I blinked, saw spinning behind my eyelids. As if I had sugar binged and was suffering the aftermath, the crash, the mortifying flush of blood to my face, suddenly red and warm and ugly. I told myself to look at Jake, but couldn’t, and turned my gaze to the floor. “I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” was all I could think to say. No, I had never considered getting implants. Lean like the models I’d grown up looking at, that was how I’d fashioned myself. When it came to Instagram, selling anything, I’d thought a body that promised absence—of hunger, of desire itself—was worth more than flesh. I hadn’t noticed the ideals were changing, or that they’d been made up to begin with. I knew—from Instagram memes, mostly—that top surgery was noble, a worthy, gender-affirming transformation, knew post-mastectomy reconstruction was also. But a boob job was silly and embarrassing, a job for silly embarrassing women, porn actresses, Real Housewives, Pam Anderson. Girls like me didn’t get breast implants. We didn’t need to be affirmed, or weren’t supposed to.

“Babe.” Jake latched his arms tighter. “It’s no big deal, an outpatient procedure, like thirty minutes and it’s over. I know tons of girls who’ve had it done.” Tons of girls. On his account, in his DMs. “I mean, I don’t care, I think you’re beautiful, but for this level of exposure—” He turned me to face him, lifted my chin and made me meet his eyes. “Just think about it,” he said.

I nodded yes but my mouth was closed. When he kissed me, I kept it shut. Because what had he said about the IUD? So easy. And inserting it had hurt more than he understood, more than I suspected he’d ever have to understand. He pushed his tongue into my mouth and I let him. He fucked me before the mirror like our reflection was the cure for whatever I was feeling. I felt self-conscious, yes, my small B-cup breasts too small now, the plate of bone between them protective as armor, and just as repellent. Also I felt fear. I might have felt rage and beneath it a sorrow tall and wide as a man’s leaving body. But by the time Jake finished, pulling out from inside me and coming on my sacrum, I felt nothing. At least I thought so.

But afterward, I couldn’t sleep. Jake bumped ketamine to kill the molly and pass out and I stayed up, propped in bed beside him, searching: paid placements for plastic surgeons; before and after photographs of headless breasts; assurances of rapid recovery augmentations, patented incision techniques. And an advice column on a feminist website titled Help! My boyfriend wants me to get boob implants, the letter writer identified only as Itty Bitty Titties.