“I’m twenty-one exactly. How old are you?”

“Oh shit,” she said. “Girl, older than you.”

She led me to an old warehouse in the Central Eastside with OFFICE LIQUIDATORS painted on the front in three-foot letters. Cleo moved through an open door. “Follow me.”

We walked through lit hallways. We heard the voices of people at work, faint and far away. Cleo turned up a flight of stairs, and suddenly, we were in a cavernous, slanted room. It was like an enormous lecture hall, but filled with desks and rolling chairs and filing cabinets instead of seats.

“Check it out!” She scrambled up toward the back. Her hoodie was falling off her shoulders, and the light made a huge shadow of her on the wall. We were at the top and panting. “Turn around,” she said.

There was a huge window on the other side of the room taking up the upper half of the wall, looking onto the interstate. It was near sunset, and the concrete was blasted with light. You couldn’t see the skyline on the river’s other side.

“This is pretty,” I said, awed.

“You’re pretty,” she said. She said it with sass. She said it without looking at me. Then she said, “Do you want to make out?” That was another first for me: the idea that you’d ask. We kissed slow, delicately, and I felt for the first time the largeness of another human’s body as beautiful.

Later, in the dark, we walked through a cemetery swigging from her water bottle, and there was, of all things, a rolling office chair sitting in the middle of a path. She flopped into it and said, “Push me!” I pushed her down the walk until the chair spun out and she landed in the grass. I got in and she pushed me, hooting all the way out to the street.

We passed a woman in the cleanest, crispest shirt in an empty, bright shop. She was putting racks up on a wall and her front door was open. Cleo asked, “What are you doing?” and the woman in the crisp shirt said, “I’m putting in my store. I’m going to sell clothes!”

Cleo pushed me on ’til we stopped at a light, and I stood up and kicked the chair spinning into a doorway. “I’m drunk!” I said with surprise. A falter of sadness crossed Cleo’s face. “Yeah,” she said. “I have that effect on people.”

She led me through a backyard filled with purple lights to a detached garage. Inside: a concrete floor and no insulation, a dresser and a space heater and a bed with a sleeping bag for a blanket. She turned on the heater and said, “Come here.”

She fucked me with my legs straight up, gathered in one of her arms.

The next morning, she took me in the house to make breakfast. There was detritus on every surface of the kitchen and a bookshelf filled with gay shit and mass-market sci-fi. In the living room was a makeshift bench press, above which was a Sharpie’d sign: I AM A QUEER MUFF-DIVING SPARKLE GLITTER FAGGOT AND PROUD.