I can’t reach out to touch you. You’re furloughed, but just, and you’ve talked face-to-face with several dozen pending citizens today and every day for weeks. You don’t like it. You’re afraid you’ll get sick. But it’s important. This is cynical, you say, but not the least because of all those votes. November is coming. The plague has put us hundreds of thousands of new citizens behind. No one’s touched you for eighteen weeks, three weeks longer than I’ve gone, because of Eve’s hug. You said, on the circle in the park, that you’re “not a physical person,” which worried me, but here we are, leaning toward each other, talking about how we can’t touch, and blood knifes through me. I can’t even breathe. The first time I might touch anyone new in a decade. An exposed person—this shouldn’t turn me on. People are dying. People I know. My friend clutching Voldyne and wishing five would never come. It shouldn’t turn me on that there’s no future for us because of my girlfriend. It’s doomed, this thing with you, like the rest of the world. I shouldn’t be here, in a stranger’s apartment, but you already don’t look like a stranger, the way you turn your head and laugh silently when I say something off-color. You’re like my older friends: cool, sour girls on the tail end of Gen X, with their hoodies like yours and their plague-canceled Bikini Kill tickets like yours, but this is different, this is new, and you told me on the app you weren’t sure about me, that you’ve dated other people—girls, but we won’t say girls—in relationships already and it hasn’t worked. I’ve considered the pitfalls, of course I have, but different ones—disease—who’s not thinking about disease right now—my girlfriend’s jealousy, mine, which is worse—I’m a Scorpio, I’ve told you so already and still you’re standing here—but not, ever, have I worried about someone liking me too much, which suddenly seems possible in this dark, peaceful apartment, no sign of the Mission up here, not even the distant ocean hum of Valencia.

And then you take off your mask. It’s dirty. It’s a dirty thing to do. In two different but related ways. Your mouth and nose are body parts I shouldn’t see inside a room: exposed, fleshy, freshened with sweat. My blood knifes again. Your smile—I know from photographs, but I forgot—is gummy but wise, mocking. You say, “This is going to be illegal,” and I know, the way I didn’t know when Eve asked, “Are you ready?” that I’m about to be touched, and this time the endorphins come early, because I understand now, for the first time since my long, lonely childhood, what it means to be touched after months, and my pleasure rises to meet you.

You reach my shoulder first. I don’t remove my mask, though your face is close, asking. I pull down the fabric. We kiss. Almost, it’s too much. Not like Eve’s hug, not like nerves everywhere cooperating to light up, but scary, as if this threat I’ve guarded against for months, sanitizing my hands and spraying bleach on my phone and kicking the gate open, letting the mail percolate for a day, three if it has tape, texting my friend in the ICU if I haven’t heard from her in three hours, forsaking everything I used to love—classrooms and parties and restaurants and adventure and my girlfriend most of all—and now I’m smashing my mouth against the mouth of a stranger and my spine kicks back against the shock.