We were much less chatty on the way home; for me it was the pot and the booze and my fear. I worried what was on his mind. I chain-smoked and listened to Einstürzende Neubauten blend into Skinny Puppy; I couldn’t find a foothold in all this urgent, unfamiliar music and I marveled that a man with such a sweet disposition could enjoy such dark, heavy music. He didn’t seem violent, but I had no idea what I could tell him or how he’d react. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him emotionally or sexually or what.
When we stopped for gas, he started to try to convince me to stay over. He had a point; if we stopped at his house we could be in bed soon after 2:00 a.m. If he drove me home and then back, he wouldn’t get to bed until 3:30. He offered me a grilled cheese with brie before sleep and a trip to the finest brunch in the galaxy in the morning. While he cooked I curled up on the couch and flipped through the channels. When the sun woke me, I was dusted in crumbs and he was snoring on the opposite side of the couch.
We went to brunch in our disheveled cruise clothes; he dropped me at home and we went off to our various Christmases.
The office shut down between the holidays, so almost everyone spent that whole week traveling. I stayed around, though, and hung out a bit with Wendy who totally scolded me for not coming out to Jonas on the cruise.
“Dude, I’m sure he already knows. He’s totally into you and it’s not exactly like you’re the only tranny in this town. You’re not even the only one who works at this company.”
“I just don’t know how to bring it up,” I said. “There never seems to be the right time.”
“You could do it any time. You’ve got his cell phone number. You should do it right now,” she said. “The longer you wait the more you’re going to fuck this up. He’s into you, and I bet that at least part of why he’s into you is that he knows you’re trans. But there’s only one way to find out.” Wendy pushed the phone into my hand. “Call him now.”
I called. I got his voice mail. I left a message: “Hey, Jonas, I was just wondering how your holiday was and what you’re doing for New Year’s. Let me know—I’d love to talk again. There’s something I wanna tell you.” I still felt like a chicken, but Wendy said, “Well, at least it’s a step in the right direction.”
He didn’t call me back for another couple of days—family had kept him busy. “So what’s up?” he asked as if he was expecting a casual conversation.
“Well, I sort of wanted to apologize for the other night. I didn’t expect to get so tipsy and all, but I wasn’t sure if you knew that I was, well, that I am transsexual. Pre-op.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, I thought so,” Jonas finally said. “I mean, people gossip and all and I figured that if it was true you’d say so. It’s okay with me, but honestly I think I prefer you as a woman.”
His tone was so dry that I didn’t get that he was joking until he started to laugh. He asked if we could get together after he got back on the second. He offered to pick up sushi and bring it to my house. I counteroffered: I’d cook. Maybe I’d make a pesto lasagna. We had a date.
He arrived in a bolo tie. “Posies and a present,” he said. “It smells amazing in here.” He’d brought a lily bouquet, a bottle of wine, a pint of gelato and a gift box.
“I know you’re not big on Christmas, but I got you a little something” he said, smiling and pushing the gift box into my hands. “But don’t open it yet. Maybe after dinner.” He ate generously, praising my culinary skills with the same elaborate flourishes he gave to his jokes; I watched while he helped himself to seconds. He finished, refilled the wineglasses and requested that we retire to the parlor.
“I think it’s time to open presents,” he said gleefully. He sat on the couch while I opened the box and shook out a white negligee; a shimmering nylon skirt with a scalloped lace bodice.
“It’s custom,” he said. “I have a friend who’s starting to sell vintage recreations through her website. That’s her Cat On a Hot Tin Roof model.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You can say you’ll let me see you in it,” he said. “I’d really like that.”
I just stared at him, barely feeling the cool, soft material in my hands; I dropped it back into the box. “Like, right now?” I asked and he nodded eagerly. I stood up, feeling terribly lightheaded. I drained my glass, took the box and said, “Why don’t you find some music while I slip into something more…comfortable?” He was pouring more wine as I closed the bathroom door behind me.
I was tipsy and the bodice was a little loose; I hoped he wasn’t going to feel disappointed that I wasn’t quite yet capable of filling it out on my own. I’d have never chosen to wear white and was surprised to see that it looked kind of pretty on me, and that the cut of the gown seemed to be giving me curves I knew I didn’t have. I posed in the mirror, gauging my ability to disguise any telltale bulge beneath my waist. I primped my hair, touched up my makeup and took a deep, cleansing breath. I felt sexy and delicate; I felt scared and vulnerable. I still felt that I wasn’t enough of a woman to be in this position, and I was still skeptical that he didn’t harbor similar doubts. “Relax,” I told my reflection. “This is what you’ve wanted your whole life. This is a dream coming true.”
I opened the bathroom door to find that he’d doused all the lights except for a candle and the music videos on the television. The candlelight somehow made his eyes look more sparkly than ever. He offered me a refilled wineglass as I perched on the couch, and quoted Cat On a Hot Tin Roof: “Be careful, Maggie, your claws are showing,” he said. I froze up, worried that my slight costume had malfunctioned. He pressed the glass into my hand, apologizing: “Sorry, no—I was just quoting the movie.” I sipped and said, “I guess I just don’t get a lot of guys quoting Tennessee Williams at me anymore.” He kissed my mouth. “You are even prettier than I imagined.” He traced his thick finger along my shoulder blade and asked, “What would you like me to do for you?”
