We stayed at the bar for hours, drinking, eating the kind of greasy bar snacks that made me feel like I’d have to run twice as far the next day to make up for them. Before the night even began I had decided not to go home with him. We walked along the promenade by the beach when the bar closed, and the night was warm, the water slapping against pylons.

‘Have you ever ridden?’ he asked.

‘Not since I was, like, ten.’

The board felt precarious beneath me. He ran beside me as I rolled, unsteady, with the courage alcohol brings. I went faster, pushing off, positioning my feet. There it was: the knife edge of balance. I understood. But I couldn’t stop, and there was the grass and I tumbled, landing free, the dull thump of damp earth. He brushed me off, both of us laughing.

There was a man packing up his fruit stand beneath a streetlamp and Ash asked if he could buy something. He gave the man three dollars for two peaches, and we ate them without even washing them, the juice running down our chins, the brush of fuzz and wet bright flesh beneath. There are seventy calories in a large peach. We threw the stones in the sea. I was telling him about growing up in Virginia and needing to get away from what I’d always known when he put his hand on the back of my neck and his sticky fingers through the hair above it.

‘Can I kiss you?’ he asked, and that question was what undid me. Instead of answering, I kissed him. I tasted peach, and sun on leaves, and thought about creamy white blocks of tofu quivering on trays. When I felt his tongue against my lips I thought of how a man had come into the university hospital the other day who had bitten his tongue clean through, and the threads of flesh and tissue it hung by. The way the surgeons stitched the tongue back into place. Ash’s fingers traced the hollow behind my ear, the curve of my cheekbone, the tenderness of my temple where you can feel an echo of pulse.

In the months since moving to LA I had not once felt my body want something my mind had decided against. I stopped to catch my breath, regain control.

‘Are you okay?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘I’m fine.’

•

Ash doesn’t know about the years I was in and out of treatment facilities. I can’t bring myself to tell him. I don’t know why. Or I do. Because he’ll watch me more closely, like my mom does, like everyone who knew me then. He’ll see my body differently. With pity. Less desire.