After Peter kissed me—not quite kissed, more nuzzled—I remember pushing him away; not an angry or unfriendly push, but a firm sort of discouraging push that, to my mind, clearly communicated my insistence on boundaries. I wasn’t that drunk. What was it, wine? One glass? Also, I got up immediately from the floor. I didn’t let anything linger between us. And it wasn’t a real kiss, more a nuzzling in my neck area. Which, granted, Peter should not have been anywhere near my neck area. Nothing adulterous happened, if that’s the concern, I told myself, knowing how alcohol distorts memory, how it exaggerates little things—a sound, a word, a passing glance, a “kiss.” Although I drank just one glass—and “drank” is an exaggeration. I sipped.

What else am I blowing out of proportion, I wondered. This was when I was home later, alone in bed, thinking about what had happened between Peter and me, if “between” even applies, since the kiss, for lack of a better word, was one-sided. I did not reciprocate. Moonlight came through my window, casting pale, silvery stripes on my bedspread and down across the floor, where I noticed fragile dust bunnies scattered about. I saw my silk blouse hanging on the doorknob, and the capri pants I’d worn, their legs seeming to straddle the back of my rocking chair. I must have thrown them there while undressing. I couldn't remember.

“Let’s have spaghetti!” That I remembered clearly. Janet had said that, after I’d won at Monopoly. She went into the kitchen, leaving Peter and me on the living room floor, sitting on either side of the Monopoly board. “Great idea!” I’d said, but I was referencing the spaghetti, not the fact that she was leaving me alone with her husband. My meaning was clear. I was hungry because I never have time at the clinic to eat—I’m an intern, getting my master’s in psychology. So why the cold sweat, thinking I somehow seduced my best friend’s husband?

A ridiculous thought, I knew. Catastrophizing. In clinical terms, it's a common type of cognitive distortion. I see it all the time at the clinic—the problems people make for themselves by overreacting, panicking, imagining horrible disasters. People take any number of perfectly normal life situations and make them worse.

Let’s not go there, I told myself. Let’s not turn Peter’s kiss into the apocalypse.

I got up to take an aspirin and glanced at my neck in the mirror, squinting against the jab of bathroom light. Nothing. No hickey. No stubble scratch. No evidence, cognitively speaking. Skip the histrionics, Deirdre, I told myself. You have your clients to consider. As a psychotherapist, I can’t afford to lose a night’s sleep over something that I, or any innocent bystander, would call kissing (more nuzzling). If it’s problems you want, think about Carmen Hernandez. (She was first on my caseload in the morning.) Compared to Carmen’s problems, I realized, nothing had happened between Peter and me. If she’d seen us, she’d be sound asleep right now.

I went back to bed, remembering clearly how I’d pushed Peter away—empathetically, though—mindful of our friendship. Nothing castrating.

I dozed, until a police car siren outside jolted me awake. I listened in the half-light of my bedroom, staring at the ceiling and picturing the culprits, wondering whether they’d resist arrest or go along with the officers in an orderly fashion. I wondered what crime had been committed. Not crime necessarily, I told myself—misdemeanor, more likely, once the facts were known.

“Nice perfume, Deirdre,” Peter had said, taking my coat at the door when I arrived at their apartment.

"Thanks, Peter,” was all I’d replied. Nothing suggestive. No innuendos. No pathetic double entendres from me, trying to arouse his attention. I think I can be trusted to leave nothing open to interpretation. I handed him my hat and scarf without a glance. I didn’t linger.

The siren faded.

It was 1:30. Call Peter, I wondered? Now? Over nothing? Again, ridiculous. Impulsive, in my experience, knowing how people go out of their way just looking for problems. I put my phone down. My caseload—that’s what I should be worrying about, I told myself, if I’m so desperate to have a problem. Think about them. The last thing Carmen needs is my insomnia. I considered finding some old movie on TV to help me sleep, something I’d seen a million times, that wouldn’t keep me awake because I’d already know the ending.

“How about it, Deirdre?” Peter had said, lifting the game down from the closet shelf. He smiled at me, giving the box a sharp little snap, rattling the tiny plastic hotels and houses inside while Janet, always eager, made room on the living room floor.

