“No, no, no. It’s fine. I’m gonna explain it for them. There is absolutely no miscommunication, you both know what’s happening, but this is where things stop for Joy. Seeing a naked someone, thinking about them being naked, does nothing for her. It doesn’t happen even if there’s an emotional connection between them. They’re just naked.”

“But if you know nothing is gonna happen, why would you get naked?” Summer asks.

“Because I don’t care?” Joy shrugs. “Yeah, that trips a lot of people up. I like being naked. It truly doesn’t bother me.”

Malcolm tosses Joy’s pillow back to her. “She’s practically a nudist.”

“Since I was twenty. Living in a dorm profoundly changed me. I’ll get naked right now and be perfectly comfortable.”

“And just to clarify,” Malcolm continues, “nothing will happen without an active decision to have sex on her part.”

Summer asks him, “Is it like that for you too?”

“Mostly. I’ve leaned demi enough times to make me question it.”

“That’s so strange to me,” Summer says. “I understand what you said, and it makes sense, but I can’t reconcile it in my brain.” She makes a motion of trying and failing to link her fingers together.

Joy says, “And now you know how I feel. Two different sides of the same coin.”

End scene.

Joy’s seen that lightbulb moment so many times she’s lost count. She became a pro at explaining by accident. If she treated everyone else like the special unicorn, if she pretended to be fascinated and baffled, if she stopped pleading and begging for them to understand, it stopped the questions. It makes them think. It’s simply less emotionally exhausting to center their experiences.

“So you never think about sex? Ever?” Summer pushes.

“Oh, I think about it all the time, because I have to.”

Understanding visceral sexual attraction will always be out of her wheelhouse. But she does try to understand it on an abstract and physical sensation level, like how Malcolm did. Sex is everywhere! It’s inescapable! A lot of the time she felt like if she didn’t get on the bandwagon she’d be left behind to die of cholera on the trail.

Joy continues, “Eventually you get tired of hearing ‘stop leading me on’ and getting violently threatened after accusations of ‘being a tease.’ I had to learn how to recognize situations like that. I know what their expectations are. I know how to flirt, work a room, and dazzle people. I also know my limits and how to keep myself safe.”

“Oh, I guess I didn’t think about it like that.” Summer glances at Malcolm for help, but he shrugs. “There’s good stuff too. Like in a you get turned on and you want to have sex kind of way. Oh god, you just said you didn’t, I’m sorry.”