“You know I don’t judge,” she said. “But I can’t stand the thought of you sleeping with those guys to make my rent.”

I told her I wanted to pay an honest price.

She made good money selling cosmetics over the phone, and she probably could have lived somewhere nicer than a trailer. But she’d given up on the world by then, assumed she was destined for ugliness and there was no use trying to get out of it. She had a comforting voice and worked with a headset. She leaned back in her yellow recliner and told women how pretty they’d be. It’s got this sparkle to it, she’d say. Your eyes will look like jewelry. They must have imagined her young and thin, strolling inside some kind of greenhouse, running her fingers over tropical flowers to find words for all the shades of her eye shadow. When really, truth be told, every green was an impossible miracle under the bright white bone of our sun.

When I came home from one of the worst nights—You’re one lucky whore—she nearly pulled out my hair, yanking back my head to see the bruise on my neck. I flinched from her grip.

“God,” she said. “You’re so afraid. You’re so fucking afraid.” She folded me into her huge warm body and rocked me back and forth until she felt better and I told her I felt better, too.

I was still seeing Abraham a few times a month. Sometimes we fucked and talked. Sometimes we just fucked. Even his smallest questions—what did I think of this weather? this kind of soda?—made me feel seen, as if there were more of me because I was something to him.

Fiona’s leg was getting better, but the rest of her body was getting worse. I slept in my own bed most nights because it was more comfortable for both of us. It was a strange thing to be a woman with another woman, like a wave breaking across water. Everything was made of the same stuff, but still—there was an event.

I saw her body in pieces: thighs spiderwebbed with blue veins, a big belly loose with folds of skin. She had the kind of crimson stretch lines you’d get from a baby, but I never asked if she had kids. Once I found a scar hidden between folds of flesh.

“What’s this from?” I asked.

“I got this nasty bug in my side,” she said. “My friend had to dig it out.”

I kissed the cut. I waited until she’d fallen asleep that night, and then I pulled off her thick white socks. Her feet were soft white paddles in the darkness. She woke up laughing. “Jesus Christ!” she said. She was groggy, sweet to me and playing.

My first orgasm surprised me. I’d come plenty of times—my body private between sheets, face muffled in the pillows, hand clamped between my legs—and I’d been with plenty of people. But the two things had never happened together.