by Zoe X Rider
I almost said, “We don’t have to do this,” to let him off the hook, but then he was crawling back up the bed, his shirt gapping loose where it was unbuttoned. I reached for the front of it and started pulling the rest of the buttons. He sat on my hips and helped me push the shirt off him. When it caught at his wrists, we each worked the buttons on the cuffs. Then he was lying on me again, bare chest to bare chest, his mouth hot and wanting on mine. I dragged lines with my fingernails, all the way to his waistband. His hips rocked. His thigh pushed between my legs. I wanted to keep him there, moving against me. I wrapped my arms around his head and buried my face in the crook of his shoulder, rocking, keeping time with his rhythm.
His weight pressed down as he reached back to push his trousers off. I felt for the first time the scratchy tickle of his pubic hair against my skin. Somehow we managed to get the dress and slip off me, kicking it down the end of the bed. He pressed his arms against my sides, cupping his hands over my shoulders, our bodies naked.
I felt the rush welling. There was more slickness down there than just my own excitement. My cock jutted against his belly, and I clutched his back to bring him tighter against me. He rocked, gripping my shoulders, his face buried in my hair. I wrapped my arms around him, our ankles bumping, our legs touching—I was thinking back to the hallway at the party, the keg rolling past us, our bodies pressed together. His hand warm on my back.
The porch, that fleeting first touch of his tongue. The kitchen, its blinds bending against our weight, his thigh between my legs. And here on the bed just a few moments ago, his breath heating satin, his fingers drawing fabric out of the way.
“I’m gonna come,” I whispered in his ear.
“That’s the point,” he whispered back. I caught a glimpse of him before my chin tipped up. The look in his eye burned into me, so dark and close. I teetered on the edge, my neck arching, my eyes clamped shut, my fingernails digging in. The wave rose beneath me, and rose and rose until I thought I was going to lose my mind. He made the softest of sounds against my hair, and I crested and crashed, shuddering, gripping his back with Charli’s fingernails. I bit his shoulder hard enough to make him gasp.
His cock slipped in my slick heat. His thrusts quickened. His forehead pressed into the pillow, his lips against my shoulder. Each of his breaths sent shivers through me, my nerves still jangling from the orgasm.
I wrapped an arm around his head, holding him there, and worked my hips against him. A Chhuh came from him, breath against my shoulder, and then again—and then another spill of heat hit my stomach, his body taut, his hand gripping my arm hard. Holding on so tight was probably going to have a bruise, and I didn’t care.
When he relaxed, his chin moved up from my shoulder, his face turning so that he panted into Charli’s hair.
I felt like someone had turned my bones to caramel. It was all I could do to bring my arm up—his hand falling away—and push Charli’s hair back from my forehead. Then I gripped the wig and pulled it off, Jeff lifting his head so the curls could slip free from under his cheek. I dropped it on the bedside table without looking to make sure that was where it was going. My chest heaved. Jeff slid off me and rolled onto his back, breathing as heavily as I was.
I pulled the panty hose thing off my head and raked a hand through my flattened, sweaty hair.
And I was thinking, Orange is the New Black. The guy fucking binge-watched the show. I’d just thought he had a thing for lesbians in jail.
I wiped my stomach with the wig cap.
The Eddie Izzard DVDs. Claudia Charriez, who I’d looked up online after Jeff said we were going more for her look than Eddie Izzard’s. Do you know who his favorite drag queen is? I did. I knew that, and hadn’t fucking thought anything of it.
Some guys like that kind of thing, he’d said. And so had Lydia. Some guys like that kind of thing.
“Does Lydia know?” I asked.
“Know what?”
I turned my head on the pillow, and he was looking back at me. I swallowed. I could be wrong. But. I forced it out: “That you’re into trannies?”
“Don’t call them that,” he said, putting his forearm across his eyes. “They don’t like to be called that.”
Well, that about counted for a ‘yes.’
I balled the wig cap and tossed it. “I think she suspects.” Because that made sense of the look on her face, the advice she’d given. If she did, that made her a lot sharper than me. I was dumb enough to not see it till after we’d fooled around in a pile of ladies clothes.
“Why do you think that?” he asked from behind his arm.
“She in not so many words told me to watch out for you tonight.”
He raised his arm so he could look at me. “Shit. Really?”
I felt naked suddenly. I mean, I was naked. I sat up and pushed the blankets back so I could crawl under a sheet. “Yeah, I think that’s what she was saying.” I’d just been too stupid to get it at the time.
Would it have made a difference, spending the evening questioning his motives the whole time?
“Did you feel like you had to ‘watch out’ for me?” he said.
“No.” I hadn’t felt like the whole thing was anything more than a gag—even as I started weirdly wanting to act exactly like it wasn’t. “I mean, the costume was your idea, but I’m capable of saying no, you know. Although, I don’t know. Maybe I might have if I knew. But, not knowing, I didn’t think there was anything weird about it, or the way you acted.” I glanced his way again. “Nothing I felt like had to ‘watch out’ for I mean. I didn’t feel creeped out.” Though I had felt pretty creeped out by a few of the other guys at the party. “That’s why you wanted to go as girlfriend and boyfriend, though, isn’t it?”
