We did not speak.

He fucked my hand until he shuddered, wet, like the muffler of a truck starting up in the rain. Until my palm slickened and he said, “No, oh no,” as if it was blood, not semen, that was leaving him. Done with ourselves, we lay for a while, our faces cooling as they dried.

Now, whenever I visit a museum, I’m hesitant to come too close to a painting for fear of what I might, or might not, find there. Like the pinkish smear of Trevor’s dollar-store peaches, I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed.

Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do. The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all.

* * *

—

The boy is standing in a tiny yellow kitchen in Hartford. Still a toddler, the boy laughs, believing they are dancing. He remembers this—because who can forget the first memory of their parents? It was not until the blood ran from his mother’s nose, turning her white shirt the color of Elmo he had seen on Sesame Street, that he started to scream. Then his grandmother rushed in, grabbed him, and ran past her reddening daughter, the man shouting over her, out to the balcony, then down the back steps, shouting in Vietnamese, “He’s killing my girl! God, god! He’s killing her.” People ran from all over, from their stoops down the block to the three-story apartment; Tony the mechanic from across the street with the wrecked arm, Junior’s father, Miguel, and Roger, who lived above the convenience store. They all rushed over and pulled the father off his mother.

The ambulances came, the boy, hoisted to his grandmother’s hip, watched the officers approach his father with guns drawn, how his father waved a bloody twenty-dollar bill, the way he did back in Saigon where the cops would take the money, tell the boy’s mother to calm down and take a walk, then leave as if nothing happened. The boy watched as the American officers tackled his father, the money slipping out in the tussle and landing on the sidewalk lit by sulfur lights. Focused on the brown-and-green money-leaf on the pavement, half expecting it to fly up, back onto a winter tree, the boy did not see his father cuffed, dragged up to his feet, his head pushed into the patrol car. He saw only the crumpled money, until a neighbor girl in pigtails swiped it when no one was looking. The boy looked up to find his mother being carried out by paramedics, her broken face floating past him on the stretcher.

* * *

—

In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

He tugged at the visor of his Red Sox cap, his lips scrunched. A porch light reflected on the barrel a small white star in the faraway-dark, which rose and fell as he aimed. This is what we did on nights like this, a Saturday with no sound for miles. I sat on a milk crate sipping Dr Pepper and watched him empty one cartridge after another into metal. Where the rifle’s butt recoiled against his shoulder, his green Whalers T-shirt wrinkled, the creases grabbing with each shot.

The cans leaped one by one off the bench. I watched, recalling a story Mr. Buford told us back on the farm. Years ago, hunting in Montana, Buford found a moose in his trap. A male. He spoke slowly, rubbing his white stubble, describing how the trap had cut off the moose’s hind leg—a sound like a wet stick snapping, he said—save for a few stringy pink ligaments. The animal groaned against its body, which, bleeding and torn, was suddenly a prison. It raged, fat tongue lolling out a voice. “Almost like a man’s,” Buford said, “like you and me.” He glanced at his grandson, then at the ground, his plate of beans speckled with ants.

He put down his rifle, he explained, and took out the double barrel holstered to his back and steadied. But the buck noticed him and charged, tearing its leg clean off. It ran right at him before he could aim, then veered toward a clearing and broke through the trees, hobbling on what was left of itself.

Like you and me, I said to no one.

“I got lucky,” Buford said. “Three legs be damned, those things can kill ya.”

In the backyard, Trevor and I sat on the grass, passing a joint sprinkled with crushed Oxy. With the back blown clean off, only the legs remained of the bench. Four legs, without a body.

* * *

—

A week after the first time, we did it again. His cock in my hand, we began. My grip tightened around the covers. And that inertia of his skin, damp-tight against my own, made the task feel, not merely of fucking, but of hanging on. The inside of his cheek, where the flesh was softest, tasted like cinnamon gum and wet stones. I reached down and felt the cockslit. When I rubbed the warming globe, he shivered against himself. Out of nowhere, he grabbed my hair, my head jerked back in his grip. I let out a clipped yelp, and he stopped, his hand hovering beside my face, hesitant.

“Keep going,” I said, and leaned back, offering it all. “Grab it.”

I can’t make sense of what I felt. The force and torque, of pain gathered toward a breaking point, a sensation I never imagined was a part of sex. Something took over and I told him to do it harder. And he did. He lifted me nearly off the bed by the roots of my follicles. With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. He let go of my hair only to put his arm under my neck. My lips brushed his forearm and I could taste the salt concentrated there. Recognition flinched inside him. This is how we were going to do it from now on.

What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.

Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head.

He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll say yes. “Keep going,” I begged. “Fuck me up, fuck me up.” By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice. In Trevor’s grip, I had a say in how I would be taken apart. So I said it: “Harder. Harder,” until I heard him gasp, as if surfacing from a nightmare we swore was real.

* * *

—

After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.

* * *

—