Later over the course of the evening, she would give me what her ex-girlfriend Sammy refers to as a “smiley,” a simpler burn of that from a heated liquor-store lighter. It took her two tries to get it right, and then she flew off to the bathroom to grab the toothpaste that she ended up rubbing into my smoldering skin in order to cease promotion of more blisters.

“How did you know how to do that?” I of course had to inquire.

“I used to burn myself a lot,” answered she with that lilting, charming voice of a toddler at the top of the stairs. She judiciously daubed and spread the toothpaste like ointment on my arm, then covered the affected area with a red Crayola crayon sticker, and all was good.

Earlier, when Cordelia had done it to herself with that vaporizer of hers that doesn’t work very well and that reminds one of a old-time lantern with a 7-11 Slurpee straw jutting out of its side, I had pondered whether or not she did this to impress me or because she really wanted (had) to do this. But, I’m getting over such deliberations: they’re needless anymore, and after all, why should it matter? The fact is that she did it, she does it, and I’ve found a girl who burns herself and loves me dearly. So, I’ll just enjoy the ride, no?

Yes, and that’s not all. No.

There she was on the toilet in the bathroom, “micturating,” after telling me that the people in her MFA class felt that this word synonymous with “pissing” is a little too ostentatious to be employed as a garden-variety $64k word in her book-thesis. She told me in the same breath nearly that the females in her class had grown cross with her for revealing that girls need to “go to the bathroom after sex in order to avoid a UTI.”

“You’re not supposed to put that in a book!” they chastised her loudly in class.

But, Cordelia just laughed it off, as had I when earlier before this, our first fuck of the night, I had been lying in her bed - me in my self-made brown-and-yellow SARCASM IS FONY shirt and nothing else, she in her dishabille turquoise chemise with the spaghetti straps that tend to drive me to the brink of ripping them off, seemingly tattered country-girl skirt from Wal-Mart, and her damned black hair with electric-purple streaks that made me fall for her along with her sapphire-in-the-sky blue eyes - and she says to me - also in those green, knee-high socks with white stripes at top that I had purchased for her (us) from American Apparel - “Where do you want to cut me?”

Now it was all a bit too much for me, and so I began to laugh, cackle really, holding my closed eyes betwixt my fingers as one would who wishes to relieve a headache.

“Are you in the right headspace right now?” she asked me with maternal care born of my having lost it a little the last time we smoked together in her cluttered art-shack where she grew up and now lives on her own.

“I’m fine. It’s all a little too perfect,” I told her. Then we went for it with a razor that she had materialized from Some Other Place and a tab of sponge-like paper drenched in rubbing alcohol.

I didn’t try to make a “Hi” on the inner part of her silky-smooth thigh, but that’s what came out. That and her taking my finger to “show me what I did.” No, not the “Hi” mark now reddening and becoming semi-permanent for all her future lovers to admire under the sheen of her sweaty passion, but rather her most intimate and womanly part, now moist and wet with exuberance. “You made me cum,” said she in that same pedomorphic moppet voice I need to hear so regularly these sordid days.

So, I suppose that it doesn’t matter anymore, regardless, whether it’s for me, for her, for us. Here we are. Some people prefer vanilla and are made to believe and promulgate further that vanilla is all that one should eat. We prefer chocolate. I know I do, and I believe now more than ever so does Cordelia, whose gift to me at night’s end was a card that she hid in my computer case, one that read on the cover a quote from Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (“This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph”), and a cartoon kitty on the cover of said card, with an inside inscription written in sober, spare, feminine writing: “Mathew, I love you, and I love when you strangle me. – Cordelia.”