“It’s like we’re porn stars,” he said, and I reached for my own penis because I knew this was what he wanted. Looking at Thomas’s scrawny body in the mirror, I began to understand that we weren’t so dissimilar, that we both wanted to be desired. But somehow, being with me fueled his fantasies, and as I observed our bodies, I gained even more evidence of my high place among the rungs of attractiveness. Marvin, that guy I hooked up with from the porn theater in Times Square, told me I needed to enjoy being young and blond, and I responded to that call by getting Thomas, sleeping with Allen. But it was in that mirror, witnessing firsthand how another man projected his fantasies onto my body, that I came to a concrete understanding of my beauty’s worth.

Yet I also felt a visceral repugnance, at being merely the surface of Thomas’s lurid fantasies, at myself for recognizing his desire to be beautiful as my own, how I too would want to see myself in the mirror with a man who was my better physical ideal if I had the chance. But there was something else. Looking at my image, smooth skin on a naturally slim body, the toned slopes of gym-defined muscles, I realized that the only way for me to go further up those rungs of desire was to fill out my body so I could become broader and more masculine. But even though I wanted to feel my most attractive, to have hordes of men falling at my feet, I realized how the body that could achieve this outcome was not the body I wanted.

“Can we finish in bed?” I asked, and Thomas relented. I turned off the light, and darkness once again wrapped itself around me. I wondered if Thomas saw my naked body in his mind when he brought me to climax with his mouth, while I only felt sensation.

In the morning, he asked if we could spend the day together, and I should have told him it wouldn’t work out, but I’d never broken up with anyone before and didn’t know how. So instead I told him I needed to study, which was always true, and I left his apartment to take the number 1 bus back to Harvard.