“I thought you might forget to bring clothes to sleep in,” he says, putting the pajamas in my hands. I say nothing about the black nightgown in the bottom of my backpack.

In the bathroom I try to make as little sound as possible as I peel off my clothes and break the tags off the pajamas. Before I put them on, I stare at my face in the mirror, peek in the shower at his bottle of shampoo and bar of soap, inspect everything on the counter. He has an electric toothbrush, an electric razor, and a digital scale that I stand on, curling my toes as the numbers flash—145, two pounds less than I was at Christmas.

Holding up the tank top, I wonder why he chose this particular set. Probably because he liked the print—he’s said before that my hair and skin remind him of strawberries and cream. I picture him browsing a girls’ clothing section, his big hands touching all the different pajamas, and the thought fills me with tenderness, similar to how I felt a few years ago when I saw a photo of that famous gorilla cradling her pet kitten, the vulnerability of someone so big handling something so delicate, trying their best to be careful and kind.

I open the bathroom door and step into the bedroom, shielding an arm across my chest. The lamp on the nightstand is on, a soft warm light. He sits on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched, hands clasped.

“Everything fit ok?”

I shiver and give a half nod. Outside the window a car drives by, the noise approaching then receding, a hush of silence.

He asks, “Can I see?” and I step toward him, close enough for him to wrap his fingers around my wrist and pull my arm down. As his eyes move over me, he sighs and says, “Oh no,” like he’s already sorry for what we’re about to do.

He stands, folds down the comforter, and, under his breath, goes, “Ok, ok, ok.” He says he’ll stay dressed for now, which I know is meant to soothe me, maybe also himself. On his shirt, dark circles spread out from his armpits, just like during the convocation speech the first day of classes.

I slide into bed beside him and we lie on our backs under the covers, not touching, not talking. The ceiling is covered in cream and gold tiles that form a swirling pattern my eyes circle around and around. Beneath the down comforter, my hands and feet are warmer, but the tip of my nose stays cold.

“My room at home is always cold like this, too,” I say.

“Is it?” He turns to me, grateful I’ve made this somewhat normal by speaking. He asks me to describe my bedroom, what it looks like, how it’s arranged. I draw a map in the air.

“Here’s the window facing the lake,” I say, “and here’s the window facing the mountain. Here’s my closet and here’s my bed.” I tell him about my posters, the color of my bedspread. I say that in the summers, I wake sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of loons screaming out on the lake, and that because the house isn’t well insulated, ice forms on the walls in the winter.

“I hope someday I get to see it for myself,” he says.

I laugh at the thought of him in my bedroom, how big he’d seem there, his head brushing the ceiling. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

“You never know,” he says. “Opportunities come up.”

He tells me about his childhood bedroom in Montana. It was cold in the winter, too, he says. He describes Butte, the old mining boomtown, once the richest place on earth and now a depressed brown basin cradled by mountains. He describes the abandoned headframes poking up between the houses, how downtown was built on the side of a hill and how at the top of that hill is a big pit of acid left over from the mining.

“That sounds horrible,” I say.

“It does,” he agrees, “but it’s the sort of place that’s difficult to understand until you see it for yourself. There’s a strange beauty in it.”

“Beauty in a pit of acid?”

He smiles. “Someday we’ll go there. You’ll see.”

Under the comforter, he links his fingers through mine and continues talking, telling me about his younger sister, his parents; how his father was a copper miner, intimidating but kind, and his mother a teacher.

“What was she like?” I ask.

“Angry,” he says. “She was a very angry woman.”

I bite my lip, unsure what to say.

“She didn’t care for me,” he adds, “and I could never figure out why.”

“Is she still alive?”

“They’re both dead.”

I start to say I’m sorry but he cuts me off, squeezes my hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “Ancient history.”

We lie quiet for a while, our hands linked under the blankets. Breathing in and out, I close my eyes and try to pinpoint the scent of his bedroom. It’s a thin, masculine smell, traces of soap and deodorant on the flannel sheets, cedar from the closet. It’s strange to think this is where he lives like a normal person, sleeping and eating and doing all the monotonous everyday chores of living—washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry. Does he do his own laundry? I try to picture him hauling clothes from washer to dryer, but the image dissolves as soon as I conjure it.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I ask.

He glances over at me and I feel his hand loosen its grip on mine for a moment, long enough to tell me this was the wrong thing to ask.

“Marriage isn’t for everyone,” he says. “You’ll figure that out as you get older.”

