Pressing the “No” Back In

Simon shouts out what he has been holding in for a week: “You kiss her — there, in front of everyone. Then you kiss me — where no one can see. And when the door opens, you throw me to the floor. I can’t do this anymore.” Jacob answers: “I don’t care.” And covers Simon’s mouth with his own — “sudden and forceful, as if he could press the other man’s ‘no’ back inside him.” That sentence deserves to be read literally: the kiss here is not passion but a way of making him be silent.

The romantic canon has trained us to read such scenes as “he couldn’t hold back.” Psychology reads them differently: a person clearly said “let go” and “I can’t,” and his words were overridden by force. That a minute later Simon’s body “recognized the old command” and went still changes nothing — freezing is precisely the response to coercion (see “The Science of Being Invisible”). This scene mirrors the hospital room in chapter seventeen: the same palm, the same “mine,” but now another person’s “no” stands between them. And Jacob steps over it, because he does not yet know any other way to be close.