The author with her first color cell phone (2003).

I remember he said it like a fact. Calmly — an if-then statement. To my teenage ears, it didn’t sound like a threat. Paul didn’t sound like a calculating monster saying the words to control me. He was just informing me what was likely to happen if I hung up the phone on him.

He was going to kill himself.

Sometimes, where once was love, there becomes a web. Sometimes, if you’ve been caught in the web long enough, it feels unclear who is the fly and who is the spider.

When I was a freshman in high school, I met a boy online. This was in the early 2000s, when young people visited AOL chat rooms and lied to each other’s queries of “A/S/L?” Paul and I became friends, and then fell in love.

Back then, meeting a partner online was considered desperate. I’d wanted a boyfriend but a primarily online-boyfriend seemed like the best I could attain. In the beginning it felt like we were play-acting romance, gesturing at a pale impression of what a real-life, in-person relationship would be. As months passed though, what started as a game became something more robust.

Paul was from a big city, and he seemed so worldly to me, a kid from rural Maine. He knew so much about music, sports and movies, I was always learning something from Paul. Plus, he was funny. There was a lot of laughter.

We chatted on AIM. We talked on landline phones with prepaid calling cards. Paul and I made our relationship official when I was 15 and he was 16. We were together for three years, long distance for all of it — visiting several times a year when school breaks and parents permitted.

The phone sex began innocently enough. We were young, horny, and several states apart. Phone sex was special punctuation — an exciting interrobang to our growing love. It made me feel desired, and therefore, powerful. Sexual relationships were something adults had with each other — how Paul and I talked was a deliciously grown-up secret.

Over time, the flirtatious, sexy chatting became expected and a daily occurrence. We would talk late into the night, and I would perform for him, narrating exploits which were mostly fabricated. The phone sex felt like a private realm between the real and the unreal. We both had desires, and this felt like a relatively safe way to explore them and to strengthen our bond.

At first, I think for him, the novelty of merely speaking with a girl who purported to be nude was titillating enough. But Paul became habituated to my routine, and soon begged for novelty, so my little shows began to adapt. He wanted more raunch, more degradation of me, more time before climax, just... more. A 20-minute activity became an hour, or two, every night. I was falling behind on schoolwork and not getting enough sleep. I loved Paul, but I grew to dread what he was asking me to do.

I never confessed to anyone in my life what I was participating in, because I was ashamed, because I didn’t know how to put it into words. I had transferred to a boarding school with a heavy course load, and I spent my time anxiously dodging roommates, and juggling homework and extracurricular activities. When I said I was too exhausted for our nightly show, Paul became alternately pushy and pathetic. “I’m addicted to you,” he would tell me. “You did this to me. I love you. I need you. You owe........

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