It's because she's different, something new, a departure from what I usually run into around here. She's not dumb and knows exactly what this is and tells me so. She's not naive and frank as frank can be, completely aware of what she's doing and what everyone else is doing too. And I'm walking there in the snow--blizzard, says my mom, and I'm to wear my hat and gloves which I dutifully am. The stairs look like little snow ramps; all the space where my feet should go is instead covered in snow. Footprints only minutes old are now just dimples and I re-create someone else's path for a while but still get snow all over my socks. I have no objections to the weather apart from the snow is falling so heavy it gets in my eyes and makes it hard to see the beauty of it all. But my jacket protests, stiffening under the cold, creaking when it flexes with my back.

We negotiate the awkward moments beforehand listening to Burgess' words while seeing Kubrick's sets, her silently insisting I make the first move and I, just to be a butthead, stubbornly refuse turning the entire film into a battle of wills. And the finale, something of yarbos and gullivers and viddie and slussie, and she puts on "something we don't have to pay attention to."

I laugh when I see that it's Willow, and proceed to pay no attention, except when the brownies come on and I snicker a "Kevin Pollack."

And when you're not wearing any clothes, euphemism and innuendo lose all meaning. It's ridiculous to even try.

She's naked in the windowsill smoking a cigarette. My toes are playing with the boards of the loft under which her futon rests. "So just how many people have you slept with?" she asks, and I make note of the gender-neutral noun. I tell her. "Wow. Figure someone that good with his hands would have a number much higher than that." I wonder to myself how many people I'd have to sleep with to justify her orgasms, or why she didn't ask anything about how many times. She crawls back under the blanket which was earlier ripped hastily from the bed above and we talk. She tells me about the guy she had sex with last week, and how she's been trying to avoid him ever since. Nice kid, nothing inherently wrong with him, just not interested in a follow-up, and I compare and contrast with similar experiences (compare: near everything; contrast: penis) and eventually we fall asleep.

And in the morning, "That was fun. We should hang out again sometime," she says. I smile a goodbye smile and consider how similar we are (some say cold, calloused, calculating, and looking for nothing we can't touch) and agree.

And my friends with their quasi-puritanism and full-bore nosiness demand to know where I've been and what I did and her name and I stare at them blankly, thinking of her smell and taste and touch and look, and go back to my video games.