My hand was still on his wrist. He had removed his other hand from my forehead and seemed to have placed it on the arm of the couch, behind me; he was trying to wrench himself away from me. I was still lying on my back and couldn’t see him at all, just my forearm, hovering above my face. I would not let go. I pulled his arm toward me like a rope, alternating hand by hand: forearm, elbow, biceps. And now his face was above mine, upside down, such that I could barely read his expression. I wanted him to kiss me softly, in this upside-down way, like they did in the movies. I released one of my hands and jammed my fingers through the underside of his beard, yanking him toward me. His lips were pursed tight. I had the sense that I could open my mouth wide enough to swallow him whole. I pictured it: my mouth stretching into a chasm, pulling him into me, first his head, his beard scratching my throat, then his shoulders, his arms like spaghetti…Everything he’d ever said would be inside me. Did you want to be seen? But then I’d be all alone. He would have nothing more to say.

I released him.

Silence.

“Put your hands on my head again,” I said, but he didn’t respond. “Do it!”

“It’s not a good idea,” he said.

“Please!” I said.

As if he had read my mind: “If you eat me up, there will be nothing left.”

More silence.

“What are you doing?” Freud asked, and I realized that I had been probing the roof of my mouth with my tongue again.

“It’s something I do to calm myself,” I told him. “I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth. But recently it became ruined—I noticed it felt too much like something else…“

“Like what?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid it will remind you of what you saw yesterday, in the back of the bar.” I was afraid—and I wanted it. I wanted him to know everything. But didn’t he already?

“It reminds you of a penis,” he said.

Penis. “Dick,” “cock,” “prick,” even “wang”—I’d call it anything but a “penis.” It sounded too vulnerable, like a baby animal. I soundlessly carved the word into the air with my lips, trying it out—penis, penis—and, as I did so, images from yesterday coursed through me: Dominic’s sneer, patio guy, grabbing Jojo’s arm, Sam’s rejection and Langham’s, too, my father, That’s very short—I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to stall the tape as it ribboned through my mind. Come back. What had he asked me? My tongue, my mouth. It reminds you of a—

“Yes,” I said. “It reminds me of a…penis.” But why, I wondered, would the fact that the inside of a mouth reminded me of a dick make it any less of a home? Weren’t dicks the only thing I loved?

“Why did you tell me that story?” he said again, and again there was the helpless flood of rage. It occurred to me there was nothing keeping me in this position. I grabbed the arm of the couch and clawed myself around to face him. There he was. I stayed on my belly, my chin resting on the arm of the couch.