He was an amateur soccer player from Bosnia: flawless body, sand-colored hair, sparkling eyes. We were in one of those gay bars on the Lower East Side where they don't turn on the lights. It was after 2:00 a.m. He had some kind of adorably awful haircut, a mullet-mohawk middle ground, and a smirk that killed me, and he wasn't tall. Every time I leaned down to kiss him, I thought of something from a Miranda July short story: "People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you." We went the distance shortly after he walked up to me, and 45 minutes later we were in a cab rushing through a blur of lights—Manhattan's random churches, lit-up drugstores, apartment buildings, Jamba Juices—to his place in Chelsea.

His parents were the superintendents of the building, so he lived rent-free. It wasn't a proper apartment. It was a big room in the basement, at the far end of a hallway crowded with bulging Hefty trash bags, through a door marked FIRE SPRINKLER SHUT-OFF VALVE: DO NOT ENTER, then through the room behind that. It was just a big raw space divided by an L-shaped couch. Bare brick walls, except for a huge map of Bosnia. His "kitchen" was a sink with a table next to it. We had sex. We made use of his bong. We had sex again. We talked about his parents: Bosnian Muslims who'd fled their home, their 6-year-old in tow, during the genocide—200,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serbs between 1992 and 1995—and had orchestrated a system of secretly housing new refugees in the building's vacant apartments. We had still more sex, the kind of disorienting, tunnel-vision sex you could just keep having forever.

Right away I did the thing I always do, where I imagine the shape of things to come, filling in all the unknowns with invented qualities—his fundamental sweetness, his desire to be my boyfriend, the education I would get about the Balkans. Everything about him seemed designed to be fascinating: his un-American name (two sounds I wasn't used to hearing next to each other—he kept saying it and I kept forgetting), his taboo religion (paradoxically, he was a believer), his radical activist parents upstairs (whom he was not out to and who might knock on his door at any moment), his past (he was young and had seen many people die), his effortless physical presence (that great un-self-conscious thing that athletes have). His apartment was frankly disgusting, full of dirty dishes and knickknacks and that filthy couch, but all that dematerialized when I looked into those eyes.

Everyone has his thing. Mine is crazy people. My first boyfriend was a felon (bank fraud) with (eventually) a crystal-meth problem; we lived together for five years. Later I dated a shamanistic Alaskan in the middle of some "journey work" who was into things that would make Edmund White blush. More recently, I let a Culinary Institute of America graduate with a good job (restaurant manager) and a cute accent (Boston) move in, and when we broke up after a punishing four months, he bragged that he'd had to hide his crack pipe really well. The Bosnian's eyes should've been a clue—that vortexy feeling I got staring into them. I thought he was interesting, the sort of guy you meet all the time in New York City: worldly, special, tough. We fell asleep in each other's arms, snuggling, sweating, as his little basement window lit up with the dawn.

One of the things he did for his parents was take the building's trash up to the curb, and the next day when we were hanging out again he asked me if I would help. "You're not afraid of rats, are you?" he said. I remember a friend of his, carrying big shopping bags from the Nike store and Banana Republic, stopping in to sell him some pot and measure a bunch out for other people—the shopping bags were crammed with weed. I remember admiring the shape of Bosnia on his wall and getting his spiel about the U.S. not recognizing Bosnian Muslims' rights. (I was listening, but a friend of mine was simultaneously cracking wise in a text message: "Are you going to penetrate his Muslim strongholds?") That night I had dinner plans, but the Bosnian wanted to see me. After dinner, I stopped into a market and picked up some sliced fruit and a magazine. When I got to the Bosnian's, he was sleeping in front of the TV. Get up, let's do something. I was jonesing. I'll do anything you want.

Murmur murmur murmur, he replied. Then he rolled over, looked at me, and said, "I want to torture you."

This wasn't completely out of nowhere. We'd spent the previous evening wrestling and building forts and saying crazy/dirty/role-play stuff to each other. He'd made a lot out of normally being a top, of what a big deal it was for him to be submitting to me. I figured he was just trying to turn the tables or something. But tonight he was sullen, saturnine, sort of psychotic looking.

"What do you mean?"

"I want to torture you."

"Yeah? How do you want to torture me?"

After a staring contest, he pulled a small, sharp, serrated knife out from under the mattress. It was crusty with rust. People don't keep knives under the mattress, I thought. I smiled to break the tension, certain he was kidding. He smiled and pulled out another knife. And another. And another. Four brown sharp implements. I felt a cold flag of fear rippling through me.

"If I show you a video I made," he said, "do you promise not to call the cops?"

"Call the cops? No. Why would I call the cops? I'm unshockable," I stammered.

There are, in my experience, two kinds of kinky guys: Guys who are kinky because they've been seriously fucked with (raped by their stepdad, witness to murder, neglected) and guys who are kinky because an untraumatic childhood left them without hang-ups (my camp). The Bosnian was clearly in the former camp. He was raised around violence and vengeance. Clearly the video was of something bloody and nonconsensual and sick. The calculation in my brain: If I ran, he'd see me panicking, and it seemed crucial not to do that; but if I let him play me a video of him, say, chopping someone up, then he wouldn't want me out of there alive. Fuck. An off-the-grid apartment. His job taking out the trash. His creepy friends. The knives under the mattress.

"Let's go out, let's get a drink somewhere," I said, steeling my hand from shaking as I buttoned up my coat, my voice breaking. My fruit slices were near his sink, my magazine was on the coffee table, my scarf was on his TV. Fuck the fruit, fuck the magazine, fuck the scarf.

"Sit down," he said. "You promise not to call the cops?"

Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck, I thought. And then I ran. I ran out through the dripping utility room and down the basement hallway. I wondered if he was going to chase me. Wondered if he had a gun. I hit the button for the elevator—we'd always used the elevator, I couldn't find stairs—and waited... waited... waited. It was one of those old New York elevators that takes forever. Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck. What was I doing here? Why do I just go home with any blue-eyed soccer player who wants me? Why am I so cavalier? Why am I always so intoxicated by freaks? Why can't I—

The elevator door opened. There was a fat man in one corner. Someone's father. He looked Bosnian. "Hello," I said. Harumph, he said, and didn't get out, eyeing me. The elevator took a hundred thousand years to go one floor. I ran out of the building, down to Eighth Avenue, caught a cab, and told the driver to floor it.