“Don’t get outta the truck yet,” Owen said briefly. He went to greet the dog, a border collie, then opened my door and helped me out. He wrapped me in a big hug, briefly rekindling the heat I had felt at the bar, then asked me to crouch and let the dog smell my hand. “Friend,” he said to the dog several times. “Friend, Sparky, friend.”
The dog seemed to agree because he licked my hand and let me pet his head. I noticed that the dog was not young, and he had only one eye. “Rescue?” I asked. The dog sat down as soon as I quit petting him and gravely offered me his paw to shake. Then he went to investigate his owner’s butt. I felt a little jealous.
“Yeah,” Owen said, not inviting questions about the dog’s unhappy life story. Then he took my hand and led me into the house. Black-and-white Sparky trotted behind us, happy that his fella was home. I really liked holding hands with this cub. His paw felt so right inside my own, a perfect fit.
Owen said, “I could make you some coffee if you want to wait for me while I do my chores.”
“No way,” I decided. “Let me come along. We can talk some more.”
There was dog food and water to put down in the kitchen. Then he went outside to leave some dry chow and fruit salad for the raccoons. “Don’t they forage?” I asked.
“Gets hard for them in winter,” he replied.
There was also a homemade structure that looked like a couple of little huts on stilts. Those were for the feral cats, he explained. The openings were too small for the raccoons to bully their way in. They had little solar heaters on their roofs. “Running an extension cord out here for a heating pad got kinda dangerous when it rained,” he explained. “There’s one old tomcat, I think he has arthritis, he likes to lay up here and warm up. Last year I had some kittens born out of season.” We had to hike several hundred feet to get to the limits of his fences. There was a lean-to that had a salt lick and an oil barrel with an open tap of water running into it, to keep it from freezing. “For the deer,” he said, breaking open a new bale of hay. After we got back to his patio, he refilled the bird feeders. Then we went into the barn, where there was a horse. The stable had to be mucked out and the horse combed, then fed. Did I mention he also had a chicken coop? I got to look for the eggs—after I stepped on one and broke it. The baseball cap came in handy. Owen greeted each of the chickens by name. They preened and strutted for him and ran around like crazy to peck at the grit and feed he spread around. I decided chicken shit didn’t smell that bad, but I was glad to get back out into the open. I had picked up Saint-fucking-Francis of Assisi.
“This is quite a little retreat,” I said as we followed an icy path through the snow back toward his house.
“Yeah,” he said. “I like animals. They have a kind of innocence that people lack. If they’re violent it’s usually for a reason. Territory. Food. Sex.” He gave me a shy look to see if I understood. A stray sunbeam lit up his long, dirty-blond eyelashes and made his hazel eyes look green. How could anybody look at that face and not want to kiss him?
In his big kitchen, we sat for a while over diner mugs of hot coffee. I was glad to warm my hands up. I hadn’t brought any gloves with me or a decent coat. I’d just planned to walk into the bar from my warm rental car, then walk back to the car and go home. I wondered whether I ought to phone home and finally decided I should. I left a vague message about running into some friends and going out for a while. My parents knew I didn’t have any friends here, but they wouldn’t question me. I just hoped my mom wouldn’t wait up. Pops couldn’t sleep if she didn’t come to bed.
Owen asked me questions about them, and I found myself describing our troubled relationship and the family crisis that had persuaded me to come home. Pops needed debilitating cancer treatments. I was an only child, so there was nobody else to help Mom look after him. Owen was easy to talk to. I told him things I rarely think or speak about. But I didn’t forget my main agenda. Eventually I got us out of the kitchen and onto the living room sofa, where I kept sliding closer to him or drawing him closer to me. Finally I got him leaning on me, with my arm draped over his shoulder. His dog was on the other side, leaning on Owen. We made a cute little tableau of domestic tranquility.
I can’t remember who started kissing who. But it sure was nice. I was so happy to be enjoying masculine attention in a place where I’d never found it before. I wasn’t sure if it was me kissing Owen or that sixteen-year-old gay boy who had so badly wanted to know if men fell in love with each other. In high school, I would have settled for a blow job, but underneath the adolescent hormones was a big fuckin’ romantic. I wanted a boyfriend who would slow-dance with me and wake up in bed with me more than I wanted to come.
