“It’s okay.” David said. “Yeah, I am. I do. I need to. Get some info on that.”

“There’s a clinic everyone goes to. It’s really low cost. I just started going there. Do you have insurance?”

“Not anymore.”

“If you get it again, don’t tell them.”

They stood there in silence. A wave of ache and understanding passed between them.

“So,” Ridwan said, making to go to their room. “I’ll text you the number. Just call and they’ll set you up with an appointment.”

Their door shut, and then David’s phone dinged. He sat on the couch, sweat sticky on his back, and stared at a spot on the wall over the radiator.

He understood then, with a calm undertow of darkness, that he could not have made this choice without leaving. Getting on hormones back home, that would have never worked. He wouldn’t have done it. It just wouldn’t have happened. He’d marched to this point with his eyes fixed to the ground and only now looked up at a horizon that, in most other circumstances, he would’ve turned back from long ago. He supposed there was a lesson in there somewhere. A drop of sweat ran down his back and he grabbed his phone.

Now, David was good at this. When a task before him was pressingly necessary, he went at it without dithering. He had another month’s rent on him but not much else, which meant he needed a job. So the next day he was pounding on every restaurant and bar door both cold and off Craigslist, with a resumé lying about his experience to match. It took two weeks of dragging his ass all over, but at the end he got work, at an old-man locals joint clinging onto a razed-and-revamped block of the Upper West Side, a railroad flat of a bar run by a Dominican guy who was both a teetotaller and a good-time Charlie. It fast turned into a decent gig. David was okay at the bartending thing, too, it turned out.

Living in New York City? Yeah. It did overwhelm David at first. Not a week in, he was on a crowded train stopped between 18th and 23rd Streets when the lights went out and he thought he would legit lose it, have a screaming, messy breakdown right there with his face in someone’s butt.

It took some months to acclimate. But acclimate he did. Sure, the sixty square feet he called his room was a little claustrophobic, and he didn’t love sleeping on a couch, but he’d done that enough as a kid. His roommates weren’t the neatest and the kitchen was a roach factory, but thanks to work (Lord, right away he was working all the fucking time), he only cooked at home so much.

He went to his appointment at the clinic and got his hormones, came home and drew the curtain by his couch, and held the bottles of E and spiro, one in each hand.