by SM Johnson
Avery opened the nightstand drawer and set the scissors on top, like he’d done before. “Color?” he asked me.
“Green,” I answered, my voice not much louder than a whisper, but I was already hard. I liked this passive helplessness. I could hardly move, which meant I couldn’t possibly do anything wrong. There was more comfort for me in that than apprehension.
Apprehension. The word that didn’t have to mean fear, didn’t have to lead to panic. It was still an uncomfortable feeling, but it didn’t overwhelm me. It was an interesting enough feeling that I was willing to see what Avery would do. I trusted him.
He took his shirt off, which made me feel slightly less naked, then came around the bed and leaned over me to tuck a pillow under my head. “Close your eyes, Jules. Trust me to go far enough, but not too far.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but I rested my head and closed my eyes, trying to pretend I was at ease.
I felt him on the bed, between my raised knees, and startled only a little when his fingertips brushed the inside of my thigh, from the crease of my groin to the tender inside of my knee. Again that sense of being touched in places I’d never been touched before. My dick twitched, sending tendrils of tension through my belly, my raised legs, all the way to the fingertips of my bound hands. I raised my head off the pillow to look at him, and he repeated the touch. The little blue jar was on the bed beside him.
“Rest your head, Jules. Close your eyes.”
“What are you going to do? Sir?”
“I’m going to open you, just a little. Just enough to introduce you to your prostate gland.”
I cringed with embarrassment, then forgot to cringe as he stroked a hand over my balls, along my shaft, and all the way to the tip of my dick. Silky again, from the little blue jar.
Somehow I’d forgotten he had two hands, and the press of a finger against my anus made me clench in surprise.
“Don’t clench,” he murmured.
Which was kind of ridiculous, because I couldn’t really help it.
More pressure, gentle but pervasive, and my whole body clenched, my knees jerking against the ties.
“Jules. Relax into the bindings. Let them hold you.”
I could feel the bad kind of anxiety starting to knot my gut.
“Jules?”
“I don’t know how.” I could hear a bit of hysteria in my voice, and Avery’s hands stilled. The pressure at my anus disappeared. Both his hands were on my chest now, smoothing silky circles into my skin.
“Take in a breath, Jules. Now let it out.”
He coached my breathing until the bad anxiety started to go away. He told me to tighten my hands into fists, and then open them. Tighten the muscles of my arms, and then relax them. I knew this exercise. I did this sometimes when I couldn’t fall asleep. One muscle group after another, tighten and relax, tighten and relax.
He talked me through progressive muscle relaxation until I could let the soft ties hold me.
“There, good, my pretty one.”
I hadn’t even had to ask for yellow. He’d known before I was there, and responded.
I felt a touch to my dick again, and then, without warning, his finger breached my hole, gently but quickly, and by the time I might have clenched to keep him out, it was too late.
That weird, invaded feeling went through me, and while I knew it was nothing more than a finger, all of my attention was focused right there. It wasn’t hurting me, not exactly, but it was still foreign and strange, and thus surreal. For real, no one but him had ever touched me like this. I felt flayed open, more naked than naked. This… this was like he owned some part of me that I hadn’t known existed. I’d never been this exposed or this vulnerable.
I was making noises again. Silly insipid nonsensical murmurs. He moved his finger and I whimpered. It didn’t belong there, inside of me. I was suddenly overwhelmed by that sense of dirty, the inside of my belly folding in on itself, an anticipatory sickness.
Another movement, backtracking, his finger gliding nearly out of me, but then back in, and it was neither tentative, nor particularly gentle.
I made more noises, and realized I was trembling in the bonds. Not shivering like when I was cold, but a faint tremor that encompassed all of me, from my shoulders to my toes, as if every nerve in my body had just been activated.
His hand moved, this time touching me somewhere inside in a way that made the tremors more pronounced.
The glide of his finger out of me, all the way out, brought a humiliating rush of sensation because it felt like…it felt like… oh, but then he did something new. “Little stretch now,” he said. “Two fingers.”
