“You coulda worn your pajamas and an overcoat, for all I care,” he goes on to say. He sets his glass back on the table and puts his arms around me. “I’m just so fuckin happy to see you. This sweater looks good on you.” He gives the ball of my belly a shake. “But I can’t wait to see it on my bedroom floor.”

Fighting the mental image of Star Wars sheets on a twin bed in a messy room that smells like Esau’s feet, I kiss him.

We kiss. We sip at our wine. We pull chunks from the loaf of bread and feed each other. It’s harder for me to keep my hands off him than it should be, but his shirt’s come untucked on his left flank, and the need to rove his warm, soft skin is more than I can resist. He’s so solid, so taut -- so exotic to my hands, accustomed to the heavy, hairy curves they have at home.

But it’s not just Esau getting me hot and bothered. The pot on the stove is billowing steam, clattering on the front burner. “I guess it’s ready for noodles,” I say.

He gives me a funny look. “It’s full of noodles. We’re ready whenever. I just wanted to say hi.”

“There’s noodles in there?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been here like twenty minutes.”

“Yeah. So?”

Al dente they are not. I yank a plastic bottle of oregano from a puddle of spilled super glue in a utility drawer and find the remains of some minced garlic in a small, crusty jar in the fridge. By the time we’re stirring some flavor into the scoops of sweet jarred sauce, it’s more like eating polenta, but I polish off two hearty servings of Esau’s spaghetti to allay his embarrassment. It’s not disgusting, and it’s certainly filling, and anyhow, there’s plenty of wine. We crowd one corner of the large, sturdy table, knees touching, and drink from the same glass. After he carbo-loads through a third heaping bowl, the wine’s gone, the bread’s gone, and there’s talk of sneaking out for dessert. “We were gonna have pie,” he admits, “but I ate it for breakfast.”

“The whole pie?”

He shrugs. Food is fuel, I remember, and he’s running a high-end machine.

“You want me to run and get something?”

“Kinda,” he says. “But I don’t want you to go.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“It’s already seven-thirty. Ten o’clock’s gonna come so fast, anyhow. I don’t want you to go.”

“Well,” I say, moving my hand up his thigh from his knee to his lap. “What do you wanna do instead, then?”

He doesn’t dramatically sweep the table clean with one long arm, but I see the idea flash through his eyes. He overturns his chair in his rush to jump up, and the sink is jumbled with plates and pans and green glasses and Esau’s shirt inside ninety seconds. He stumbles over the khaki pooled around his ankles, but, having already wriggled out of my jeans, I’m there to help him right himself.

He grabs me like maybe I weigh two hundred and forty grams rather than pounds and tosses me onto the table. I don’t know where he got the condom; I’m not paying attention to what he uses for lube. The entire eye-popping length of him has gone from sleepy to rigid before my eyes in a flash. I just grab my knees, gasp out the word “Esau,” and take a deep breath.

He drives it in me like he’s gonna hammer the square peg through the round hole, psychiatrists be damned, and I howl, only partly in pain. I swear he’s in me so deep I can taste his tip at the back of my throat. His legs are all muscle and he’s yoked like a cart ox. There’s a hundred and ninety-nine pounds of force in every thrust, and I feel like he’s fucking me with a fence post -- I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying or singing the Gettysburg Address to the tune of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” All I do know is that when he stops dead and cries, “Dad?!” I go silent.