Jesus looked at Margery without recognition and waited long enough for her to feel the thrill of her own absence, as though looking back into a room she’d just stepped out of. He eliminated the particular without granting the absolute. She touched her breasts for comfort. She forgot her intelligence, the beauty of her body, her courage. In forgetting, she lost those qualities. She persisted, “Is there one thing about me that you like?” Jesus raised his eyebrows.

•

She got him aroused, kept him erect, delayed his orgasm. Just in time she let her hand fly off the end of his cock. Still, she knew her energy counted for less because she was not loved. Jesus desired to increase desire by waking and manipulating her points of arousal but they floated in a cosmic dereliction. He tended them insofar as they resembled others of their kind. Margery wanted to be engulfed but retain that loss of self in the memory of her skin. Jesus turned his face away, then allowed her his lips, then yielded his tongue.

Once sex was fully entered nothing was hidden. The skin on her hands tried to memorize a strapping young man planted on his knees waiting to fuck. He was thin from his long calves to his narrow skull yet caressing him was extravagant opulence.

They stood up at the foot of the bed. Margery bent at the waist and Jesus had to crouch. Her toes curled as he guided his cock deep inside her; she dilated and clenched. She saw her legs and those of Jesus—his were squatting and looked rather inexpressive, even comic, turned out as a frog’s. He tipped her back and forth with increasing force, thrusting back the borders of their delight; in that motion she was clarified, her giddiness transformed into rapturous calm.

Their flesh emitted fierce oscillations. It seemed odd that they didn’t echo in people who surrounded them. She looked up in surprise. It was 1420; experience was crumbling. A tension rose between the arousal that tried to be everything and the doubt that wouldn’t believe it. From her window, Margery saw a civilization that had never entirely come to life. It amazed her that pleasure was so mechanical, so located in space. She had the sinking fear that the party was happening elsewhere. She watched herself convulse from her city’s point of view and felt isolated and estranged from her thrill. She wondered if she loved Jesus less. Their little bodies lost significance like words repeated too often. He vaporized as he fucked her, leaving emptiness vibrating in her chest and cunt walls like the blare of a trumpet.

•

Jesus didn’t memorize the serenity of Margery’s inner thigh or the jut of her breasts. Perhaps he considered her question, because later he volunteered that he did like something about her: “You have nice ears.”

“Too big,” Margery said, unbelieving. She looked down at her naked body.