I couldn’t place his accent, only that it was from one of the thousands of small islands in the middle of the country, maybe a fishing village he’d left because he could not afford a boat of his own. I wondered how he ended up in this room, but I couldn’t extract this information unless I switched to Tagalog, nor, I reminded myself, did I want to know Boy as a person. I just wanted him as a body, as a fuck, to see what it was like.

I told Boy to undress, and when he stood before me at the foot of the bed, I finally saw a Filipino man naked for the first time. I motioned for him to kneel in front of me as I unbuttoned my jeans. I didn’t have to tell him what to do next.

But as I stroked his coarse, straight hair, I found myself imagining him in his village, swimming with his friends, wrestling on the shore. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on just the pleasure, but I couldn’t imagine his mouth without his face, his body, his life. I was one of his friends on the beach, who he unexpectedly ended up on top of, and no one could tell who started, what look or touch began it all, but we found ourselves kissing. I turned off the light and undressed myself, motioned for him to lie next to me in bed, then put my hand against his lower back to guide him on top of my body.

We rubbed against each other while my hands explored whatever parts of him I could reach, as he explored mine. I became the boy I was before I left, made true those fantasies of youth I never got to fulfill with Samuel. I kissed him like he wanted me to, as our surroundings fell away and we were just two boys from the country who had never been taught what it meant to be together, that boys could do things like this, be this to each other. As our hands and our breaths became one, there grew no distinction between giving pleasure to the other and giving pleasure to ourselves.

I opened my eyes after we came and met Boy’s too-wide smile. Even in the darkness, the only light coming from the narrow window that overlooked the street, his face reminded me that while I only felt like a village boy, he was a true village boy who’d just been with a rich white man, who might take a shine to him and take him back to America, lead him away from his life. Whatever lay beyond our initial transaction could not surmount the difference between how he saw me and how I longed to see myself.