We’ve been naked together most of the night, past midnight, into the hard, blunt hours of the morning, but Pete doesn’t notice until now the scar. It slashes down my narrow hip, the left one, a ten-inch streak of puffed angry skin, all of it a dull purple, the color of plums. From the crest of my hipbone, the scar descends and juts toward my ass at the last of its length, forming a hockey stick. Pete peers at the scar in my bathroom mirror as his hips press against me. I want him to stop looking.

“How’d you get that?” he asks. We hear a police siren streak down the highway that runs beside my complex.

“Complicated story.”

He buries his nose and chin in my shoulder. “I like stories,” he murmurs.

“You won’t like this one.”

“Unhappy ending?”

“It’s real life—there is no ending.” In the glass, I see his ice-pale eyes. Now confident, I continue. “Well, none except the obvious one.”

Pete smirks and draws his finger across my throat. I smile hearing my whiskers scratch softly against his knuckle. A wet, dirty gurgle departs his mouth. From my days as a boy wandering through the schoolyard, I recognize the sound, the gesture, and know what they mean: you’re dead. I turn my head to kiss him, hoping the gesture will snuff his curiosity. There is so much I want him to divine from me, but not this.

“We all die,” he says, wrapping his arms around me. There’s a warmth in his tone and I think, Yes, a gentle voice and a firm embrace is all death needs to claim me. From the living room, the television airs a game show. Something about polling average Americans and having the contestants guess the correct percentage. Laughter. Applause.

I turn a plastic knob on the sink and let the water spill from the faucet down into the drain. Grinning, I say, “You’re morbid.”

“We always die tomorrow, never today.”

He looks down and watches my fingers pass through the stream of water.

“We could hop in there,” he says, nodding back to the shower beside us.

“I just want to wash my face before bed.”

“Let me do it.”

He’s forgotten about the scar already. Thank you.

I perch on the bathroom counter, enjoy the coolness of the bright yellow tiles beneath my bare thighs. Facing him now, I lean back into the mirror overlooking the counter, the glass cold against my back.

Pete reaches behind himself and pulls a stiff and worn washrag from the towel bar. He eases it under the stream of water but yanks back his hand.

“You trying to burn yourself?” he asks.

“I forgot to turn the cold water on. You distracted me.”

He twists on the cold water and the stream falling from the faucet doubles in force. I listen to its steady splash. The air conditioner shudders to life. As it moans, he slides his hips between my raised legs, pulls my body toward him with his free arm. I tuck my head and nestle into his broad chest, encircle my legs around his waist. I run my fingers through his coarse blonde hair, crushing the ends of those strands between my fingernails. His chin digs into the back of my skull and I am safe.

“Here,” he says, lifting himself from me, wringing out the washrag with one hand. “Look at me.” Pete’s at least a half-foot taller than me, more so now that I’m seated before him.

“Don’t forget the soap.”

“I haven’t.” He uses his thumb to pump the creamy soap from the ceramic dispenser. He kisses me softly, again and again, on the mouth as he spreads the soap in the limp cloth by grounding it into a ball in his fist. “You wanna get clean?”

I smile at him, hope my eyes hold a sufficient and alluring dreaminess. My hand trails down his chest.

He lifts the washrag to my face. My cheek thrills to its moist roughness, the milky suds canvassing my skin.

“Feel good?”

I nod and smile. The rag slides over my jawline and down my neck. I nod again.

With his other hand, he grazes my scar then traces it with his finger. “When are you going to tell me about this?” he asks.

I ease back against the mirror. I look into his face, boyish and wide, those ice-pale eyes, the lips thin and tense. This used to be a happy night.

“Will you keep doing that?” I ask. He runs the washrag over my shoulder.

“I never planned on stopping.”

“Not till I’m clean.”

“Nope.”

You don’t have to tell him. This story is yours.

Pete scrubs down the center of my back.

I tell him, “I jumped out of a car.”

“What?”

“Don’t stop, that feels good.”

He resumes washing my back. With his other hand, he strokes my wrist. “Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t want to be there anymore.” I dare a quick glance into his eyes, asking for his silence. The washrag makes spongy sounds against the hair on my chest. My skinny neighbor’s nasty terrier yips and whines outside. “I was with some guy, we’d met somewhere—“

“Here?”

“In Dallas. And I can’t remember where we were going, must’ve been back to his place. We were driving, he was a deejay. He kept going on about how music could be measured in beats per minute. He called it the science of sound.”

Pete gently lifts one of my arms out to the side and begins to lather it. “I had a friend who did that back in Austin.”

“We’d gotten high in the bathroom at the club, so I was pretty tweaked. I wasn’t thinking, and I—“

“Just hopped out?”

“He just kept going on and on—“

“What was his name?”

“I used to know. Now he’s just The Deejay. That’s what I call him.”

“What would I be?” The worried note in his voice slices me like shafts of morning through just-opened blinds. He runs the cloth down my thigh, his eyes never leaving mine.

“You’re here,” I say as he pulls up my foot to wash my calf. “He’s there and you’re here.”

He smiles but it flickers then fades. “Was the car moving?”

“Not too fast.”

“If it’s moving, that’s too fast.”

