JulieYBM

  Illustration by @Jessiethelion

  September 01, 2021:

  Three years.

  Three years as Miss Candace Queen.

  Wild.

  The first day of the school year is always a little exciting.

  My hands practically quaked with anticipation as I changed out the coffee filter of the beaten down, grime-worn, seriously, vaguely brown-stained coffee maker in the faculty break room. The counter that it rested on looked like it hadn’t quite been properly wiped down since the st day of school back in the middle of June and for that I hesitated in simply resting my hands on the counter at any point in my quest for coffee.

  In my jittery rush, the slightly sticky dustiness of the counter escaped me and by instinct my left palm nded quite casually on the surface. Not bothering to immediately lift my palm off of the surface, I sighed, took a breath, and returned to my task.

  This—well, twenty minutes from now—would be my third official ‘first day of school’ as a full-fledged teacher—not a student teacher, but rather a teacher entrusted with teaching and looking after high schoolers—and even still, that feeling of anxiety never quite went away. Somehow, part of me always expected to be found out—my qualifications as a teacher—as a woman—called into question and then my immediate termination and the ruination of my very life.

  Ugh, I was thinking in run-on sentences again.

  The fears and anxieties made no rational sense, of course. I knew that everyone at the school was kind and polite to me—I knew that none of them suspected me of being anything more than a cishet woman—but still, that little fear ate away at my brain at any chance it could—especially near the beginning of the school year.

  “Holy shit Candi, have you seen the new PE teacher?” May August—the school nurse—asked as she cheekily stepped through the heavy, decade-old wood door of the faculty break room as if she were the coolest person in the school. The question flew swiftly from her pleasantly dark green painted lips, which had an exaggerated, almost character actor-esque expression on them. Non-standard colors weren’t usually my thing, but I had to be sure to ask her where she got the color ter. Probably Sephora.

  The dark green really brought out her auburn eyes.

  First, the middle finger of my slightly-shaking right hand pressed a button to start the coffee pot. Second, I let myself begin to process the question asked by my hellraiser work friend whose very tongue I could hear tipped with a self-satisfied zeal.

  Turning to face May, I leaned back against the counter, smoothed the already smooth pink dress shirt and bck scks I had decided to wear for the first day of school, and turned to May. Effortlessly, I pyed my role, “Oh, hello May. No, I haven’t?”

  I had promised myself that if I was going to indulge in creating my ideal body—making my body ultra curvaceous and feminine—then I was going to present myself as professionally as possible.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of myself as an affront to women everywhere, however. Having turned myself into a bimbofication timeline's final form, I could still only see in the mirror an actress who was from a bad porno—no matter how professional I had done my makeup earlier that morning. The guilt of it all ate away at me—well, when I wasn’t imagining myself with a vagina to match the rest of my body being eaten out by some mass of muscles.

  “Hey, Earth to Candi?!” Waving her hand in front of my face, May snapped me from my self-loathing.

  Cd in her usual long, white b coat over her usual Goth punk garb, the dark green bobbed woman fished a vape from her b coat's breast pocket and then took a hit before moving over to the counter to fiddle with the electric kettle.

  I had long ago given up trying to remind her that vaping was not allowed indoors—May August was simply the type of woman to march to the beat of her own drum.

  It was a trait that reminded me far too woefully of another woman that I used to know.

  “Yes, May?” I replied, hands folded in front of me and lips curled inward. My eyes were opened wide enough to start drying out.

  “So, like, this guy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Jacked like that guy from the Dark Tournament arc!”

  “...Younger Toguro?”

  “Right, yeah.”

  “Shit, that’s jacked,” I mused, silently praying for the coffee to hurry up and brew so that I could escape my current nightmare.

  Well, coffee probably wouldn’t have helped the jitters, but as, I was already walking down one paved path to Hell, I might as well walk down another.

  “Yeah, like, holy hell. He’s definitely your type,” May’s cool demeanor never failed to contrast against mine. I wasn’t sure exactly why someone who seemed like a bad role model out of a raunchy comedy was working at a high school, but her ‘vibrant’ personality was at least such that I never found myself with a shortage of entertainment—especially on the days where I wasn’t afraid my heart was going to burst through my expensive tits and give whoever I was talking to a bck eye.

  “And how, pray tell, do you know my type?” I asked back, packaging my annoyance as amusement.

  “You know how I ask you about your dates the day after, standing in the exact same spots that we’re standing in right now?” May asked, frustratingly cheeky as she started to hobble in pce with just the right amount of angle to show off her cleavage through her blouse.

  “Ugh, yeah.”

  “That’s how I know your type, babes.”

  Breaking any facade of mental fortitude, I rolled my eyes at the cheeky bitch’s attitude, “They’re not all carved like a Greek God, May.”

  “Have you ever dated a man shorter than six-three?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m asking if you’re ever dated a man shorter than you, Candi,” May’s smug satisfaction was apparent on her face and it burned me that I would have to tell her what she expected—what she wanted to hear.

  “No.”

  “Come again?”

  “I said no, okay?!”

  May’s snicker was frustratingly smug and even more frustratingly cute.

  “You know, you have an awful bedside manner, Nurse August!”

  “And you have an awful poker face!”

  “And you have an awful poker face!” I mocked, pitching my voice up even more than usual with a slight nasal effect.

  “God, you make this so easy,” May giggled, leaning on the counter beside me, “But no, for real, I think you’ll like him.”

  “Doubtful,” I mused aloud, “I have awful luck with men, anyway.”

  “How the hell is that when you have knockers that big?”

  “You know, sexual harassment is against, like, a bunch of rules, Nurse August.”

  “Report me,” another break for her vape, “But seriously girlypop, either you’re not the epitome of grace that you present yourself as here,” May turned to fiddle with the coffee maker behind my back, “Or you’ve got the world’s worst taste in men.”

  As luck would have it, I had apparently pressed the wrong button.

  “Shit!” I groaned at my mistake, realizing that the wait for sweet release would be even longer.

  Twisting back around, May took the electric kettle off of its heating dock, poured a packet of hot chocote into a styrofoam cup, and then filled the cup with hot water. Stirring the ingredients together for a moment, May then handed me the cup, “You look like the kind of girl who’s better off with hot cocoa, Princess.”

  Pouting, I begrudgingly took the hot cocoa, “Thanks…”

  “Of course, Sweet Tooth,” May settled back into pce with her back against the counter, looked at her boots—very strap-heavy boots, as it were—and then swung her head back up to face me, “Ever think about just dating a woman?”

  I had to stifle a groan at the question—and then stifled nearly puking up my hot cocoa at the thought, “I’m straight, May. I’ve told you this before. A million times before, in fact.”

  Grinning like she didn’t believe me, May shook her head with a low giggle, “Whatever you say, girlypop.”

  “Ugh, come on, May!” I groaned, half-stamping my right foot in pce. Hadn’t I put up with enough of this shit in college?

  “Sorry, sorry, can you bme me?” There was an honesty to the Goth woman’s question that I didn’t quite expect, “You stare at me all the time when you think I’m not looking. Hell, you’ve spent this entire conversation staring at my lips!”

  “I like your lip color!” It was a good color!

  “Yeah, on my big, kissable lips?”

  Softly blowing bubbles in my cup o’ cocoa, I groaned, “You can think a woman’s attractive and not be attracted to her, you know.”

  “You gnce just a little too long at my boobs.”

  “Why would I do that? I’m bigger than you,” I countered smugly, “Besides, you’re, like, half a foot shorter than me, I have to look down!”

  “Because you’re a dyke!” May’s giggle erupted into a snort, even as she stifled her voice. “And tisk-tisk, bmining my height for your wandering eyes, Princess!”

  “You’re driving me insane, May!”

  “You’re driving me insanely gay!” May mocked, shoving her chest out like she was imitating me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I groaned, pnting my free left hand over my face.

  “Sorry, sorry,” my colleague slowed down, collecting herself, “I’ve been dating nothing but loser guys tely, so I’m a little, y’know?”

  “A little ravenously horny dyke?” I groused, rolling my eyes.

  “Pfft, you can’t say that, straight girl.”

  Shit, that’s right—I had not informed May that I was trans. Or that I spent four years living as a gay boy! “Oh god, I’m so sorry, May! I—”

  “Don’t worry about it, I know what you meant.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah,” a wicked grin spread across May’s face as she dramatically gestured her arms outward, “You’re secretly in love with me and your conservative upbringing is just too much to overcome to embrace your deep, passionate love for women!”

  Rolling my eyes at the woman’s ridiculous, over-the-top dramatics—she rolled the ‘l’ on ‘love’, for goodness’ sake—leaned back and groaned loudly up at the ceiling.

  Well, I hardly had anyone to bme but myself. I was the one adamantly staying stealth.

  Turning to May, I delivered to her the softest of smiles, “Just download an app, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m far too much of a feminist to thrust myself upon a poor, unsuspecting woman from some app, Princess!”

  “Now who’s the one with the repressed conservative upbringing?” I shot back, sticking out my tongue.

  May crashed face first into my right shoulder, so I nded my right temple atop her head as we shared a giggle.

  “Excuse me, is this the faculty room?” Asked a thundering—yet ever-so-soft—voice from directly in front of us.

  A rge man holding what was a comically too-small clipboard in a comically too-rge left hand poked his head into the faculty room. Cd in the most inoffensive combination of cargo shorts and a pink polo, one might have been able to see the veins in the titanic man’s upper arms through the tightly stretched cotton material itself.

  Unfortunately for me, those muscles—matured as they now were—were thoroughly familiar to me. Following the line of the muscuture from bottom-to-top, I locked eyes with the school faculty’s fresh meat. Unlike in the life that I had once known this man, he now wore a thin yer of stubble on his face. It was appropriately mature for a man now in his te twenties. It betrayed the boy I had once known to serve the man I was now meeting.

  “Well, speak of the devil!” May trumpeted, recovering from her giggle fit, “Come on in, Coach!” Turning to me, “Candace, this is Coach Michael Summers,” then back to the meathead bashfully walking inside, “Michael, this is Miss Candace Queen, English.”

  Michael walked and carried himself a little taller than he had in college. In fact, as he stood back to full mast to enter the room, I noticed that his stride was less afraid of his own shadow than I had remembered from when we had first met. It was honestly upsetting.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Queen,” Michael said earnestly, extending a hand for a shake.

  The motherfucker didn’t recognize me. Maybe it was the fact that I took on a metric shit ton of debt to help pay for sugeons to sand down my bulbous fucking skull so that I didn’t look like a goddamned monster anymore? That or the giant tits I had bolted onto my chest.

  Hell, at least I didn’t need to cover my forehead with bangs anymore, either.

  Still, leave it to Michael Fucking Summers to keep his gnce down at my porn star tits to the briefest of split-seconds. Hell, even May was more shameless than that.

  “Charmed,” I droned, returning his shake. His hands were as strong as ever, if rougher and warmer. Were they cmming up on him?

  Was he nervous?

  So, he did recognize me, right?

  Finally, I noticed that we were still robotically shaking hands, and looked down at our bridging limbs to draw Michael’s attention to them.

  “Oh!” Michael coughed, quickly letting go of my hand, “My bad, Miss Queen.”

