Barrett opened his eyes and smiled. I could tell they were hazel but not much else, though I’d examined plenty of close-up eye pictures before, and filled in details with my mind—dark rings around his irises, dilated pupils because of the dim dawn light and, maybe a little bit, his attraction to me. He tilted his head to indicate that we should leave the room together, and I followed him down a set of wooden stairs with steel pipes for rails, part of this couple’s industrial aesthetic in a house they designed and renovated themselves.

“I’ll get us some coffee,” he whispered as he proceeded to the kitchen on the ground floor while I stayed on the second, an open area lined with bookshelves, a peacock-green velvet couch on one side and a mid-century dining table on the other. Off that big room was a smaller room they used for guests. I noticed that the door was open, so I went inside.

Barrett and Jason also used the room as a walk-in closet; I noticed a shelf of stylish shoes on one side along with suits on wooden hangers. On another end of the room was a giant mirror, framed in ornate gold leaf, leaning against the wall. I stood in front of it and looked at myself, as morning light illuminated my body, and recalled how comfortable I’d been walking around nude in Barrett’s presence. It was a relief to feel safe without clothes in front of someone else, after years of asking men to turn lights off, for fear they would find something overly masculine about my body, my too-slim hips, my muscular shoulders and back from years of lifting weights, a fear that did not go away even when men admired that body for being powerful and athletic.

“Admiring yourself again?” Barrett asked as he poked his head into the room, then went in to stand behind me. “I’m sure it feels great to be almost forty and have the breasts of a teenager.”

I laughed, not just at the joke but at the openness of our relationship. The past decade when I decided to be private about my transition except to those I was closest to, the men I’d been involved with had accepted my history as fact but had also been all too willing to deny its reality, something never to be discussed again once revealed. Though really, I was more responsible for this than they were, because their reticence was an echo of my own shame, my silence like trying to suffocate my history by refusing to breathe. It was such a relief to exhale.