He pulls out a chair, motions for you to sit. He offers you a pill, and you hesitate a second before you pinch it from his palm. He watches you place it in your mouth, mime a swallow, and slide it under your tongue. You want to please him but not obey him. What you’ve given up so far has been things or parts of yourself that you were already willing to lose. You wait for him to take a pill, too, and when he doesn’t, when he turns around, you slide the pill into the pocket of your jean shorts, the white surface puckered and cratered where it had started to dissolve. You catch the brassy glint of a ring on the bedside table, the kind of weighty championship ring the football players wear at school. You stifle the impulse to smirk. A man that age still hanging on to a scrap of old glory. You are only eighteen, and yet all of those victories feel like they happened so long ago.

You wait for him to touch you, to ask for something or demand it, but he only sits on the bed, watching you. Once, you and your friends found a list of strange fetishes online, read them off to one another at school, and laughed so hard that your abs were sore the next day. Foot fetishes and men who wanted to be peed on, men who wanted women to talk to them like babies, people who dressed up as fuzzy animals and had sex, men who wanted to be kicked in the balls. You wonder if there is a fetish for watching to the point of awkwardness, for making women uncomfortable.

Minutes pass. How many? Three? Ten? Forty? You can’t tell anymore. The room feels small and the minutes feel long and you start to feel hot, then cold, then hot again.

“Where’d you put it?” he says. He looks mildly amused.

“What?” you say, but you know he means the pill.

He sighs. “You’ve gone and made this difficult, haven’t you?”

It’s like your body knows something before your brain can put it into words. Your jeans go damp. You are nine years old again, still pissing the bed in your aunt’s house every night. He rises from his chair, and the next thing you know there is a cracking noise that splits the air and you cry out, but then something covers your face and you can’t breathe right, then you can’t breathe at all, and your lungs are burning, burning in a way that reminds you of running. In your mind you are running, running out of the parking lot, back down the dark road, down the boardwalk, which stretches on and on, somehow carries you all the way back home.