I’m watching Bluey at my best friend’s house and talking with his wife about her anxieties about having a gay son but, really, we’re both thinking about fucking each other. I can’t tell you how I know this but I do. A certain look. A bend, a shift, a rush of blood to the neck—the body reveals. Not the heart’s intent, necessarily. Because the heart is a mysterious muscle. But it reveals something and that something says, “I wish we could fuck. Now. Once or twice and then never again. Just to get it out of the way.”

“Maybe you’re worried he’s gay because you’re actually gay and have suppressed that gayness because of Catholicism or something, left it unexplored, and these regrets are twisting you up about your son.” I say this but don’t believe in psychobabble. This is just how we flirt.

“I’m not gay. Someone said he was autistic. He’s just hyper. And flamboyant.”

She has very large breasts and I’m an ass man but I can appreciate these breasts. The burden they must have been. Back pain and an onslaught of leering attention at puberty. “He’s not even three. Way too early to be speculating on all this. Let’s just watch some Bluey.” I turn the volume up. My friend is out getting sandwiches at the deli down the street. The son starts screaming and running and screaming and running and screaming and running and then slips and falls. He’s crying. The mother picks him up. Kisses his forehead. She says “That’s alright, pickle, it’s just a little boo-boo.” She covers her face, reveals it. Covers, reveals. Says “Peek-a-boo-boo.” The son starts laughing. She leans back with her son in her arms. Then she rests her head on my thigh, exhausted, intimate. “Sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” I say.

She starts crying.

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” I run my fingers through her hair, clearing her face. “Peekaboo,” I say.

“I see you,” my friend calls from the kitchen. We didn’t hear him come home. But he’s just answering the call. A dad on autopilot. He can’t actually see us from there. He asks us what we’re doing. Asks us if we’re hungry.

His wife sits up quickly, stiff, tired, her son in her arms.

“We’re watching Bluey,” I say. “And we’re starving,” I answer for the both—for all of us.