After Hazel fucked him for the first time, her legs wrapped around his body like a spider, she thought Christopher might cry. He had that look boys got after they came when the sex had really meant something to them. So many boys thought they were warriors after they had an orgasm. That, or they got sad. Or gave off waves of dissociation, and then weeks later admitted they were girls. (This had happened to Hazel not once, not twice, but three times.) But Christopher didn’t cry—his eyes closed briefly, something grateful unlocked from within his body like he was with God, and it made Hazel feel beautiful.

2

Can I even begin to express how hard I began to re-believe in my life? How his bedroom is forever preserved in my memory as a centre of peace? Christopher had a big studio on Corydon with purple curtains and gentle traffic sounds and a neighbour who watched cable news that came through the walls as a burbling lull 24-7. For many months, when I stayed over at Christopher’s house, he would get up, make coffee, and kiss me, still sleeping in the bed, before he went to work. I lived between that apartment and my mother’s house, doing nothing. He didn’t seem to mind (something I would later realize I took for granted). Sounds so chaste, describing it now, though it wasn’t. We fucked against buildings, and I went with him to parties. God, he liked to drink, almost as much as I had in the old days, but that part wasn’t even hard. Once everybody knew I was sober, and wasn’t trying to get me to drink, parties got fun! It was a kick to be around drunks and see so clearly now what was happening to them.

And sober sex. Do you know that had never happened before, either? It was through sex with him that I felt my body flower and come back to me. I felt my skin as a real part of the world. It was weird. Sex became not something that I tolerated, or even assented to, but a thing I wanted and liked. It felt like the same restless and tingling part of me that had stayed up late as a kid. A ghostly hand touching my insides, bringing something back to me about desire.

“You know, I only ever dated one other girl in my life,” he said one night, after we’d made love. The moon was out, and it tinged his red hair a pale blue. A car’s shadow from the street washed over the room.

“Really,” I said.

“We dated for four years,” he said, staring straight up from his pillow. “She had a kid, a little daughter.”

I propped myself up on my elbow. “Why’d you break up?” I didn’t mind hearing this stuff, and it wasn’t unprecedented. We liked filling each other in on the vast blankness of what had happened during the past half of our lives.