She twists again, giving me an unencumbered view of her long, lean neck, of the taut muscle between her jaw and her shoulder. “I got this one when I was twenty-one, right after I came out.” She’s pointing to a picture frame with two women kissing inside it.

“Wait. You didn’t come out until you were twenty-one?”

Jack slouches back toward the air dryer. “Nope.”

“Oh. I guess I just assumed, since you grew up here in Portland, that it must’ve been easier for you….”

“I think it can be difficult to come out no matter where you live,” she says with a shrug. “And technically, I grew up in Lake Oswego, which is like the Orange County of Portland.”

I stare at the story on her skin, the story I want to read and memorize by heart. “Was it hard because of your strict parents?”

“No. My parents don’t care that I’m gay. I have a grandpa who was a dick about it, but he’s just generally a dick about everything, so I don’t really care about his opinion. Figuring things out is just hard, you know?” She shrugs one shoulder, the tattoos dancing on her skin. “Look, I played a lot of sports, cut off all my hair, and insisted on going by Jack from a pretty young age, so I knew that people were speculating about my sexuality behind my back. Sophomore year of high school, I forced my best friend to watch The L Word with me, because I thought that would be the moment it all clicked.”

She somehow steps even closer to me, so it’s the heat of her body I feel even more than the heat of the air dryer. “But no one on that show really looked like me, and basically all the characters ever thought about and talked about was sex, so after a few episodes I was convinced I couldn’t possibly be a lesbian, because I wasn’t thinking about sex at all in high school. All I thought about was swimming and smoking weed and figuring out how to smoke more weed without damaging my swim times. I knew I wasn’t into guys, but I wasn’t actually sure if I was into girls, either. I didn’t even have my first crush until I was twenty. Is that…” She finally lowers her voice to accommodate her proximity, the almost-whisper of the words flickering against my throat. “Is that too honest?”

“No!” I say, too loudly, too enthusiastically—being altogether too much and completely incapable of restraining myself. Was it possible to have a hole inside you, cookie-cuttered into the shape of a person you hadn’t met yet? Because that’s how it felt when I talked to Jack. We were nothing alike and everything alike and— “No, not at all! You can never be too honest with me.”