For my birthday, she took me to a fancy restaurant. “Here,” she said, sliding a package across the table during the intermezzo course. The rectangular shape of the package betrayed its contents.

She knew I knew.

“So you can carry it with you,” she continued without invitation. “And so you can stop writing on bar napkins.”

Later, she let me fuck her in the ass (my “third gift”) and then went home (my fourth gift?), complaining about the pain she would be in tomorrow.

I shook myself a martini and opened the package–a pocket-sized journal, as I had more or less expected. I grabbed a handful of pages at their lower right corners and flipped back to front. Then I noticed writing–black ink, feminine–her writing. I looked closely. Each page was full of details from my life.

I began reading about things she had no business authoring: drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts. I read further: my birthday, anal sex, a journal with its curious contents. On the last page I read about my death–prolonged and messy. I didn’t get it. “I don’t have AIDS,” I said to myself.

My cell buzzed. “Um,” she sighed, “there’s something I should have told you.”