This evening, as he laughed, I noticed that one of his teeth overlapped with another, as though shyly hiding. I found this defect incredibly fascinating and wondered why I had never noticed it before. I know his moles and his skin, and I know the different smells that arise one by one from the exploration of his body. I know that he has an extra rib, the one he didn’t give to the woman. He has freckles on his back and big, deep knuckles on his hands. The gleam of the stars is a flat, monotonous glare in comparison with the flash of his eyes. He has a soft mouth, the kind only women tend to have. He has a maternal belly and breasts, soft as the limbs of a newborn child.
He has a mole under his eye, in the same place as mine.
As I looked in delight at that twisted tooth, he stared at me and asked, almost irritably, “What’s up?”
I knew something was wrong.
I knew I was about to be abandoned.
The first thing we shared was a book of poems by Mao Tsetung, bought in an antiquarian bookshop. We read it at night, in his room, our warm, naked bodies covered by the duvet. Red Christmas lights hung from the walls of the room, and we thought we were in a transparent cube suspended in midair, from which we could be seen by anyone.