You’ve been tender when you touched me before. Too much so. A feathery touch, too affectionate, makes me squirm. But when you touch my chest now, it’s firm, exacting, like you want to know the shape, and what’s inside, to measure what I’ll lose. Sometimes I imagine the scar, jagged and wine red, crusty with old blood, terrifying my girlfriend as she bathes me even as she pretends it doesn’t, steadying her hands on the sponge on my spine, and I think about the mornings I got up early from age eleven on to slice my fingers under the nail bed with a razor, my wrists, my upper arms. I stored the razor in my Pillsbury Doughboy doll, graduated to scratching through the skin until I’d left ointment-yellow patches beading with blood. My parents said nothing because they thought the habit was “private.” My therapist said to consider the scar a sign I finally did what I wanted with my body, but I don’t know if I can.

You’re absorbed in touching me. You’re not looking at me anymore, only at the part of me that will soon be gone. I’ve deserted this transaction. The part in your hair is pink where the gray roots meet scalp, in a way that never would’ve been visible with the red dye you’ve applied since age fifteen. Before we met you told me about your roots. You said you didn’t feel sexy now, because of your roots. You sent a picture, yourself in the knife mask, lying on your spine in Dolores Park, stroking the chin of a dog who I’d hoped was yours but isn’t. I told you I liked your hair like that, and I do. It looks crazy, but I do. There are freckles high in your part. Two, huddled in their gray forest. Do you know they’re there? I touch them, lightly, with one finger.

You take it as an order. You hunch down and suck a nipple. You haven’t noticed yet that I have five nipples, in two rows, like a dog. My girlfriend is the only one who ever noticed. I didn’t for my first twenty-eight years of life, because I avoided that part of me. I didn’t believe her, but the surgeon said she was right; that it was normal enough. He laughed. “If we lose one, you’ll still have four.”

I hate you sucking me, though you can’t know this. All my sensation, electric and painful, gathers in my nipple that will soon be removed, a coin of skin, and laid on a hygienic table, awaiting grafting. But now it is attached, attaching us, and I’m so skinless I could fall apart. This is the first time I hate myself in this whole experiment. This is the first time I cross the line. And it’s not about the lines that should matter. Not all the ways we might spread the virus. Not my friend in the ICU, about to be intubated. Not all the ways we’ll destroy each other in the next hour, or, if not, soon, inevitably. But because I haven’t let my girlfriend do this for years, and she wants to, and she’s alone in New Jersey with her blocked throat, waiting for the world to get less dangerous. I should stop you. That’s the least decency I could offer. When you read this, you’ll feel so bad. Especially since some of this is not exactly true, while most of it is exactly true. Maybe for you, none of it is. But, for now, the strip of scalp between your roots is under me, pink and vulnerable, your back arched like it is every day over documents in your sunless apartment, alone, and I don’t say a thing.