She took longer than expected, but eventually she came to sit with me on the couch, putting her legs across my lap. “We need to talk.”
I paused the game and looked over at her. “If you’re going to tell me I need to stop moping and get my act together, I know.”
She flinched like I’d taken a swing at her. “Nope,” she said, and then sighed. “You know, ordinarily I start these conversations by passing a large bottle of grog over. But I’ve done enough damage to Junior already, and your deceptively sweet little blonde girlfriend very cheerfully told me she’d fucking kill me if I let you drink.”
I had to smile a bit at that. That didn’t surprise me.
“So I hope you forgive me for being totally crap at this stuff sober, but I just got off the phone,” she told me. “And I wanted to apologise for nagging you about your mum. I didn’t know what she was like until I saw the fallout. I haven’t seen you like this since Jason picked you apart.”
I smiled in appreciation. “Well, at least at Frost, I could just quit.”
She pressed her lips in a line. “Yeah, exactly.” She sat back. “Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, mainly about how fucking terrible I’ve been. I’ve been whinging constantly about not wanting to tell people I’m pregnant. But seriously, why? Work aside, none of my family or friends are going to disown me. No one’s going to do to me what your mum did to you. Look at you. You’ve been catatonic for three days straight because at some point, you’re actually going to have to deal with breaking the bad news to your super crazy mum that there’s no more Mr Perfect, and that she has a son instead of a daughter. And I’m like, Jesus Christ, Sare, get a grip. I’m being precious about disclosing something that’s not even a big deal.” She took a breath. “So, broke the ice and told my mum.”
My eyebrows went up. I hadn’t expected that at all. “You did?”
“Yeah,” she said, and then struggled a bit to continue. “And she didn’t make me feel like crap and I didn’t crack the screen of my phone. She was so happy, she was crying, like, ‘I’m going to be a grandma?’ and made me wait while she went to find Dad so I could tell him, too. They both dropped everything to drive back to Bathurst tonight so Rob and I can stay there over the weekend to celebrate.” She looked a bit teary. “I told Mum that I nearly had an abortion, and she said, ‘Honey, why didn’t you tell me earlier? I would have come over, I would have made you hot chocolate.’” She swallowed. “And the whole time I was on the phone to them, I was thinking about what it must be like for you, not ever having this.”
That just served to make me feel really depressed again. “Yeah,” I agreed. “But that’s great, Sarah. I’m really happy for you.” I was, but my heart wasn’t in it.
She reached across and squeezed my hand. “So, yeah, sorry for being a total bitch about pressuring you into talking to your mum, and I guess we’ll deal with it when she rocks up.”
It was a really nice thing to say, but honestly, Sarah had no idea about Mum’s capacity to fuck things up. I didn’t particularly want her to find out, either. I didn’t really want any of my friends to find out. I wanted the whole situation to just disappear. “Thanks.”
After that, Sarah went to go pack and I went to bed. Being unconscious seemed like a better alternative to listening to Rob’s happy whistling and their chatter about what they should and shouldn’t take to Bathurst.
The following day I did get myself out of bed before midday, and despite the fact I felt like doing nothing else except playing the most mind-numbing titles on my PlayStation, I managed to do some grocery shopping for everyone—taking my bank balance down under $1000—and then panicked about impending poverty and opened my tablet to put together some sort of ad for commissions. I didn’t get very far.
Bree showed up in the late afternoon, armed with a massive bag full of god knows what. She bounced over to me, leant over the back of the couch and drew a big, lopsided smiley on the empty canvas I had open. Then, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “Are you feeling better now that you’ve had a few days to—” I was stiff as a fucking board, and she noticed. “Oh,” she said, and hugged me anyway. “Don’t worry! I have some stuff with me that will help you totally forget about your mum and we can have a really nice, relaxing weekend!”
“Unless it’s a gallon of wine, it’s not going to do enough,” I said darkly.