“Great idea!” I’d said, but I was referencing Monopoly. I was being polite. Accommodating. I had no desire to sit there all evening rolling the dice, pushing my thimble around the board, passing Go, going to Jail, listening to their annoying antique clock in the corner keeping time, time, time. But I did. Because I was their guest. Because they never treated me like a third wheel after Kevin and I broke up. Because the least I can do is reciprocate. Nothing passed between Peter and me as it dragged on—no sly glances, no seemingly accidental touching. Between turns, as I recall, I handed Peter the dice perfunctorily, my mind, if anything, elsewhere.

“Congratulations, Deirdre!” That I remembered clearly. They had chimed that in unison when I’d won.

It was 2:05. I knew without looking. For a psychotherapist it’s internal, this sense of time. I can tell to the minute, without a watch or clock, where I am in any given hour. Exhausted, and alone in bed (single, since Kevin left), I gazed gloomily around my moon-lit room, at my messy desk, nightstand, dresser, TV, and at my rocker, poised at a standstill—all wearing that forsaken look that furniture gets in the middle of the night; my worn leather armchair sunk in the dim corner, arms flung open, empty. I eyed the remote. Find a movie, Deirdre, I thought; the insomnia stops here. I kicked off the covers for starters and felt a slight chill, lying there naked except for my shapeless tee. I wanted to find something I’d already seen—in blessed black and white—knowing how it had always worked before to help me sleep on those suddenly solitary nights when I had lain awake wondering what had happened between Kevin and me.

“I’m hungry,” I’d said to Peter after Janet left for the kitchen. Again, I was referencing the spaghetti. But now, remote in hand, and shivering in my skimpy tee, I realized that Peter had misinterpreted me. People do it all the time, in my experience. A common type of distortion. People misinterpret things, making life worse than absolutely necessary. Obviously Peter thought that what I’d wanted was him—a man to satisfy what he took to be my aching “hunger” (Kevin being gone). Because that was the exact moment when Peter—smiling, lowering his wine glass from his lips and with his free hand brushing a thick shock of brown hair back from his forehead—leaned across the Monopoly board and kissed me.

The image of his kiss came flashing back, despite the fact that I never actually saw it, Peter’s face being buried in my neck. But the sensation, the warmth of his kiss returned now, clinging so tangibly that I began to visualize it, flesh it out with intimate details that, at the time, were hidden from me: his hazel eyes, half-closed in a sort of heavy-lidded languor, his lips parted—eager, I imagine, hungry—but holding back, poised impossibly between complete abandon and an exquisite restraint.

An assumption on my part. Because in reality the kiss, invisible, had lasted less than a second, while I sat there stunned, disbelieving, with an eerie sense that it wasn’t really happening, that I was confused, or, better yet, that Peter was—that Peter was confusing me with Janet, his wife, my best friend; that maybe he was experiencing some momentary amnesia, some fugue state, in clinical terms, causing him to confuse the two of us, both of us blond, thoughtful, trusting women—possibly a little too accommodating, too eager to please, costing us dearly if we’re not careful.

Could I have been more unsuspecting? I heard Janet in the kitchen during the kiss: drawers slamming, utensils jostling, water running, the big pasta pot ringing as the faucet filled it up to brimming, while I, up until that kiss, had simply been doing my part in the living room, tidying up, returning the plastic pieces to the box with nothing more on my mind than the fact that it was getting late and I had to be at the clinic early and needed to get home after the spaghetti and go to bed. Because sleep is crucial in any profession, but in mine it’s make or break. As a psychotherapist, I can’t be caught yawning.

We’d gotten through dinner as if nothing had happened. Everything seemed normal, a word that, as a psychotherapist, I don’t use lightly. So normal, in fact, that, sitting at their table—the three of us chatting, eating spaghetti, drinking wine—I began to think that Peter’s kiss, for all its trappings of illicit passion and unreciprocated longing, had been nothing more than an innocent peck, a little congratulatory kiss: hadn’t I just won Monopoly? Plus I pushed him away gently. Hardly castrating.

