Your room faced West, like mine. Two rectangular windows, one bed, one desk, one drawer, a vertical dresser, two chairs, and a low-ceiling (really low-ceiling) storage unit in the back. You crammed those top shelves of your desk with books, books you had read and hadn’t read, spine against spine, cover on cover.

When you took off your shirt for the first time I noticed the gold chain around your neck. And I noticed, by your bed, The New American Bible on the windowsill; the crucifix beside it; the framed pineapple art above the crucifix. You told me your mother gifted you the chain on your seventeenth birthday. I looked at my own gold panther necklace and realized—my mother had gifted it to me on my seventeenth as well.

Sometimes when I would kiss your neck I would bite into your chain. It was delicate, too thin to taste metal, or the coldness of metal. It was you, that’s all.

The last time we lay in bed together (which was only, perhaps, the fourth time), we were nearly sleeping by the end, and I carefully pulled the blinds open and the sun, the bright warmth, the early evening, flooded in. I traced my fingers on the skin of your hips. It was soft, light. Paler than mine.