After sunset, he went downtown. He put on a black dress and grey overcoat and stared into the bus window’s warped light. When he got off, it was cold but not raining and David liked this. He liked the dry, androgynous wrap that winter gave his body. He left his headphones quiet to keep an ear out for strangers and drifted north. He saw teenagers gaping under the wire-bristle sculpture across from Powell’s, lit in milky sepia. One of them, the tallest boy, was reaching up to the bottom curve of the sculpture, straining to touch it.

He saw the Red Light and thought, I could get some new skirts! He owned a few, but they were so Pacific Northwest frumpy—long, multicoloured, wrinkly. David hated wearing them, actually, and some days this made him think, Maybe it was a phase and it’s over, but today wasn’t one of those days. Maybe I’ll finally find something Iris likes, he thought before catching himself. Right.

Moot point, though. Nothing good in his size, a lady giving stink eye, and soon, he walked out, hands in his overcoat, wisps of snow falling that caused every car to halve its speed. He walked into a sex shop (no one looked at him funny in sex shops) and admired a blood-red high heel. A current flickered down his body as he took the vinyl in his hands. A size 9, whatever, but on the bottom a sticker—available up to size 15?!

A sign said shoes were twenty percent off next week, Monday to Friday. It was Sunday.

Then a voice shouted, “Hey!”—David nearly bobble-flung the shoe into the ceiling—“Sale’s already on!”

“Seriously?” He turned.

The girl behind the counter had a goofy smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I just decided.”

David gave silent thanks for this, this kindness that both was and wasn’t about money. She rang him up and said, “My girlfriends and I, we always say: ‘New pair of shoes?’ And we run around the house naked. Haha! Lie down on the bed and kick our heels. We call it a shoegasm.” The word “fetish” flashed lightning behind David’s eyes. Then he went home, and he turned on the heat, and he got naked and put on the heels and sat on his bed, staring at the wall.

The next day he called his mom. They had to talk Christmas. First one without the architect in a long time. But David confided, too: it might be finito for him and Iris.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “Davey!”

Then she became all business; Connie was thoughtful that way. “So what’s that about?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” David said nervously. “I like hanging out with her, but lately when we’re together, I’m thinking how I’d rather be with my friends. Or just go out by myself. Alone! I think of spending nights with her and it makes me anxious. That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Sure not a good thing,” she agreed. “Let’s think about this. Do you have reasons you want to stay with her?”