Back in the present, we had each other’s shirts open, and I was playing with his nipples. I noticed that he kept wincing. “Don’t put up with it if it doesn’t feel good,” I said.
“Scar tissue,” he explained.
That made a finger of ice water run down my back. What the fuck? “Show me,” I said quietly.
He stood up and took off his shirt, refusing to look at me. His arms were nice, muscles built up by hard work: a tattoo of his dog on one bicep, a barbed-wire cuff on the other. I realized I was avoiding looking at his chest. I studied the ant trail of hair that ran into his jeans, then let my eyes follow it up. It was…impressive? Scary? Different and new? He had two long cuts under each pec, and his nipples were an angry-looking red. But they were small and flat and in the right place. Looked like someday he would be so hairy chested that the scars wouldn’t even show.
“How did they—do that? Where did you go? What exactly—Owen, tell me your story.”
His chuckle was a little bitter. “How far back do you want me to go?” he asked. “These scars aren’t the worst part of it. Can you understand that? The worst part of it was knowing, for years and years, that I was a man who wanted to be with other men. But no matter how many men I had sex with, it never worked, because they thought I was a girl. I thought I was a freak. There was nobody else like me in the whole world. And it was hopeless, there was nothing I could do to change it. But when I finally got up the nerve to correct this mistake, that was the happy part of my life. These scars prove how much I wanted to be a man. What I was willing to pay for the privilege. What I was willing to give up. Proof that there is no ambivalence, no turning back.”
“Have you got, uh, anything else? Any more scars?”
He shook his head. “The rest of it is original equipment. Works good. Want the grand tour?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose I do.”
“Scared?” he asked.
“Yes!” I replied. “Not of you, not exactly. But I’ve never done anything like this. I worry that I won’t know what to do. Won’t be able to please you.”
“Won’t be able to keep it up, you mean? I’ll help,” he promised. We went down a short hallway, past a bathroom, and there was his bedroom, across the back of the house. He had a four-poster bed with natural wood, the bark still on it, nodes where branches had been trimmed off. There were plaid flannel sheets and a thick down duvet that had a picture of (I am not kidding) a bear on it. Shelves in the headboard contained some books, a couple of bottles of different kinds of lube, and condoms. “I keep the toys down here,” he said, gesturing toward a drawer on the side of the bed. “Not that I’ve had much call to use them on anybody except myself.”
I thought about what I would do if Owen was the same kind of guy I was always bringing home. I decided I was going to follow that script as close as I could. “So get on the floor, boy,” I said. “Down on your knees between my fucking boots.”
When I think that I almost decided to stay home that night… what a mistake that would have been! Going out to a bar where people used to know you by a different name and a different gender is not a pleasant experience. I wasn’t even sure why I bothered. Loneliness and boredom can drive you to hang out with people who will be mean to you, I guess. The dykes were all pissed off at me. If they talked
to me, it was to loudly use my “girl name” and female pronouns. Before I transitioned, I was known as that weird woman who was way too butch and hated sex. The occasional high femme pressured me to take her home, but I didn’t want them. I was staring at the guys, fantasizing about them. Now, none of the lesbians wanted to have sex with me. (Well, I did get the occasional drunk dial, but I wasn’t that horny.)
I had a lot of fantasies about leaving, going some place more liberal, or at least a place where I could start over, without memories of my younger self always being thrown in my face. But I had inherited a house here, my auntie’s old place, and my dad’s business, and I didn’t want to live in a city. I’m a small-town boy. I know that about myself. I like working on my truck in the driveway and the slowly changing seasons. And I’m stubborn. I guess I went back to Brothers for the same reason I kept my dad’s auto body shop open and made the customers deal with me, the son he never knew he had. If I refused to go away, that unreasonable part of myself said, sooner or later I would wear down their resistance. They’d have to accept me because I wouldn’t accept anything less. So I put on my flannel-lined jeans, my best pair of boots, a fisherman’s sweater my mom had knit for me, and a down vest, then sailed in to confront their gender essentialist asses.