  “Candace,” I replied, poorly hiding my annoyance.

  “Candace! Right, yes, I suppose—I suppose that we’re not in front of students right now, right?” Michael’s newfound confidence seemed to crumble the longer the conversation went on. “Sorry, it’s just that my college girlfriend was named Candace, so I’m a bit taken aback.”

  Jesus Christ, he really did think he was talking to someone else!

  Taking a deep sigh, I turned to May, who balked at me. I must have been wearing a pretty strong scowl, because May looked like her grand sm had just been ruled out at the bottom of the ninth. “It’s been lovely as always, Nurse August, but I must be returning to my cssroom before students start arriving.”

  Lifting myself off of the edge of the counter, I promptly dumped my half-finished hot cocoa in the sink and then walked out of the room, leaving nothing but the clicking and ccking of my heels in my wake.

  With any luck, that meathead knew now to keep his distance.

  ***

  September 02, 2021:

  Crashing on my bed after returning from work, I stretched my back as much as I could, rested for a moment, then sighed.

  The stresses of needing to avoid my ex at work for the past two days had transted to me being unable to take care of my own needs. Which was to say that, unfortunately for me, I was horny—and this was an itch I could not scratch alone.

  Grindr was for scratching an itch and EHarmony was for Serious Shit.

  Dating as a pre-op trans woman was Hell, especially when I was stealth and needing to sift through the chaff on dating apps. I could barely manage to keep a retionship after college, because most of the men interested in retionships with trans women were creeps who wanted you to top them or to suck your cock and most of the men I could count on for just acting like normal adult men were, you guessed it, almost immediately turned off by the prospect of dating a chick with a dick once she finally told them after a few dates.

  Keeping my transness close to my silicone chest when it came to the men I figured that I could actually maintain a retionship with was something that I did as a necessity. If I advertised my transness via the app that I was using my actual name on and presenting myself as my usual professional self, I would run the risk of being outed to someone from my school life—something that I was not willing to deal with.

  Remaining stealth at work and in my daily life afforded me both safety and the ability to simply be a woman without the baggage that came with being a trans woman. There was a degree of loneliness to it, of course. Nobody left in my life knew who I was before joining the professional world…but that was also how I preferred it. I left that life behind when I broke up with Michael. I kept my contact with Megumi minimal, and I had long gone no contact with my old Woods family members.

  Being disowned had—alternatively—meant a fresh start. No more reminders of the broken boy I had been. What would the point even be? Keep up with Elliot and his boyfriend? Risk being exposed for being trans that way?

  I was done with it all. As surreal as it was to be back out in the world as a straight person, it was a cost worth paying for total control over who I was seen as now.

  Sifting through my messages on EHarmony, I found a new message from the accountant guy I had been flirting with for a few days.

  AccGuy: “Are you free Friday? I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, so I was thinking that we could maybe catch dinner and continue things face-to-face?”

  The man’s soft features and grizzly beard in the pictures on his profile picture were quite handsome. He wasn’t exactly in great shape, but he was also 6’5’’, which was infuriatingly proving May’s point about me.

  Damn, I really needed to scratch an itch tonight, though.

  TeacHer: “I’m definitely avaible, actually. What time?”

  Having pressed ‘sent’, I immediately switched over to Grindr. It was self-deprecating—and I definitely didn’t really like just fucking randos—but sometimes a girl needed to scratch an itch and a dildo just was not going to be able to do the trick.

  Sifting through my matches, I came across the least offensive-looking guy with the least offensive profile, “Six-two?” I mumbled, checking out his profile pics. There were numerous pictures of the man fishing. Thirty-nine years old and fishing? Fine, fuck it, I’ll bite—hardly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in a chaser before. He was probably just a divorced dad or something. Also, I’d be proving to May that I could date someone shorter than me!

  Valerie: “hey cutie ?”

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  The end of the first week of school rolled around both quickly and agonizingly slowly. As much as I had gotten used to the grind of teaching school five days a week over the years, it was still a harrowing experience needing to be responsible for a bunch of kids who were in a precarious state of their development. Sure, the first week of school was technically just a half of a week, but Friday’s were always Fridays when you had to spend the week in school: both as a student and as a teacher.

  Avoiding Michael hadn’t been that hard, it turned out. With Michael working in the physical education department—a nice, big, musty gym situated on the other side of the school—it was hardly difficult to not have to fre up in a state of abject annoyance any time I crossed paths with the lumbering jackass.

  The only admirable thing about that bastard was that he wouldn’t add four fucking inches to his fucking height when he was hooking up with trans women on Grindr for an unsatisfying fuck with his small cock.

  Organizing my desk had become something of a losing battle, no matter the time of year. I had come to accept that during my first year of teaching, and then it had become swiftly apparent to me during the beginning of my second year that that first year had been no fluke, even when I was more experienced.

  Nevertheless, I shuffled through my chaotically organized desk and prepped the first set of papers I would start grading once the school day ended in five minutes. My fourth period this year was a Sophomore css, which meant dealing with st year’s freshman and seeing if any of it had stuck over the summer or not.

  I mostly preferred to teach seniors—and at worst, juniors—but this year I had been ‘voluntold’ to take up a Sophomore css.

  I would have compined, had I not taken a gnce at the roster for the css and noticed a very surprising addition: one of my first cousins once removed, Richard Penn, was one of my students this year.

  As expected, he hadn’t recognized me, and for my own selfishness, I hadn’t volunteered my identity. I was, after all, stealth.

  There was nobody left in my life who knew the boy I once was, nor anyone I would dare risk telling, even if I had nothing but fond memories of my dear Richie.

  Peeking up for just a self-indulgent gnce, I caught sight of Richie painting his fingernails a garish purple when he should have been finishing up his assignment.

  I hadn’t seen the poor dork in years, but I was pretty sure Cousin Penelope’s son was gay. Fshes of his fmboyant movements and voice as a small child at family events bubbled up through the troubled waters that was my mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if he wasn’t gay, he sure as shit was trans.

  Turning to his best friend in the seat to his right, Richie shook him fervently by the shoulder—despite his painfully limp wrist—to get the other boy’s attention, and then—once having it—threatened to poke Jae Jeong in the cheek with his still wet fingers.

  Jae’s poorly veiled feminine whine of annoyance did little to beat the allegations that the two were secretly dating.

  God, it was like looking in a mirror with these two.

  The way that things had changed since I was a high school Sophomore even just eleven years earlier was inspiring, to say the least. Several of my students were openly queer and had partners of the same gender—something that high school me would have thought impossible—but it did my heart good to see that life was a little bit better for them than it was for me.

  Especially after all those awkward dates with girls.

  But that was what it was all for, wasn’t it? To at least be there to stop any harassment? To set an example that you could grow up into a respectable adult, even if the horrors of one’s teens made that seem an impossibility?

  I wasn’t out as trans, but did I really have to be to prove that I could be a good role model? Could I not simply lead by example and call out any bullshit I saw?

  The bell eventually rang and with it came the expected mass exodus of teenagers more concerned with their social lives than their education. As my students swiftly stood from their seats and a chorus of ruffling backpacks filled the air, I called out to my little pet project, “Richie, can I see you for a moment?”

  Like a meerkat poking its head up, Richie swung his head around like a lost puppy, “Huh?”

  “Over here, dear,” I called out again as the room quickly emptied and the tall pole of a boy was able to better locate who was calling out for him.

  Cautiously, the Penn boy stepped to the fore of the cssroom and stood in front of my desk. His—I assume—boyfriend wasn’t far behind.

  “What’s up, Miss Queen?” Richie asked, the nervousness in his voice making it sound like he was being dragged over a stripe of fiery coals.

  Approaching this as diplomatically as possible was going to be difficult. By all rights I should have expined to my bosses in the principal’s office that I couldn’t teach Richie—we used to py Pokemon and other video games together at family gatherings, for Christ’s sake—but at the same time, this kid clearly needed someone looking out for him who wasn’t just going to write him off because he could mask a little better than other kids like him.

  “Richie, please do try to finish the assignments,” the blonde mane that the poor soul sported looked as if it was going to stand on end as some sort of animalistic warding instinct, “If you have any questions, I’m happy to crify for you.”

  “Oh, uh, sorry, Miss Queen,” Richie’s ugh was no less nervous, nor his eye contact any more accurate, “I forgot.”

  If my suspicions were right, Richie probably needed to be in a…well, non-standard cssroom. Did Penny and her husband not know that their son was autistic? It seemed pretty apparent to me just from his speech patterns and his mannerisms. While I was hardly an expert on the subject, knowing autistic people from the queer community had gone a long way towards helping me understand what to look for.

  At the very least, the poor kid needed to be on some sort of medicine for ADHD. He rattled off about fashion, makeup and anime at a mile a minute, sometimes entirely non-linearly. He reminded me terribly of myself, had I not been neurotypical.

  Taking a deep breath, I began with a smile, “You’re a really passionate kid, Richie. I understand how easy it is to get overwhelmed.”

  Richie fidgeted in pce, not quite knowing what to do with his hands, so he let his arms cross over his chest briefly, before quickly stuffing them into his hoodie’s pocket. Angling his body just enough to shoot a gnce back at Jae—who merely shrugged his shoulders—Richie turned back to me, eyes open and smile pcid. His jade eyes might have been looking, but I could tell they weren’t seeing. It was as if his body was on autopilot while his mind was out to lunch.

  With a soft touch, I crossed my hands together on my desk as I looked up at the distressed teen with a nice pair of eyes as I could manage, “Would you maybe like to discuss options with your parents?”

  That brought him back to life, “No, no, it’s fine, Ms. Queen!” A frantic panic filled Richie’s eyes, “I’ll be sure to finish my assignments!”

  Why did I feel like I was torturing a small puppy?

  “How about staying after? I could run through anything you needed crification on—”

  “Naw, uh-uh,” Richie's voice was like a rock skipping on the surface of a body of water as he idly bounced in pce, “I got this, I j-just g-gotta m-make sure that I don't forget to finish!”

  Softly, “You know where to find me if you need help, hon,” before I gave the nod that my student was waiting for signaling that he could leave.

  Shooting a look back at Jae, Richie quickly turned towards the door and sped walked out, his probable boyfriend right behind him.

  With the room to myself, I finally breathed out all the tension mounting in my shoulders. When I had suggested meeting with his parents—rudimentary shit that was technically my job anyway—it was like Richie had gone as white as a ghost. Was he afraid of Penny and Peter? The hyperactive, boisterous theater kid in training that I remembered from growing up was, well, a child. Teaching Richie now—with only two css periods so far to get to know him as a more fully-formed person—was going to require a lot more than just three hours spread across two days this week to get to know him. Hell, how was I going to do that when there were thirty other kids I had to make sure I could teach, too?

  Ugh. Why was this teaching shit so hard?

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  Close to an hour had passed since the end of the school day and yet it felt like the stacks of papers needing to be graded never shrank.

  People who blew up old buildings for a living must have enjoyed the catharsis that came with the downfall of condemned buildings ever so much.

