“Y’all go ahead and have your fun,” John said, starting to back away, slowly. “We’ll see who has the biggest hangover the next day.”

Win walked toward him, looking concerned and as if he had questions he wanted to ask. “John, where you headed? You need a ride?”

John held up both palms. “Just talking a walk. See y’all tomorrow.”

He should have headed home right then. He stood for a moment in the dark trying to do just that, but then he thought of Angie, and a sense of purpose came over him. Every nerve in his body jangled, his fingers buzzing with adrenaline, and he had to laugh at himself. He was being drawn across town like a sixteen-year-old boy with an itch.

It’s not about sex, he told himself. And then: It’s not just about sex.

Because he couldn’t deny that he was going to talk to Angie, but he wanted her, too. He had been wanting her for weeks, and there was no more sense in pretending he didn’t. At least he wouldn’t need to make excuses to her; she would be more comfortable with what drove him through town in the middle of the night than he was himself.

Angie’s approach to sex had taken some getting used to that summer; her ability to ask for what she wanted, her preference for plain words. She cringed at making love and told him in all seriousness that she preferred the Anglo-Saxon alternative. Fucking was a strong, healthy word that didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was.

This conversation had happened in bed, the first night they spent together. They were lying exhausted in a pool of heat and sweat under the overtaxed air conditioner in the window of her bedroom on Eighth Street.

He said, “Tell me again, what’s wrong with ‘making love’?”

Lying on her stomach, her hair floating across her back, she had turned her head to look at him. “It’s coy. It’s insipid. It’s euphemistic, and it complicates something that doesn’t need to be complicated. Do you like the term, really?”

He had to admit he didn’t. “What about ‘having sex,’ then?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Grammatically suspect, and definitely not the thing to say when you’re inside somebody. At least not when you’re inside of me.”

It had taken all his self-control to hold on to the conversation, but he managed. “Hasn’t ‘fucking’ been co-opted,” he asked her, “by just about anybody who ever stubbed a toe or got cut off in traffic?”

“Not by me,” she said. “It’s far too powerful a word to waste on casual cursing.” She ran a finger up his thigh. “Have I hit a sore spot? Stumbled on a slumbering inner prude?”