than to a darkened room. The perfume keeps that tone. Fruit, whipped cream and sun, nothing heavy anywhere in it. The first peach of the season never gets eaten politely.

Notes: yellow peach, bigarade, chantilly cream, jasmine, honeydew melon, benzoin, soft flesh