She hugged me tighter. “It will be okay, Min,” she told me. “It will. Don’t listen to your mum. You’re amazing. You’re better than being her slave for the rest of your life. You’ve got this great future ahead of you and it’s going to be awesome, and I am not just going to sit by and let her take that from you,” she told me, and then announced, “So I’m going to cheer you up!”
I did worry a bit about what Bree had in mind, but Bree’s first act of cheer was actually just taking her oh my god, cutest ever apron out of her bag and then cooking me some ‘real’ food. While I was eating it, she stood in front of me—still wearing her strawberry-patterned apron—and solemnly recited a long list of things she liked about me as numbered dot-points. It never seemed to end.
I interrupted her. “How long did it take you to do that?”
“I’ve been working on it since Monday,” she said. “Every time I’d think of something, I’d take out the list and add it, and I’m not done yet, so shhh.”
I ‘shh’ed, looking properly chastised. There were so many things on it—little things, like the fact I texted her when I knew she had a test to wish her luck, and things I’d forgotten, like the time a year ago when she’d messaged me on Deviant Art to say she was having a bad day, and apparently I’d replied with something comforting, even though she was a relative stranger. There was also big stuff, like how inspiring I was for standing up to the people who were awful to me at Frost, how it made her feel to watch someone finally take a stand against Andrej, and how she can sit in class now and not be terrified the teacher will ask her questions. She was a bit teary by the end of it. “Basically I just want you to know that despite how your mum sees you and the awful things she says, that’s not who you are. You’re all of these other things, and there are people who actually value them and can see you’re amazing, and people who think to themselves every day how lucky they feel that you chose them, even if they don’t really know why.”
I couldn’t watch her cry. I put my rice aside and patted my lap, and she came and sat across my thighs and put her arms around my neck. “Who else would spend five days writing a list of things they like about someone just to cheer them up?” I kissed her temple. “You’re beautiful, inside and out.”
She sniffled, smiling appreciatively at my compliment. “I’m not sad,” she said blotting her cheeks on the long sleeves of her jumper. “These are happy tears.”
I laughed once. “Yeah, no better way to celebrate happiness than openly sobbing.”
She joined me in some miserable laughter. “I am! I mean, I’m not happy that your mum is trying to wreck your life—that’s awful—but I’m really happy that you have a life to be wrecked, and I’m happy you’re sharing a big part of that life with me. I made us tarts.” I wasn’t sure about how tarts and sharing lives were connected, but I released Bree to go get them out of her bag.
She was preparing them when Sarah bustled through—“Hey, where’s my invite?”—so Bree laid out a plate for her, too. Unfortunately, Sarah ended up getting distracted needing to finish work for Frost so she didn’t have to do it over the weekend. Rob arrived later and stoically refused to eat any dessert because Sarah hadn’t, and then they went to bed before ten so they could leave early on Saturday.
I was up early enough to wave goodbye to them. Before they left, Sarah took Bree aside for a private talk.
After they’d gone, I asked Bree, “Did she finally tell you she’s pregnant?”
Bree looked surprised and then laughed. “No, she asked me to take care of you. Don’t tell her I told you, though!”
Bree’s plan for
both Saturday and Sunday was a marathon of obscure movies. Some of them were awful, though, and I ended up with serious second-hand embarrassment for the actors. Halfway through a particularly terrible one on Sunday afternoon, Bree stopped playback and scrunched up her nose. “Um. Sorry about that.”
I was laughing at her expression. “I thought the plan was to ease my suffering?”
“It had good reviews,” she protested. She took a break while another one was downloading to fix us a selection of little powdered European biscuits, passed me a Red Bull out of her bag of tricks, and then set up the next movie.
“What else have you got in that bag?” I asked her as I tried one of those biscuits and got icing sugar all over me. It was a rhetorical question because I was pretty happy with what had come out of it so far, but a few minutes into the movie I realised Bree was watching me thoughtfully. “Mmm?” I prompted her.
