In the meantime, a number of men had gotten closer to me. They all seemed older, which I didn’t mind, some of them fat, which I did. With only the reflections from the screen against their faces, their bodies shrouded in winter clothes, I distinguished race in subtle movements, the slouch and syncopated gestures of Latinos compared to the languid language of white men, their more erect posture, along with a couple of Asian guys, who I dismissed as possible hookups. Even though I told people at school I had no preference when it came to race, I had only slept with white men, because I’d been brainwashed to want them even when I resented their attractiveness. So when I ended up flanked on three sides with implied offers of sex, young Latino men in front of and to my left, a white man to my right, it was the white man whose gaze I met, who sidled from a couple of seats down to move right next to me and feel the erection under my tight black jeans. When I turned to meet his gaze up close, I noticed the gray in his temples, the lines around his eyes, as he blinked in a way I could only interpret as self-conscious.

“Wanna go to my place?” he whispered, and grinned when I nodded. I noticed the rapt eyes around us when we stood up and heard the faint hum of panic between my ears, the feeling of being nothing but meat to devour. But when the man reached the aisle and turned, I caught his face in the dim light of the screen again and saw kindness there, which pulled my feet toward him. We exited the darkness to the dim light of the lobby, then the less dim light of a late winter afternoon. We walked one, several, a dozen blocks uptown, not saying a word to each other, as if locked in a spell that speech could break. He let me inside a narrow apartment building and led me up several flights of stairs, to a door that opened to the sight of a queen bed, faint afternoon light filtering through a single window the same dimness and cool color as the movie screen, except lovelier, as I sat on the bed and he knelt on the floor to unzip my pants. He seemed surprised yet pleased when I took off all my clothes and slid up, then received his own naked body, so that what happened between us was reciprocal and unrushed, my kisses tender, my mouth hungry.

“You haven’t done this before,” he said afterward, as he sat up to turn on a lamp beside him, while I lay on a pillow with my arm on his lap, feeling the softness of his flaccid penis and the prickle of his pubic hair.

“Not really,” I replied.