I hadn’t prepared for that question. I’d been so wrapped up in worry about what he wanted from me that I had no idea what I wanted. I said, “I really don’t know. Can I do something for you?” He shook his head no. “I’d really like to explore you,” he said. “Let’s figure out what you like.” He kissed me and asked me questions.
“Do you like men?’
“Some.”
“Do you like me?’
“Yes.”
“Do like women?”
“Some.”
“Do you like penetration?”
“It’s never really worked for me.”
“Can I see your pussy?”
“I don’t really have one yet.”
“Let me see.” He pulled at my girdle until I pushed him away so I could slide it off. I sat up; I was shivering. I couldn’t believe I was letting this happen. I tossed the girdle to the floor and pulled my legs up on the sofa again. He pushed my knees apart.
“I’ve been doing some reading,” he said. “Since you told me I’ve read up a lot on what they’re able to do these days for girls like you.” His fingers traced a line up my leg until he reached my crotch. He stroked lightly on my scrotum. “Like this here, this is your labia, right?” His fingers rolled in small circles around the soft tissue until his middle finger came to rest on the underside of my penis. My stomach rolled; I didn’t even like to touch my genitals.
“You’re shivering,” he said. “Do you need a blanket? Do you need to stop?” We’d gone this far; I shook my head no. He continued: “Good. Well, this, this is what everyone seems to have an issue with. I can see how everyone wants to think they know what this is and now that I’ve seen it for myself, I gotta say that it’s sort of penish, but when all is said and done this—” He stopped talking and pushed his finger up into me and held it there while I writhed, pressing down with my hips until I couldn’t take any more of the pressure. He pulled his hand away, and I said, “Not yet.” I grabbed his hand and pushed his fingers up, beneath my scrot
um/labia, up into my pelvis. “There,” I said. “Fuck me there.” He rolled his fingers around inside me and my mind splintered. Everything felt electric—his fingers burning deep trails into me; the fabric of the couch scratching out messages against my arms and my back. I felt like I was howling.
Later, Jonas would tell me that I was hardly making any sounds at all apart from soft, short gasps for air. He told me that he found that all it took was one small circle of his finger to send tremors all through me; he couldn’t believe how little it seemed to take to send me into the stratosphere. I didn’t feel like I could get enough. I had no clue what he was touching inside of me, but I didn’t want it to stop. Surely he was going as deep as he dared; we were both in new territory. I felt him pull his fingers out of me and with that came jolts of energy, great muscular contractions. Jonas told me that I writhed for almost a full minute after he’d pulled out, and that he’d never seen anyone come with such intensity. My mind was blank; I remember feeling exhausted. I had no idea how long I lay there, dazed; soon enough I came to and I found him sitting opposite me, smoking his pipe and smiling.
“Was I out long?” I asked him, and he shook his head no. “Just five or seven minutes. Long enough for a bit of a smoke. Do you need anything else?” he asked, and I said, “How about dessert?”
HOLD UP
Ivan Coyote
She was hot and so was her friend. I had pissed her friend off about an hour before, back at the bar, by confessing that I really didn’t like a lot of spoken word poetry, but out here on the sweltering summer sidewalk it seemed like all had been forgiven. They were sharing an American Spirit cigarette and flirting with me and my buddy with the suit vest and bow tie and slicked-back hair. It was one of those dress-up nights. Minutes ago she had had me by the necktie up against the wall in the hallway that led from the dance floor to the bathroom, her hand sliding mine up under her skirt to the soft smooth place where the curve of her asscheek met the top of her stockings. Now all four of us were halfway up the block from the bar, swaying and smooth talking and suggesting naughty things.
Somehow all four of us ended up back in my king-size hotel room bed, shirts off but pants still on, all eight hands meandering and mouths mixing lipsticks and cigarette-bitter and warm whiskey breath, spit-shined black boots and high heels all a-tangle. I remember her nipple hardening between my first finger and thumb, and her friend’s fingernails biting into the sweaty skin of the dip in my back above my ass, and then she said it:
“So nice to have hormone-free beef in my hands again.”
Her friend moaned in agreement just as my friend unsnapped her bra.
I froze; shook my head to get her words out of my ears, but they stuck there.
I didn’t jump out of bed and ask them all to leave or anything drastic, but my heart just wasn’t up to the mission after that, and a couple of minutes more of midnight groping later when she raised one expressive and delicately manicured eyebrow and tugged at the top button of my fly, I shook my head and stopped her hand in mine.
No sense letting her into my pants if she was just going to stumble around in there, knocking stuff over and scrambling for the light switch. I already knew she wouldn’t know her way around without a detailed map, and I didn’t have the energy to draw one for her. Not at this hour.
She thinks I am her type, but she only sees what she wants. She doesn’t really see me at all.
Minutes later, my buddy started to snore like a puppy, her once-slick hair falling in a greasy curtain over her eyes, one hand tucked into the back of the BFF’s black panties.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, watching the light turn blue then gray then white on the hotel room wall, this almost stranger with her head on my chest, smelling like foreign shampoo.
