I sat, small and dumb. “What will never work?” I asked.

He came toward me on all fours. “You and me,” he said. He took my face and kissed me. “I’m not lying to you,” he said. “And I’m not trying to hurt you. I want you to trust me.”

The room felt like a vacuum. Everything felt different—his hands, the way he moved me around. Like I could feel his fingerprints on my bones. And nothing outside that room was real.

It was hard to pay attention. I kept thinking of the dead kid, bleeding out, his head bashed open. Maybe it hadn’t been that hard. Maybe his death was delayed.

My distraction stopped him.

He stopped. In the middle of kissing me, when he had already pushed the covers on the bed down to make a space for us, had already gotten undressed. He stopped, leaned over me, and I snapped my eyes open, like I was coming back from the dead, like I was coming up for air.

He leaned into my neck. “I want you to trust me,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. It was empty.

He ran his hands along my collarbone, up, onto my neck. And then pressed his thumb into the side of my windpipe, his fingers tight.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Things are going to scare you,” he said. “But it’s okay. I’m not dangerous,” he said. “You think the wrong people are trying to hurt you.”

He tightened his hand, and he thrust hard into me so that my whole body was jolted with a shot of pain. My mouth opened, and I gasped.

“Now?” Bear said.

I shook my head. I didn’t know what he was asking.

“Do you trust me?”

My air was tight. My chest panicky. My heart raced hard, and a fine sweat broke out along my shoulders, down my back, across my forehead. He squeezed.

“Tell me,” Bear said, between his teeth as his back arched and pumped. “Tell me.”

My eyes streaked pink with shooting stars when I came. My head was like a pounding balloon. My vision began to darken from the outside in.

“I trust you,” I mouthed. But my limbs were weak. My voice gone.

In the morning, I leaned into the mirror, inspecting my own face. Normally, I avoided it. I was disappointed by my own mediocrity. My left eye was bloodshot in a way that was different from smoking or drinking. The redness was heavy in one spot, with a streak of blood. Underneath both my eyes were dark freckles, not pigment but blood, rising up from underneath the skin.

It hurt to swallow.

My neck was shadowed with the shape of Bear’s hand. A deep, dark thumbprint along my windpipe and a stretch of fingers around the side.

I thought: He’s going to kill me.

Just like he killed that other kid. And some expensive lawyer is going to erase me from history. Like I never was.