IN THE MORNING I took a Lyft back to Jake’s condo and signed his contract. My name, my initials, dashed carelessly across the screen of an iPad, made him my manager. To celebrate, we shot content at his rooftop pool, first just me in a black bikini, then in a red bikini, then with a girl named Ella who provided the bikinis. Ella was Jake’s client, too. She had 320,000 followers and was in her late twenties but didn’t look it. She looked like money, lean and round in only the right places, with a gap between her two front teeth she said she’d had filed by a cosmetic dentist in Beverly Hills. “Guys lose their shit over it,” she said, which, when I followed her on Instagram and scrolled her likes and comments, seemed to be true. But both on the gram and IRL Ella had a boyfriend, an Instagram-famous photographer, known mostly by his handle, @Chrisss. He and Jake instructed poses suggestive of girl-on-girl action, everything twinned but slightly othered: Ella’s full body against mine, pitted; Ella’s ease with the men and their camera, my discomfort with Ella, the tangerine one-piece she wore, somehow sexier than all my skin.

“Pretend it’s just us,” she said, but that made me worse.

“Anna, loosen up,” @Chrisss said. “You look like you don’t want it.”

Jake came at me with a vape. “Babe, you need some weed,” he said. I inhaled, exhaled, and felt extra aware of my body beside the other girl’s. When what I needed was to forget us both.

Ella said, “Try like I’m one of them, like I’m a man.” It was a game I had played with Leah when we were small, the two of us taking turns becoming the desirous guy—Rhett, was our name for him—who had a knack for throwing nameless female characters against walls and kissing them there, the violence thrilling and oddly familiar.

“You’re a man,” I said and sat on the pool’s edge. I dipped in my legs and watched them distort with sun and water. Ella crouched behind me, touched my cheek. I turned, made my eyes a question. The camera fluttered. Ella leaned to my ear. It fluttered again. “You’re so hot,” she whispered and I would have told her no, you are, if she were still herself. But she was a man, so I touched her like I knew she wanted me. She slid into the pool, slid me in too.

“Kiss,” I said and we did.

“Money shot,” @Chrisss said, and showed the camera screen to Jake. The pictures were perfect, Jake said, “Très Wild Things,” just what we needed.

WE ATE THAT night at El Coyote, site of Sharon Tate’s last meal. I ordered a salad, swallowed my last birth control pill with a vodka soda. Ella was herself again. She ate guacamole with a fork.