  Dropping my pen onto whatever student’s paper I was grading, I poured my face into my palms—fuck, why are my hands so huge?—for a moment’s rest before scolding myself for likely ruining my makeup. Well, not that wearing it for eight hours hadn’t likely ruined it already, of course. Still, a little darkness—as well as the feeling of my blissfully soft palms on my face—was an opportunity enough to refresh myself. There was only so much staring at—and trying to decipher—a teenager’s chicken-scratch—chicken shit?—handwriting one could do before one’s eyes threatened to go on strike.

  Or tear themselves from one’s sockets to run away forever.

  Knuckles rapping on my cssroom’s decade old wooden—minated birch, perhaps?—door summoned me back from my morbid fantasies, “Hey, uh, Ms. Queen?”

  It was the meathead. The clueless meathead.

  “Yes, Coach Summers?” I replied ftly, measuring the ratio of snippiness-to-mild annoyance just well enough to not seem rude. If the big bastard couldn’t tell that I was still mad at him because he didn’t even realize who I was then I was going to make sure he had to keep thinking about why a blonde teacher who had the same name as his college whatever-I-was would be mad at him until he put two-and-two together.

  The disgusting, giant oaf was leaning into my cssroom in what barely qualified as a hunch forward. Nearly the entirety of his massive frame was in eyeshot, with very little of it covered up by the fact that he was leaning around the outside of the doorframe with his right shoulder, “Have a minute?”

  “I suppose,” I huffed, curtly returning to grading papers so I wouldn’t have to look at the ridiculous cartoon character of a man.

  “So, uh, like—basically, I feel like we—maybe?—got off on the wrong foot the other day?”

  The coach was going to have to learn that his “Aww, shucks,” charms weren’t going to work on every woman—especially when they already had four years of immunity to them, “I was very busy is all, Coach Summers,” I lied, “Just as I am now, as you can see,” I was good at lying, “It was nothing personal,” the best liar, even.

  “Oh…uh…sorry, I just wanted to—uh…”

  “Is there something I can help you with, Coach?” I shot the walking, talking department store mannequin a terrible look—his bumbling was only making my patience with him that much more thinly spread.

  Jesus fuck, was he wearing a denim jacket?

  “Uh, sorry, Ms. Queen. I just meant to say, I noticed that you’re signed up to be taking over the GSA club this year. I’ll be mostly busy with coaching the girls’ volleyball team, but I thought I’d let you know that I might pop in from time to time? You know, to support the kids?”

  Ugh, he fucking would, “Well Coach Summers…” deep breath, “I suppose we’ll see you there then, won’t we?”

  “Oh…um…yeah,” from the corner of my eye, I noticed that a smile no less awkward—if maybe a little more chipper—spread across his face, “Sorry, I don’t mean to step on your toes or anything. I was the president of my GSA in high school, so I just wanted—”

  It took every fiber of my being not to turn to my ex-boyfriend at that moment and raise a limp wrist in mockery, “You’re fine, Michael!”

  Michael straightened up at the tone of my voice, then took a step forward into my css, “Wait a second…oh my god?!”

  Well, I guess the jig was up, “Oh, did you finally recognize me, Mikey?” The nickname that I had once so-lovingly used for the big bastard now took off from the tip of my tongue like an airpne full of poisonous snakes.

  “Jesus Christ, is that you, Candi?”

  “Is that you Candi?” I repeated back, in a poor facsimile of a man’s voice, “What the fuck do you think, meathead? That you met another blonde teacher named Candace?”

  Michael’s face—hardened by the years—lost any of its softness as it dawned on him what tension stood between us. Crossing his arms and looking to his right side—a rge drawing of an anthropomorphic waffle greeting him just inches from his face on the whiteboard—Michael curled his lips. “So, this is how it’s going to be?”

  “Yes, it is. I’ll trust you—even though you don’t deserve a fuckin’ ounce of my trust—not to say anything unnecessary to anyone.”

  “About us?”

  “About me, you neanderthal.”

  “Fuckin’ A, Candace, you think I would tell people that you’re—”

  “—a tranny?” I hissed, restraining my volume as much as I could while seething.

  “Transgender,” he stressed, a little more quietly than me.

  “I don’t know, you apparently didn’t have an issue telling Ashley about what we did in the bedroom!”

  “Goddamn it Candace, I was worried that you—”

  “—Yeah, right.”

  The cautious coach stepped closer to my desk, so I turned from the papers I was no doubt poorly grading and stood to face him. He was, as always, somehow impossibly taller than me.

  “Candace, please, let’s not—”

  Try as I may, I couldn’t stop myself from tearing up just a little, “Fuck you, Michael.”

  “I never meant to hurt you, Candace,” I hated him like the darkness in the woods hated a campfire. I hated the kindness in his voice like a sword hated the dulling of its edge that came with the cutting of its prey’s flesh.

  I hated him, because all I could remember was the st thing I said to him before I broke up with him: “What the fuck would you know about fucking a woman? You’ve never fucked one before, you fucking faggot!”

  The acid and fire on my throat had been unforgettable. Even now, it felt like it was still there—still choking me alive. A slow, unending death, just to remind me of all the horrible things I had done and said and thought on that day.

  Michael was closer to me now—I couldn’t remember how our bodies had inched closer together, even as my skin felt the dreadfully familiar heat of his sculpted body radiating from his form like a furnace that knew no quiet hour. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t keep my eyes from blinking as a filter of tears blurred my vision, leaving the lumbering fucker that was my ex-boyfriend to only close the gap between us entirely as he made open his chest and made wide his wing span.

  Before I knew it, I was quickly wrapped in the embrace of Coach Summers, pressed against the fabric of the tight dark green polo wrapped around his even tighter chest. Nightmarish bck-and-white photographs of him getting down on one knee and proposing to me—my hand ripping his heart out of his chest—were seared into the inside of my eyelids. I wasn’t sure if the warmth on my hands was from the blood I had torn from Michael’s chest, or from my own body heat, attempting to melt down my very body as retribution.

  I hated him—this man I truly knew only how to love—and yet I had nothing but the greatest of desires to pour the entirety of myself into his embrace. The whole of my body and my soul and all their damned aches and sorrows seeped into the pores on Michael’s skin. I had little will nor reason to tear myself back from the gentle giant. We became a being of one hundred twenty percent water, so very much of it leaking out from what was once my eyes.

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  “So, nobody else knows?” Michael asked, as he sat atop the surface of the desk directly in front of mine.

  “No,” I replied, voice drained of any song.

  “Not even May?”

  “No.”

  “God, Candi, I’m so—”

  “—Don’t be. It’s my decision.”

  “But why? Do you really think that May—of all people—would care? Aren’t you two close?”

  “I don’t want—” a hiccup snuck its way out, “—I don’t want anyone to ever know about him.”

  “Candi, you were nev—”

  “—It’s bad enough that you know.”

  Michael looked almost crushed, even though I wasn’t sure I even meant to hurt him. He should have waited longer than half a beat, because his voice cracked with emotion as he replied: “I'm here for you, Candi. Always. Even just as a…friend. Please understand—”

  I sniffled, breaking his little plea, “I'll be fine, Michael. Just stick to your side of the school and I'll stick to my side”

  “Candace, for the love of—” Michael sold his arguments a lot harder now, “—Candace, we're twenty-seven now, will you stop it with this bullshit stubbornness?”

  Holding myself with my arms, I turned from Michael and looked down on the whiteboard’s bottom ledge. I made a mental note to be sure to get a new pack of dry erase markers after school, the pack from the supply room was shit

  “We can just be friends, if you want. Like, come on, you need someone in your life who knows. Heck, I need someone.”

  I swallowed hard, shooting my line of sight away from him, “Tell May that you’re bisexual, then. God knows she is. Heck, ask her out—she'll love you.”

  “Outing her to me? Really, Candace?” The contempt of Michael’s words pyed more like an annoyed scoff.

  “Please, have you looked at her? Also, she's got big boobs, you'll love her!”

  “I like ‘em bigger,” Michael nodded down, “And faker…and more tan, apparently. Jesus, Candi, do you live in a tanning bed?”

  The smugness in his voice as he let his timber deepen drove me up the walls, “No flirting, Don Juan.”

  “I wouldn't have to flirt if you weren't such a brat,” Michael’s wry grin held for nearly half a second before any pretense of sarcasm melted into sincerity.

  Eight years since our first date and the big lunk still knew how to push my buttons. Ugh, cocky bastard.

  “Michael, we can't!”

  “We can if we tell the principals.”

  I hated it when his eyes gleamed like that, “Are you seriously—”

  “—shamelessly—”

  “—I fucking hate your guts, Mikey—”

  “—if that makes it hotter for ya!”

  Fishing through my desk drawer, I tore my purse out from the drawer that I typically kept it in so as to begin sifting through it. Within seconds, I pulled out my phone, all the while grumbling words you used to not be able to say on television.

  “What are you doing?” Concern suddenly filtered through Michael's voice.

  “Same number?” I asked, unblocking Michael's number in my phone.

  “Yeah?”

  With blinding speed, I tapped away at my phone.

  A hair of a second ter, Michael got my text, “What’s…oh. Oh?”

  “Oh.”

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  Like two bricks glued together and dropped to the ground, Michael and I collided through the front door of my apartment, breath hot, hands feeling up every square inch of real estate that hadn’t been inspected in four years, and kisses pnted all over like little mines, ready to explode into hickies in the morning.

  Once inside—and my apartment door thoroughly kicked shut by my heeled foot—it was as if our bodies reacted on their own, instinctively remembering all of our old moves.

  Arms around Michael’s neck, I leapt up and wrapped my long, toned legs around the former athlete's somehow more muscur waist as our lips made loud, wet clicking noises, joining our moans and heavy breathing to form a chorus. If I was supplying the sopranos and the altos, Michael was supplying only the most profundo of basses.

  The feeling of my chest—my perfect, perfect chest—pressed against the hard pecs of Michael's chest was a euphoria I never expected to experience. Gone was the thinnest of yers of flesh that separated our hearts, repced by a deep, thick forest of silicone cleavage. As my lips felt the sensitive—if wet—touch of Michael's lips, through both polo, blouse and bra, my breasts felt the beating fire of Michael's chest. The raving fires seared through the defenses of both my clothes and my mind and sought to brand me fully his.

  With a thud, we collided into the wall where the door handle stopper was affixed.

  “Shit, sorry!” Michael grunted, like a minotaur accidentally hitting the wrong person with his club hunting his prey. Ever the gentleman, even when he sounded like a wild animal.

  A wild animal whose cock I needed inside of me, immediately.

  “FUCK OFF—bedroom, now!”

  Michael effortlessly carried me across the tiny living room of my shitty apartment, crashing into end tables and my couch only when I jerked myself upward, trying to get a better angle to continue sucking his face.

  Eventually, before my half-shut bedroom door, Michael twisted around—even as my lips trailed down his cheek to bite at his neck—and opened the door with his back.

  He always was a perfect gentleman like that.

  Tossing me on my bed—neatly made as it was—Michael immediately began unbuckling his shorts, before stopping dead in his tracks, “Fuck, wait, how are we—?”

  “—still just the ass, Michael!” I huffed, kicking my skirt off and taking off my blouse.

  The heat was unbearable.