There came a bright spark of pain that took my breath away and made me see white behind my eyelids.
“Open your eyes, Jules. Look at me.”
I didn’t want to.
I was gasping for breath, panting.
Still, his voice held that firm command, and so I obeyed. When I opened my eyes, I expected Avery to be watching his hands, but no, he was watching my face. There was a sharp, stretching pain that made me gasp out loud and brought immediate tears to my eyes. I was visibly shaking now, and yet I wasn’t fighting the ties, wasn’t fighting him.
Just then he moved his fingers, pulling them all the way out, then pushing them quickly all the way back in.
I nearly died of shame, to be looking at him, and him at me, while he did these things to my body.
I felt the blush because this was too much intimacy.
“Keep your eyes on mine, Jules,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling, but there was a sort of satisfied look to him, the predator had finally caught his prey.
There was an electric pressure inside of me that overrode the stretching pain, and I didn’t know what it was, but it felt like I was losing any semblance of control I’d thought I had.
The trembling stopped. More than that, all time and all the world seemed to pause in a gigantic endless silence. I stared into his eyes in this silent place and waited for something I didn’t have words for.
His fingers moved inside me, and the silence was broken by a loud cry. I didn’t even recognize that the noise was coming from my own throat. Every muscle in my body tensed, and my internal walls clenched around his fingers, and it was so unbearable that I started to writhe in the bonds.
The orgasm came out of nowhere, unexpectedly fast, with an embarrassing grunt, and a bearing down against his fingers that would have been humiliating, except I was too far beyond the world to care. The first burst of semen spattered my throat and chest, and the rest landed on my belly, until it ran down my sides, and when I thought it was over, Avery moved his hand, and my dick seized and pumped out more. For a moment I saw stars where Avery’s face should be, and when my vision cleared I saw that Avery was smiling.
After Avery let me loose and we changed the sheets, we snuggled in his bed. I loved the feel of his skin beneath my fingers and couldn’t seem to get enough of touching him. He still wore boxer briefs, and they still had a hard bulge. I let my hand drift down, but found I was too shy to investigate, so I ended up with my fingers clinging to the back of his thigh. “Are you ever going to let me see the rest of you?”
He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed. “I will. But not now. Not yet. It’s… the one part of myself I’m not entirely comfortable with yet. Not uncomfortable enough to have surgery. But the thought of getting that naked in front of anyone...” he shuddered instead of completing the sentence.
“You never have?”
“Since my full transition to male? No. Only my doctor, because he insists ignoring those parts could be dangerous to my health.”
“You, ah, rub against me sometimes. It feels hard.”
“Males transitioning to female stuff their bras, females transitioning to male stuff their shorts.”
I couldn’t suppress a giggle. “So there’s a roll of socks in your underwear?”
“It’s more like a prosthesis. Mine is designed to
bump my clit, so it feels good when you’re sitting on my lap, or when I nudge up to you. I’m not thrilled about not having a working cock, but there’s no guarantee a surgical cock would work, and there’s always a risk of losing sensation with surgery.” He pressed his groin against mine. “Currently, I have plenty of sensation.”
I pinched his ass in retaliation and he yelped.
We dozed a bit, and then my stomach growled.
“We should heat up the chicken and vegetables,” Avery said.
“I don’t want to get out of bed. I like this. Was your name always Avery?”
He tickled me and I arched away from him. “You’re not supposed to ask someone their dead name,” he said, but he was laughing. “And don’t pretend for one minute you’re not going to google my whole family the minute you get a chance.”
“Oh, I’m going to google everything about this. And since I’ve been known to be obsessive, I might need to take a few days off work.”
“Request denied. I am not going to work without you. In fact, I’m going to get you back into my office as soon as possible.”
Another thought struck me. “Does everyone at Phoenix & Phoenix know?”