She smiled slightly, and then tried to force it off her face. “Okay, so there might be some other stuff in there,” she said. Her cheeks were a bit pink. “Just in case. I knew you were probably going to be really stressed out this weekend and not interested, but I thought I’d pack it anyway…”
I narrowed my eyes at her. Those pink cheeks meant it was something a bit naughty, and while we were cuddling as we watched the movie, I wasn’t really up for anything else right now. I was feeling pretty good for the first time all week, and I didn’t want to risk feeling like shit again by doing anything that might remind me my body wasn’t right. I… still kind of wanted to know what it was, though. And I liked it when she blushed. “Yeah?”
She was still trying not to smile. It seemed a bit nervous. “Um. Well, I was kind of thinking about that conversation we had on Monday,” she said. “Where you asked me if I wished you had a dick. I’m happy either way, but do you wish you had one? Like, even a little bit?”
Oh. I think all the blood drained from my face. I put the other half of the biscuit back on the plate. “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“But you want to be able to fuck me, yeah? Like a guy?”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. Well, since we were being honest, that was the reason why we never got our clothes off, wasn’t it? I always got caught up at some point because I expected to have something to put inside her, but didn’t. And while I knew there was equipment trans guys could buy to fix that, I hadn’t gotten past scrolling through web pages about it. It was too confronting, and I wasn’t sure about the ‘trans guy’ title. She was right, though, so I nodded.
She smiled again. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She scrunched her face up. “And you never buy this stuff for yourself because you feel really weird about it… So, yeah, I kind of used that money I took the other week to get you something to try.”
Jesus. “It’s here?”
She nodded. “It’s in my bag. But rather than just, like thrust it into your hand because I know this stuff really freaks you out, I thought I’d just ask you if you’re interested in it first.”
I had a very mixed reaction. The part of me that always wanted to run a hundred miles away from anything like that was, not surprisingly, suggesting that I take Bree’s bag, put it very far away from me forever, and never find out if it was or wasn’t what I thought it was—I had enough going on, seriously. But another part of me was, well… a bit curious about it. Curious and terrified, because what if I did like it? “I think I’m interested,” I told her slowly. “Can I see?”
She brightened, giving me a huge, nervous grin. “Okay!” she said, and sprung up off the couch to go and retrieve it from her bag. She returned with a sex-shop-style brown paper bag and passed it to me. Biting her lip as a means of smothering her grin, she nodded at it. “Have a look.”
I took a deep breath and peeked in the bag. There was a box inside with a picture of an Asian guy wearing briefs and proudly displaying a very prominent, very realistic erection protruding out of the front of them. ‘FTM Hard Packer’, the box read, confirming my suspicions about what Bree bought. Inside, the actual packer was just as realistic as it looked on the box. Just like my soft packer, at a glance the hard packer could easily have been mistaken for the real thing. A really, really hard real thing. Blushing, I realised it came with a harness: this packer had a specific purpose. It wasn’t just for looks.
Bree reached out and touched it again. “What do you think?”
I considered it. “It’s kind of wide,” I said, and looked up at her. “Maybe you should have bought a smaller size. Aren’t you worried it might hurt you?”
She looked really embarrassed. “Um,” she said sheepishly. “It didn’t.”
God, if I hadn’t already been blushing... I gulped a breath. “You tried it?”
“Well, everyone says it hurts a bit the first time, and I wanted to make sure my first time with you wouldn’t hurt!”
…and I was holding it. I put my face in one hand for a moment and laughed bleakly. “Oh my god,” I said, and then laughed a bit more. It was surreal.
“Anyway, you want to try it on? Even just under your jeans at first or something?”
Did I? “Okay...”
I took it into my bedroom and just stood there in the centre of my room for a moment, working up the courage to put the harness on inside my underwear. It was actually more difficult than it looked. When I’d finally managed to secure it tightly against me and stood upright again, I had a look at myself in the mirror. I had my jeans and underwear around my knees, and this really aggressive-looking erection jutting out from under my hoodie. My first instinct was that I should just take it off as quickly as possible.
