Two years passed. We maintained sporadic contact as the two of us separately transitioned and moved to Brooklyn, aware of each other in the archipelago of queer friend groups that were offshoots of the same queer friend groups from when we were in school. Then, one day, he texted me.

I sorted through my feelings and decided that I wanted to see him. I had forgiven him by that point — I guess by then I thought about the things he did less as “ways he hurt me” and more like biographical data. Both of us had in all likelihood spent long hours processing the relationship, which I knew was formative for both of us, talking about it with friends and therapists and subsequent partners. Then, probably, we had started to think about it again, in a somewhat different light, once both of us made the difficult decision to transition.

I couldn’t tease him, or lie to him, or try to smooth over anything, the way I might have when I was younger. Those were the games college kids played; we had to be, at minimum, honest with each other now.

I looked up at his ass as he led me up the stairs to his apartment. It was the same ass, just in bigger pants. This reassured me.

His new apartment turned out to be completely empty except for a standing desk, a bike, a cat tree, and a precarious stack of books next to the standing desk, which just had his laptop and laptop charger on it. The light came down harsh and flat from the overhead lights. There weren’t even any boxes or anything. I heard him clatter around in the kitchen.

I sat on a patch of floor near the tall window on one side of the room. Through it, I could just make out the flickering lights of the Williamsburg Bridge from around a taller, newer building.

He came over to me with two negronis in wide, squat glasses. I indulged in checking him out. His face seemed to have gotten wider and more solid, and he had a little dusting of facial hair the same red as his buzz cut. His shoulders and arms had a new layer of dense, corded muscle, and when he pulled up the sleeve of his oversized striped shirt I traced the path of a vein up his forearm into his tricep with my eyes.

We had texted, so it wasn’t tense. I asked him why his apartment was so empty and he said nonchalantly that he was thinking about it as a sort of “spiritual project,” but also that his bookshelf, books, and table were at the apartment he used to share with Julie in Bed-Stuy. Julie had stopped responding to his texts. It sounded like he had explained this a lot of times before, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it.