“No, I get it,” I say. “I never want to get married, either.” I don’t know if this is exactly true, but I’m trying to be generous. His worry is obvious, about me and what we’re doing. The smallest movement makes him jump, like I’m an animal prone to bolt or bite.

He smiles; his body relaxes. I said the right thing. “Of course you don’t. You know yourself enough to understand what you aren’t made for,” he says.

I want to ask what I am made for, but don’t want to show I don’t actually know myself, and don’t want to push it now that he’s again holding my hand and tilting his head toward mine like he’s moving in for a kiss. He hasn’t kissed me since I got here.

He asks again if I’m tired and I shake my head. “When you are,” he says, “let me know and I can go to the living room.”

The living room? I frown and try to figure out what he means. “Like you’ll sleep on the couch?”

He lets go of my hand and starts to speak, stops, starts again. “I’m ashamed of how I first touched you,” he says, “back at the beginning of the year. That’s not how I like to behave.”

“I liked it, though.”

“I know you liked it, but wasn’t it confusing?” He turns to me. “It must have been. Having your teacher touch you out of nowhere. I didn’t like doing that, acting without talking it through first. Talking through absolutely everything is the only way to redeem what we’re doing.”

He doesn’t say it, but I know what’s required of me here—to tell him how I feel and what I want. To be brave. I roll toward him, press my face into his neck. “I don’t want you to sleep on the couch.” I feel him smile.

“Ok,” he says. “Is there anything else you want?”

I nuzzle against him, slide my leg over his. I can’t say it. He asks if I want to be kissed, and when I nod into his neck, he takes a handful of my hair, draws my head back.

“My god,” he says, “look at you.”

I’m perfect, he says, so perfect I can’t be real. He kisses me and other stuff starts to happen fast, things we haven’t done before—pushing the tank top over my breasts, pinching and kneading, slipping his hand under the pajama shorts and cupping me down there.

For everything he does, he asks permission. “Can I?” before pulling the pajama top all the way over my head. “Is this ok?” before pushing my underwear over, slipping a finger inside so quickly that, for a moment, I’m stunned and my body plays dead. After a while he starts asking permission after he’s already done the thing he’s asking about. “Can I?” he asks, meaning can he tug the pajama shorts down, but they’re already off. “Is this ok?” meaning is it ok for him to kneel between my legs, but he’s already there, letting out a groan and saying, “I knew you’d be red here, too.”

I don’t understand what he’s doing until he starts doing it. Kissing me there, going down on me. I’m not an idiot; I know it’s something people do, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s something he would want. Wrapping his arms under me, he pulls me closer, and I dig my heels into the mattress, reach down and grab a fistful of his hair so hard it must hurt, but his kissing and licking and whatever else he does—how does he know exactly what to do to make me feel good? how does he know everything about me?—none of that stops. I bite my bottom lip to keep from crying out, and he makes a slurping sound, like sucking up the last of a soda through a straw, which would embarrass me if it didn’t feel so good. I drape my arm across my eyes, fall into swirls of color, ocean waves rising to mountains, the sensation of being so small until I come, harder than when I do it to myself, so hard I see stars.

“Ok, stop,” I say. “Stop, stop.”

He recoils as though I kicked him away—sits back on his knees, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed and face shiny. “Did you come?” he asks. “Really, that fast?”

I squeeze my legs together and my eyes shut. I can’t talk, can’t think. Was that fast? How long did it even take? A minute or ten or twenty, I have no clue.

“You did, didn’t you? Do you know how special that is?” he asks. “How rare?”

I open my eyes and watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, then pause and hold that hand to his face, take a breath, and close his eyes.

He says he wishes he could do that to me every night. Pulling the comforter up with him, he lies down beside me and adds, “Every single night before you fall asleep.”

Him cradling me feels almost as good as him going down on me, his chin resting on top of my head, his big body curled around mine. He smells like me. “We won’t go further than that for now,” he says, and I turn liquid-warm at the thought of sex being nothing but him doing that to me.

He reaches over and turns off the nightstand light, but I can’t sleep. His arm grows heavy across my shoulders as I replay in my head the way he said “oh no” when he saw me in the pajamas, the way he wrapped his arms under my legs to pull me closer to his face when he went down on me. The way he, at one point, reached up and held my hand in the middle of it all.

I want him to do it again, but don’t dare wake him to ask. Maybe he’ll do it again in the morning before I leave. Maybe we’ll be able to do it after school in his classroom sometimes, or go for drives off campus and do it in his car. My mind won’t quiet. Even as I eventually doze, my brain still schemes.

