He trembles as he stands, blanking into a mirage of delicacy, recalling how he used to thumb through the glossy pages of his mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalogues. He was only 12 then, not yet having discovered the sensuality that often accompanies adolescence. His mother would walk into the room to ask about his day, only to find him sanely perusing through the obsequious ladies, and would attempt to inhale every molecule of oxygen present in the atmosphere in order to muster the strength to blather on rampantly. He would gasp as she uttered her sounds, and would find a hand to his face the second he rolled his eyes. Too predictable, he had always thought, yet he kept on going for the sake of familiarity.

At 13, he was quite the same; he grew in cleverness and skill, reaching over for his father’s magazine subscriptions rather than his mother’s. Every night before he kissed his mother her sweet dreams, he would stay up, counting the number of seconds that went by until she was out of her ritual shower and finally in bed. He would scurry down past the crevices of the creaky stairs and slip into his father’s chamber. He’d crawl past the moldy sacks of potatoes and rice, his pinky toe gently grazing and greeting the baby garden spider in the crack of one of the sacks.

He groped around the little cubby with his cheeked hand until he felt a slithered page, tabbed just like the tip of a witch’s slender hat. There always was a little zap when he tried to unfold the tab. His rounded, stubby red fingers struggled to glide across the oily page. Him on all fours, plopped down on his belly rings, and the cubby located five inches into the wall, a sufficient dwelling for one of the few mice that lived in the other corner of the attic.

He doesn’t talk to the girl; She moves his way, but he shimmies down the opposite. Occasionally, his animosity toils and stirs, clumping in the chasm of his left breast, leaving him unable to think about anything but her bold curves and smothering smoothness. He affixes his stare at her, and outlines her shape. A red hand lifts; it reaches out and coasts past the small of her waist. “Tell me how to love”, she said.