Last night, for example. In the taxi. When he nursed her. How did he know that she needed that … to be babied … at that moment? And what was it in him that made him sacrifice his own need, to give her the security—as momentary as it was—of belonging, and not necessarily to him, but to something outside herself?

Had it been another man—a strip of faces crossed her mind—there would’ve been a presumption, an insistence even, that the intimacy was about his need and not hers. And as she considered the idea of the laser beam again, she saw that it was related not just to intelligence but to a whole way of being. Which is why the tenderness he showed her was so erotic—it had transcended the needs of the flesh.

As the elevator doors opened and she was swept along the crosswalk and down the steps to the platform, she concluded that Fire had more than the strength of a man. He also had the strength of a woman. A penis as a totem could not fully represent him. For he was more than a giver of pleasure. He was a giver of life. As she thought about this she didn’t feel tired anymore. She wanted to sing now. She wanted to dance. With him. To any song. Fast or slow. However he wanted it.

As the train bumped and rattled beneath the river, she ignored the fetid armpits of the fat man beside her and mused on how nice it was to feel at home with a man. She had never felt such ease with Lewis. But then she had never felt such ease with herself either.

If she’d gone to the show with Lewis, it would’ve been a different experience. His tastes were tethered to jazz and R&B. Everything else, including blues and classical, was intolerable, or at best inoffensive. Which is why they listened to his music more than hers. Her tastes included his. And although she felt guilty, she had to admit it—it was easy for her to step down to his level.

Something had happened at the concert that she hadn’t remembered until now. As she and Fire stood next to each other, close but not touching, they shared a joke without speaking. It was quite a silly joke actually, but telling nonetheless: a woman directed a friend to the bar by pointing with her lips and not her fingers. Being Caribbean, she and Fire recognized the archetype, so they laughed. Had she been with Lewis she would’ve had to explain it. Then the joke would’ve lost its taste.

As she considered this, she realized that she’d been quietly missing her culture for years. She loved jazz. She loved classical. And the blues and R&B. But she didn’t feel them in the same way she felt some Trenchtown bass bussin her head or some Lavantille steel pan racklin through her bones. She hadn’t dated many men from the Caribbean, and this was an issue she’d never come to terms with, but which she suspected had a lot to do with Syd. And in relationships, she’d always found it easier to collapse into the man’s head-space than to ask him to expand into hers.