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I hadn’t told Ophelia that my birthday was today. I was turning twenty-eight. Was that old or young? I didn’t know. When I was twenty-three, I wore heart-shaped stickers on my face. When I was twenty-five, I fell in love. I only drank tequila and pineapple juice, as if that said something important…

The words came so easily. I love you too. But I didn’t pull my hand away. It hurt me to see him like this, crinkled and grim. This was not a man who windsurfed at dawn; this was a man who could barely dog-paddle. Had he always been this pathetic? Maybe that was why he chased such young girls—they w…

He stuck out his hand to hail a taxi, something no one did anymore. It was moments like these when he revealed his age, his thirty-seven years on earth. I liked dating older men because they were well acquainted with loss. They’d seen the rise and fall of rock and roll, good drugs, cheap rent. Thei…

Ophelia understood what I needed. I hated talking about the bad days, especially with people not in our world. I didn’t want to field their pity, their gentle suggestion that I “phase out of this lifestyle” or however they’d word it. Show me a lifestyle that feels good all the time, I wanted to sho…

The libidinal underworld to which I belonged was as foreign to Charlie as gay bars or food banks. Still, he was my first foray into what you’d call sex work. He would claim he gave me money as a favor, but at the end of the day, he gave me money for sex. People saw us in restaurants and thought he …