Around 4am we’re coming out of the club. No: around 4:30. Jules’s arms are both around my neck. Her skin is so soft. We’re both sweaty, and, out here, the air is cooler. No one’s on the street.
“Chad, you driving?”
“No,” Chad says, “We’re walking.”
Penelope says: “Are you?”
“Right, of course, you live..in the Eva Feldman building, right? Goodnight you guys no—we’re not driving. We’re..walking. How did you get here?” I ask Jules.
“I live right over there. Where do you live?”
“I live right over there.”
“Uh oh,” she says.
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight! Have fun. Play safe. Don’t get AIDS.”
Chad and Penelope turn around. Penelope points at Chad’s shirt. “Don’t get AIDS,” she says.
That’s how we leave it. Lol. Chad and Penelope—that shirt isn’t even Chad’s, he must have picked it up at the club somehow—and me and Jules, wandering off in opposite directions on South Jefferson at four in the morning.
“You want to get breakfast?”
“Do you want to?” Jules is now accommodating.
“Maybe in a while. You want to walk?”
She takes my hand.
“I thought you were crazy,” she says, “when I first met you.”
“You practically just met me.”
“Let me finish. Let me finish,” she says. “When I first met you, when I very very first met you, at the door of Ashley’s house, I thought: who is this guy?” I let her talk. She’s on a soliloquy about how I was wearing panties, and how that impressed her. She uses the funniest words. I mean in the middle of a sentence, she’ll just throw one in. “I like how you dance,” she says.
“Do you?”
“Your dancing..is like tintinnabulation.”
“No it’s not.”
“Would you—Shut up and let me pick my words! It is. It’s like tintinnabulation of the mind.”
“You’re just fucking off now.”
“Aren’t I allowed to fuck off. Don’t you want me to fuck off? Isn’t fucking off just exactly what you want for me to do?” She has this musical way about the way she speaks.
“That’s not all I want.”
“No?”
“No, it’s not just about fucking off.”
She grabs me close. We’re standing by the river.
“Yeah,” I say, “it’s about fucking in, fucking on, fucking under, fucking inbetween.”
“Fucking inbetween,” she says. “I’ve heard about that. Do you want to fuck me?”
“Not right now.” I’m trying to explain some subtle point that I think is really important—
Jules laughs and says: “Well that’s good. Cause I hardly know you. There doesn’t need to be any fucking right now.” She says it in this deep voice, like she’s imitating some actor from a movie.
She goes off along the river lights, over by the fountain, and it isn’t later till we kiss.
We’re sitting by the fountain, which is off, and the light is coming up over the neighborhoods. There isn’t sun yet, it’s maybe 5:15. We’ve been talking all this time, Jules about her play and her mother and her beautiful little sister who she hasn’t seen in months, who she emails, and who emails back. Her sister’s name is Bianca, she’s very formal, she puts image attachments in all the email she sends to Jules, pictures of flowers, and she finds a different one to attach, every time she writes. I talk about work, and Jules listens, and she cares with her eyes, and with her brow, when I say that I’m unhappy. Not in general—in general I’m fine. But with work. It’s got problems. And they’re not the kind of problems that are problems for the company. But they are for me.
We both dry out..our clothes, from sweat. And she sits in my lap for a while, and I put my arms around her, and I kiss her neck.
It’s a delicate moment, that moment you first kiss someone. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already fucked them—as is sometimes the case. That first kiss, even a hand kiss or a neck kiss, is something.
I kiss her on her neck, and she squeezes my arms that are holding her. Then I kiss her shoulder and she turns around, scooting on the concrete wall next to where the rivers meet.
We’re looking at each other and our foreheads touch.
And I like this girl more than I want her to know.
Because she’s alive. She has that spark. And it’s not a spark I want to extinguish, and it’s not a spark I want to keep me warm. It’s hers, and it’s hers only. I just like to look at it. I like to know it’s lit in her.
Knowing that is more than anyone owes anyone else.
You can’t expect people to share their spark with you.
Not even knowledge that it exists.
But I’d do anything, with this one, with this one before me, to be a spark from her perspective, and I’d do anything to never offend this one before me, so that I could always watch her glow.