Emily pulls up her jeans. She buttons them and stares at the window, eyes unfocused.

“Higher,” she whispers.

The J. Crew hair is soft and restless beneath her fingers. She’s lying on the beach with her shorts off, up near the dune grass, marooned in the small hours of the morning. The guy from the alley is between her legs. He’s half on the blanket and half off, this is John from Siasconset, living on a corner of the island too rich even for her coddled blood. His body, his lean muscularity, makes her think of lacrosse games and grass stains on white sneakers. He’s tanned and smooth. His soft pink tongue is in her cunt. It’s hesitant, blind, but with a nudge from her hand and a murmured word it finds its way to where she needs it to go.

It’s a clear night and the stars fill the sky like a Technicolor plate of the universe. The Milky Way and smudges of galaxies burn crazy bright against the velvet black of space. She’s a little bit drunk, all the connections in her mind loosened. She is adrift on the sounds of the waves and wind and shifting sand. Her eyes close. Stars swim through the darkness behind her closed lids. She feels like a part of the earth, her bones heavy, the two of them joined at the skin. He licks her slow and steady, his hands hot on the insides of her thighs.

She hums, breath singing its approval in her throat, and she’s not thinking of girls or boys or Francesca, or the smell of the ocean, or even her own fingers; she’s thinking about the stars, her steady climb up through the soft air, into them on the tongue of this strange boy. He doesn’t want anything else from her. He holds her hand because he thinks he has to, that she won’t come without it. Her breath crests and she craves the clutch of his fingers, squeezes them as she brushes up against the threshold, falls over into a deep trench full of throbbing. She gasps and lifts her hips into his face. He moans for her.

He comes up and looks at her face as the last of the spasms melt away. She pants and he smiles and she notices his slight overbite, the way one front tooth tilts just slightly off-center.

“Not bad,” she breathes.

He turns over and opens his jeans. “Watch me,” he says.

She flushes and rolls onto her elbow. “Why?”

He pulls his shirt up so his cock can rest on his lean stomach. “Because it’s hot.”

Her cheeks get warm. Embarrassment fidgets through her veins, making her sweat. She watches him from beneath her lashes. “I’ve never watched a guy do it before.”

He grips the base of his cock, squeezes it, and starts to stroke. His fist twists a little when it reaches the head. She imagines the sensation of touching it, the heat of its hard core and the softness of the skin, the pulsing of the restless blood trapped inside.

His eyebrows dig a furrow into his smooth forehead. “I’ve never watched a girl do it,” he breathes. “I want to watch you.”

The thought makes her whole body burn. She takes hold of his free hand and watches the tension build in his stomach. “Okay.”

He holds his bottom lip tight in his teeth. His breath deepens before it shortens and he makes soft breathy noises that twist around inside her cunt like butterflies. He arches his neck. When the jizz comes out it’s pearly, arcing like fish glossed in starlight. His face breaks in the starlight, muscles tightening around his features and rearranging them into something fierce and beautiful. He moans. Some of it lands on his shirt but most of it gleams on the rapid rise and fall of his navel. Emily reaches out, slides a fingertip through it. She puts her finger in her mouth and looks at this face.

He holds her eyes and looking back at him, his softly flayed expression and the intensity of locked gazes, turns her on. She slides her other hand down to her cunt, feeling new wetness welling up hot through the old and mingling together between her lips. He turns onto his side and watches her face, studies it as her breath comes faster and sharper. He watches her pupils dilate. She gets closer, her hips nudging against the dexterity of her fingers, and he crawls down and pushes her thighs apart. He rests his head on the inside of one of them, watching the way her wrist curved, her rapid fingers moving in disorganized circles. He separates her hairy lips and holds them open.

“I see your meat,” he murmurs, sliding a finger into her hole. “You’re so raw inside. Did you know that?” He turns his face, plants a soft kiss on a trembling muscle. “Did you know it before I told you?”

She stiffens up, comes with a sudden strangled noise. She goes off like a string of wet firecrackers. He leans his head into her thigh and slips another finger inside, feeling the swift strength of her spasms. His hot breath stirs in her pubic hair. Emily shivers and touches his hair, combs her fingers through its thickness. She strokes its waves. It’s so soft.

She thinks of his tooth. “How come you didn’t have braces?”

He looks up at her. “What?”

“I noticed your front tooth. It’s crooked.”

He moves onto his back long enough to zip up his pants. “I didn’t want any.”

“You’ll change your mind when you’re older,” she says. “That’s what my parents say.”

He goes quiet.

Emily looks at the sky. Inside his silence she feels awkward and too small for her skin. She listens to him as he moves around on the blanket. His body heat touches her before he does. He slides an arm beneath her neck, wrapping it around her shoulders. She allows him to pull her to him, the sky streaking across her vision until she sees dark and glittering water, the foot-pocked sand. She rests her face on his hard shoulder. Her blood is unsettled by his closeness, simmering and sleepy. She closes her eyes and listens to the breath caught in his flesh, trapped in his bones, the echo of it so different from hers.

“I think about weird shit when I come.” She feels the words, caught once in his skin and breathed once into her hair. “Like…sometimes I see needles going in skin. Sometimes there are guts, like organs, what you see on an anatomy chart. It’s weird.”

