I remember one time when he was fucking me from behind and I caught sight of my earring falling out and landing on the couch beside me. The earring wasn't the problem—it was a large chandelier, glamorous, well within my sight line. But the tiny silver back was another issue. Did she even wear earrings?

Pre-Sex Then:

We stand in the kitchen with a cup of coffee between us and the air steams with a heat all our own.

I see it in her eyes. We look at each other with a spark so potent it could burn the house down. She tries desperately to swallow the coffee faster, but it’s too hot. My hands go to her arms, her waist, curl into the hem of her shirt. I want.

I’ve hated every man I have ever slept with. A deep rage bubbling from within me. Rage at what they took from me, and how little it must have meant to them.

The light in my room is dim; it's going to rain again, and neither of my windows sit in the right spot to catch the source of the light. I’ve tried my best to illuminate the space, but it somehow always manages to feel like a cave of sorts. Like a lair. It's my lair.

No man has taken this room from me.

The summer after my dad dies is a slutty one.

I spend most of May haunting a neighborhood ex while his girlfriend is out of town. We trade plausibly-deniable texts and “accidentally” run into each other at Cobble Hill’s diviest bar. I sit on a wooden stool six inches too close to him, fully aware that my silk mini skirt has ridden up around my waist. I don’t bother adjusting it. We never cross any official lines, but the thrill of possibility is enough to feed the yawning hunger that eats through my gut at all hours.

The first time I touched their chest, I didn't know what I was doing. That's not quite right—I knew what my hands were doing. I didn't know what it meant.

We were in the Jeep, right after that first kiss. A kiss that undid me completely. A kiss that took me by surprise since we started by just talking the way we always talked, sentences that started one place and ended somewhere neither of us expected. It had been an icy cold January day and we were enjoying what felt like quiet even though the brewery was busy with families and beer and dogs and that post-holiday need for people to find something to do that was not Christmas and was not preparing for the holidays to end. Suddenly, we were looking at each other the way you look at someone when the conversation has moved into a register that doesn't need words anymore.

I left on a clear October Monday. Seated at the bulkhead, my elbow rested next to a man who asked if I was going to Chicago for business. I lied, nodding my head yes. Ambivalence prevented me from updating my second-generation iPod earlier in the day, leaving Missy Elliott and Usher to comfort me. A leathery skinned smoker picked me up at baggage claim. She drove me forty-five minutes to our rural destination while I imagined what happens when car doors open and bodies land on I-55 at seventy-five miles per hour.

I’ve always been a good patient—keep my jaw open even when it aches for the dentist, never flinch from the needle of a vaccine, and have thick, easy-to-find veins for blood draws. Maybe I learned it in high school on the soccer field; complain, and be benched. Maybe I carried it in my DNA, passed down from stoic Norwegian farmers; suffering is inevitable, better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes towards God.

My mother remembers one less, but I remember seven. Seven places I called home outside of Nanny’s trailer. Each move had its own life and timeline complete with characters and climate, seemingly separate from the world happening at Nanny’s. Seven times I packed my “101 Dalmatians” suitcase and cardboard boxes of pictures. I gained a little more makeup for each move: a new sheen lip gloss, glitter nail polish with chunky stars, Hot Topic eyeshadow, the limited edition Gerard Way palette that glowed bright red. Puberty marked by moves.

My cellmate at the correctional center that I had been transferred to six weeks after the guilty verdict, or cellie as we called them, was trying to teach me how to survive my final transfer—prison. Lucky for me. She claimed to have spent four years there. But this time she was only going to empty instant espresso packets down her throat and pace around the tiny box with her swishing Rapunzel hair in jail instead of prison.

The city lights blurred as I drove to the hospital. Mt. Spokane sat on the horizon, its slopes and lifts hidden in darkness, a silent witness to my brother’s sudden fall. Hours earlier, he'd grabbed his snowboard and driven to the top. Now, he lay braced and broken.

Part of me rehearsed the what-ifs, ran scripts about what could have been. I pushed these thoughts away, wiping the blur from my eyes. I couldn't create a second emergency. But few drivers were out, streets icy from a fresh storm.