I set the tray on the little coffee table in front of the sofa. I sat on the floor below Lewis, pouring the tea into two cups, little mismatched twenty-five-cent things Sam had found at Goodwill, like all our dishes. The tea spilled, sloshing over the sides, but I didn’t bother to clean it up. Lewis looked funny holding the teacup too. He was a dad, playing tea party with his little girl. It dripped onto his lap, but he pretended not to notice.

“Thanks,” he said.

I lit the joint, inhaled, passed it to him, waited for the blurriness to come.

“Where are you from?” I asked this Lewis.

“Wisconsin,” he said.

The state meant nothing to me and I liked that. It was just a Native American name, just a place where they manufactured cheese.

Lewis’s belly stretched out a little rounded, his legs skinny below it. His hair was starting to gray, not in salt-and-pepper strands but in broad swaths. I waited to get a little more stoned before I asked about his eye.

I tried to concentrate on what he was telling me. “I moved to New York in the eighties. Lived in the East Village in one of those apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen.”

“Do you know about Rev. LeRoi?”

“No, who?”

“The serial killer, he lived next door.”

“How do you know about it?”

“Actually I read a lot about it, I got a little weird about it. I like to walk by the house even though it’s not in the direction of the train.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Just waiting for something bad to happen, I guess.”

“You wanted to be there when something bad happened? You’re the girl in the horror movie intent on solving the mystery? Following the clues while the audience yells at her to turn around, go home.”

“There are certain bad things I seek out a little compulsively I guess.”

I took another hit and passed the joint to him again. My heart was pounding in my fingertips, gravity pulling my hand down against his leg. I dragged my palm across the denim. What a rough texture for all of us to be wearing all the time. I thought about the inner weaving of each little thread. Time was moving slowly enough for me to feel them all. I thought, this time, it’s going to be easy; I could feel every thread in his pants. I was unzipping his fly because he was hard, pressed up against the denim.

“Aren’t you too young?” he asked.

“For what?”

I had his dick hard in my hand. My body was young next to his, skinny, lithe.

“For me? For this?”