Tongue.

It wasn't so much that he wouldn't eat it--this beautiful dinner, everything braised and skewered and punctuated with unnecessary herbs, the kind of dinner you feel guilty just being in the same room with, much less stabbing open with Bill's filigree-handled cutlery. (And really, who filigrees cutlery?) It was that he watched them eat it. (If filigreed cutlery didn't make you nervous before, you were gravely deluded). It was that he placed himself in a crushed velvet arm chair in the corner of the room, and wove his fingers into a tight knot, and grinned at them, for the whole two hours, demanding their critique.

"Do you think it was, like, a sex thing?" Joe asked her in the car.

And of course she said that it was, and they speculated about the contents of that guest bedroom he wouldn't let Joe's aunt stay in when the Marriott ran out of room for the wedding guests. And he thought how good they were together, how they were the kind of couple who waiters smirked at because their conversations were the kind you'd like to eavesdrop on. He even leaned across the center console and stuck his tongue into her ear, in a gesture of thanks.

All the while she knows: if he'd been able to probe further, past the shell of her skull, to taste the thought that was blooming just then, an inch deeper in her brain, he would understand Bill. That night, her dreams would be all taste: a spike of sangiovese as sudden and red as a wound, the absent pearl at the base of an oyster's small corpse.