They drank the rest of the wine and she started telling him how sexuality is so different from American sexuality, her Italian fluttering, percussive, his ears drunk on it and him understanding most of it, the rest sliding past him like objects on ice, the trajectory smooth, quick; l�amore non e tutto la mia vita� ma e molto importante� He understood her and had unbuttoned three of her top buttons of her gray shirt. Her body heat; he could feel it play against the underside of his fingers as he continued. She tilted her head back and her eyes looked down on him, like wet pieces of slate, glittering, dark, through lazy, half-closed eyes. They locked the door to their cabin and knew the ticket-takers would not be by for at least three hours. Moonlight flecked their skin. The intercom squawked, grainy and full of static and beads of clarity. He stopped, mystified. The voice was a commercial for car body repair. The landscape swerved outside, spiraled, dissolved and the angry red digital glow of 9:51 crept in through his half-closed eyes, full of sleep and still swimming the sap of a dream.

Heavy limbs move like tree trunks, turn the alarm clock off. He looks at the ceiling for a bit, white and flat, watching the last wisps of his dream spiral outward on his ceiling like ink in water. The house smells like coffee. The bed smells like nobody. Dogs bark and he misses his. Anonymous laughter skitters into his room from next door, and the blanket suddenly heat up, grow hundreds of layers softer, swell and move around him like a mist. The numbers tell him to move, but then like two shutters he spins back into sleep.

The air conditioning buzzed like a refrigerator and she slid her underwear back on, the twin straps making small creases in her hips. The train slid slowly to a stop at a train station, small and nameless, and through the stalled light, florescent and different compared to the recycling of light they had been used to for the past 34 miles, the light stayed on her body for a few moments, taking solace between the curve of her hips, or resting on the underside of a bare breast. He was sitting down, she was looking at him. She opened her mouth: �Wake up. Get to school.� He shook his head. �No.� Arms curled around him like sheets, her shoulder a pillow. Steady was the slow-burn of sleep, simple and she whispered �You have physics. Get up.� The air outside of his body is suddenly cool. The alarm rebounds back from Snooze with the lyrics �You have been in love / have you ever been in love�.

He groans, runs hands through his hair. Yes. Yes, he has, and for the rest of the day it is spelled out in the clouds, chalked on the ground, hidden in-between people�s adjectives and verbs, and the trajectory of Vector C seems to say Yes, even, the Y-shape like a smile. Yes, he has been in love, and it is past-tense all the time, in the clouds, on the ground, and inside his head she roams restlessly and waits for him to close his eyes so she may appear, projection-like, flickering on the inside of his eyelids like the most secret cinema. It is frustration, exquisite and never losing the edges that it is famous for as it carves its� history into everyone. Outside, it starts to snow.