I managed to just take a few breaths and not panic about it, though. I’d been far more freaked out by my soft packer than I was by this now, and my soft packer and I had come to form an uneasy truce. I could probably come to terms with this one, too, even if I wasn’t sure about it right now. I didn’t need to feel comfortable immediately, after all. I just needed to try it.
I followed Bree’s suggestion of pulling my undies and jeans up over it. It was a bit of a struggle to contain it—I’d watched Henry do that a few times, so I guessed that was realistic, too—but when I was done, my reflection was mildly less confronting.
Because Bree had bought it for me, I felt a bit obliged to at least show her. It took me a few false starts to get out the door, though. It felt ridiculous. I felt a bit ridiculous wearing it. I was casually wearing a sex toy like it was completely normal, when any regular guy would lock himself away until a big prominent bulge like this was gone.
I somehow made it out into the living room to model it for her anyway. “Uh, so…” I presented myself to her. My face was bright fucking red.
“Whoa,” she said, eyebrows up, and spent a couple of long, painful seconds considering my groin. Then, she started giggling. “I’m kind of not sure what to say? I mean, what’s the appropriate compliment? ‘Wow, Min, that dick looks great on you’?”
I grimaced. “I suppose just pretending it’s not there isn’t an option?”
She was still giggling. “Why would I do that? It looks good, I promise! Like, I mean it’s super obvious, and my eyes are like, whoa, right on it, but that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? So, if you came out here to get my opinion, I like it.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said, satisfied she’d had her input, and then turned around to go back to the bedroom.
“Wait!”
I turned and gave her a quizzical look.
“You don’t like it?”
I opened my mouth long before I actually replied. “I think I need some time to get used to it.”
I’d only taken one more step before Bree stopped me again. “Um, Sarah and Rob are away for the weekend. Isn’t now, like, the best opportunity ever to do that?”
I frowned at her for a moment. “You mean I should leave it on?”
She shrugged, wrestling with that nervous grin again. “I’m just saying.”
That
felt like more of a subtle request than a suggestion, and so—aside from my ever-present discomfort with genitals in general— there didn’t seem to be a compelling reason to not do it. I went and sat beside her on the couch.
I put my arm around Bree as she unpaused the movie, and then we sat in uncomfortable, tense silence for a few minutes while it continued. Bree was fidgeting, though. She kept glancing towards me and shifting in the seat, and eventually, just as the movie was finally starting to make sense, she tugged at my sleeve.
“Um,” she asked tentatively, “Can I see how it feels?”
I swallowed. “Yeah, if you want.”
Hardly able to make eye contact with me, she reached down between us, giving the bulge a quick experimental prod, and then putting her hands back primly in her own lap.
I had expected her to do more than that. “That’s all?”
Her cheeks went a bit pink. “I didn’t want to freak you out.”
“I don’t think it’s going to.”
She took a breath. The coy little smile made another appearance. “Can I…?”
I nodded, and her hand crept back into my lap, squeezing the bulge a little, exploring the length of it, and then feeling all the way down to where the shaft met the harness. That was deep in my lap, against my skin. I inhaled sharply. It made her look up at me with her hand still there, and we locked eyes. I saw her take a breath.
Afterwards, she tried to sit still and keep her hands to herself as we both pretended to casually watch the movie. It was a lost cause. I was too aware of her next to me: my thigh against hers and her hand on top of it—slowly, fractionally moving upwards as we kept watching—each time she took a breath, and how each breath came faster when she realised I was looking at her. She was more engaging than the movie, and both of us were hyper aware of the bulge in the front of my jeans.
We made it through two more movies before it was time to be responsible adults, stop looking for more movies to watch, and admit Bree needed to go home. It was with a heavy fucking heart I turned the TV off and stood up to let her go and pack up. I could have done with some more of her hand creeping up my thigh and her little smiles in my peripheral vision.
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