The next day Dean brought all his stuff over from Chrissie Peck’s place. Chrissie was his “bud,” he said, just his friend, a good person. Dean didn’t have much to bring, just what he carried around in the truck with him, his backpack with some clothes, his magic books, his ditty bag. In the bathroom, I peeked inside the ditty bag—there was a razor, a roll of Ace bandages, Polo aftershave, a toothbrush, some pills, with the name of the drug on the label blacked out with Magic Marker. The label read L. Dean. Pharmacist’s error, I thought.
That night, when we made love, Dean again insisted that it be dark. And when I touched him on the chest, I felt a thickness there, from the long underwear he wore, and then—maybe something underneath that. When I tried to touch him at his waist, or below, he pulled my hand away, and gripped my wrist tight. But I didn’t mind, for now, at least, if he only wanted to give me pleasure. He arched his body over mine, pulling himself up on one arm, thrust his fingers inside me, then his hand, until it seemed like his whole fist was inside me. As he did it, he studied my face, like he was reading a book—though I was a book in motion, my head sweeping from side to side.
I felt him push one finger into my other hole, then another finger, prying me open, and I could feel my flesh part, a place exposed that no one had ever known before, and I could feel myself close around him tight enough to kill him.
After it was all over, I fit my body into the curve of his, my back close to his chest. I could feel two soft lumps there. As I turned, he stirred. “Hi,” he said.
Now, as I turned to face him, he opened his eyes, caught me looking at him. Then he closed his eyes again, smiling and pulling my head down to rest in the crook of his neck, so I couldn’t look at him.
“Dean,” I said.
I pulled back away from him a little, and reached my hand out, almost afraid to touch him, but I did, on the chest, and his flesh gave way under my fingertips. I realized that before he must have been wearing a bandage around there. But now he was naked underneath his long underwear top.
I slid my hand under his top. He was wide awake now, watching me, and I felt his warm, smooth skin, the mounds of flesh so soft they gave away instantly under my fingertips, and his nipples had hardened into little stones.
I pulled his underwear top all the way up to his neck and I could just see, in the light from the fields, the smooth skin of his chest. Now a fragrance seemed to rise from his body toward me. It was familiar, a warm perfume that seemed to emanate from the very pores of his skin. It was the perfume of breasts, I realized.
“What?” I said. “What’s this?”
“It’s a deformity,” he said. “I usually wear a bandage around it, but I took it off because it was itching.” Indeed, the Ace bandage lay on the floor by the bed.
“A deformity?”
“Like nature made a mistake. It happened when I hit puberty. I usually hide it.”
I slid my fingers around the breasts. The breasts were small and soft. “Does it feel good when I touch them?”
His eyes were closed now. “Yeah.”
“Ummm . . .”
I saw the smooth skin, moist-looking, the aureole around the nipple wide and dark, the skin puckered, long soft hairs sticking out. I squeezed his nipple between my thumb and forefinger, and watched his face. He closed his eyes, and turned his head from side to side.
Slowly, I slid my hand down to the place between his legs, but he grabbed my wrist, as he always did when I tried to touch him there, and he brought my hand up again.
Now I inched my head down, took each of his nipples in my mouth, flicking them with my tongue, licking him there til his skin was wet. There was a low, moaning sound in the back of his throat.
Abruptly, he sat up in the bed and jerked his body away from me. Then he lay down on his back again. He arched his hips above the mattress, and he thrust his own hand down and dug it between his legs.
* * *
Later, as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt him get out of bed, the mattress tilting down to my side, the breath of cold air, and I heard him go into the main room. I roused myself, forced myself to climb out of the bed and I followed him.
He was sitting in the middle of the room at the round oak table. It was warm here, warm inside the house from the woodstove, which was still burning. But outside, the wind was blowing, I felt the house rattling. In the other room, Bobby slept through.
Dean took a pack of cigars and a bag of reefer from his backpack. He sliced open one of the cigars with his nail and unrolled the skin from around it, emptied out the tobacco, and repacked the cigar skin with weed. He sealed the skin down with his tongue, then lit up and offered the thing to me.
“No, I don’t do that.” Drugs always frightened me, losing control. And the evil it did to people in Sparta.
“As an experiment,” he said. “See what happens.”
He looked at me with those liquid eyes, the deep light shining within them. His cheeks were red, windburned from playing outside with Bobby. He had given Bobby a good run today. He smiled. “Good for fucking,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Bobby in bed, safe, asleep. I took the blunt from him. I’d tried it once or twice, and as then, when I inhaled the smoke burned my throat, and I started choking and my chest hurt and my throat burned.
“Try again,” he said. “One more time. Once your throat’s a little burned, you don’t feel it as much the next time. Makes it like scar tissue.”
I inhaled again, and this time the smoke went right down into my lungs. I could feel the stuff begin to permeate my body, softening my limbs, and I let out a little laugh. I wasn’t really high, but just the gesture of inhaling had giving me a new license.
“I want to see you naked,” I told him.
The smile disappeared from his face. He took another puff on the blunt. “Can’t,” he said, avoiding my eyes.
“C’mon!”
“Sorry.”
“But why? You see me! I’m not afraid. It’s not fair.”
I giggled, and I leaned over and pulled down at the top of his jeans, but he jerked his body away from me, as if he were irritated.
“I want to,” I said.
“Please,” he said. “Stop.”
“Just tell me why. I love everything about you.”
He hesitated, composing his words. He opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it.
“I want to understand,” I said. Besides, there might be something even better, sexually, something we hadn’t done that we could do now. And now, because of the dope, I could ask him.
“Please,” I begged. “You can tell me.”
He paused, studied me a moment as if planning how he would put it. “See,” he said, “I wasn’t born like other people.” He stopped. “I was born different.”
“You told me that. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter to me.”
He sighed, and suddenly he looked tired. “It’s more complicated,” he said.
“So. Tell me.”
“Hard to explain.”
“Try me.” I stood up from the table, walked over to his side, knelt down on my knees in front of him, and took his hand in mine. “Nothing’ll make me stop loving you,” I whispered.
He hesitated. “I was born with both things,” he said. “As a man and a woman. On the outside, I did look like a girl, but inside I’ve got male organs. I don’t have a uterus or a cervix—or whatever . . .”
He looked away, as if embarrassed for the first time. But he had nothing to be embarrassed about around me.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
“My grandparents, they gave me money to have an operation.”
“An operation?”
“Yeah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “They take your thing and they make a—” He didn’t finish describing it.
The thought of what they had done to him made me dig my knuckles into my eyesockets. “It hurts me to think about it!” I cried. I looked up at him again, seeing white, blind from the pressure on my eyeballs. “It’s all done?” I asked him.
“Yeah, sort of.” Still not looking at me.
“So, why can’t you—I mean—why can’t I see you now?”
“They don’t do it all at once. It isn’t finished yet. I gotta save up money for the second half. They still have to do one more operation. I got the hormones now. That helps.”
“Hormones?”
“I take pills.”
The ones with the name of the drug blacked out, the pharmacist’s error, the name back to front. “I don’t mind seeing you, whichever way it looks.”
He shook his head.
“I told you,” I said, “nothing about you can upset me.”
His face was drawn, shadows etched under his eyes, around his mouth. “But you’re happy?” he asked, as if for reassurance. “This is the happiest you’ve ever been—right?” He was eager for me to say yes.
“Yeah.”
“So—why change things?” he asked.
“But you don’t get any pleasure?”
“I do,” he said. “I get off watching you.”