With Jake I was close to power, but not fully in possession of it, neither a child nor a woman, and not yet a wolf. It shocked me, to see myself entwined with a man, the lines of his body colored in and shaded. I watched us move together in the mirror, and thought of Marcus, my high school fuck buddy, his concave torso, skin stretched rice paper thin over the bones. With him, I had mostly felt uncomfortable, awkward and small. I had imagined him comparing me to the adult film actresses we both watched alone on our separate screens, their bodies efforted, like holes distressed into fake designer jeans. It was always about the women, then. Whether or not I was better than them. Sexier, but not sluttier, my wants smaller, my body smaller, though not too small.

But as Jake pulsed behind me, then from the side, then above, I began to feel sure that I was better than those women, sure that I was a body, a soul, that any man would gaze upon and see his own soul, reflected back. Jake watched his cock in the mirror, moving in and out, like he was watching a laptop screen, cocks moving in and out. I watched too. We were together in the glass, both of us enacting sensation, experiencing sensation. It was all the same, the performance, the reality.

“Baby,” Jake said, “I’m coming.”

“I want it,” I said. It was the right thing to say. And it was true.

Jake’s face snapped and he collapsed, lay still for a moment. Then he peeled away the condom, tossed it to the floor, turned so he could see us both in the mirror.

“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” he said and put his fingers in my hair. He went quiet after that, watching himself touch the beautiful girl. My heart pounded. But I hadn’t come, hadn’t expected to. This, Jake’s pleasure, was better than orgasm anyway. Like a crime I’d gotten away with. And proof of what else I could pull off.

I WOKE IN Jake’s bed the next morning, worried I’d left blood on the sheets. I had recently started a birth control pill designed to cut down on periods and never knew what to expect. I rolled to one side, checked for red, found only white, pulled tight. Except an empty space beside me, rumpled where Jake had slept. In the bathroom, the shower ran. I tiptoed to my tossed-off clutch, removed my phone, brought it back to bed. I checked my Instagram, found two hundred more likes. I checked the selfies I’d shot the night before, rolled over, checked the sheets again.

Before I started the pill, my periods had been irregular anyway. My mom took me to a stern gynecologist who said birth control was the only way to protect me from myself, the disordered eating habits she accused me of “courting.”