“For the record,” he said, “I had no plans of it ending up here.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, lying there in the dark with my best friend, who’d just fucked my stomach while I was wearing a wig.
“But yeah,” he said. “I thought it would be cool to get a chance to get to spend an evening with the kind of date I’ve always wanted to have.”
“Always?” I looked at him.
“Well, for a long while.”
“And it being me, you felt like it could come off as just a lark. And it being Halloween meant you could do it without anyone thinking twice.”
“If we’d done this at a nice restaurant on some random night, everyone would have been staring and whispering, yeah. And I probably couldn’t have talked you into it.”
“No. But also, it being me, you thought maybe you’d be able to come out easier one day maybe?” I hoped. I sat up, pulling the hem of the sheets against my waist. I liked to think of myself as open-minded. I didn’t care who people dated. He could have mentioned it to me. Even fucking hypothetically. Maybe not when we were twelve or sixteen. But there’d been plenty of time since we’d become adults, plenty of late nights in the glow of the TV screen, talking about all kinds of crazy things.
“It was really cool,” he said, “everybody just being okay with it. I’m so fucking sick of seeing all these couples, and no one thinks twice about it, and here I am, like, standing inside myself, looking out from behind these fucking invisible walls, thinking ‘I’m never gonna get that.’”
“Never?”
“Not in this fucking world.”
I hugged my knees. “That’s what you really want? A guy who dresses like a girl all the time?”
“I’m good with a guy who dresses like a guy some times and a girl other times. I think that would be cool.”
“Would you just be friends with the guy and sleep with the girl, or what?”
He scrubbed his face. When he dropped his arms, he said, “I’m still working that out. I haven’t…. I mean, this was the first time I ever, with…you know. With not an actual girl.”
I ‘got’ gay, and I got bi, and I even got wanting to fool around with guys who dressed up as girls, but I didn’t—I don’t think I got what he wanted,
which sounded like a relationship with someone who was whatever, whenever. Like rules didn’t matter, and you could just make things up as you went along. Like three-year-olds.
“What about if you wanted to have kids?” I said. “I can’t imagine anyone’d let you adopt. They’d be worried about confusing them. Today it’s Daddy 2, tomorrow it’s Mommy. ‘Why does Mommy have a penis?’”
“Do you want kids?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I tucked the sheets around my feet, the press-on nails almost black in the dark. Somehow I’d managed to go all night without fucking them up. “I guess I always kind of imagined one day I’d get married and start a family. You know, because I’m straight, and that’s kinda…that’s the roadmap, right? What about you?” And just like that I jumped forward ten years in my head, seeing myself turning circles on a lawn with a kid hanging onto my arms, laughing, and Jeff’s got another one hugging his leg. A shiver went down my spine at the way I could see it so clearly. But of course I could see it clearly: except for the months I’d spent away at college, Jeff and I were pretty much each other’s main relationship. Just not, you know, “that way.” Well, except for what’d just happened.
Jeff said, “I don’t have enough room in my head to think about kids right now. I’m too busy trying to sort my own fucking life out.”
“Are you going to hit up the dating sites, try to find someone?” I asked.
“I might. Most of that stuff is just people looking for hookups. Married guys who like to put on a dress and have some fun on the side. And lots more married guys who want to find someone willing to put on a dress and have some fun on the side. I don’t want to end up one of those guys someday. One guy, his profile said wife was fine with it—”
“One guy who dresses up or one guy who wants someone who dresses up?”
“The latter. Anyway, she knew about it and didn’t mind, as long as it was just sex and they were safe about it, and he didn’t want anything more than sex anyway. But a lot of these guys, their wives have no idea. I couldn’t live that way. But I lie awake nights thinking that’s where I’m going to end up.”
I tongued the inside of my cheek. Listened the rustle of sheets as he sat up beside me. “Have you talked to any of these guys who dress up as women?”
He pulled his knees toward his chest, like me, wrapping his arms around his shins. “There’s this one guy I chatted with in the UK.”
A crankiness crawled through me, pulling my muscles tight. I didn’t know if it was over the fact that he was talking with this guy, or just over the fact that other people knew about this part of him before me. That he couldn’t talk to me about it. Although, again: it wasn’t like there hadn’t been a knee-deep trail of fucking clues—how many normal guys have a favorite drag queen and know what “tucking” is? All I’d had to do was look down and fucking notice those hints piling up.
God, I’d thought he’d was just Jeff. You know, everyone’s a little eccentric in some way. Kyle, for instance, has a Thomas the Tank Engine collection. He still watches the show.
“This guy said that when he dresses up as a woman to get with a guy, he doesn’t think of himself as a gay man at the time,” he said. “He thinks of himself as a straight woman. As far as he’s concerned, he’s heterosexual all the way. He’s just also heterosexual both ways.”
“That just sounds like rationalizing to me,” I said. And sexist or something too: what was wrong with just admitting he was fucking bi?
“Who are you to say?” he asked.
“It just sounds to me like he’s deluding himself. Or you. Or both.”
