“Okay, top five rub-up songs of all times.”

“What’s that?”

“A grind song,” he replied, patting her head.

“Of all time?” she asked, turning around and crossing her legs. “No eras or decades or anything? Okay … ‘Let’s Get It On,’ Marvin Gaye; ‘Reasons,’ Earth, Wind and Fire; ‘Me and Mrs. Jones,’ Billy Paul; ‘For the Love of You’, Isley Brothers; and ‘Close the Door,’ Teddy Pendergrass. Let’s hear yours.”

“ ‘Distant Lover,’ Marvin Gaye; ‘Don’t Ask My Neighbor,’ the Emotions; ‘Sweet Thing,’ Chaka Khan … and I haffe draw for some reggae now … Dennis Brown, ‘Your Love’s Got a Hold on Me,’ and Bob Marley’s ‘Sun Is Shining.’ ”

“I didn’t know we were including reggae,” she said. “Okay, lemme replace ‘For the Love of You’ with ‘Night Nurse’ by Gregory Isaacs.”

“You should’ve said this at Club Rio,” he replied, narrowing his eyes.

She blew him a kiss. “Everything … as you like to say … in the fullness of time.”

They stayed up after midnight, yapping away like bunk mates at a sleep-away camp, chatting about everything and nothing, erupting without obvious provocation into the raucous laugh of Caribbean peasants and market hucksters—a hand-clapping, leg-flailing, foot-stomping, head-rocking, back-jerking laugh that crouched in their bellies and vaulted through their lips in the form of roars, whines, wails, and rumbles that would have been a true source of embarrassment in different company.

And as the night went on, after they were sure they could really talk about anything without embarrassing either themselves or each other, they ordered a full-house pizza and progressed to higher degrees of outlandishness, rolling on the floor, bouncing off the furniture, banging on the walls, punching the air with their fists, and contorting their faces in visages reminiscent of New Guinean masks.

They switched the brand of humor at will with the intuition that the other would make the transition, like Cuban Americans switching from Spanish to English, or Pippen dishing off blindly to Jordan.

And in the middle of this, as they were both thinking how wonderful it was to be with someone whose interests ranged from Robeson to Robespierre, RuPaul to Romare Bearden, Sylvia looked at Fire, who was down on all fours to illustrate a story about crawling under the school fence to see what he billed as the greatest kung-fu movie ever, The Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, and fell in love, with a snap, like that.

As soon as it happened, she knew that he knew what she was feeling, that he understood the capacity of the cloud that was seeping out of her mouth and floating over his head, ready to burst and shower him with trust and tenderness and patience and understanding. For he stopped his story and looked up at her, and she could feel him reading her mind, could feel his fingers slipping between the folds of her brain, stretching them apart to view the feelings she had hidden there.

She sat there on the couch and watched him watching her in silence, then reached forward, held him by the chin and pulled him toward her, leaning back, opening her thighs—into whose embrace he fell, his body trembling, like hers, with need and expectation. The lights were on, and the television. They both wanted silence and darkness, but neither was willing to move, to pull away from the other’s yielding flesh. They began to chafe against each other, finding crevices and surfaces to move over and under and in between, creating heat like hands being rubbed together over a feast.