Avery shrugged. “I don’t know, and try not to care. Evan knows, of course, but probably not Stephanie, or at least I’ve never told Stephanie. I think Evan knows it’s in poor taste to out me to others. I doubt anyone in submissions bothers thinking about me all that much. Well, except for Susan. She’s known my family since Livvie and I were small. She’s always doted on me and treated me well, and didn’t miss a beat when I showed up as a man to take on my dad’s role in the company. My dad never knew, but my mom – well, I told you she helped a lot. She paid for intensive therapy and top surgery, pretty much anything insurance didn’t cover. So she’s good, except she doesn’t care for my name.”
“I noticed something about the way she said your name, now that I think about it,” I said. “I guess I’m more observant than I thought.”
“I suspect you are very observant.”
“I wish you’d have felt like you could tell me, before now.”
“Finding the right time is more difficult than you think. I’m out of practice, because at this point, I’ve been on T long enough that people who didn’t know me before don’t even take a second look. The only people I need to tell at all, now, are potential sex partners.”
“Plural?”
“No, so far just you. As much as I dreaded this conversation, I’m glad we’re having it.”
“We’ve been having sex for a week,” I said. “And I was kinda looking forward to sucking your cock.”
“Oh, I’ll find you a cock to suck, don’t you worry about that. There’ll be a cock down your throat, and one up your ass, and I’ll fill your ears with dirty words, and your brain with even dirtier thoughts. I’ll tell you how much you’re gonna take, and you’ll take it.”
He was the same Avery who kissed me in the office. The same Avery who pulled me onto his lap and spanked me. The same Avery who would happily tell me what to do when I was nervous, and probably when I wasn’t.
I snuggled closer to him, and then lifted my head to bite his chin.
“If you’re that hungry, we should get up.”
“I’m not hungry for food, Mr. Phoenix. Sir.”
chapter nineteen
may you feel safe
I should have been tired as I got organized for the day, but I wasn’t. I was euphoric. Avery hadn’t been kidding about not getting any sleep. We took a nap somewhere about four in the morning, and we both groaned when the alarm went off. Prior to the nap was talking, and Avery trying to teach me how to deep throat a dildo, and more talking. There was kissing. And me trying to peek into his boxer-briefs while he dozed. There was tickling at one point, and then laughter, and long comfortable silences.
I danced into work, silly and goofy and feeling just as excited and free as I’d felt dancing toward kindergarten. And Avery? He walked with his usual grace, but grinned at me the whole time and never once told me to stop prancing.
When Tasha came in to the submissions office, I was just settling down, browsing the feed with an earbud in one ear, humming to a ridiculous song called ‘Juicy.”
“Well, you’re in a good mood this morning,” she said to me.
“Avery and I aren’t just a thing, we’re boyfriends.” I didn’t mean to blurt it out as loud as I did, but I couldn’t stop smiling either.
Maybe it was contagious, because she started smiling, too. “You didn’t know this yesterday?”
“I wasn’t quite sure yesterday, but we cleared it up. I am ridiculously happy.” I’m pretty sure that sounded exactly as campy and gay out loud as it did in my head.
Tasha laughed. “Well, don’t go soft on bad writers just because you’re happy.”
“I hereby solemnly swear I will not enjoy bad writing any more today than I did yesterday.” I smothered a giggle. It was fun to feel this wonderful. Maybe this was like being high. I felt confident. I felt attractive. I felt remarkably not at all like myself.
My solemn swear was a lie. I loved the bad writing even more than usual, because instead of being annoyed, I was entertained. I made a point to carefully read over every letter before I sent it, because in my head I was making fun a little bit sometimes, and I didn’t want that to come across in a hurtful way.
My rule today was that I couldn’t put anything in my mouth without emailing Avery, and waiting for him to reply with permission. So when Susan came in brandishing a plate of cupcakes, I groaned out loud .
I typed, “Dear Mr. Avery Phoenix, Sir… may I put a cupcake in my mouth? Sincerely yours, Julian.”