A couple of months earlier I had a totally hot four-day fling with a not-so-straight woman with crazy hair and a heavy Quebecois accent. One of the things I loved about fucking her was her total and complete lack of processing my gender or my body or its desires. We were both staying in the same hotel and attending the same conference, and nobody at the morning round-table discussions had any clue whatsoever that the two of us had been up all night fucking, largely because she was so apparently heterosexual. No one suspected that she had rug burn on her ass and shoulder blades. She had invited me into her suite the second night to drink wine and listen to music, and the two of us had slept for a combined total of about fifteen hours since then. She never touched my breasts, she touched my chest only ever with an open flat hand, usually for balance while she rode my cock, oblivious to the fact that my tits even existed, uninterested, hungry. She never once put her hand in my boxer briefs, never once asked me, was it okay if she touched me like this? We would leave the dinner table separately, five or ten or fifteen minutes apart, and I would go back to my hotel room and put on my dick, bend and tuck it into my pant leg, pad down the hallway in my boots and leather jacket and knock quietly on her door as soon as the hall was empty. She would open her door just a crack and grab my sleeve, drag me into her room and bolt the door behind us. She was about ten years older than me and confessed that she usually dated older men; all she ever said about my silicone dick was that finally she had met a man who could stay hard long enough to tire her out, pour faire changement.
I don’t think I could sustain a fully straight relationship like this over any length of time, but she sure was fun for those four days, and she sure beat out the hormone-free beef lover in the hot-for-me category. I remember thinking what did it all mean in the airport lounge in Oakland the day after the fumbled four-way in San Fran. What does it mean exactly when a predominately straight fifty-year-old woman who speaks another first language sort of gets me more than two twentysomething Bay Area femmes did? I pushed the thought from my head because it depressed me.
I know I can be a complicated creature. I know this. I know it cannot be easy for a trick to figure out my body on the fly, and I understand that often the kind of tiresome questions and trepidation and fear that a femme feels when feeling me up for the first time is born from a desire to not trample where she shouldn’t, and to step lightly through possibly painful territory, but that doesn’t make it any hotter for me to discuss do’s and don’ts in the dark, when I would rather be fucking or fisting or tangling tongues or pulling each other’s hair and deciding by willpower and whim just who is going to suck whose what, and when and exactly how. I have always been a pay-as-you-go kind of guy, a trait that has landed me in trouble at times in the past, but more often led me to just right where I wanted to be as well, so I have resisted the urge to try to tame myself in this matter. I have always been more of a doer than a talker, when it comes to fucking. What is that old saying? Better to ask for forgiveness than permission? Dangerous, maybe, but definitely hotter. Nothing kills my boner faster and for longer than a good old-fashioned lesbian sex process. If you have to ask me whether or not I can be touched like this, or here, or like that, usually the fox has flown the coop. The cat is no longer in the cradle, or whatever. Just read my wet-and-hard-o-meter and listen to my breath. My body will always tell you the right next move. Stone butch? Only if you talk my dick out of its hard-on.
Last week I landed in the Vancouver airport after a long stretch of road and packed my suitcase up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. I opened my door and there she was, stretched out and sleepy in my clean sheets, blinking and smiling. She slipped from under the covers and met me in the bedroom doorway, smelling like her good perfume and the unmistakable odor that is her neck, and only her neck.
She kisses me and reaches around to grab one asscheek.
“Long road, cowboy?”
I nod, let my carry-on bag slip from my shoulder and to the floor. She pushes it to one side with a stockinged foot. She is wearing the new garters and stockings I got for her when she finished her PhD, and nothing else, her small pink nipples saluting me through my button-down shirt when she presses herself against me. She grabs my cold hand
and leads me to her pussy, slides her warmth and wetness against my numb fingers. Her breath catches in the back of her throat.
“I was just thinking of you, right here, inside me,” she whispers. “Cold outside. I am going to run you a bath.”
I nod again, slip two fingers up and inside her, grab a handful of curls in my other hand, kiss her hard.
She slips out of my grasp and flits into the bathroom, lighting candles and filling the tub.
She washes my back for me and then leaves me alone in the tub for a minute. I hear music come on in the bedroom and will myself to sit up and get out of the tub and towel off, my skin now pink and clean and pulsing warm with my heartbeat.
She is in the bedroom, now wearing stockings and garters and black five-inch heels and nothing else, except for a cherry-red harness and dildo that matches her fresh coat of lipstick. She smoothes the covers out on the bed next to her.
“Get over here and lie down on your belly. We are going to start out with a little back rub and then I am going to take it from there.” She winks. “I am going to take you from here.”
How did she know? I am never quite sure, but she always does.
ALL-GIRL ACTION
Helen Boyd
She was convinced her body wasn’t feminine enough, or sexy enough, to turn a woman on. Men weren’t so picky, and chasers—well, chasers were after the cock she didn’t like as a cock. We called it The Hugest Clitoris Ever. Eventually, that is, once she let me near her.
Take Me There Page 3