Excerpt from Nocturne Variations:

   From that point forward Piers and Teresa hung out nearly every night, getting drunk and stoned and completing each other in various ways.

   An adverbially inflamed Teresa fell hard for Piers and loved her swoonfully, piningly, achingly, loinfully, gaspingly, inviolably, subhumanly, deepseedingly, couldn’t get enough of her, told her things like you enable me to breathe, and considered Piers her soulmate, the one whose rogue independence she would draw from in gathering the strength and courage to ditch Redline and head out into the great wide world.

   Piers, on the other hand, was not in love with Teresa, not in that way, but she enjoyed her company and friendship and the way she gave her body and holy fire without reserve, she enjoyed reading Teresa Anne Sexton poems and enjoyed Teresa’s sensually tubercular responses to Sexton’s words, as if she were swallowing tiny drops of razored rain, and she definitely and deeply enjoyed the banshee-pitched, convulsive reactions that surged from Teresa when she was being eaten out.

   You might say: Piers was on the periphery, playing at love, while Teresa was seriously and thickly in the middle of it.