I glanced at Langham again. He looked resolutely away from me. His eyes followed the conversation like a schoolchild’s. When the line of conversation required his gaze to pass over me, he managed to avert it, either blinking briefly or flitting his eyes down underneath me and back up again. He had no problem looking at Olivia. Would he try to fuck her, too? Olivia. Client Z. But she wouldn’t do it, would she? She was too valuable for such things. She was beautiful. She had on a fucking velvet dress. And, of course, she was cured. I clasped my hands together and remembered Langham’s businesslike handshake moments earlier, then that very hand awkwardly caressing my face just one week ago while I lay on my father’s closet floor. Again the image of his hairy belly pushing between my legs flashed into my mind and I looked down at his real belly, now in front of me once more, his pin-striped button-down straining around it. Remember how you laughed when I licked right underneath your mustache? I wanted to say. Remember how it made your gut jiggle? I wanted to screw up my face into the grimace he wore when he came. Remember this? But he wouldn’t even look at me. He thought I was vile.

The tip of my tongue found its way again to the roof of my mouth, probing the ridge that ran down the middle. One side of it had what felt like a seam, while the other melted away. My tongue pressed back and forth along the ridge, over the hump near my throat into the softness behind, back down toward my teeth, where it found those ripples. Tap the teeth, back over the ripples, one, two, three, four, five, six…I lost count as they, too, melted away and ran my tongue back along the ridge again, digging it into the seam, noticing for the first time that it felt just like the vein threading its way along the underside of every dick. I released my tongue from the roof of my mouth, tried to hold it in space, not let it touch a thing. Nothing was a home, nothing was safe, not even the inside of my own mouth.

The familiar desperation began to bubble inside of me. I could hardly sit still, my skin was prickling and tingling. I wanted to rip it off in a clean sheath. I looked around the room, from my mother to my father to Patrice, all focused on one another, obsessed, entranced. My mind seemed to exist on a separate plane. Perhaps I was an alien, sent to observe these bobbleheads and report back to my home planet. But this game, this fantasy, did nothing to help contain me. My emotions were hot and lurid, so immense I was floored no one else could feel them. It seemed to me I was bleeding out, my anguish flooding into the room. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut and push out a high-pitched noise, all the muscles tightening in my stomach, my throat straining and aching with the effort, anything to dispel these dark energies. I had the urge to reach down into my underwear and almost did so, then remembered with a start that I couldn’t do that here. I clanked my empty wineglass onto the floor and lurched upward.