The third beer

I’m reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and I’m totally digging it. For whatever reason the following passage struck me in the way it exposes the cruel tenuousness of young love:

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

It wasn’t going anywhere and it was keeping him lazy, like a pampered honey bear who had only to stick out his paw for another scoop, and so had lost the agility of the tree-climbers, the bee-fighters, but not the recollection of how thrilling the search had been.