“Anyway. Eventually, the whisky and the beer go and we are fucked up. And then I kiss him and he’s surprised! I don’t know. But he’s into it, and we have sex, and let me tell you, baby, it was bad, like it was nooooot good. I’ll spare the unsavoury details, but like, we were both too drunk to stand. And we were scared, and we didn’t know what we were doing with each other’s bodies.”

Christopher sat up and put his arms around his knees, watching me talk to him.

“We blacked out and woke up the next day feeling terrible,” I said. “He had to work, but it was my day off. I walked him to the subway and asked him to kiss me. He did, and then he left, and almost right away I had a text saying he just wanted to be friends.”

“Motherfucker!” said Christopher.

“No, the sadness of that hadn’t kicked in yet,” I said. “I walked home, even though it took over an hour. And I felt so clearly that I had finally lost my virginity. It seems silly, right? It wasn’t the first time I’d had sex as a woman. It wasn’t the first time a lover had stuck something up me, either. It wasn’t even the first time I’d touched boy penis. But fucking him and sleeping in his bed felt special, like something I would read about. And I guess maybe part of that feeling was heterosexist patriarchal whatever. But it occurred to me, as I was walking, hungover in the wind, feeling so in my body—that virginity is not the lie. Singular virginity, that’s the lie. It made me think: Maybe virginity is real, and it can be lost, but it can also be given. Maybe there’s something beautiful in the concept and not just … ruinous. Maybe the truth is just that virginities are malleable, personal, and there are lots of them. And maybe you can even do them over again if you don’t get it right the first time.”

Christopher was quiet. I’d like to say he eventually said or murmured something before we fell asleep, but I just don’t remember.

Once, when Christopher was drunk, he hit me in the balls. Well, he tapped me in the balls. It was supposed to be a joke, I guess. There was a split second where I didn’t understand where the pain was coming from. “Haaaa,” he said. “You remember that? You remember that?” I clocked him back before I even realized what I was doing, and then he was on the floor. He sobbed once, not from pain, I don’t think. He said he was sorry. He said he was drunk, and stupid, and that he was a bad and evil man he was bad he was bad he was bad he was evil.

Usually, when he was in blackout mode, I’d just guide him around like a cat. I remembered how pliable I used to be—at least, the shadowy mental cross-stitch I could summon from pinpricks of memories and what my friends told me later.