When I wake a couple hours later, it’s dark outside. Hallway light streams in through the bedroom doorway, across the floor. Beside me, Strane is awake, his mouth hot on my neck. I turn onto my back, grinning, expecting him to move his face down between my legs, but he’s naked when I roll over. Pale skin covered in dark hair from his chest all the way down his legs, and in the center his penis, enormous and erect.

“Oh!” I say. “Ok! Wow. Ok.” Small, stupid words. When he takes my wrist and guides my hand to it, I say them again. “Oh! Ok!” He closes my fingers around it, and I know that I’m meant to do the up-and-down stuff, and my hand immediately starts pumping away, dutiful as a robot, disconnected from my brain. It’s loose skin sliding over a column of muscle, but rough, halting. It’s like a dog hacking up garbage that’s been sitting in its stomach for days, that violent, full-body gag.

“Slower, baby,” he says. “A little slower.” He shows me what he means, and I try to keep the pace even though my arm is starting to cramp. I want to tell him I’m tired, to roll over and never look at the thing ever again, but that would be selfish. He said me naked is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It would be cruel for me to counter that with disgust. It doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.

When he guides my hand away from it, I worry he’ll ask me to use my mouth next and I don’t want that, I can’t do that, but instead he says, “Do you want me to fuck you?” It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.

I can’t wrap my head around the change in him. Now I’m not even sure if he really said, We won’t go further than that for now, or maybe “for now” meant something totally different from what I assumed. Do I want him to fuck me? Fuck me. The crudeness of it makes me turn my face into the pillow. His voice doesn’t even sound the same, haggard and rough. I open my eyes and he’s positioning himself between my legs, brow furrowed in concentration.

I try to stall, tell him I don’t want to get pregnant.

“You won’t,” he says. “That’s impossible.”

I move my hips away. “What does that mean?”

“I had an operation, a vasectomy,” he says. He holds himself with one hand and steadies me with the other. “You won’t get pregnant. Just relax.” He tries to push in, his thumb digging hard into my pelvis. It won’t fit.

“You gotta calm down, honey,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”

I start to tear up, but he doesn’t stop, just says I’m doing great as he keeps trying to get it in. He tells me to breathe in and out, and when I exhale, he thrusts hard and pushes a little farther inside. I start crying, really crying—still, he doesn’t stop.

“You’re doing great,” he says. “Another deep breath, ok? It’s ok if it hurts. It won’t hurt forever. Just one more deep breath, ok? There we go. That’s nice. That’s so nice.”

Afterward, he gets out of bed, a flash of belly and butt before I shut my eyes. He pulls on his underwear and the elastic band snaps like a whip crack, like something splitting in two. As he walks to the bathroom, he coughs hard and loud and I hear him spit into the sink. Under the blankets, I’m raw and slick, my legs slimy all the way down my thighs. My mind feels like the lake on a calm day, glassy and still. I’m nothing, no one, nowhere.

When he comes back into the bedroom, he looks like himself again, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his glasses on. He slides into bed, curls his body around mine. He whispers, “We made love, didn’t we?” and I gauge the distance between “fuck” and “made love.”

After a while, we have sex again and it’s slower, easier. I don’t come from it, but at least I’m not crying this time. I even like the weight of him on top of me, so heavy it slows my heart. He comes with a groan and a shudder takes over his body, radiating from his core. The feel of him trembling on top of me makes my muscles contract and squeeze him even tighter inside, and I understand then what people probably mean when they say that stuff about two becoming one.

He apologizes for finishing too quickly, for being clumsy. He says it’s been a while since he was last intimate. I roll the word intimate around in my mouth and think of Ms. Thompson.

After we have sex the second time, I go to the bathroom and peek in his medicine cabinet, something I wouldn’t think to do if I hadn’t seen women in movies do it when they spend the night in a strange man’s home. His cabinet is full of the usual Band-Aids and Neosporin, over-the-counter digestive stuff, plus two orange prescription bottles labeled with names I recognize from commercials, Viagra and Wellbutrin.

On the dark drive back to campus, the streetlights flashing yellow, he asks how I feel. “I hope you’re not too overwhelmed,” he says.

I know he wants the truth and that I should tell him I didn’t like being woken up by him hard and practically pushing into me. That I wasn’t ready to have sex this way. That it felt forced. But I’m not brave enough to say any of this—not even that I feel sick to my stomach when I think about him guiding my hand to his penis and don’t understand why he didn’t stop when I started to cry. That the thought I want to go home ran through my head the entire time we first did it.

“I feel fine,” I say.

He watches me closely, like he wants to be sure I’m telling the truth. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s what we want.”