She’s touching me like I’m fragile, precious, and it’s making me want to flip her over, pin her wrists down, climb on top of her and do things to her until she feels boneless, desperate. Until the only word she can make with that mouth is my name, over and over. I want to know every fragile hollow of her body, and I want my tongue on them, my name inscribed in some secret language only Caroline and me even know.

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

I’m dangerous.

I sit up, scooting over a few inches and trying not to be too obvious about it. My hands are shaking.

“You’re high,” I tell her.

“I know.”

“How’s the Internet treating you lately?”

I ask because I want to remind her of the money. I want us to be a transaction, logical, bounded. I miss the bakery walls. When I’m on the clock and she’s nothing more than a visitor, we both have a role to play. On this rooftop, there aren’t any boundaries. I’ll put them back up, if that’s what it takes.

“That company you hired doing what you want them to do?”

She’s turned away from me slightly, not giving me her back but not showing her face, either. I think I must have hurt her feelings. She asked for it, though, touching me like that. “I’m supposed to get a report every month, but so far I haven’t seen one. Maybe because of the holiday, they’re delayed or something.”

“Does it seem like it’s working?”

“I don’t know. I decided I was better off not Googling myself all the time, so I stopped.”

“Makes sense.”

She wraps her arms around her knees. “I’ve been thinking about changing my last name.”

“Seriously?”

She doesn’t answer me. She’s looking out over the backyard.

“To what?”

“Fisk. That was my mom’s name.”

“Don’t let him do that to you.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it like that. I just think—”

“Don’t let him win. Not like this. It’s not who you are. You’re no coward.”

She whips around, eyes flashing. “I didn’t say I was going to do it. I was just thinking about it, and I have every right to think about it if I want to.”

I lift my hands. “Fine. Think about it.”

That just pisses her off more. “You have no idea what it’s like. I walk around campus knowing people are talking about me behind my back. I look around my classes, and I can’t tell who’s seen me with my legs spread. Could you stand it, if it were you?”

“If everybody on campus had seen my dick? Sure. It’s just my dick. It’s not me.”

“Maybe. But it’s different for guys. Nobody would call you a slut if that happened. They’d just think you were, you know, kind of a tool. Or that you had too much to drink. Not that you were worthless.”

“If people think that, they’re idiots. Why should you care what a bunch of idiots think?”

“Because the world is full of idiots, West! And because it matters to people who aren’t idiots. My dad’s not an idiot, okay? He’s smart. But if he finds out … if my sisters find out? Or what if I go to law school and I try to get a good clerkship, but I can’t because my vagina’s on the Internet? You know how much that would suck?”

“It would, okay, I get that. But changing your name—that’s who you are. That’s you.”

“Women change their names when they get married.”

“Apples and oranges.”

“No. It’s always arbitrary. It’s a decision I can make if I want to. And I’m surprised you’re being a jerk about this. I thought you were on my side.”

“I am on your side, I just … He put those pictures up there so people would call you names. He was pissed at you, right? He wanted you to feel shitty. And I think if you change your name—that’s what he wants. That’s probably even more than he ever wanted. That’s what all of them want, for you to be ashamed of yourself, but you didn’t do anything to be ashamed about. You took off your clothes with a guy, sucked him off, let him fuck you—big fucking deal, Caroline. So they call you a slut, and they call you a frigid bitch, and it doesn’t even make sense. I mean, pick one, right? None of it means anything about who you are. Those pictures aren’t you.”

“They are, though. I’m the pictures. The pictures are me. There isn’t anything else anymore. I think about this guy I met, Scott? You know why I haven’t called him? It’s because I’m wondering, How long will it take him to find the pictures? And he doesn’t know my name yet. When I met him, he actually thought I said ‘Carrie,’ so he thinks my name is Carrie, and it’s like … What if it was? What if I were Carrie Fisk? Then I wouldn’t have to worry, How long until he knows? What will he think? What will he do?”

“If he’d judge you for that, he’s a dick and you’re better off not knowing him.”

