There’s a quiet gasp and the two are leaning into each other, Carmen on her tiptoes, their hands immediately clasping each other’s bodies, and in the wet glistening of the city at night their thoughts slipstream as their lips meet and everything becomes the violins of biology, the cool wet mouths provoking a spiritual déjà vu, like they’ve done this before, done this a thousand times in different ways and with different tongues—and suddenly there is just the opening of a mouth, just the electricity of a hand on my waist, touching the flesh under the clothing, yielding, the feel of a hipbone under my hand, hands designed to grip grasp and un-grasp, the heat of your body a whole other engine burning away in its chassis, how soft can anything be, the barest of her exhalations across my face, the contrast of his stubble on my cheek, a small trembling rhythm to it all, poetical flesh in the smallest friction, the exact center of reality has been located, it’s your mouth—the scent of her hair a beguiling scent from another land—the scent of his rained-washed body a sharp citrus, the bloom and decay of the rising blood, arterial trees inside each of them branching deep to the heart, the softness of her lips I could kiss forever, the foreign coolness of his tongue—

There is the sound of a trepidatious cough.

The two look over in the lamplight to the undergraduate research participant who is looking back at them, standing nervously, backpack in hand.

“Umm, Professor Green?”

Kierk and Carmen pull apart, but like trees coming untangled parts seem to catch, his hand by her waist, her one finger hooked in his belt loop. Kierk is stifling a laugh.

Carmen collects herself. “Hi! Sorry. You must be the participant. Thanks for coming in so late.”

She turns back to Kierk, who raises his eyebrows. Both of them smile and make gestures as if about to speak but neither do.

“So . . . Friday?” he finally says. “What if we got a drink. Just us?”

“Friday,” she says, smiling, and then as Carmen leads the participant into the CNS, she leans back out the door and yells after him—“So it’s a date?”