Darcy the drag queen is always nice to me, even though she can’t quite understand why anybody would want to be a man. Her desire for change goes in the opposite direction. We sometimes have fun dancing together and making it look like we’re going to go home. But of course she never takes me seriously as a potential trick. Darcy is a size queen.
Georgie the bartender completely hates me. That’s because he was a newcomer who hadn’t heard the news about me when he got hired. On his first day of work, he was all over me like an octopus. We made out in between customers. The rest of the bar let it go on for a while. It was one big practical joke to them. I’m not sure who told him. But after he took a piss break, he barged out of the men’s room mad as hell and actually took a swing at me. I grabbed a magazine off the top of the cigarette machine, rolled it up, and bopped him on the nose. He sat down with blood streaming from his nostrils and the wrath of a faggot who thinks he has been deceived. “How dare you!” he kept saying. “How dare you?”
Now he makes it a point to get in between me and anybody who shares my table.
So when that hunky newcomer started making eyes at me, I was nervous. Part of me wished he hadn’t noticed me. I didn’t want to let myself get turned on to him, get outed, then see his flirtatiousness turn into scorn. But there was something different about him. Self-confidence? Was he more secure in his homosexuality? That leather vest hinted at the fulfillment of certain fantasies I treasured. Whatever it was, it got past my defenses. So I let myself wink back at him, banter, and enjoy the rush the first time he squeezed my shoulders and drew me closer, so I could smell his sweat and sense the heat of his body. Everything I had between my legs was hard for him. But would that be enough?
George’s loud revelation of my supposedly shameful secret hurt worse than it usually did. I guess that’s why I ran for the door. The people in Brothers had never succeeded in ousting me before. I guess I ran out of nerve or lost all hope that they would change. Here was a man I really wanted, who wanted me, and they were going to ruin it. But it wasn’t really their fault, was it? Because I could never be a real man, never have another man love me, and so the fault was in me. The problem was my fucked-up mind and body. I was never going to be good enough. Real gay men do not want FTMs. How could they?
When Glenn chased me down and started kissing me, I was beside myself. First of all, you just don’t do that here. The gay activity is kept behind closed doors. I was afraid of getting beaten up, but when he acknowledged both of us as faggots to the heckler in the car, I was dizzy with happiness. How weird is that? I wanted to be a fag so much that I would have happily gotten my ass kicked for being one with him. He had spoken my identity out loud; nobody else had ever acknowledged my gayness.
I kept telling myself not to get attached, and he kept not going away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been kissed; never with so much skill or passion. The boys I’d dated in high school, before I transitioned, were not allowed to have facial hair. I doubt they’d have wanted to let their beards grow even if the school dress code had allowed it. So the sensation of his beard and moustache was all new. I liked the way that felt, so much. It made my toes curl and my breath come fast. Those boys had always had something critical to say about the way that I responded to their attention. One of them said, “You aren’t supposed to kiss me back like that. You’re supposed to just relax and wait for me to kiss you. Just respond a little bit, don’t get so aggressive!” It made me want to throw up because I knew what they were really saying was, “You aren’t doing this right. You aren’t being appropriate as a girl. I want a girl. So if you can’t convince me you are one, I’m going to leave you.” I couldn’t, and they did.
Glenn’s hands felt different on me. He was a gentle person, but he wasn’t holding back. He wasn’t monitoring himself to make sure he didn’t overwhelm me. I’d never made love to a woman, but I knew how straight guys related to me—as somebody weaker and more sensitive. Glenn just did what he wanted to do and assumed I was strong enough to take it and respond in kind. It was good—affirming. I needed and wanted more of his hands, on me, inside of me.
