I sat on the floor with my legs spread out and open, my tights lengthening to my flexed toes. Jesse sat opposite me. The soles of our feet pressed together. Tension increased. Every muscle of thigh, calf, ankle, and foot held firm. We gripped hands and leaned as far back as we could to stretch the back. Jesse pulled me forward. I pulled him forward. We pulled in a circle and pulled again until our torsos reached flat against the floor. We were both breathing heavily as if our bodies didn’t quite match, and all the pulling and stretching was trying in vain to fit us together. I used to do this exercise with a girl my size. We had the same spread. With Jesse it was different. My pelvis and thighs stretched wider than before. The muscle tension in our swaying, stretching, pulling, give-and-take felt electric. Then I noticed the bulge in his tights. It grew larger into a fat ball he tried to hide but couldn’t. How different men are! The same exercises don’t apply. You have to consider differences in height, pelvis, groin. Then the grown-up Phillip came back to my mind in his dance of drugs, different from Jesse’s stretches or his cleaning the kitchen, bedroom, and bath, or how I stretched close to the ground, pulling back and forth and not lifting my thighs, which was a way of hiding my freckled ass when I was a kid or toe-tapping the air above a man’s pumping back now that I’m grown.

One night I heard Jesse crying. I got in the bed and held him to my chest. Before I knew what was happening, I was kissing the tears gathered at his lips, and when he realized what was happening, he started kissing me. I felt something crawl along my navel. The man’s sex was in relevé all by itself. We just stopped right there. Jesse calmed down, and I told my jittery knees to get back in place, which they did, but the flutter went all through me. I remembered the song and Nina Simone’s thick voice, and my trembling, improvising knees. Then it was my turn to sing, “He does not know his beauty.”

Why did he call me Rooms? What did he say about Metro’s name? Was Jesse going somewhere, too? They were lovers, I understood that. But Jesse was still a man, the relevé told me that much. While he slept, I touched myself all over and found the spaces I could offer, all the rooms he could visit.