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I want to describe it, but it’s hard. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her. She was pretty. She had a great laugh. She was looking at me with big, warm, hopeful eyes, and her hand was on my knee, and I sat there and waited for the thing to happen. The thing that always happened. The spark, the drop in the stomach, the little electric yes.

Nothing. It was like knocking on a door and hearing the echo of an empty room.

“I need the bathroom,” I said, and got up so fast I bumped the table.

The bathroom at the Northern Lights Lounge was tiny, tiled in a green I can only describe as “pond,” with one sink and one stall and a framed photograph of a moose. I locked the door. I braced my hands on either side of the basin. I looked at myself in the mirror.

My face was pink. My eyes were too bright. I looked like a guy who’d been dropped from a height.

“Okay,” I told my reflection. “Okay. You can do this. She’s a nice girl. You like nice girls. Think about nice things.”

I thought about Marisol.

I thought about the twins.

I thought, for no reason, about a wrist. A pale one. Pinned to a pillow under a long-fingered hand that had held on for exactly three seconds and then let go.

Just like that, without a hesitation, I’d said let go, and he had let go, and I’d sat there with my heart in my mouth, thinking, nobody has ever done that. Not a girl, not a coach, and not a father had ever done it. People don’t let go when you ask. They argue, they negotiate, and they tell you you’re being dramatic.

He’d looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that mattered, and he’d let go.

My breath shuddered out of me.

I looked down.

Oh, for the love of—

I was hard.

Right there in the bathroom of a lounge on Kessler Street, with my forehead against a moose, I was hard, and it wasn’t Marisol, and it wasn’t the twins, and it wasn’t the nice woman waiting at the table with her hand on my knee.

I said, out loud, “Explanation B.”

The moose did not comment.

I turned on the cold tap and put my wrists under it. I stayed there for about a minute and a half, breathing through my nose, watching the water run. Then I dried my hands on my jeans, and unlocked the door, and walked out.

I’m not going to make excuses. I kissed her.

It wasn’t planned. I sat back down, and she smiled at me and said, “You okay?” and I said, “Yeah,” and then I leaned in and kissed her, because I thought that if I just did it, my body would catch up. She kissed back, and she tasted like wine and lip gloss. It was a good kiss, technically, warm and soft and well done.

It was like kissing a very nice sofa.

I pulled back.

She was looking at me with her head tilted. I could see that she’d felt it. I don’t know how, but she had, the way you feel the difference between a phone call and a text.

“Oh,” said Vanessa.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“No, I’m— that wasn’t— it’s not you,” I said, and heard how tired that sounded. “I swear. You’re great. You’re amazing. It’s just that— I think I’m having a—” I couldn’t find the word. “A week.”

She reached across the table and picked up her drink, and took a long sip, and set it down. And then, very gently, she started to smile.

“Lex,” she said. “I have a brother.”