I guess a part of me had thought that I was screwed up about sex. I thought that even if I took testosterone and changed my legal name, I would still be fucked up about the things people did to feel pleasure. I wasn’t sure I could have that. Glenn’s touch set me free because it was purely sexual—and I liked it. I was fully aroused, without any penalty. I wasn’t nauseous, I didn’t want to squirm away from him, I didn’t have to put up with it or leave my body or count the minutes till it was over. I was just there with him, his scent in my face, his big warm body under my own hands, and I wanted to hear him groan the way that I secretly groaned when he moved his tongue in and out of my mouth.
Now we were here in my house. In the master bedroom, where I had so often jerked off and dreamed about gay boy sex, watched porn, fantasized, experimented with vibrators and dildos. I would go through a few days of sexual frenzy, when I couldn’t keep my hands off my junk, then realize that masturbating was just making me feel more lonely. So I’d stop for a while; avoid anything sexual for as long as possible. But the need would build up, as it does when you are on male hormones, until I had to take care of it, even if coming sometimes made me curl up like a cooked shrimp and cry.
Glenn was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he wanted me to kneel in between his thighs. Was I going to do that? I looked at him sideways, from under my eyelashes, understanding that if I was going to have sex with him, he was going to take a dominant role. Did that mean he saw me as a girl? I didn’t think so. He was being too macho, for one thing. I was so curious. What was it like to be a boy? Would I enjoy it? Would he take good care of me? If I sucked his cock, would that be as far as it would go? Well, if it was, so what? Sucking his cock was still more sex than I’d had since I transitioned. It would be something I could treasure, think about later, something more real than a picture in a DVD.
Could I flip him? (It took only a split second to have all of these thoughts.) I wondered if I could dominate him. Maybe, if I really wanted to, he would go under for me. But he would have to know me better first, I sensed. He would have to trust me more than he did tonight, on our first encounter. And if I did take control, would I get what I wanted? I wanted to know how another man would relate to my body. If I was on top, I could keep my clothes on, refuse to let him touch me, stay back from the experience. All of the sensation and all of the vulnerability would be his. So I let that idea slide, kept it for another time. And this was one of Glenn’s gifts to me—the conviction that there would be another time.
Luckily, my boots just slid off my feet. I knelt, smoothly I hoped, between his knees. He gave me a q
uick squeeze with his thighs, and we shared a smile. “Do you like my boots?” he asked.
“Yes, Sir,” I replied. His shoulders relaxed when he heard the word “Sir.” Just three letters had communicated volumes about what I wanted from him and how far he could take me.
“Then give them some attention,” he said. A shade of sternness crept into his voice, but he left it open-ended. I could deep-throat them or just try to see myself in the polished surfaces, I guessed. So I slid down onto my belly and took hold of his left boot. I gave it some kisses and licks, worried about marring the shine. “Other foot, too,” he reminded me, so I changed directions and did the same thing over there. “How does that make you feel?” he asked, hooking a finger in my collar and bringing me up to his level.
“Safe,” I replied. “I trust you.” We looked into each other’s eyes. His brown eyes were full of intelligence, curiosity and humor. “I hope I will deserve your trust,” he said solemnly, then he kissed me.
Holy smokes! I wanted to touch myself so bad. I could feel his fingers on my buttons, opening my shirt, and was glad I had gotten rid of the sweater in the kitchen. He was exposing bare skin and sliding his hands over me, gently tracing my scars, tickling my stomach just a bit as he ruffled my newly sprouted fur. Instead of squeezing my nipples, he just sort of…noticed them. His fingertips wandered over them, he circled the base of each one, so I began to think that someday it might feel really good to have him pinch my nipples.
“It’s getting kind of crowded in here,” he said, undoing his belt buckle. I reached for the zipper, batting his hands away, and opened his fly. He put his hands on the bed and leaned back, watching me work. His face looked hungry. I gently squeezed the bundle I felt inside his shorts, then pulled the waistband of his briefs down and extracted what was inside. Getting his cock out was a bit of a wrestling match. It was just too hard. I had to sort of bend it to get it past the folds of his underwear and jeans. But then it was free, and that made it easier to scoop his balls out, too. He gave a little hiss when I wrapped one hand around the base of his sac and pulled his eggs down, so I continued to squeeze them. But I had another hand free, and that one was angling his cock toward my mouth.
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