  “Jesus, they're huge!”

  “I told ya I wanted ‘em big!” I giggled, grabbing a heavy, globur breast and giving it a little shake. They spilled out of my hand every time I tried to hold one, which elicited an elicit whine from the overgrown boy scout.

  “Fuck me…” Michael's erection was painfully evident through his boxers as he slowly crawled onto the bed. Whatever he had done to somehow become more, frankly, man, had also made his frank—frankly—fatter.

  “That’s my line!” I joked, pincering Michael's cheeks between my two hands as I drew him in for another kiss. The feel of the stubble on his cheeks was prickly, but oh-so-fitting.

  He was a man, and I was a woman.

  It felt right. This is why I had dated Michael, even if I could not bring it to life with words at the time. When I was with Michael, I could just be me, a woman who loved men. All the hang-ups—all the failed attempts at being Michael in a life before him—made so much more sense now.

  I wasn’t meant to be a man, I was meant to fuck a man! My man!

  Through the moans and the creaking of my bed, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon flickered into my ears, like a skipping record. The strings of the piece sharply cut through each moan and each kiss. It was impossible not to bite his lip just a little, just to make sure he knew that if he was going to be a cheeky brat, then I was going to make the big faggot understand that such came with consequences. Michael didn’t even make a whine or a grunt when my teeth met with the flesh of his lips, trying to peel off any strip of skin that they could.

  Michael’s right hand began shamelessly pawing at my left breast, kneading it despite the silicone beneath the flesh. A moan of pure ecstasy slipped from my mouth as Michael ripped my bra off with his impossible strength. I didn’t even care that it was one of my favorites.

  “I'll pay for that,” Michael grunted, wasting no time in going down on my right nipple.

  “Good boy,” I cooed, eyes shut. I wasn’t sure if I was praising him for offering to pay for the bra that he had destroyed, or praising him for immediately sucking my breast yet again.

  As Michael sucked away, I dug my fingers deep into his dark hair—thankfully as thick as ever—kneading his skull as I let the familiar smoothness of his hair wrap and tangle around my fingers. It was like coming home.

  “God, I fuckin’ hate your guts!” a chain of moans was the stepping stones for each little word to cross the shallow creek that was my heart at that moment in time. Gripping the big lunk by the top of his hair, I dug my sparkly pink acrylic nails into the back of Michael’s hair, just barely penetrating his thick, dark hair.

  “Huh?”

  “Shove your cock in my ass, you fuckin’ faggot!!”

  And to his credit, he did.

  Michael detached from my nipple—spontaneously—before setting about trying to create a ndmine field of hickies on my neck. Each new kiss was like being branded by the fiery poker of a loving farmer, all in perfect sync with the rapid thrusts of his cock sliding in-and-out of my ass. The sound of our bodies ppping together was somehow embarrassing. I had fucked plenty of men over the years, but none of them nearly as satisfying at fucking this awful bastard whose very touch brought back any memory it asked of me.

  I was definitely going to have to cancel the EHarmony date I had set up for tonight, though.

  As Michael continued to thrust away into my ass, I averted my eyes. Missionary had become my favorite position when we were dating, but now that we weren’t, it was far too awkward to just look Michael in the eyes. Diving my head into his neck, I began biting and sucking, the pain of which only made Michael’s cock rger in my asshole.

  “Stupid! Fucking! Masochistic! Faggot!” I moaned as each thrust from the bastard cut off my ability to properly speak, “You’re going to break my asshole!”

  “Good!” The nibbling and the teasing had only brought out the aggressive side of my former boyfriend as he spped a palm over my mouth, “God, you’re such a little bitch!”

  My asshole tightened at the insult as I felt my cock trying and failing to squeeze out something. I had orgasmed, yet Michael had yet to finish or even pause for my moment of release. The furious puncturing left me gasping for air as the newest of my many colleagues continued to thrust away. Tears began to seep out of my eyes, like a miserable puss from a festering wound. Unable to hold my neck in pce any longer, my head fell comfortably back on the pillow beneath it and I caught a terrible sight: Michael’s eyes were also watery.

  In both the tears in his own eyes and the light touch with which he kept my arms pinned down, Michael smiled weakly as he bared his soul.

  When Michael finally came, the tex of the condom in my ass snapped and I felt the hot sauce fill me like a hot cheese oozing from a piece of meat.

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  Against my better judgement, I allowed Michael to join me in the shower after our impromptu three rounds of hate-fucking. My body was a different shape—and while that meant that some different moves needed to be made in the confined space of a shitty apartment bathtub—it became immediately and horrifyingly apparent to me that Michael and mine’s muscle memories were still in perfect sync.

  It felt like the very universe itself was pushing me back toward Michael, even though all I wanted was to escape him and the universe’s cruel reminders of the limits of my transgender body.

  The lukewarm apartment shower was hardly the reviving elixir that I had always wished it would be, but it was nevertheless enough to wash the sweat and cum from my skin. As Michael scrubbed his body with soap, I couldn’t help but take quick peeks. Every little muscle had somehow become more defined and more powerful than my memories of his physique in college. I had fucked a man, just now—not the boy I had dated in college.

  It was more than just his body, though. The way I had seen Michael walk at work—taller, somehow. Steps now—not so much heavier—but firmer. If Michael had been jovial in talking to our cssmates, he was now casual in how he talked to our colleagues. I had found it interesting—as I snuck gnces his way during the past three days—just how much he seemed to have changed, while still being the Michael I had once—well, loved.

  Past tense.

  Even now, though, it was as if I was back in college—and it made my stomach churn.

  Wrapping his right arm around my trimmed waist to pull me closer, Michael reached with his left to grab shampoo from the shower rack behind me. The sensation of my delicate form against his hardened, soapy form left me woefully more concerned with the rising heat in my belly, rather than the churning that now had to contend with said heat. Even just a single instinctively protective move like pulling me closer to him was enough to override any bitterness I tried to hold on to.

  It just wasn’t fair.

  Why did I have to be roped back in again, after four motherfucking years?

  I was supposed to be beyond all this.

  I was supposed to be a new person—as wholly divorced from the miserable fool I had been in college as possible.

  And yet here I was, taking the opportunity to press my engorged breasts into my former lover’s chest, wrapping my arms around his neck and standing on the tip of my toes so as to kiss him on those now chapped lips of his as he thered shampoo through my hair. Globs of the shampoo dropped from my hair onto my skin, sending a chill down my spine. Still, I persevered and not once was I broken from twisting my tongue around that of the man I so painfully loved. The brush of his nipples against mine as we shifted all over was enough to make me gasp between kisses, but each gasp was just an excuse for my body to react with more fervor.

  Hands coated in the excess soap from his body, I wrapped my fingers around Michael’s cock and slowly, gently jacked it back to attention, little squeezes given on occasion, just to remind the little painslut who was in charge here.

  Resting my head against Michael’s chest as I jacked away, I id eyes on the bite marks I had left on his neck. Lifting my free left arm, I wrapped it around Michael’s back and traced gently over the markings with my index finger: both a reminder of who had marked him and a show of my gentle ownership. I was his queen.

  And I was such a damned, damned fool.

  ***

  September 03, 2021:

  Sving over a hot stove after sex was hardly a new experience for me. Wrapped in the most comically pink, plush robe imaginable, I used the very stove that my ndlord often conveniently forgot to get fixed to cook eggs for myself and my guest, who held me protectively from behind. It hardly made the scrambling motion easier, but I couldn’t bring myself to kick a puppy when it was begging for a teat—even if it was asking to drink poison itself.

  “I love you,” Michael whispered into my left ear, his right index finger tracing cheekily around my right areo.

  “You shouldn’t,” I replied, eyes locked on the sizzling pan.

  Michael allowed the tips of his right hand to gently graze down my right side and over my hip as his hand swerved around and took hold of my bottom, “I’ll be the one to determine that,” the familiar grip of the behemoth’s palm on my ass sent a pang to my tummy, like a drop of honey falling back into the pot and rippling throughout the surface of what remained. I could practically feel the new lines that had formed on his palm over the past four years, signalling his aging. Each new line, a new adventure I had missed out on—of my own volition.

  And yet, I wanted him—I wanted so badly to simply give in, give myself to the life that I had dreamed of for as long as I could remember.

  A life that could do no less than continue to tease me with its possibilities, despite never being fulfilble—never being just.

  Turning in his embrace, I looked up at Michael and flirted with losing myself in his dark eyes, “Michael, please, I—”

  “Do you love me?”

  It was the most terrible question in the world.

  “Do you love me, Candi?”

  Tears began streaking down my cheeks, not with a dramatic slowness, but an overwhelming rush. To catch my breath would have been too much for my luck to handle, so I poured my face into Michael’s bare chest, and allowed myself to abandon myself to an audible weep, even as my subconscious admired the smell of Michael’s natural musk—desiring to smell it every day for the rest of my life.

  Finally, a crack formed in the dam—if only a small one.

  “If we do this—”

  “—Candi, I can’t understand you—”

  I swung my head back, out of Michael’s chest, and looked up into his dark eyes, abandoning myself to the vastness of them even as the voice in my head screamed at me not to, “—we’re telling the principal.”

  Whereas his warm smile should have melted my face into a wide reply, I could only force a smile to spread across my face.

  ***

  September 10, 2021:

  Fridays meant casual wear in the Ms. Queen Handbook of Accessorizing For Professionalism When Teaching With Massive Knockers. The internalized misogyny was a hell of a cerberus to battle against, but I had set down the ground rule that if I was going to dress in dress shirts, scks, skirts or dresses four days out of the week, then I was going to give myself Fridays for being such a good girl and just wear my school hoodie, school tee shirt, and a nice pair of blue jeans for some comfort.

  I had a work boyfriend—who was actually my actual boyfriend now—though, so I indulged a little more and simply dropped the hoodie for the day, just in case I saw him roaming the school between csses.

  Fortunately, I could use the excuse of the rising sun turning the school—and especially the faculty room—into a hotbox as an excuse for leaving my hoodie tied around my waist, too.

  Michael had bought a new Keurig for the faculty room, even though I had challenged whether or not that would be considered against school policy. After its instaltion, no member of the administration had made any fuss—none that had gotten back to me or any of the other teachers I saw using it, at least—so the new source of caffeinated joy remained. Its royal red coloring cshed with the counter, just as its spotless, speckless exterior betrayed the lovably detested surface of the counter and all its drawers.

  “Damn, I can’t believe the Grime Goon is gone,” May mused, joining me in staring at the red contraption as it poured my coffee.

  “You say that like it’s a proper name,” I lobbed back, my right hand’s fingers tapping on my left arm, crossed beneath my right. I’d gotten my nails done after work the previous day, just in case I grew adventurous and decided to fishhook open my boyfriend’s mouth while I forced him down onto his knees or something.

  Tapping the surface of the counter seemed inadvisable, no matter how many times one wiped it with a soggy piece of paper towel.

  “You could hear the capital Gs?”

  “I could hear the capital Gs.”

  “Damn, she could hear the capital Gs!”

  “She could hear the capital—I’m going to go insane if we keep doing this.”

  “Sorry, Candi.”