She fills with a sunburst of recognition. It scorches her, burns away her breath.

“Tonight, just now, it was nylons. You know…stockings? Dirty ones. Bloody ones all tangled up on a floor somewhere.” He lets out a skittery little chuckle. “I’m weird.”

Emily thinks of Francesca. She imagines the cut, the little nibbling fish swimming up to it, slithering inside. Sometimes this image is all she needs to get herself wet. “That’s okay,” she says, putting her hand over his heart. It’s strong, beating out the rhythm of her words. “Me too. Me too.”

Emily opens her purse, digging around inside it for her credentials. Her breath comes in rapid little puffs. She pulls the little leather folder out and opens it, looks into a miniature version of her face. The photo stares up at her through the laminate. She presses her lips together and flings it onto the bed.

The sudden strength of her memory sweeps through her, making her weak. She sinks into a chair. She puts her face in her hands, her elbows propped on her knees. Tears drip wet and hot all over the insides of her wrists. She sniffles and pulls in a deep shuddering breath. She wipes her nose and sits up.

Then…kissing. There had been no kissing up until the moment I thought of Francesca and wanted so badly to tell him, ached to do it, but I was too afraid. He waited a handful of seconds and pulled back enough to look at me and asked if he could kiss me. He said he wanted to. He was so far ahead of his time, asking me for everything, making me wait, pulling me down into complete awareness of the moment by making me hear the words: I want to eat you out. I want to kiss you. May I make you come? May I French kiss you? I want to.

And me, lying on the sand and quivering in all this awareness, this sudden agency, my loins humming like plucked strings. I was desperate for it by the time he wanted it, so willing to open myself, so willing to drown. He pushed me onto my back and kissed me until the moments stretched into sea-scented nets full of sensation. He asked me to show him my breasts. I arched my back and took off my shirt, flung my bra onto the sand. Just the air on them, a cool breeze drifting in from the sea, made me squirm. He asked to touch them and my nerve endings yielded to his hands. He brought his face close to his hands, watched his fingers at work, and he whispered that he wanted to put his mouth on my nipples.

By then I was begging. He licked me, he sucked me and I used my words: please, fuck me. Please. The words flooding me, filling me with restlessness and new hunger. A hollowness opened up in me. It was a hunger that roared. Put it in. Your cock, put it in me. Oh fuck. I’m on the pill. It’s okay. All I could think of was the hot thick slide of cock, pushing in, filling the throat of my newborn hunger. Choking it. Killing it. Please do it, I said, moaning his name. I sharpened it with my lungs, flung it like a hook into the sky. I scrounged up my guts and pushed them into my voice: Fuck me! Please!

I like it when girls scream, he panted. Will you scream for me?

Emily steps into her flip-flops. She looks at the credentials on her rumpled bed, reaches out and picks them up. She pulls a tissue out of the box and uses it to blow her nose. She shoulders her purse and walks out of the room and strides down the hallway.

She expects someone to stop her. She waits for a voice, for the sounding of an alarm. No one does.

The sun is blinding. It’s warm, the air buffeted about by the sea. The sun on her skin is almost enough to make her burst into fresh tears.

She takes a shuttle to Surfside Beach.

So early in the day, and this early in the season, the broad swath of pale sand is empty. The wind barrels in off the water and ruffles her ponytail, its cold edge carving a chill blush into her cheeks. She walks close to the ledge of dune grass. Brittle strands of sun-blackened seaweed and pale shards of shell crunch beneath her feet. She hikes over the shifting sand, heading for a gentle curve in the horizon. It’s fine, crumbly with moisture, still cool from the night before. She pauses, turning toward the sea. The wind blasts her full in the face. The water gleams underneath the fierce morning sun, blue and green and variegated as the inside of an abalone shell. She squints and shades her eyes with the flat of one hand. The sun’s warmth is tentative on her wrist. White sails skim the hard dark line of the horizon, out where the sandy bottom drops off into ruthless depths. They look antiseptic, like bleached fangs.

It’s just so fucking picturesque.

Emily puts her back to the dunes and sits down. The beauty, the simplicity of it, lulls her against her will. Seagulls screech overhead. Their thin shadows race through the hills and valleys carved into the sand, zigzag toward the water.

The sun lands on her jeans. The denim soaks up the heat and the skin beneath starts to get warm. It’s a dark blue, a mottled color like a stormy midnight sky. She looks at her thighs and sees bloodstains on them like clouds. The ghost of George’s blood tucks into thin wrinkles, leaves its smeared orange kiss on the faded seams of her fly.

She lays down on the sand. She curls up with her back toward the water. Her eyes sting.

The sweatshirt, light blue, soaked through. A dead loss.

She wants it. She wishes she had it for a pillow, a thin cushion between her cheek and sharp bits of shell, between her nostrils and the tidal stink of the sand. She wants to bury her head in it and hide from the rest of the world, wants only waves and seagulls echoing in her ears. Her t-shirt is black, scoop-necked. She pulls the thin cotton away her belly and rubs it between her fingers. She touches the stains and thinks about all those clinging proteins, a secret only Luminol can tell.

Parts of her break off and start to crumble. She feels them slide down with her tears.

She cries for a long time. She watches the tiny shadow of an upturned shell creep around its chipped edge, held hostage by the persistence of memory.