I stood immobile. I forced myself to swallow, to blink, then raised my drink to my lips and pulled a mouthful through the straw. I plastered a calm, beatific expression on my face, looked out toward the patio’s back fence, pretended I was thinking items of depth and nuance, rather than staving off tears. My fingertips pressed hard into the folder, as if for sustenance. I remembered the weeks we’d spent in college, talking late into the night on his dorm-room bed, him tracing my forearm with his nail, so lightly, up and down. He’d had me close my eyes and walked his fingers from the wrist up the tendon that emerged there, all the way into the crook of my elbow. “There,” I’d say, when I thought he’d reached the ridge, but when I opened my eyes, he was always inches away from that margin of skin. After we’d finally slept together, I noticed, for the first time, that his gums showed when he laughed, like he was a scared animal. I noticed his arms were skinny and weak, like a rag doll’s. I noticed that he was barely taller than me, that he had a birthmark on the tip of his nose I’d never seen before. His lips had been the softest I’d ever tasted, and until that night I had hungered for them, but afterward they felt far too soft, like they threatened to swallow me whole. All at once, he disgusted me, and I couldn’t bear to return his calls, so I didn’t. I saw him across campus a week or two later and changed direction to avoid crossing his path. I thought he hadn’t seen me, but maybe he had. Anyway, he refused to talk to me after that, so it was really more like he had rejected me.

I retreated to a corner near the door to suck down the rest of the drink. It really was bad, but when I reached the bottom of the glass, I dug the straw between the ice cubes to get those final droplets. My limbs went limber, the muscles of my neck released, I closed my eyes and felt around the inside of my mouth with my tongue. There were my teeth, sturdy and dependable. There was the palate where my tongue lived, which it nestled against when it went to sleep at night. I drew the tip of my tongue down the ridge in the middle, then back again. I felt a gaze burning into me, but when I opened my eyes, there was no one staring.

I looked across the patio. I felt empty and forlorn. Dominic and his little girlfriend were gone, who knows where. There were two young guys with half-drunk pints, the glasses sudsy, at the table nearest me—but they were already eyeing a blandly pretty girl down the table. She was sitting with a slightly less attractive version of herself, whom she surely brought around with her as a point of comparison. In the back corner a rangy guy in faded jeans sat on top of a table with his friends, feet on the bench, cigarette hand hanging limply over his knee. A big, bumpy man-knee. That hand. That knee. I knew all knees must be the same, but only men’s knees seemed to point downward in those sharp, seductive Vs. Torture to behold, delicious torture.