“It’s not … It’s not even him, West, it’s everybody. Everybody says, Be careful what you do with pictures. The Internet is forever. Don’t post drunk shots on Facebook. I could be sixty years old, and the pictures might still be online. They could be there for the rest of my life. So what if Scott doesn’t care? What if we date for years and get engaged, and then his mom finds out? Or his dad, or his great-aunt, or whoever? What if he has some pervy cousin who jacks off to my pictures and tells Scott, you know?”

“What if you die in a freak accident next week? What if your firstborn gets leukemia? Jesus, Caroline, don’t make this the center of your entire fucking life!”

I hear what I sound like in the silence afterward.

Pissed off. Accusing.

I feel like the lowest thing. Worse than a worm. Something rotten, disgusting. Something decayed in me.

I’m as bad as every guy she’s worried about. I jerked off talking to her on the phone a few hours ago, and if that doesn’t make me a pervert and an asshole, I’m not sure what would.

I just hate hearing her talk about this other guy. I hate that her hope is attached to a name that isn’t mine, her future to a name that isn’t hers.

Shame floods through me, a hot impulse that makes me angry she’s not talking. Makes me fill the silence with more stupidity. “It’s normal,” I tell her. “It’s tits and a cunt, legs, an ass—it’s not the end of the fucking world, Caro. You think you’re so fucking special, but there’s a million other girls’ cunts online, and most of those girls aren’t moaning that their lives are over just because some random dude is getting off looking at them.”

Quiet again. In the nice neighborhood where Caroline lives, everyone is sleeping tonight. That makes me feel vile, too. That she should live in this place that’s just exactly the kind of place where I want to put Frankie. Surrounded by safety.

That I am the thing here, tonight, that’s making her unsafe.

I risk a glance at her face. She looks like I slapped her.

I did slap her.

The worst part is, there’s no reason for me to be mad at her. I’m not—I’m just mad in general.

I’m mad the world sucks so much, that this should have happened to her, that she should feel so bad about it.

I’m mad that sex can’t just be sex, it has to be everything else, too—money and power and misery and pleasure all mixed together. Because I want her, I’m mad at her, and it’s fucking stupid.

The whole thing. Stupid.

I sigh and stand up. Pace out the rooftop. This giant house where Caroline spent her whole life, sheltered from anything half as bad as what her punk-ass ex-boyfriend did to her. He probably grew up in a house like this, too. Probably wrecked her whole world without a second thought.

I walk back toward Caroline.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “That came out … I’m just sorry, all right?”

She shakes her head. She’s got her arms wrapped around her legs, her head turned away. “You know, I never called it that?”

“It?”

“Cunt,” she says, like the word tastes bad in her mouth. “Pussy. Slit. Tits. Cock. All those words—they never had anything to do with me before.”

She angles her head toward me, and I see her eyes, full of tears. “I don’t want them to have anything to do with me.”

I sit down a few feet away. Not sure what to tell her.

“There are so many things I’m not sure I can ever get back,” she says quietly. “I mean … I get what you’re saying. I get that life doesn’t end because of a couple grainy pictures online. But it kind of does, too, you know? Because now everything I’ve seen people say about me is in me. I have a cunt, I am a cunt, I’m dressed like a slut, I am a slut, I’m frigid, I’m a bitch, I want cum on my face—all those dirty things that never used to apply to me and now they do. They just eat away at me. So if I feel something, if I want a guy, if I get … if I get wet for a guy, if I want somebody to kiss me—it’s not the same anymore. It’s always going to be full of that stuff, either because I’m pushing all those words away or because I’m trying to figure out how to make them mine. And I hate that.”

I wish I didn’t know what she meant, but I do. I can’t tease a woman, work for a smile, get her off with my tongue inside her, without thinking about what she wants from me. What I’m going to get for it.

That’s the thing about trading sex for favors. It makes everything feel like a transaction.

“Do you want somebody to kiss you?” I ask. “Is this all theoretical, or …”

Her arms wrap tighter around her legs. “It’s not theoretical.”

“Scott?”

“Sure, Scott. I mean, maybe. I just met him. But what if, right? Why does it all have to be spoiled before it’s even started?”

“It’s not spoiled.”

“It feels spoiled.”