The crop was all hung, packed from beam to beam to the rafters, their leaves already wrinkled, the green, once deep and lush in the fields, now dulled to the shade of old uniforms. It was time to fire the coals and speed the curing process. This required that someone stay all night in the barn, burning briquettes piled in tin pie plates set eight or ten feet apart across the dirt floor. Trevor had asked me to come hang out for the night while he stoked the coals. All around us the heaps burned, glowing red and flickering each time a draft made its pass through the slats. The sweet scent swelled as the heat warped its way toward the roof.

It was past midnight by the time we found ourselves on the barn’s floor, the oil lamp’s gold halo holding off the dark around us. Trevor leaned in. I parted my lips in anticipation but he left them untouched, going lower this time, until his teeth grazed the skin below my neck. This was before I knew how far into the year those incisors would sink, before I knew the heat in that boy’s marrow, his knuckled American rage, his father’s inclination for weeping on the front porch after three Coronas while the Patriots crackled on the radio and a hardback of Dean Koontz’s Fear Nothing sat by his side, before the old man found Trevor passed out in the Chevy’s truck bed in a thunderstorm, the water lapping at his boy’s ears as he dragged him through the mud, the ambulance, the hospital room, the heroin hot in Trevor’s veins. Before he would come out of the hospital, clean for a whole three months before hitting it again.

The air, close and thick from the summer’s last heat, whistled low through the barn. I pressed myself into his sunbaked skin, still warm from the day in the field. His teeth, ivory and unrotted, nibbled my chest, nipples, stomach. And I let him. Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away. Our clothes fell off us like bandages.

“Let’s just do it.” On top of me, his voice strained as he struggled to kick off his boxers.

I nodded.

“I’ll be slow, okay?” His mouth a gash of youth. “I’ll be easy.”

I turned—tentative, thrilled—toward the dirt floor, planted my forehead on my arm, and waited.

My shorts at my ankles, Trevor postured up behind me, his pubes brushing against me. He spat several times into his hand, rubbed the spit between my legs until everything was thick and slick and undeniable.

I put my head back down. The scent of dirt from the barn floor, notes of spilled beer and iron-rich soil as I listened to the wet clicks of his cock as he stroked his spit along its length.

When he pushed I felt myself scream—but didn’t. Instead, my mouth was full of salted skin, then the bone underneath as I bit down on my arm. Trevor stopped, not yet all the way in, sat up, and asked if I was okay.

“I dunno,” I said into the floor, panting.

“Don’t cry on me again. Don’t you cry on me now.” He spat another wad, let it fall on his length. “Let’s try again. If it’s bad we’ll stop for good.”

“Okay.”

He pushed, deeper this time, pushed his weight down hard—and slid inside me. The pain sparked white in the back of my head. I bit down, my wrist bone touched the contours of my teeth.

“I’m in. I’m in, little man.” His voice cracked into the whisper-shout terror of a boy who got exactly what he wanted. “I’m in,” he said, astonished. “I can feel it. Fuck. Oh fuck.”

I told him to hold still as I braced against the dirt floor and gathered myself. The pain shot out from between my legs.

“Let’s keep going,” he said. “I gotta keep going. I don’t wanna stop.”

Before I could respond he was pumping again, his arms planted on each side of my head, the heat pulsing from them as he worked. He was wearing his gold cross, the one he never takes off, and it kept poking at my cheek. So I took it in my mouth to keep it steady. It tasted like rust, salt, and Trevor. The sparks in my head bloomed with each thrust. After a while, the pain melted into a strange ache, a weightless numbness that swept through me like a new, even warmer season. The feeling brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into an impossible, radiating pleasure. Getting fucked in the ass felt good, I learned, when you outlast your own hurt.

What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I.”

As he heaved above me I unconsciously reached back to touch myself, to make sure I was still there, still me, but my hand found Trevor instead—as if by being inside me, he was this new extension of myself. The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life. I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like: as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

Then, about ten minutes in, as Trevor went faster, our skin sucking with humid sweat, something happened. A scent rose up to my head, strong and deep, like soil, but sharp with flaw. I knew right away what it was, and panicked. In the heat of it, I didn’t think, didn’t yet know how to prepare myself. The porn clips I had seen never showed what it took to arrive where we were. They just did it—quick, immediate, sure, and spotless. No one had shown us how this was to be done. No one had taught us how to be this deep—and deeply broken.

Ashamed, I pressed my forehead to my wrist and let it throb there. Trevor slowed, then paused.

All quiet.

Above us the moths flitted between the tobacco. They had come to feed on the plants, but the pesticides left over from the fields killed them soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves. They fell all around us, their wings, in the midst of death throes, buzzed across the barn floor.

“Fuck.” Trevor stood up, his face disbelieving.

I turned away. “Sorry,” I said instinctually.

His cock, touched at the tip with the dark inside me, pulsed under the lamplight as it softened. I was, in that moment, more naked than I was with my clothes off—I was inside out. We had become what we feared most.

He breathed hard above me. Trevor being who he was, raised in the fabric and muscle of American masculinity, I feared for what would come. It was my fault. I had tainted him with my faggotry, the filthiness of our act exposed by my body’s failure to contain itself.

He stepped toward me. I rose to my knees, half covered my face, bracing.

“Lick it up.”

I flinched.

Sweat shone on his forehead.

A moth, suffocating, thrashed against my right knee. Its huge and final death merely a quiver on my skin. A breeze shifted the dark outside. A car hummed down the road across the fields.

He gripped my shoulder. How did I already know he would react like this?

I twisted my face to meet him.

“I said get up.”

“What?” I searched his eyes.

I had misheard.

“C’mon,” he said again. “Get the hell up.”

Trevor pulled me by the arm to my feet. We stepped out of the oil lamp’s gold circle, leaving it empty and perfect again. He led me, along the barn, his grip tight. The moths dipped in and out between us. When one hit my forehead and I stopped, he yanked and I stumbled behind him. We reached the other side, then through the door, into the night. The air was cool and starless. In the sudden dark, I made out only his pale back, grey-blue in the un-light. After a few yards, I heard the water. The river’s current, although gentle, frothed white around his thighs. The crickets grew louder, lush. The trees rustled unseen in the massed shadows across the river. Then Trevor let go, dipped under, before quickly surfacing. Droplets ran down his jaw, tinkled around him.

“Clean yourself,” he said, his tone oddly tender, almost frail. I pinched my nose and dunked under, gasping from the cold. In an hour, I’ll be standing in our dim kitchen, the river still damp in my hair, and Lan will shuffle into the glow of the night-light above the stove. I won’t tell anyone you been at sea, Little Dog. She will put her finger over her lips and nod. This way, the pirate spirits won’t follow you. She will take a dishrag and dry my hair, my neck, pausing over the hickey that, by then, will be the shade of dried blood under my jaw. You been far away. Now you home. Now you dry, she will say as the floorboards creak under our shifting weight.

The river up to my chest now, I waved my arms to keep steady. Trevor put his hand on my neck and we stood, quiet for a moment, our heads bent over the river’s black mirror.

He said, “Don’t worry about that. You heard?”

The water moved around me, through my legs.

“Hey.” He did that thing where he made a fist under my chin and tilted my head up to meet his gaze, a gesture that would usually get me to smile. “You heard me?”