Barbara Muldoon won’t let me unbutton her purple blouse though we’ve been wild with drunken kisses for nearly an hour. She stops my hand and stops it again. Her mouth tastes of Molson Gold and mine of another kind of gold, just now learning to hold the sweet smoke in my lungs long enough to start loving my own unwieldy body, the press of something sweet between my thighs. Barbara sighs, our tongues touch again—wrap each other in a new warmth then withdraw, then touch again. We are learning how talented the tongue can be. I want to use its new skill on Barbara’s brown nipples—I can almost taste them in her beery breath. But the Grateful Dead is playing quietly through the walls—Friend of the Devil boy sound I’d never heard till I came to this strange place— and I don’t know the rules, whether I’ll want to keep on kissing girls; if Barbara will talk to me again; if I’ll ever learn this world. That was nice, we agree in the morning. But let’s not do it again.