He answered, “Dear Adorable Jules. No. You may put one bite of a cupcake in your mouth. Sincerely, Avery Phoenix.”
It took about a hundred years to eat one cupcake and finish my morning cup of coffee, because I had to send and receive an email before every bite or sip. I managed to browse only four submissions and write four letters before Avery came to collect me for lunch. Either I was going to really drop my coffee consumption, or my production numbers were going to dive into the trash.
Instead of feeling awkward about Avery coming to get me, I felt a rush of excitement and satisfaction. Tasha gave me a very obvious wink, and whispered, “Don’t have too much fun at lunch.”
At the café, I watched Avery browse the menu, interact with the waitress, and drink a cup of chai tea. I tried to see the ‘girl’ in his face, but he just looked like Avery to me. A handsome man who was one hundred percent courteous to the waitress. I liked that about him. Well. I liked everything about him, but the fact that he treated the waitress well gave me that sunburst feeling in my chest again. I couldn’t think of a time when he hadn’t been pleasant to people who waited on us.
A guy two tables over was rude to the waitress. He was clean-cut, well-dressed, and exceptionally good looking, but the more he berated her for not having this or that flavor of pie, the uglier he became in my eyes.
I found myself glancing between that guy and Avery, making comparisons in my head. Avery was winning all the way. He must have noticed something, because he said, “Should I intervene?”
“What? Oh. No, she has it handled. I was just thinking how you never treat people like that, and yet you have this hard-ass reputation.”
He smirked at me. “Oh, I can be hard-ass, and you know it.”
The blush was hot and immediate. I reached across the table and flicked his collar with my fingers. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. I was a boorish prick for quite long enough, trust me. I try to make up for it every chance I get, now that I’m myself. So, if you think I should confront that guy, say the word. I won’t fall down if I see the punch coming.”
Flashback to yesterday, the strange mix of feelings I was too shocked to identify in the moment. Avery on the ground, that guy kicking him, and me just standing there, completely frozen, too helpless myself to offer any h
elp. Scared, and angry on Avery’s behalf, and there was even a wave of embarrassment that he was on the ground, barely defending himself.
And yet. He hadn’t acted embarrassed at all, either in the moment or afterward.
“Thanks for reminding me of yesterday.”
He grinned. “No worries. That was just a blip. I suspect Kevin knew Livvie was about to dump his ass, and he figured he’d just jump to the other twin. He acted personally insulted when I told him I was thinking of transitioning. Like it hurt his manhood that he was attracted to me. I was clumsy about explaining, though, came out to him by suggesting he’d have to be gay to date me. I was trying to pass it off as a joke, just to see how he reacted. And he reacted very, very badly. And then I reacted badly, telling him to go fuck himself.”
The customer berated the waitress again, so loud that it caught the attention of everyone in the café.
“Want me to go punch him in the face?”
“Real macho, Avery.”
“It would be.”
He looked pleased with himself, smug.
I snuck a look at that other guy. The waitress had sat down across from him in the booth for a minute, whatever she said must have had an impact, because now he was staring into his coffee, looking deflated.
“He doesn’t look angry anymore, he just looks sad.”
Avery turned his head and his whole upper body to look. “As if he’d been looking forward to that pie all day. Maybe it’s really good here. Or maybe his wife left him last night, and he woke up alone for the first time in five years, and a slice of apple crumble pie would have been a comfort. Yeah, I think that’s it. He’s managed to hold his shit together so far today, while all his underlings aggravated the piss out of him, needing constant direction, as if they couldn’t so much as take a piss without him pointing the way to the bathroom. He just kept telling himself, ‘I can make it till lunchtime, I can do this, and then I’ll have some of that magnificent pie and then I’ll feel better.’ But they’re out of the pie, and now he’s remembering his wife had lunch with him at this very café twice last week, and he had no idea she’d found someone else and was trying to find a way to tell him. Or wait – maybe he had lunch here with his secretary twice last week, and he had no idea that his wife knew about the affair, and was going to confront him and leave.”