“We were in Oak Lawn, Saturday night. I promise, it wasn’t fast.” Pete wraps the washcloth around my left foot and begins to scrub. “I was listening to him, and I thought, how much longer can I do this? Meeting guys like you pick out a head of lettuce at the store. Going away with them. Going and going and going. But once you stop…” I look down at the top of his head. After a moment, he senses me and lifts his chin to look at me. There’s such compassion in his face, and I feel sick. A car alarm pulses from the parking lot. “You stop and all you think is, how the hell am I going to get out of here?”

“Is that what you’re thinking now?”

I shake my head, slowly, as if Pete might miss it otherwise. “I’m thinking how happy I am.” I’m not happy, of course, but I want to be. Isn’t that close enough?

“Maybe you should stop thinking so much.”

The laugh gusts from me like a grimy sparrow charging from inside a chimney. “I tell myself that every day.”

“Did he come back for you?”

“The Deejay?”

He nods, tosses the washcloth in the sink and grabs the dingy towel from behind him.

“No.” I smile, look away, as if the memory delights and embarrasses me. “I mean, I had just ditched him in the most unambiguous way possible.”

“You could have been hurt.” He clamps his hand on my marked hip. “You were!”

“It was two in the morning in Dallas on a Saturday. When someone falls out, you just keep moving.”

“Were you conscious?”

“The whole time. I ran. That’s probably what started the fluid buildup in my leg. I ran till I found that gas station next to the porn store on Cedar Springs. The asshole there didn’t seem to know any English besides ‘I’m calling the police.’”

Pete rubs the towel across my shoulders, my back. He kisses the top of my head. I drop it onto my chest and sigh. This is why I’ve never told this story. To hear it spoken aloud, the candy-corn impulsiveness and daytime-soap desperation—now Pete will know one day, without warning, I may leave him and I will risk death just to get away. In the kitchen, the dryer buzzes. Pete and I had finally remembered to put our clothes in there after running in from the rain hours earlier.

“So the scar’s where they drained the fluid from you?”

He wants me to skip to the end. He’s doing it for me. Or himself. But maybe me.

“I remember, and it must’ve been my imagination, some mindfuck—”

“You were high.”

“It wasn’t that. I never have visuals, just auditory hallucinations sometimes. No, I remember very clearly laying on my side in the operating room. There was a sheet over my chest and my legs. I saw the surgeon. He was cute.”

Pete smiles and laughs, rumples the towel over my head.

“You didn’t wash my hair,” I say.

He laughs again and folds the towel back over the towel bar.

“Well, he was,” I say.

“So what did you see your cute surgeon do?”

“I saw him cut into my hip. I saw the scalpel go in.”

“Then what?”

“That’s it. The anesthesia must’ve kicked in after that.”

“It would’ve taken effect long before they took you to the operating room.”

“I saw it, Pete.”

He leans down and kisses me. The apartment is completely silent. That gift, the stillness when he kisses you, kisses you to take something away, so that when you remember that kiss, all you remember is his lips against yours, his mouth parting along with yours. Your eyes are closed, it’s silent inside with him and it’s silent outside. A memory comprised of nothing but sensation.

Pete lifts me up from the counter and sets me on my feet. “Let’s go to bed.”

“What about the clothes in the dryer?”

“We have the whole weekend. They can wait.”

I need something bigger than the cramped, oak-framed twin bed from my college days. One of my ex-lovers, the one who played guitar, always complained. But I enjoy how the slim mattress forces the man beside me to huddle close, sheets pulled to our chests, us stacked on our sides, curving into one another, like dishes set in the rack to wash.

My bedroom window faces the forest behind the complex, and we listen to the crickets chirp. In Dallas, there are no insect noises at night. Just cars passing somewhere unseen, and men laughing somewhere beyond you.

Pete drapes his arm around me. “I’m glad you told me that.”

“Now you know the guy you’re spending the weekend with is…”

“Is here. And everyone else is there.”

We make love. We sleep. The night fades into morning, and morning swells into early afternoon. I wake to the loud, steady rumble of a lawn mower. The maintenance crew trims the grass on Saturdays.

I twist my head and see Pete still asleep beside me. He doesn’t hear a thing. Why measure music, or any sound, when there is no one to listen? If he and I make it past these first few weeks where everything is wonderful until it’s suddenly not, I understand I will be the one who rises first from bed. I smile at this realization. For at least a few moments, my apartment and its native noises will be mine alone.

The bathroom is located at the center of my apartment, so there are no windows. It is still dark inside when I enter. I flick on the light. At first, I don’t notice it. Why would you notice what’s not there?

My left hip. Nothing but smooth white skin.

The scar, it’s gone.

In that moment, I hear the noises my two years living here have conditioned me to ignore. The agitated hum of the oversized bulbs lined in a row over my mirror. The shy tick of the wall clock in the bedroom. The quick, hushed squeak of my fingers against the mirror as I reach out my hand, amazed at what I see.

It’s gone and so no longer mine. You cannot own what is not there.

I must have cried out. I did something Pete heard. He calls my name from bed. He calls it again. I sink to my knees as if before a revelation. I will stay here until Pete comes to me and lifts me to my feet, lifts me up and sees what I see, what I no longer see.

We will tell no one this story. It is ours.