Once Matty and I started messing around, all he ever wanted to do was have sex. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if he heard a word I said, but it’s like he was addicted to me and that mattered more than the kids who teased him about his weirdo girlfriend or his mom picking at him to find someone better. It mattered more than when I bruised his ego with a joke or turned him down when I didn’t want his grabby hands on my body. I knew I had this power over him, and I liked it.

Adam hears every word I say, but he has to be drunk to want me and even then, he can always stop. The fooling around part with Adam is better than sex was with Matty, but I worry it means that this isn’t going to last, and I want it to. More than just because I want a place to stay, but because I like being with Adam. I like talking to him. I like the way we have patterns, that things are the same most of the time.

At night, when Adam turns the light off, we confess things to each other. Stupid stuff, mostly. Adam says he’s afraid of clowns. I tell him about the way starlings flocked in bare tree branches in the winter in Little River, so many that they looked like leaves, and when they up and flew away all at once, it would make me scared for reasons I don’t know how to say. I tell him like it was years ago. Not weeks.

We lie there, staring at the ceiling, looking for shapes in cracks we can just barely see in the street light that leaks through the blinds. Sides touching, holding hands, like Matty and I used to when we watched clouds as kids.

Adam tells me that he slept with a blankie until he was twelve. I say that I used to sing Whitney Houston into a pencil at the top of my lungs. He cops to liking Air Supply. I tell him about the pink puke sneakers I had from the time I threw up in Margo’s car. I don’t tell him why I puked, just that my dad didn’t see the need to buy me new shoes. But even that feels like I’m saying a little too much, because I have to be so careful about the whens.

There’s a part of me that wants Adam to know everything, like if I told him, my life could start from that moment and nothing before would count. It wouldn’t even leave a stain. But if he knew everything, he wouldn’t like me anymore. He couldn’t. The catch in all of it is that if he knew and didn’t care, he couldn’t be the Adam I want him to be. Either way I’d lose him.