One night Abe asked me to stay in his bed. “Maybe we should tell Tilly,” he said. “About us.” Maybe she deserved that. She needed to get better, I said. We needed to tend her closely, let her heal.

He was sick of secrets. He wanted to live like lovers in the open. I was tired of negotiations. I pushed him back and tugged down my underwear. I asked him not to treat my body like he cared for it. His shirt sent up the scent of soap. He pushed my legs open and stuck his finger inside. The sudden pang made my whole body shiver. It hurt like the first time all over again. My first lover had had trouble arranging my legs. The pain, finally searing, felt like victory. He’d arrived. A part of him remained for all the others.

My own voice shamed me coming back, full of pride and wounds, full of its own sound, sharing my history with Tilly: He was so old, so stupid, so cruel; he was so goddamn young but I loved the lies he told me in the darkness…I’d thought up names for what it might have been, what summoned them, some holy loathing of self or sex or need, some unholy greed. They’d come into me and then I’d let something suck them out again. Just once there had been another word for what cleaned me dry, the cannula, with its numb and steady whirring.

Abe pulled off my underwear and my lips were in the dip of his shoulder—kissing him once, twice, tasting the slight salt—and I could hear the crinkle of the wrapper, and then I felt the rubber, smelled it. I dug my fingers into his neck, his back, thinking about the bruised paper of a nectarine’s skin, how I could break the crust of him with my nail and find flesh like fruit. I wanted to draw his blood. I wanted to taste it. He wrapped his arms around my waist, and there I was, a thin reed quivering, my teeth against his teeth, our foreheads knocking.

“Take it off,” I said. “Come in me. Without anything.”

He pulled out and there was a coolness, air breezing my inner organs, and then he pushed back in again harder, and then he came, that sudden warmth, and I did too, a sweeping heat. It bloomed like ink in water, spreading darker, wider, and then shuddered into closing beats—one, two, three—of sparked charge. The muscles pulsed like a second heartbeat.

I was perfectly still, breathing. I was a live wire singing with electric light.

They lasted through spring, these nights of putting my body next to his and then sleeping next to hers, waking to the solid hours of another day. There were weeks. We had weeks. It seemed impossible that they’d last, and impossible that they wouldn’t, and in the meantime I kept waking up and fixing coffee, asking her, “How are you doing? What did you dream?” and clinging eagerly to every word, wary of seeing that hard glass of drunken stupor cloud her eyes and give away the secret of her hurt. So we had weeks, each one stronger than the last, all of them built on the possibility, the mounting bodies, of all the weeks that came before.