He mutters, “That’s different — hospital’s air-­conditioned.”

His breath on her neck, hands moving slowly over every curve of her body, the heat of the night melting them together, her face pushed into the damp pillow, every part of him hot inside and outside of her. His lips on her spine, pulling her hair, her head back, her hips lifting off the bed, gasping. “Shush,” he whispers in her ear.

She sits on the back deck, her naked body drying rough with salt crystals. The smell of their sweat is acrid here, where the air is cooler, but the smell is lost as the scent of the night bloomers rises from her verdant garden, the fragrant evening clematis running up a chain-link fence and sealing off this urban Eden.

The cat lady calls out again, each syllable so elongated the young woman knows her hands must be cupped like a bullhorn. The voice breaks, then stops. Far-off traffic sounds drone and laughter floats over from a neighbour’s rooftop balcony. She loves the city on the hot summer nights when she cannot sleep, slipping from the confines of the house, sitting outside in the dark. The house a veritable sepulchre for the winter insomniac, the snow dampening the nighttime sounds of life, when the window can’t be opened, sealed in from the cold, sealed in from the world.

She always walks quickly across the Commons. It’s dangerous. She knows this. She always says never again, but each time she slips back, safe, into the house, she knows she will cross over again, in the dark when it’s dangerous, when the night city is alive and mysterious.

She had slipped inside the house from the back deck and into a dress and sandals, pulling her hair back in a ponytail. Then quietly out the front door and down the steps, the man in her bed still asleep. The old neighbour, dark as night, sitting on his front step.

“Evenin’,” he said, dragging on his cigarette. “Shouldn’t be goin’ out alone. You know it, girl.”

She knew it. “Insomnia,” she said. “Going to get a movie.”

He shook his head and she walked past him, down Maynard Street.

Then she was moving fast — as she is now moving fast, halfway across the Commons, running even though there is no one around. Scared and excited. Her sandals clipping on the path. In the winter she’d be in the tub, hoping the water and candles would bring sleep. There is no traffic crossing Robie Street, but a police car drives up as she steps onto the sidewalk.

“Problem, Miss?” the cop in the passenger seat calls out the window. His head is shaved.

“No, no problem.” Shit, she thinks. “Looking for my cat,” she says. “Lister.”

“Now, you know, dear, it’s not safe to be out in the neighbourhood at night. Cat’ll show up in the morning looking for breakfast.”

Do they think she would be safer on some quiet South End street, she wonders? What they think is that they should drive her home, but she says she lives only a block away. They sit in the car with the engine purring, watching her walk up Compton Avenue. She turns around and waves at the police and then walks into someone’s dark driveway. When the sound of the car fades off, she runs back out to the sidewalk and to the bright lights of Quinpool Road.