  “Whatevs, how are you doing this woefully sweltering morning, Nurse August?”

  “Swell, Ms. Queen.”

  Cup filled with a—deviantly held over from st year—peppermint candy brew—one of my few vices—I guided my colleague to one of the well-worn and wickedly wobbly folding tables peppered throughout the faculty room to sit for a spill.

  The taste of the coffee on my tongue was matched only by the inadvisable heat—a heat matched only by the heat passing filling the school and its ck of central cooling. The school district apparently felt that it was cool enough at a proud seventy degrees fahrenheit to do without incurring the cost of cooling the school, despite the Septembers of Washington no longer being as cool as they once were.

  The heat coming from the good nurse wasn’t helping, either.

  Perversely, I just had to ask: “Why are you staring at me, Nurse August?”

  A little hunch forward and a little scrunch of her face warped my beloved work friend into a suspicious gremlin, “There’s something different about you this week, Candi.”

  “I don’t know what you mean?” Sometimes, lying was a fun little game. A feel good story for the masses to enjoy, really.

  “There’s a spring in your step, Princess. I’m not quite sure why, though…” as her voice trailed off, a slow realization dawned on the young school nurse, “Ah! You’re gettin’ id!”

  “Everyday after work this week,” I giggled, risking another sip from my cup.

  “Holy shit, did that EHarmony guy actually turn out to be a winner?”

  “I canceled the date, actually.”

  “You’re fuckin’ with me?! Where did you get a man with your tastes?”

  My eyes took on a half-closed form as I looked my friend in the eyes, “Guess.”

  “Holy fuck, you’re fuckin’ one of the teachers!”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Try not to make a big deal out of it, May. We’ve told Principal Sanderson, we’re doing this by the book.”

  “So, it’s not Riley from the English department, then.”

  “Ruling out people from my department right off the bat, I see.”

  “Riley’s the only male English teacher close to your age, and even then he’s still, like, thirty-six or something.”

  “I like older men.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t date men shorter than you. He’s also kinda, y’know,” lifting her right arm up, May let her wrist go limp.

  I scoffed at the implication, “I prefer my men a little faggy, May.”

  Shit, I shouldn’t have said that.

  Pointing at me with a face that feigned scandal, May mocked, “Ah!! Tut-tut, Princess Candi!”

  May was such a cheeky little bitch. As straight as I was, sometimes I just wanted to make her squirm a little—it wasn’t like a little teasing would tip her off to my previous life. Rubbing my thighs together as subtly as possible, I adjusted my posture in my deeply uncomfortable pstic folding chair and sat a full head above May, “Y’know, my ex-boyfriends call me the Queen of Candy-ass-faggots-nd, May-May.”

  The calcuted husk in my voice caught May’s bottom energy by the tail and yanked her towards me, “C-Candace, really, you shouldn’t be saying that word if you’re n-not queer.”

  Something about the quiver in her voice and the doe in her eyes filled me with a jolly that I didn’t quite know what to make of it. A heat between my thighs left me continuing to rub them against one another, and I was thankful to have that awful, awful shit between my legs carefully tucked away, so as to not ruin the occasion. Fuck, we were alone in the faculty room, anyway. It was fate!

  Pulling my phone out, I texted Michael:

  Candace: Trust me?

  Boyfriend: ??

  With tepid approval given, I bit my lip and leaned forward, “You know May, I think you might be right!” With much practice now paying off, I sounded like all the syrup in the world came from my vocal cords.

  Cheeks taking on a red like a white tee shirt washed with a gallon of paint, May adjusted in her seat, “R-right about what, Candi?”

  “I think I am bisexual,” leaning forward, I stopped my face just inches from May’s and let the most cruel of intentions wash over me. If the proximity of my bedroom eyes and my devious grin weren’t sending May into a panic, the chill of my right palm cupping her left cheek sure as hell did. Her eyes watered like a squirrel’s might upon setting eyes on the biggest peanut of all time. There was no doubt in my mind what she was pleading for at that moment.

  So, I moved closer.

  “C-Candace?”

  Closer.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  Closer!

  “Wh-what are you d-doin’?”

  Almost there!!

  “Just showin’ you that you were right, sweet pea…”

  And then, I did it: I connected our lips.

  A split second in time became an eternity.

  May leaned into the kiss, wrapping her arms around my neck while I took a hold of her head by both sides and poured harder, slipping my tongue into the little bitch’s mouth to dance with hers. The very sensation of our tongues touching sent a twitch down to my crotch. Determined not to ruin what was the closest I had ever come to enjoying physical intimacy with another woman, I ignored the unwanted appendage and poured myself deeper into the moment. Closing her eyes fully, May gave herself entirely to me, and I took her like I had always owned her. For the briefest of moments, she was mine.

  Finally, May pulled off of me, “F-fuck, Candace?!”

  Falling back against the back of my chair sent the silly pstic piece of shit wobbling on the title floor of the faculty room, but all my conscious mind could think of was how great it felt to finally kiss a girl and not feel disgusted—to feel powerful and confident and horny as fuck.

  Two hot women kissing? That felt a hell of a lot better than being a guy and kissing a girl.

  God, I needed the bratty slut to eat my pussy.

  Ugh, that’s right, I didn’t have one yet.

  …and it’s not like I was even bisexual! May was just fun to tease—especially considering how much and how often she liked to push my buttons—egging me on to do whatever it was that she kept saying I wanted to do with her! I’m just giving her a little of the cheeky dork a taste of her own medicine for once!

  …right?

  Why had what was supposed to be just a little joke felt so good?

  I was confident in my sexuality—I knew that I was straight now. As much shame that still lived within me for liking men existed from a lifetime of my parents’ bullshit homophobia, I’d decided eight years ago that I wouldn’t be ashamed of liking men—of kissing them, of holding their hands in public—of fucking them!!

  And yet, here I was, doing something that I had sworn that I would never do again: kissing a woman, desiring her—rather than desiring to be her. I didn’t need to be her, Candace Queen was her own woman, and May August was also her own woman, different and separate from me, but oh-so-cute in that way that she always looked a little like a gremlin who had pulled herself out of bed just to do her makeup, then begrudgingly came to work since she might as well show off her eyeliner for that day.

  I could tell that she wanted me. I’ve always been able to tell as much—especially just now, in the way her arms wrapped around my neck so gently—but firmly—the way her breathing slowed to a nice pace, as the savory soup that was her saliva quenched a thirst I had not even known I had as she let me take her for my own.

  It was so confusing, this swirl of emotions within me was no different than the swirl of emotions on May’s face—eyes so big and bright, as if the concept of color had just been invented at this very moment.

  I had too little strength for anything more than a gentle whisper, “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate, May.”

  There was a guarded spiritedness to the younger woman’s reply that completely overpowered mine, “Mayday for May, Je~sus Ch~rist,” May trailed off before standing up swiftly to pace around the room, her face flush with color and life and it seemed like every little sound she caused to echo in the empty faculty room was born entire worlds louder than any noise I could make. All this energy and bouncing around emanated from the befuddled woman, despite the shocked look of her bulging eyes.

  “I—I’m not—” just say it, Candace, “—I’m not—” fucking SAY IT, “—I’m not looking for a girlfriend right now, by the way,” fucking fool, “I just…thought that might be a fun little way to pay you back, y’know?” You’re straight, you fucking dumb bitch, just say it!

  May turned back to me mid-pacing in a daze—the lights were on, but I wasn’t sure that anyone was home, “Oh? Yeah, no, I get it. Boyfriend, right?”

  “Yeah, actually. I think Michael and I are goin’ steady, as the kids used to say.”

  “Coach Summers?!”

  Sheepishly, I shrugged a confirmation.

  “Holy fuck, he’s like the ultimate you-type!”

  Oh, if only she knew.

  May straightened up in pce, pushing out her chest in a show of confidence. Pulling her vape out of her b jacket’s breast pocket like it was a pen, the nurse look a deep inhale, before letting it all out, “Fuck it, I’m gonna start having better standards for the men I date. And also, just, like, y’know…?”

  “What do I know?” I asked with mirth on the corners of my grin.

  “I’m gonna stop this ‘avoiding dating women’ shit!”

  “Good girl,” I winked with an exaggerated coo, unable to help myself.

  With the red that the green haired woman was beginning to turn, she almost looked like a Christmas tree.

  ***

  September 10, 2021:

  “Holy shit, you made out with May?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  The warmth of Michael’s embrace as we zed about after work on the second-hand couch in my living room was complemented by the plush throw bnket id across us, but I still couldn’t help but let myself lean a little harder against the solid mass of muscles that constantly emanated heat like a furnace, “Are you okay with that?”

  Snapped from his own thoughts, Michael replied chipperly, “Huh? Oh, yeah, no problem.”

  His little dorky salute with his right hand nearly made me want to jump his bones right then and there, “God, you dork.”

  Michael wrapped his right arm back around me to join his left and then rested his head atop my head, “How did it feel?”

  I’m straight, of course it felt, “Amazing, honestly.”

  I kicked myself.

  “I knew it,” the former collegiate snickered, the softness of his well moisturized right thumb lightly grazing my right forearm beneath the bnket and sending me into a horny squirm.

  “Knew what?” I asked back, scandalized.

  “God, you’re such a bimbo sometimes,” Michael snuggled tighter, more intimately, which only brought back to my skin memories of the summer sun burning it.

  I knew what he meant, but I couldn’t admit it to myself, “I’m—”

  What the fuck was I even doing? Why couldn’t I just say it? Why was I always refusing to admit what was right there, on the tip of my tongue? What was the point of not just—

  —That twitch in my crotch from when I kissed May repyed in my head, twisting my stomach into knots. I wanted to vomit, all the good vibes from the day choking to death the more I thought about being with a woman—

  —having a woman know about my penis and seeing me for nothing more than a man.

  Oh.

  Oh, no.

  Tears began to roll down my face. I could no longer stifle the wail that built and built like a car driving down hill, even without one’s foot on the pedal.

  “Candace, what’s wrong?”

  I screamed into Michael’s chest, feeling like acid was being poured down my throat.

  “Candace, baby, I’m right here—”

  All these years.

  “Candi—”

  All those fucking years of torturing myself.

  “Candi, I’m here for you, always.”

  All those years of running from what was right there in front of me the whole time: I couldn’t be with women unless I was a woman.

  Michael held me tight and close, until I finally fell asleep in his arms.

  ***

  September 11, 2021:

  I missed hitting the gym early in the morning with Michael. It was much more difficult to start a day with an hour at gym when you had to work long hours as a teacher in her twenties—as opposed to a college twink in her early twenties—but with Michael hanging around my apartment more often now—as opposed to driving back up to his mom’s pce in the Seattle area for an hour-plus commute—it just made more sense to spend more time together.

  It was kind of like we were living in a dream.

  All six and a half feet of the mountain of muscle delicately spotted me as I rose up from my squat. I could feel how my legs were a little out of shape now, but I was determined to harden back up now that I was off the market and actually had a partner with a workout routine that worked for the both of us.

