I have to smile at that. I’m the only one she hid from in the bathroom.

“Since we’re being honest with each other …” Nausea washes over me, and I exhale through my mouth, trying to breathe it away.

She watches me with a frown, waiting for me to speak.

“I didn’t have some kind of injury before. I was sick.” My nausea increases until I’m almost dizzy, and I force the ugly words out. “I had testicular cancer, and they had to remove one. Some people would say I’m only half the—”

She presses her fingers to my lips to silence the rest of my words. “Don’t say that.”

I’m not done. There’s more to drag into the open. But my eyes are watery, and there’s a fist lodged in my throat. No matter how many times I swallow, it refuses to go away. I don’t want to be like this in front of her. I want to be the person she thought I was, a confident motherfucker who wouldn’t give a shit about any of this. But I do give a shit. I want to be enough—for her, for me, for the people in my life.

She touches my face like I did to her earlier, her eyes creased with concern. “Does it hurt?”

“Not at all. I’ve been healed and cancer-free for a while now.”

A brilliant smile stretches across her face. “That’s the best news.”

“Not quite the best news. I don’t look the way I should down there. It’s not—”

She breaks into laughter, surprising me. Honestly, it burns a little.

“Sorry, I’m not laughing at you,” she says. “But really, I don’t care what you look like down there. I’ve read books where women are obsessed with how a guy’s balls look, and I never understood it. ‘Nice’ ones, ‘not nice’ ones, they’re all the same to me. I don’t, uh, know how to appreciate them.”

I could get angry, I realize. Her words are insensitive in a way. But I know she doesn’t mean them to be. She wants me to know that she doesn’t care if I’m more lopsided than I should be, that it really doesn’t matter to her.

So I let it go.

I choose to be angry at the situation, at cancer, and not at her.

I imagine her puzzling over elaborate descriptions of hairy balls, maybe looking at a mosaic of scrotums as she tries to understand their appeal, and I can’t help being amused. She has a point. Before I had the surgery, my doctor encouraged me to get a silicone prosthesis to replace what they were removing, and I said no. After having cancer, I didn’t want fake junk in my junk. I told myself that I could handle looking different and no one cared anyway. But that was before, when I hadn’t lost anything yet. After the surgery, I felt vulnerable in a way I’d never experienced. I still haven’t gotten over it.

But I want to. Maybe I’m finally on my way.

“You keep talking about these books that you’re reading,” I say. “What kind of books are they?”

She purses her lips, stubbornly silent, though a smile hints at the corners of her mouth, and I sigh and touch my forehead to hers.

“Let’s do this—you and me, together—and see what happens,” I say.

“Okay.” That’s all she says, but that’s more than enough.

Now that we’re not talking, the roar of the fountain in the lagoon fills my ears. I’m aware of Anna, the building around us, the rippling light above us, and the night beyond.

Everything, every single thing, is absolutely perfect.

EIGHTEEN

Anna

WE GRAB FALAFEL AND PITA SANDWICHES FROM A FOOD truck and eat them as we walk by the marina, where the sail-less masts of the boats point toward the sky like upside-down lollipops. We talk about octopi and joke about the possible places where we might find one hiding along the shore. Like usual for us, we end up kissing, but when Quan touches me, his hands feel like ice on my skin. I don’t want him to die of hypothermia, so I insist we call it a night.

Outside my apartment building, I debate things for a second before asking, “Do you want to come up?”

“Do you want me to?” he asks instead.

“I asked first.”

He laughs as he fiddles with my helmet. It seems to take him a long time to lock it to the back of his bike before he says, “Yeah, I want to.”

“Then come up with me,” I say.

After attaching his own helmet to his bike, he follows me into the building and up three sets of musty old stairs to my apartment. Inside, I step out of my shoes, remove his jacket, and drape it over the back of my armchair, suddenly ill at ease. I know what comes next, but I don’t know how to get us there.

“A-are you thirsty?” I ask.

“No, thanks,” he says.

“Do you want to watch TV?”

His lips quirk in amusement. “It would be different to finally watch something with you in person, but no, I don’t feel like TV right now.”

He advances toward me, and my breath catches. The way he walks, like he’s going somewhere important, appeals to me. Because he’s coming to me.

“I figured out how we need to do this the first time,” he says.

“How?”

He leans down and presses his lips to my temple, my cheek, the soft spot behind my ear. “In the dark.”

I immediately think of his self-consciousness with regard to his surgery and nod. “I’m okay with that.”

We head down the hall to my bedroom, and in the doorway, I automatically fumble around for the light switch until Quan whispers, “Let’s keep the lights off. Unless you changed your mind?”

“No, I just forgot.” I wander through the darkness, eventually bumping my knees against the cushioned side of my mattress.

I turn around to find him, and smack straight into his chest with an ooof.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Yes, but this is a little awkward.”

“A little,” he agrees. “But I kind of like it, too. I get to learn a whole new side of you.”

“The clumsy side of me?”

“I’m so used to seeing you. Now I get to focus on feeling you.” His lips land on my forehead, on an eyebrow, eliciting a laugh from me, on the tip of my nose, my mouth. He sucks on my bottom lip, licks, and then claims my mouth with bold strokes of his tongue as his hands sweep over my body.

When he palms my behind and squeezes, my inner muscles clench tight, and moisture floods between my thighs. Logically, I know he won’t ease the ache in my body—there’s no way he could know how—but I want him anyway. I want his kisses, his caresses. I want him close. Most of all, I want him to want me.

My kisses acquire a wild edge. I slip my hands under his shirt and test the firmness of his stomach, his chest, his back. Even without the light, I can sense how strong he is, how fast. I am neither of those things, and I delight in our differences. When I register the hardness pressing against my lower belly, I rise instinctively onto the tips of my toes until we line up … just right.

He makes a hoarse sound and rocks against me, slowly. Sensation arrows straight to my core, and my knees buckle. He doesn’t let me fall. He holds me up, pulls one of my thighs over his hip, and rubs sinuously between my legs as he kisses me deeper. The rawness of the action, the friction, his mouth, it all overwhelms me.