“I’ll tell you about being fucking deluded,” he said. “Deluded into thinking there’s something wrong with you, that you’re somehow fucked in the head and unfixable and all you can do is fucking pretend you’re like everyone else because the world’s made it pretty fucking clear that what you’re attracted to is fucked up.”
My heart caved in.
Was that true? Is that what he’s gone through? Or was he making too much out of it? Like when I thought I was in love with Cindy Monaghan, and I was going to die if she told me she wasn’t interested. And then all of the sudden she was dating this guy from another school, and I managed to survive, and now looking back it just seems kind of stupid—all that angst, over what?
Maybe it was just a phase. They say brains don’t fully develop until you’re twenty-five. By the time we’re thirty, this could just be some silly thing he did when he was younger. But I couldn’t say that, so I said, “All I’m saying is if you sleep with men and women, no matter who’s wearing what when you’re doing it—”
“You’re not in this guy’s head. You don’t have any idea what it’s like in there. He was explaining what his experience is like for him. If you tell me oranges taste like strawberries to you, I’d be a dick to tell you you were wrong about your own actual experience, wouldn’t I?”
My shoulders hunched. Half my brain was saying you can’t just redraw the way the fucking world works because you want to, and the other half was saying, Why not?
Both finished with the same statement: What kind of world would it be if everyone did that?
I hitched a shoulder and rubbed my ear against it.
“So, are you ‘bi’ now that you’ve slept with me?” he asked.
“Are you?” I shot back.
With a sigh, he said, “I don’t know. Not because I slept with you but because I don’t know whether I’d still sleep with you as a guy. I really don’t know.”
“Do you think about it?” I couldn’t decide which of us was crazy: this stranger sitting there talking to me in the dark, or the person in my head who felt like I was sitting there was a stranger.
“More like wonder about it,” he said. “I wonder about a million things. You’d think it’s something you’d know, right? I mean, you’d think you’d know how you yourself felt about everything, since it’s you feeling it. But, shit, everything gets in the way. Everything we hear, every ad and movie we see, every fucking video game we play. All the shit we’re so conditioned to believe we’re supposed to be and think that we don’t even realize it’s just conditioning.”
Someone’s been spending too much fucking time on Tumblr.
He got off the bed, bending to retrieve his underwear, his lean flank almost glowing in the moonlight.
“Keep the outfit,” he said as pulled his briefs on, “or donate it to Goodwill, whatever you want to do.” He put his knee on the bed and leaned toward me. His lips touched my cheekbone, leaving a wet mark. “In any case, thanks for tonight. I had a good time.”
He left the room. A moment later, his bedroom door latched shut.
I pushed my arms under the sheets so I hug my chest to my thighs. The teardrop he’d given me, on its thin silver chain, pressed into my skin.
I thought about buying that dress. We’d gone to the Saint Vincent De Paul thrift store, then Goodwill. I hadn’t wanted to try anything on, but Jeff had said, “It’s October. Everyone knows why you’re trying on a party dress,” as he pushed me and a pile of dresses toward the changing room door. It took all afternoon; by the time we walked into the parking lot with a five-dollar blue strapless dress in a recycled grocery bag, evening was falling. I was cranky from hunger. Jeff was quiet. We’d headed to the mall to grab something to eat.
And that’s where we saw it, in a store window—nothing fancy, just a short red dress with a black strip around the waist like a belt. The dress was on one of those clothes-maker forms, so there were no graceful mannequin arms, no long, slender legs, no perfect collar bones or pert nose to tell me I couldn’t pull that dress off.
Just the dress itself.
We stood in front of the window, wordless.
Then he looked at me. I could see it in his eyes.
I’d said, “No. Five dollars is enough for a Halloween costume I’ll only wear once—and badly at that.”
“Well,” he’d said, looking at the dress with his hands pushed
into his back pockets, “if you’re only going to wear it once, it should be the best possible one.”
And I’d had to admit—though I didn’t do it out loud—that I liked that red dress a whole lot more than the one sitting on the back seat of his car.
As I’d pulled the red dress over my head in the fitting room, the fabric cool and rich-feeling, and the skirt fell around my legs, and the short sleeves hugged my shoulders—the blue dress was no fucking competition.
I’d liked that dress. I’d liked wearing that dress at the party, pretending to be a girl, pretending to be Jeff’s girl.
So what did that make me?
Someone willing to try something different, fuck convention? Someone Jeff thought a little more highly of—until I’d disappointed him with being an ass afterward?
But this other guy Jeff had been talking to, with his “heterosexual both ways” bullshit. You didn’t get to be heterosexual “both ways” unless you were born with both things. Telling yourself anything else was just trying to have your cake and eat it to. And I couldn’t help thinking Jeff was doing some cake-eating-and-keeping too somehow. I wasn’t sure yet how, but it felt like it.
Or maybe it just felt like it because I couldn’t get my head around this Jeff I didn’t even know.
And all of this—these thoughts circling like vultures—was just me staying outside the perimeter of what I didn’t want to think about, which was, What the fuck about me?
Jeff was dead on: how do you not know the truth about yourself when it’s you you’re thinking about? I’ve been the sole resident of my head for twenty-three years. How did I wind up hugging legs at the end of all that time, confused out of my fucking skull?