  It was a little disconcerting how much Michael and I had slid back into our old routine in the past week. That very fact always sat at the back of my mind, worrying me about how I might repse and ruin my life again. Yet—in a lot of ways—I felt so much different from who I had been when I broke up with Michael four years ago. Dedicating myself to simply being a woman and to becoming a teacher who had to present herself to both students and colleagues most months of the year meant that I was faking it until I made it from Day One, and that had resulted in me not even knowing at what point I stopped being the woman who had drunkenly ruined her life, and at what point I had become someone that people listened to.

  Well, it was probably that time half way through my first year of teaching when I told off a bitchy mother about how her yelling at her daughter probably wasn’t conducive to helping the poor kid raise her grades.

  Completing my final squat, I housed the weighted bar back on its rest and stepped off to the side for a quick drink of water. My legs felt like they were simultaneously jelly and like my joints had become so greased that they would spin around at a hundred miles per hour if given the gentlest flick. Quenching my thirst after peeling aside my KN-95 mask, I turned back to Michael—still sheening from the sweat summoned up through his pores and onto his skin from his own go at squats before me—and grinned beneath the pink protective mask with the utmost pleasure at the sight of his jaw that now sported the makings of a beard.

  I had never been much one for beards before—either for myself or for men—but the thin yer was good on Michael, even when obstructed by a bck face mask. It made him look more like a man, which was a silly thing to say given my own history with facial hair—but it was nevertheless entrancing. I had read on the internet that the mental changes from hormone repcement therapy would continue on even past the first two or three years, but as I was now approaching eight years in the forthcoming December, I found my attraction to men was somehow sharper and more succinct. I was so damned lucky to have this big goober all to myself.

  Not lying to myself anymore had done a hell of a job at helping me settle into this comfort, too, of course.

  Additionally, the events of the prior day had definitely gone a long way in changing my perspective on things, as well. While I didn’t have any desire to date anyone other than Michael, I still found myself engaging in a spot of what felt like ‘naughty’ looks at other women. I was rediscovering a piece of myself that I had sorely misunderstood for so long that it only brought back to mind what I had heard once from Megumi: that she felt like a sick, perverted predator for looking at and desiring women as partners. At the time, I had refused to think too hard about the subject, but as I stole a gnce at the muscur woman absolutely crushing her deadlifts on the other side of the weight room, I began to find myself staving off once familiar feelings that somehow felt more real now that I could give them a name: sexual attraction.

  Perhaps it was just the way her back muscles moved—or the exposure of her shoulders in her tank top—but I found the older woman’s silhouette somehow irresistible. So long as I didn’t think about what I had down there, the guilt and shame was just a bit more bearable than it had been before.

  Hell, was this what I had been doing all these years? Confusing desire for envy, and not envy for desire? Or was it to finally have some degree of ‘self’ that finally allowed me to understand my desire for what it was? I loved how I looked now—I didn’t want to change it, other than getting some work done in the basement. Putting aside the awkwardness of feeling attracted to May as I had felt yesterday, I certainly wouldn’t want to take on her style—not that I couldn’t for the heck of it, either.

  No, no, the image and sensation of our bodies connecting skin-to-skin was simply intoxi—actually, don’t go there. You’re not together and she’s your friend, dummy!

  Turning back around to pce my water bottle back down on the floor off of the mat, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and simply saw what I had seen in the mirror for years now: just a basic—albeit, stacked as all hell—blonde white woman in her te twenties with an amazingly sweet boyfriend.

  Okay, my forearms were actually looking pretty good, too.

  And my ass. Goddamn, squats were amazing.

  Michael’s touch on my shoulders brought me back out of myself as joined me by staring at my reflection from behind, “I’m proud of you, you know?”

  “You are?”

  “Girl, do you seriously think that what you accomplished over the st few years without your parents’ money or help isn’t incredible?”

  “I mean, I am up to my eyeballs in debt, but I guess I get what you mean,” I giggled, taking hold of his right hand as it remained on my shoulder, “What about you, big guy? What have you been doing the st few years?”

  “After graduating? I was pulling double duty either teaching math, subbing for a phys ed teacher during my grading periods, or working a part-time job to help Ma pay the bills.”

  “Jesus, are you still—?”

  “Naw,” he scratched the dark hairs of his stubble, “I took this job because it meant I could just focus on teaching and coaching. Sure, I gotta commute further, but it’s worth it.”

  “How is she?”

  “Ma? Same old, same old. She’s in charge of her own store now, so he’s basically just working all the time, unless she’s visiting dad in the physical rehab ward.”

  “Wait, did he—?!”

  A curious look that almost spelled out the word ‘whoops’ in comic book sound effects font wrapped itself around Michael’s face, “Oh shit, did I not—?!”

  A downcast face appeared on my reflection, as I slowly saw it looking downward. Michael had been trapped in his own living hell for all these years and I had broken up with him like I had while he fought his own battles. But now? I had missed his dad’s apparent recovery from a coma that he had been in as a result of protecting his son from a hate crime? It was a pricking point of guilt.

  “—Oh God, Candi, yeah!” Michael picked up his water bottle, tilted up his KN-95 mask, and began draining it, “My dad woke up from his coma about a year and a half ago? It was really touch-and-go for a while there, but he’s coming back to life day-by-day. Stronger mind and body, too.”

  “It must be so weird, missing, what, almost seven years of life like that?” I mused, hoping that I could appear unaffected by my depressing realization.

  “Yeah, definitely,” Michael motioned for the front entrance, indicating that he was ready to leave, since I did not feel safe showering at the gym, “It’s been weird for him, since he woke up in the middle of a pandemic of all things.”

  “Good grief, yeah,” I picked up my things and began to follow Michael toward the entrance. Luckily, I didn’t live too far from the gym. Lukewarm water aside, showers at home were better now, anyway—I had a boyfriend to share them with!

  One I didn’t have to expin my cock and balls to, too.

  The thought of ‘it’ permeated through my mind? I had been considering just doing ‘it’ all alone, but now that Michael was back in my life, I couldn’t help but consider something that I had been avoiding broaching with him.

  As Michael and I—seated once again in his much familiar passenger car seat—pulled out of the gym’s parking lot, I broached the subject that was needling me on and weighing down my core muscles like an anvil, “So…uh…I’ve scheduled my orchiectomy for this summer.”

  I could see Michael’s eyebrows rise up, even if he hadn’t turned to face me, “Woah, congrats! After school gets out, I assume?”

  “Yeah, a week after, actually.”

  “Kind of a bummer that you’ll be spending all summer break recovering.”

  “It’s worth it,” I giggled, sensing exactly how Michael was about to respond.

  “Oh shoot, I mean, like, of course, I just mean—”

  “You’re fine, dear,” I ughed, “I was actually wondering, y’know, if you would…like…like to maybe stay over then?”

  “Oh, does her majesty want to be waited on?” Michael chuckled, turning left onto a main road.

  Determined not to let Michael get the best of me, “Of course she does, Sir Michael! I deserve only the best!”

  “Then, only the best you shall receive, my dy!”

  It felt weird falling back into our old rhythm so easily—as if we had never broken up—but I wanted to cherish the moments that we had. I wasn’t sure how much longer they would st, after all.

  The truth of the matter was: things had not actually changed between us. I knew not when, but I knew eventually that I would likely be faced with the truth of my reality again. It was as if we were both carefully avoiding the subject, never wanting to broach it for fear of the Earth splitting open and swallowing us whole.

  Perhaps to be swallowed whole was what I deserved, though?

  Turning to Michael, I watched his face silently while he paid attention to the road, and did as best I could to commit it to memory.

  It was not hard to do so.

  ***

  The rushing pitter-patter of feet on the hardwood floor drew my senses back to the world of the woken, but it was the crashing sensation of two little bodies on my legs—and the subsequent bouncing of the mattress—that brought me back to life.

  “Girls,” I groaned into my pillow, not even bothering to open my eyes, “What have I told you about jumping on the bed?”

  “Only when you’re not in it?” Giselle mocked, her intonation steadily more mature than I remembered it.

  I just groaned again, this time louder so that even the pillow couldn’t muffle it too much.

  “Mom, Dad, come on!” The gentle bouncing of Mia’s knees kept the bed in a perpetual motion that was doing little to awaken my husband, but much to give me a headache.

  “Mikey, tell your daughters to get down!” I couldn’t make out what my husband was groaning into his pillow, but I decided to pretend he was acquiescing, “You heard your father, girls.”

  With yet more bouncing, the girls got off of our king-size bed, but just pitter-pattered around to stare at us face-to-face. Michael and I remained in pce, our bodies hoping to remain dead to the world.

  “Mommy, you and Daddy said you’d take us to the zoo today!” Giselle whined, not quite enough to hide how cheeky she was acting.

  She got it from her father, clearly.

  The little cuss only broke out the ‘Mommy and Daddy’ nonsense when she wanted something—or to act innocent for something she’d done, “Mmm, right, yeah,” good lord, the sheets were comfortable—I’m gd that we finally got the central cooling installed, because now I could actually stay in bed and not toss and turn all night from the sweltering summer heat anymore.

  “Then! Time! To! Get! Up!” Giselle cheered, cpping along to a beat like she was already getting ready for cheerleader tryouts.

  God, I envied the energy reserves of nine year olds.

  “Mikey, get up,” I groaned, filing my left arm back over me to nudge my husband. Upon making contact with his right bicep I did little more than draw out a groan.

  “Daddy! Hurry up!” Mia’s cries for attention were a little less maniputive and a little more just outright annoyed with her father, which, yeah, same girl.

  “Okay, okay,” Michael finally replied, propping himself off and off his pillow.

  “Showers and breakfast first, girls,” I could practically hear Michael rubbing his eyes, he was rubbing his face that hard.

  Joining my husband, I swung myself up and sat on the edge of the bed, where—once upright—I felt an immediate pressure against my bdder, “Gigi sweetie, I gotta use the bathroom.”

  “Say no more!” Giselle sassed, backing away to give me space before sliding onto my bed from behind me to push her father forward and up.

  Once in the restroom, I sat down on the toilet and did my business. I was beyond gd to be back on a break from teaching, because my being a mother had completely ruined mornings for me. Maybe once the kids were older I could return to help out poor Michael with paying the bills, but for now I was content to just stay at home and work on my writing when I wasn’t doing undry or whatever.

  With the toilet flushing, I washed my hands, then washed my face just to shock myself awake a little more. When I finally finished drying my face, I turned to the door and looked at my reflection in the full body mirror on the back of the bathroom door and sighed. Pcing a hand on my belly, I rubbed it and remarked aloud, “Christ, this boy is going to be as big as his father, isn’t he?”

  And then, morning sickness struck.

  ***

  December 25, 2021:

  My eyes shot open as I awoke from my dream feeling a cold sweat soaking my body, like a thousand daggers piercing my body at the same time.

  Scrambling out of bed, I tripped on a bnket and fell onto my right arm, before scrambling back onto my feet and into the bathroom of my shitty apartment as I emptied the contents of my belly into the toilet.

  What a terrifying nightmare.

  A disoriented Michael wasn’t far behind, “Candi, are you okay?!”

  “Y-yeah,” I lied, “Probably just something I ate yesterday.”

  Michael breathed a sigh of relief, his entire frame dropping its tension as he removed himself from the bathroom door’s frame and stepped back, “Are you sure that you’re cool about today?”

