When he jumps out of his van, she sees that he’s armed with a pistol held in his right foot. His Velcro fly bursts apart so that his cock, too, points straight at her, just below the gun. She’s out of her car now, running up the hill. When she looks back, she sees him hopping behind her, gun and penis aimed, clearing bushes in one bound. She’s panting; she can’t quite reach the top because the hill grows as she runs. He dances after her, faster on one leg than she is on two, and she wakes up just as she hears the gun explode.

She’s breathless as she teaches the end of her story. “I was having an orgasm when I woke up,” she says. “It was as though the gun that woke me started the orgasm. He finally gave me what I wanted.”

“Death?” I ask. My fingers are clenched under the table. “How can you think you’re in love with someone who shoots you?”

“But it was like being shot to life.” Ilka looks at me and sighs. “He shot his power into me. I can’t explain it; there are no words in any language I know. I’m not talking about love, Chris.”

Lynne rolls her eyes to the ceiling and chuckles. “Well, Ilka, that’s one way of looking at it. If you won’t carry a gun, suck power from his. It’s not a bad dream, when you think about it.”

Ilka smiles into her empty coffee cup, turning it around in her hands as though trying to see the future, while Patty nods like the therapist she wants to become.

I can’t find words for what I want to say, either, so my mouth stays closed while I watch Ilka bind her hair up into her scarf again. Though I long to stroke the smooth light hairs on the back of her neck, there’s no language in my hands for this desire. I tell myself I’m not gay and never have been, and yet I know I could love her better than any man without arms, no matter what she thinks she wants. Sitting across the table from her that night in Sacred Grounds, I think I can save her if I just put my arms around her, but I can’t move them. It’s as though all their muscles have been pulled out.

We didn’t see each other much after that night. Ilka had so much work in the fall she had no time for self-defense. When the job possibility in Hayward fell through, she wasn’t disappointed. “One job would be as boring as one lover,” she said.