Outside my window the moon, pinned against the cloudless sky, beamed its borrowed light, casting pale metallic stripes across my bedspread, my flimsy tee. I stared down at my sandals, strewn recklessly on the bedroom floor. Peter said nothing during the kiss, no “I love you, Deirdre,” but that doesn’t prove anything. I tossed and turned, inadvertently stirring the fragrance of my perfume, which rose in musky puffs, the fruity, humid air reaching my nose with every rustle of the bedclothes. I groaned. Why, after donning my blouse and capris for the evening, had I dabbed perfume on my neck area? What was the motive? Why, during Monopoly, when the dice escaped my grasp, bounced on the board and rolled uncontrollably between Peter’s legs, had I reached for it? Why hadn’t I let Peter retrieve it and hand it back to me or, better yet, held back and allowed Janet to do it, his wife, my best friend? I had reached for it, impulsively perhaps, but with nothing more on my mind than the fact that Monopoly was taking forever and I didn’t want to wait. Wasn't that clear? I felt my face redden as I twisted miserably in the bed I’d made, and now would have to lie in, my perfumed sheets reeking. If only I’d stayed home, everything would be different, I kept thinking. I’d be asleep now. I’d be up at 7:00 rested. I’d be showering, making coffee, humming along with something upbeat on the radio. I’d be ready for my clients. I’d be brushing my teeth with a light heart. I’d be flossing. I’d be innocent.

By now I knew it was 4:30, my sense of time, at least, still intact. I dreaded the day ahead: dragging myself into the shower, drooping under its spray, dressing haphazardly with mismatched socks, pulling my hat down over uncombed hair, riding the subway to another neighborhood, where I would exit and plod along pocked, littered pavements, my head bowed under a lattice of sharp black shadows cast by the Elevated, past the men’s shelter, the drug rehab, the welfare office, the bullet-proofed bodega, to the clinic. Too tired to care. In the wrong mood to be seeing Carmen.

I thought of calling in sick and canceling my caseload. I imagined calling Carmen, reaching her at home, where she was up, rested, ready, and on her way to the clinic, expecting to see me.

“All I wanted was attention,” she’d told me in our last session, describing her childhood, how at thirteen, lonely, neglected, wandering the streets, she’d met the pimp, Angel.

“I didn’t want sex—Dios! I was innocent.”

“I understand,” was all I’d replied—empathetically—putting myself in Carmen’s shoes, mindful, as her psychotherapist, that our lives are worlds apart. When did I ever suffer callous abandonment, repeated abuse, numbing addiction, grim incarceration? I should be sleeping.

I closed my eyes and pictured Carmen in her skin-tight jeans, her tattooed breasts ballooning out of a tiny pink tank top. If she were me, I realized, she’d be sound asleep, Peter’s kiss nothing but a memory. And then I wondered how Carmen, in my shoes, would have remembered the kiss. I imagined it coming back to her at an odd moment years from now. The vivid memory—triggered by something trivial—of an evening when she sat alone with Peter on the living room floor. She’d recall, with some sadness I imagined, how alone and abandoned she’d felt at that time in her life. And how hungry she’d been, sitting quietly cleaning up the houses and hotels the moment before Peter, smiling, lowered his wine glass and leaned toward her. She knew that look, that smile—she'd seen it a million times on a man, I imagined—but Peter had moved too fast. She’d remember being caught off guard, stunned momentarily, thinking that Peter was confused, that in his drunken stupor he’d confused her with his wife. And then how, feeling him so near, she’d started thinking maybe she was confused, that she was confusing Peter with a man she thought she’d loved once, felt bound to inseparably, which could explain why Carmen lingered, not flinching, feeling his breath, his lips, taking it on the neck patiently, knowing—a child no more—how quickly a kiss will pass, how something that seems so warm, so true, so real between two people, can end suddenly, vanish, leaving no trace, no evidence behind, as if nothing had ever happened. I imagined Carmen remembering her impulse to kiss him back, uncertain of her own feelings for this man who crossed the line, trampled boundaries, looked beyond her tough exterior to see the person within and found her desirable. She’ll never forget, I imagined, the murky ambiguity surrounding the kiss—how it hovered on the brink, poised impossibly between right and wrong, between something so good and something ridiculously bad, and it’s only now, with the passage of time, that she can admit that yes, she’d lingered, and yes, she can forgive herself, knowing what loss, what loneliness can do to a person. Still, in the end she’d held back, knowing that their lives were worlds apart, and that his kiss was really so small, so insignificant—nothing like the attention she’d always wanted. “Ah, Dios. No más, miho, no más,” she remembers whispering. Gently, I imagined.

And at that moment I realized just how wise Carmen is, how tough she had to be to survive what she'd been through. How could I cancel Carmen? I was up. I was ready to see her.

It was 6:30. Plenty of time to get to the clinic.