  “I mean, meeting your father would be nice and all, and I feel like I kind of owe your mother and sister an apology, y’know?”

  “It’s been four years, they’ve forgotten about it, trust me,” Michael entered the bathroom properly this time and wet his hands before rubbing his eyes, “I should probably tell you, though…”

  “Tell me what?” Apprehension filled my entire body from the tip of my toe nails to the highest out of pce hair.

  “They don’t know that we’re back together,” the sheepish grin that Michael put on did little to calm my nerves as I sat on my knees, in front of the toilet, not moving in case I needed to vomit again.

  That was probably reason enough to lean down for a second hurl, though.

  ***

  December 25, 2021:

  Michael and I pulled up to his parents’ pce a little before noon. As the car slowed to a crawl and my nerves sensed the déjà vu of being back in front of the Summers’ family home, I began to wonder how many more times I would see this pce. No matter how many times I visited, I always felt like a visitor, and not an occupant.

  Was that the universe telling me who I was…or was it me deciding who I was?

  “You good?” Michael asked, pcing his right hand on my left knee, “It’s okay if you’re a little…you know?” I loved the way his thumb gently rubbed little circles on my skin.

  I faked a smile without even meaning to, “I’ll be fine, Mikey. I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to say to your mother and Sarah.”

  “Like I said before, you’re fine, Candi.”

  I lied, “Sarah’s going to go insane when she sees me, is what I mean.”

  Michael turned a new shade of stomach flu at the thought.

  Finally, Michael and I exited the car and walked up to the front door. On the way up, I noticed all the Pride stickers still spped onto the backboard of the basketball hoop. They were weather worn, but still shining brightly—despite the sun bleaching.

  Michael used his key to open the front door, ushering me inside to the living room, where I was immediately greeted by the sight of an older man—perhaps in his fifties?—situated in a recliner. The man looked like he was in the middle of being filled with oxygen, like an inftable pool of some sort. Opening his eyes wider than the Grand Canyon itself, the man’s mouth joined his eyes as he gasped, “Jesus son, is this that girlfriend your mother told me about?”

  Lumbering in just behind me, Michael groaned like worn sbs of iron in a windstorm, “Her name is Candace, Pop.”

  Hands held tightly onto my handbag—a cute purple number covered in little gold butterflies that I had picked up over the summer—I put on my best smile and introduced myself, “Hiya, I’m Candace—one of Michael’s fellow teachers at the school.”

  A younger man—perhaps still a teenager?—sat on the couch up against the front window and waved weakly at us, “Uh, hi, Teddy—Sarah’s boyfriend.” He was gangly and sickly looking—an all too familiar sight—but had a cute enough smile that was just barely untouched by his mop of brunette hair that pyed drapes for his eyes. This Teddy fellow had eyes that looked close to bulging from behind his bangs, however, and it was from this that I could determine that he had hazel eyes that appeared to be quivering as they settled on both myself and Michael.

  If I had to guess, Sarah wore the pants in the retionship.

  Speak of the Devil and her heavy footsteps will appear in your ears. Clearing the corner from the kitchen, Sarah slid in with an extravagantly dyed undercut. I wasn’t sure if I could count all the colors in her hair, but the look nevertheless suited the chaos gremlin. As much time had passed, it was as if the breathtaking woman had not changed at all. Sarah was covered waist-to-ankle in a textured bck skirt that was neatly topped with a dress shirt tucked into her skirt.

  “Holy shit Michael, where did you find this one?”

  Putting aside the derogatory nature of her compliment, I smiled just a little at first. I was far too amused by the fact that Sarah had yet to recognize me. Stepping forward, I decided to take the initiative and put the poor woman on defense by wrapping my arms around her for a hug. Sarah’s entire form seized up at the unexpected physical intimacy, which only made me feel all the more devious. Pulling my mouth just inline with her left ear, I whispered, “Maybe a little lesbian action will jog your memory?”

  If it were impossible for a body to seize up even further, Sarah had somehow found a way to make the impossible possible. As I pulled back to break the hug and Sarah got a clearer look, I could see the realization being born in her eyes like a new gaxy.

  “Holy fucking shit, Candi?”

  All I needed to do was lift my hands up with a double peace sign to make the poor girl go wild.

  “Holy shit, Ma! She’s back!!”

  Dressed like an 1800s gentleman in casual wear, Desiree Summers entered the living room, got one look at me, and nearly ftly replied, “I see you come bearing breasts for Christmas dinner, eh? Well, too bad, we’re having ham this year.”

  Jesus, the Summers women were weirdos, “I’m sorry about st time.”

  “Don’t worry about it, dear,” Desire brought me in for a hug in that kinda ‘too cool for emotional vulnerability’ kind of way that she had about herself, but I was more than happy to return it. As much as the girls were obviously trying to wash away my guilt with their jovialness, much of it continued to make a drilling through my guts.

  Nevertheless, I decided to tune it out to live in the moment.

  Michael’s father struggled from the recliner that he had made his throne and stiffly walked over to deliver a hug of his own, “Sarah’s told me a lot about you, Candace. I’m Scott, by the way.”

  Well, that expined Michael’s middle name, “Did your parents—?”

  “—Woefully, yes,” Scott confirmed, not even needing me to finish my sentence.

  “I don’t suppose Mikey’s so big and strong because you have optic bsts?”

  “God, I wish,” the older man sighed, shaking his head. Michael, for his part, took action without being asked and helped guide his father back to his recliner. Scott rolled his eyes, but let his son do as he pleased, and by the time he was back seated in comfort, asked, “So, I guess that you two are back together?”

  “Aaah, yeah,” I smiled with just a hit of my inner nervousness, “Michael told me that he hadn’t told you all that it was me he was seeing, so that’s a bit embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no problem at all,” Scott ughed, “It’s certainly great getting to meet the girl that Sarah never hushes up about, though.”

  Sheesh, from the sound of it I was her ex-girlfriend, not Michael’s. Forcing my smile, “Well, I am sorry that this is how we’re first meeting, but it’s still nice to finally get to meet you, Scott.”

  A light salute was the graying man’s reply.

  Sarah finally interjected like a kid on Christmas, “Girl, I cannot believe how much you’ve changed!”

  “Surgery will do that for you, yeah,” as the words tumbled out of my mouth it occurred to me that I had no idea whether or not Scott even knew that I was transgender. Hell, he’d been in a coma defending his son from a homophobic hate crime, surely it wouldn’t be that big an issue if I told him, right?

  Other than the men I was fucking, I hadn’t told a soul that I was trans in…four years?

  Turning to Scott—who looked like he was politely trying to not think about how my chest was clearly surgically enhanced—I braced for impact, before shooting a look at Ted off in his own corner, looking politely shrunk up and on the sidelines. Did I really want to out myself to this nerdy milksop, too? Should I even bother to ask Sarah to remove him from the room so that I could tell her father, “Hey, your son’s dating a tranny, just so you know!”

  Aah, fuck it, I doubt that this kid was going to st long, anyway, “Um, Scott?”

  “Yeah, dear?”

  “I figured that I should probably tell you something, since Sarah and Desiree already know.” Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Sarah’s eyes go wide as she realized what I was about to say, so I looked her in the eye and shook my head, leading her to back down, “I’m, uh—” this was surprisingly hard to say when I wasn’t horny and looking for a fuck from some underqualified electrician looking to ‘experiment’ with a tranny, “—I’m transgender.”

  Realization dawned on Scott’s face, “Oh, wow. I, uh, wouldn’t have guessed?”

  I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about being told that, so I decided to just py it safe, “That makes me happy.”

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Teddy tense up as his eyes bulged out even further, “Oh, wow.”

  Well, he was dating Sarah of all people, so at least he didn’t seem disgusted by the notion, “Thanks?”

  “S-sorry, no, no, I just meant—” Teddy squirmed on the couch like he was about to blow away in the wind like a delicate flower, “—sorry, I just meant that I’m really impressed? Like, uh, you know? I think it’s really, really, really cool!”

  Curiosity whispered into my ear from the back of my mind, but I decided not to entertain the thought too seriously, “Thanks, it was the best decision of my life.”

  Teddy’s blush wrote sonnets to themselves, just to see if they could get any redder as his eyes lowered themselves to the floor.

  It was cute.

  ***

  December 25, 2021:

  The girls pulled me into the kitchen to help while the boys did whatever boys did in a living room on Christmas. Probably talk about sports balls and killing bears with their bare fists or something.

  Assigned the pinkest of aprons—it looked so new that I almost wondered if it had been purchased specifically for me—I was quickly given my marching orders: knead some bread.

  So, I tied up my hair into a pony-tail and took a knead.

  The sensation of the cool dough between my fingers as I kneaded it on the provided counter space was a refreshing sensation. During the Period in Which I Was Without Boyfriend, I had worked hard to abandon day drinking as a hobby and attempted to repce it with baking, to varying degrees of success. The powdery feeling of the dry yeast on my hands always provided something of an irritating sensation to me, but I had long learned to grit my teeth and bare it during my many failed attempts at doing the masters of old justice.

  Wisping and wisping away with her big ol’ bowl, Sarah leaned her backside against the counter that I was using and turned to her right to face me, “Girl!”

  “That’s me,” I replied, with just a little indulgence in my voice.

  “I am fuckin’ stunned. What the hell?” She was certainly drinking every part of me in.

  “Are you going to stare all day?”

  Rolling the dough was honestly pretty fun once it started melding together.

  “I mean, who wouldn’t—er, no, I won’t. Sorry. I’m just so excited.”

  “You know that I’m dating your brother, right?”

  “What? No, I know. Besides, I’m happy with Teddy! I just…you’re so radiant now. More than before, I mean.”

  “Thanks, dear,” a soft giggle was payment enough for the fttery, I figure, “Speaking of which, what is the story with the CollegeHumor cast member stunt double out there?”

  “Oh, Teddy? He’s a nice guy—built my gaming PC for me.”

  “That sounds fun,” a little hum turned the st sylble into a little musical note, “How old is that kid, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s not much younger than me,” a rge dollop of cookie dough batter clung to the wisp as Sarah pulled it out of the bowl for a hungry look, “He just turned twenty-three.”

  Three years younger, eh? Well, not that that was bad or anything. The poor guy was a stick thin twink, so he probably wasn’t eating much, which would expin the youthful disposition—until it started eating away at his skin and hair. Well, I couldn't bme him—even now I had moments where looking at food made me want to run to the bathroom to make a deposition in the ivory pot.

  “We’ve been dating for almost a year now, but I—well, I know he’s kind of like a baby tree out in the middle of a windstorm—but I think he might be, you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The one?”

  “Woah, big talk coming from the girl who romanced, what, a dozen girls in college?”

  “A dozen guys, too,” Sarah’s chortle sung of her proud record, for which I could not help but smile at, “Teddy’s pretty great. Tee-Em-Eye?”

  Did I really want to know? Either way, I shrugged.

  “He lets me, y’know, dress him up. Sometimes we have sex, too.”

  A creeping feeling crawled from the back of my mind and into the canals of my ears to whisper their theories to me, but I bit my tongue.

