There was nothing to say. Without further elaboration, I jumped her. Of course we were not lovers, nor would we ever be in any sense of the word that transcended an almost jarring physicality; lovers make love in countless ways, seeking contact as well as connection. They hang on to each other, linking arms, touching, intoxicated by the perfume of proximity. They are constantly in each other’s pockets, especially hip pockets. They whisper fatuities and assign vast significance to them. They weave small conspiracies that set them apart from all the world; they go underground. They nuzzle and nibble and chew on each other. They cosset and quarrel and eat from the same spoon. They sigh or scream hilariously, redefining wit for the outsider, who sees nothing funny there. They beam into each other’s eyes, seeking and finding the mirrored fusion that isolates everybody else. Or together they focus on the moon or the page of a book or—with what tender mercy—on the inflammation of a bug bite. They tingle with the stupefactive awareness that no duad in the long history of the earth has been so privileged or so blessed. They say things at the same time, as if other people don’t, astonished by the miracle of simultaneity. They invent pet names, sometimes cute, often playful, invariably infantile. Dawnette had a pet name for me—I guess you could call it that—she called me a little ole scum-sucking buzzard fucker—not totally, I like to think, without affection. And of course we touched and grabbed and bit and bruised, but for connection only. And with a kind of sluggish, glassy-eyed, unendearing deliberateness. Our lovemaking was like a preemptive strike, aggressive and immediate. Only once upon entering our passion pit did she postpone (for maybe five minutes) my nailing her to the springs. I had brought us a couple of hamburgers from Mother’s table, not having eaten in my haste to join Dawnette. She sat down and scoffed the cold meat in the soggy bun. “Can’t fuck on mush,” she said between bites, in her soft, musical voice.

I got to know every nook and cranny of her. Most of our moves she herself initiated. “Wanna try like this?” she would ask, and gladly I’d acquiesce to her every delinquency, however daunting or inventive, and soon the place would erupt with the brays and means of our flexions. Then I’d fall back, clamp my eyes shut, and breathe like a tortured bellows while she, the sweet-purring, fine-tuned engine of my burnout, would grin slyly at me.

“Needle on empty?” she’d ask.

“I am Judd whose sword never sleeps.”