"No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks," she said. Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. "You can wait in the car if you want," he said. # Krishna came home, (she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway, looking at the mountains on the horizon) Krishna came home, (she said, after he'd pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them) Krishna came home, (she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn't look at him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold) and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street that I'd walked past a hundred times but never gone into. He'd left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I felt...*glorious*. Gloried *in*. He'd been so attentive. He'd touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had *ever* touched me that way. He'd touched me with...*reverence*. He's gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in *church* or something. He'd kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he'd been saying all along, "Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God," and I'd felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious. He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I *knew* they'd never go on over my wings, and they were *so* beautiful. "This one will look really good on you," he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I'd never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn't, my wings would stick out a mile. I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for -- the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.