  And then I asked anyway: “What kind of dress up?”

  “Y’know, like you used to? Before?”

  “You mean when I thought that I was only crossdressing as a gay boy?” A sigh escaped me much to my chagrin.

  “Umm…yeah?”

  “Just—just be careful, okay?”

  “Do you think that I shouldn’t?”

  “I dunno. Is it just sex?”

  “Well, sometimes—actually, most of the time—Teddy and I just…hang around his apartment, actually.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Talking, watching TV, pying video games or whatever. Basic couples’ stuff, y’know?”

  A little groan preceded my next question, “Does he go by a different name?”

  “I mean, it would be kind of weird to call him Teddy when he looks so cute, you know?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “So, like, Ruby and I—”

  “—her name is Ruby?”

  “Well, she—he—I mean, it was his idea!”

  Of course it was, “How often do you two do this sort of thing, anyway?”

  “Uh…tely? Every night that we stay in.”

  Jesus Christ, this poor girl—I don’t know which girl I was even referring to, actually.

  “Sarah?”

  “Candi?”

  “Be careful with her,” Finished with the kneading, I pced the bread into the mould and slid it carefully into the pre-heated oven, washed my hands, and then turned back to the woman pying with fire, “I’m serious. Don’t push your partner into dressing up. Ever.”

  Sarah remained silent, although the anxiety on her face spoke at least as much as a true crime podcast episode’s length and content, “R-right. A-are—do you think—?”

  “That’s for ‘Ruby’ to decide, not either of us.”

  Sarah nodded respectfully and set about giving her rounded chunks of cookie dough seating assignments on the oven sheet, “I’ll be careful, Candi. I promise.”

  Hopefully she’d learn a thing or two from her brother’s previous fuck up.

  ***

  December 25, 2021:

  With Scott’s strength still as it was, a makeshift dinner spread was set up in the living room so that he wouldn’t have to get up from his comfortable chair just to sit in a far less than comfortable chair for however long and then walk back to the living room where he would inevitably retire. As a result, it gave the meal a sort of casualness that I thought was far more befitting the Summers family, and also helped crack down on any pressure to perform.

  Situated to my right around the table, Michael auspiciously grazed the back of his left hand against my thigh in that way that he knew got my engine going. Determined not to act too randy, I gnced up at his big, cheeky grin and bumped him with my right shoulder for being such a naughty boy.

  As expected, he snickered to himself, despite the looks from the others.

  “You know, we did, what, five Halloweens together and you never did Cyclops? What gives with that, Summers?”

  “We did five Halloweens together and you never did Jean Grey, Queen!”

  “I’m blonde, I would’ve done Emma Frost, Cyke!”

  “Yeah, honestly, your personality fits Emma Frost better, to be honest.”

  “The hell does that mean, Michael?” I snapped.

  “It means…” Michael's voice took a quick drop, greasing up like it was about to pose for a muscle show, “...that you’re a hell of a femme fatale, Ms. Queen!”

  The heat in my cheeks trickled down to the pit of my stomach as I realized what Michael was doing. Pressing my thighs together, I bit my lip and then did a quick scan of the others surrounding the table.

  They were, of course, all staring at us like we were a free show.

  “So!” Determined to switch the conversation to something that didn’t require asking what Michael was doing, I turned to Teddy as he sat like a stiff board next to Sarah and asked, “Umm…Sarah tells me that you built her gaming rig?”

  I did my best to ignore the stickiness in my panties.

  The gangly nerd hunched forward a little with some bashfulness, “Uh, well, yeah. I’m a software engineer, but I also like pretty much anything having to do with computers.” The carefulness with which Teddy spoke each sylble caught my ear as I wondered if he wasn’t trying to raise the pitch of his voice. The limpness with which he raised his wrist from his p to pick up his knife to cut his face was painfully familiar.

  It didn’t escape me that he wasn’t eating, either, “That’s awesome. One of these days, I’ll have to ask you for your advice when I can finally afford to buy a new gaming PC for myself.”

  “Oh! Umm…yeah? I’d be happy to…”

  “Candace. Or Candi, really.”

  “C-Candace. I’d be h-happy to!”

  God, this family was destined to be weird, wasn’t it? Well, not that I had a leg to stand on when it came to weird families.

  Straightening up in his seat, Scott respectfully toyed with his food a little to give the moment some breathing room before looking me straight in the eye, “So, Candace?”

  “That’s me!”

  “Tell me about yourself. Well, tell me something Sarah probably hasn’t before,” the man’s ugh put the frailness of his body to shame, sounding more robust than it had any right to.

  Swallowing the ham in my mouth, I waited for my voice to be clear before looking up and speaking with the best smile I could manage, “Oh, not much to say. I’ve been teaching at Gravelly Lake High for, what, three years now? Between grading papers and helping kids who stay after, I’m also the teacher advisor for the Gender & Sexualities club.”

  “How fitting,” Sarah interjected, a cheeky little look of pride on her face that looked respectfully hampered in light of the conversation I had had with her earlier, “Michael was the president of ours back when we were in high school.”

  “I remember hearing that somewhere before,” I mused, eying my gss of water, “It’s nice to be there for the kids, but budgets being what they are, work can be kind of a drag.”

  “I’ve been hearing that for as long as the kids have been alive,” Scott added solemnly, “All the money we pay in taxes and yet there still isn’t enough for schools?”

  “They need more money for bombing poor brown people in the Middle East, apparently,” Michael rolled his eyes as he shifted in his seat. It was rare to see him get agitated, but the difficulties present in our career field were always surefire starters, I had noticed.

  “Ugh, I don’t wanna think about that while I’m eating,” Sarah groaned. It seemed like the kind of thing she’d say to change the subject, “How are you two doing?” More than a little callous, but it seemed unwise to challenge, given my history of making a scene in these hallowed halls.

  I really didn’t like the swift up tilt in her voice as Sarah switched subjects, but I replied either way, “We’re doing fine. Things are good, right?” I pced a hand on Michael’s knee as I looked up at him. The scowl from the previous subject faded on his face as he returned my look.

  “Yeah, it’s been great,” a soft tone settled the score, Michael clearly wishing to not make a big deal out of the subject of our reunion. In truth, I regurly wondered if he harbored any ill-will towards me, considering how I had spat on his proposal before.

  Turning the dial mic back on Scott, “So tell me, Scott! Any big pns now that you’re up-and-about again?”

  Any fear I might have had for being too jovial in the way I phrased the question was dispelled with a burst of ughter from the graying man, “Oh, you know, try and get these legs working fully on their own again. Then, I figure Des and I—”

  Desiree sat still—no inch moved—eyes locked on her husband, just in case he got any funny ideas in his head.

  “—uh, you know? I’d like to maybe save up for a trip, now that you kids are out of the house and working.”

  Whatever you might have called ‘staring daggers’, Desiree let her eyes soften a bit, before turning to me, “Try not to go and elope on us while we’re on a cruise or somethin’, y’hear?”

  The dark humor of this woman was an inevitable fact of life, wasn’t it?

  “It’s going to be a few years before you two can afford that, isn’t it?” Michael interjected, calmly, “I mean, with Dad’s medical bills and your job—”

  “My job can fuck off. I haven’t taken a vacation in years, and I have co-managers to handle that shit while I’m away.”

  “Either way, it’s a way’s off, son,” Scott ughed, perhaps to keep the off-set the bile in his wife’s voice, “After I finish physical therapy, I’m still going to have to live in a gym for a few months before I feel up to traveling.”

  Michael backed off and instead returned to the pte before him, but I couldn’t help but touch his left thigh. It was clear enough to me that Michael harbored a lot of guilt surrounding his father’s coma. As well as he hid it when we were younger, something was obviously different about Michael now.

  It was hard not to bme myself for that. Had I destroyed the man’s innocence when I broke up with him all those years ago? That would make the most sense, wouldn’t it?

  Michael spared me any gnces, but his left hand nded atop mine as it sat on his thigh and I could feel the strength in his grip.

  It felt like his hand was going to be damned if it let me go ever again.

  ***

  December 25, 2021:

  Crashing back on my bed, I felt Michael’s body gently sit on the edge of my bed to join me. Rolling over, Michael’s back captured my attention. It seemed wider, but only inasmuch as it was now in need of more space for all of the new burdens it carried compared to when we first met. As much as I wanted to reach out, it felt like Michael was on another pnet after the exhausting day we had had.

  Was he remembering how I had treated him, all those years ago? I wouldn’t bme him if he secretly hated me. I felt the same way, really.

  But I hardly had time to dwell on that, though. My job as a teacher was all-consuming in that regard, and had given me plenty of time to put some distance from my feelings, which had been ever so welcomed. And yet, these past few months with Michael had only dragged those feelings to the surface, day-by-day.

  It was as if I would never outrun them, so long as I indulged in his presence.

  “You okay?” A whisper was all I had in me.

  “Yeah, just tired, I guess.”

  I wasn’t particurly convinced, but I let it go. Returning my attention to the ceiling, thoughts of the dream I had had that morning returned to me, bathing me both in their warmth and my own dread. If ever I dreamed of those children again, I worried that I would not survive the experience.

  Not that I really deserved to, anyway.

  ***

  July 04, 2022:

  Damn, this whole “getting your testicles removed” thing had a hell of a recovery process. The explosions from fireworks had made it impossible to keep my eyes shut for more than a few minutes at a time. That shit sure as hell had not helped.

  Pcing two extra bottles of water on my bedside table, Michael wore a smile, “How’re you doing, Candi?”

  “Like I lost a fight with a squirrel,” I joked. I felt like I was probably turning a new shade of oatmeal. The thick sweat on my face felt like the condensation on a toilet seat poorly pced next to a heater vent.

  “You’re doing great, babe,” that was a hell of a smile the mountain of muscles was sporting. I wonder how he’d feel if he had just recovered from an extremely necessary, life-saving surgery?

  Jesus, why was I thinking like such a bitch?

  “I might need to pee in a few minutes,” keeping the volume of my voice high was a challenge, most especially when needing to rely on one’s boyfriend just to get out of bed and take a piss. Michael had been an incredible help since my orchiectomy st week, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I had been asking too much of him.

  Not that he’d ever admit it.

  “How’s the ice pack down there?”

  “Runnin’ warm.”

  “Lemme swap ‘em out.”

  “It’s nine at night Mikey, you can forget about it and get ready for bed.”

  “I doubt any of us are getting much sleep until the day rolls over.”

  “True. I slept for most of the day.”

  “You need the rest.”

  “I need the breast?”

  “No, I said ‘rest’.”

  “Yeah, I got big breasts, so what?”

  “Are fucking with me?”

  “Well, I can’t exactly fuck you for at least another week…”

  “Oh my God, you are impossible!”

  “No, that’s sex, not me!”

  Walking around to the opposite side of the bed, Michael slipped under the covers and id an arm over me, “You’re such a bitch sometimes.”

  “I’m the Queen Bitch,” I giggled, too tuckered out to lean over and kiss Michael on the lips like I wanted to.

  I’d have to make sure to make up for all those times I had missed out on kissing him once I was back on my feet.

  And my knees.

  TO BE CONTINUED…