In the mid-afternoon sun, we sat in the front room of my new apartment, which is still bare except for a bookshelf, six or so boxes of books, and a thrice-used loveseat. The sun came in streaks through the blinds, dancing on the page of the book we were reading together out loud, taking turns on who read and who listened. When she read, I let my mind wander as far away as the Janis Joplin record we had playing in the background, the scratchy squeals of a woman impassioned blended effortlessly with her voice lilting over the opaque water images of Michael Cunningham�s The Hours. Every third sentence or so, she would pause to comment on the brilliance of a line, on the impact of the imagery, and once, she wrote down a phrase that made her nearly jump up from the loveseat we were sharing, our legs wrapped around each others for comfort (we are both too tall to share a loveseat without touch). When it was my turn to read, she would lean her head against the back of the loveseat, her hand absent-mindedly running through her hair, and she would interrupt me if a line particularly struck her. We spent the afternoon like this. Reading. Complimenting the author on his way with words (so much so he would have blushed had he heard us�the way we lingered for ten minutes or so on an adjective-verb-noun combination that made us both sigh together as if choreographed). That afternoon we made it through nearly half of the novel, and now it sits on my mantel, waiting for us to come together in the light of another afternoon.