He pulled the covers around him, suddenly cold. He had the sense of having wandered out blindly in a winter storm to discover that he’d stumbled onto a thinly frozen lake. He had only ever encountered chasers in one context. “Like, uh, a tranny chaser. What’s an Asian chaser called?”
She appraised him with a strange look. “A rice chaser,” she said flatly. “In Vermont, growing up, the kids who saw my dad with my mom—their favorite way to bully me was by saying my dad had yellow fever.”
Ames saw suddenly that she thought he was asking about himself. That she thought he wanted to know the slur for what having slept with her made him. He stifled an overwhelming urge to protest in horror. To tell her: God, no, I would never think having sex with a certain person could mark me as something—I just really do get what it’s like to be fetishized. I get what it’s like to have someone think that his desire for me degrades or lowers him.
But even at that moment, such an admission seemed too risky. What if coming out as a former transsexual meant never getting into bed with her again? What if it meant the end of their professional relationship? No, better to wait for the opportune moment.
* * *
—
Now and again, Ames scrutinized Katrina, and imagined what it would be like to tell her. How she would react. When he was alone, he told himself that maybe, maybe, she’d even be into it. That maybe the deepest reason for her divorce from Danny had been sexual. That while not exactly queer—she wasn’t totally into the married straight life either.
For real, she was a freak in bed. Their sex was way wilder than he had imagined in his crush stage. Their first hookup had been drunken, and involved pretty typical hetero dynamics. Their second hookup—which occurred dead sober, midday a week later after she took a day to “work from home” and told him, as her employee, to do the same—had been decidedly bent.
In her kitchen, she had opened her fridge and leaned into it. The shape of her from behind, along with the thick sexual tension, sunk him to his knees and he half kissed, half nuzzled her jean-clad ass. She looked back from the fridge, with an expression of near concern, at the same time she reached behind her and grabbed a handful of his hair.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” she asked. “If the genders were reversed, and some man had told his female employee to take a day off of work and come over I’d be appalled.”
She had her fingers entwined in his hair even as she asked, so he couldn’t pull back his head, and ended up responding to her ass, his mouth speaking an inch from her right ass cheek as if it were a microphone.
“Trust me, I love it,” he told her ass. “I’m in heaven. I’ve always had a thing for bossy women. Getting with my actual boss is like secret-hotness level unlocked. You have consent or whatever, just please let me keep my face here.”
“Should I be more of your boss about this, then?”
He looked up at her, unable to believe his luck. To find a toppy femme who was already literally in charge of him? Lotto odds. “Yes,” he said. “Please.”
“Fine.” She laughed, and turned to face him, so that his nose was level with her crotch. “Make me a PowerPoint presentation about why I should let you stay down there with your face in my pussy.” He closed his eyes, inhaled happily; a dawning awareness that this play turned her on as much as it did him chiseled loose a layer of the calcification that had begun to encrust his libido, and by extension, his heart, and by extension, his life.
The next day she sent him an email while they were both at the office. Still waiting on that PowerPoint deck we discussed. When can I expect it to be delivered?
He wasn’t sure whether to respond openly. Here he was, with all his secret queer credentials, and this divorced straight woman had completely wrong-footed him. Which, of course, was so insanely hot that he briefly considered finding an out-of-the-way bathroom in which to jerk off. LOL, he responded weakly.
No, I’m serious. I’ll expect you to present your slides to me by close of day Tuesday. If you’re late, I’ll make you present them in a conference room. Your choice.
* * *
—
This thing he had with Katrina—their power games, the thrill of sneaking around at the office and the explicitness of their flirting—it had all come together to make for really good sex. In his previous life, Ames had transitioned to live as a woman before he had ever had really good sex, and he wasn’t sure that post-detransition, he’d ever have truly good sex again. Every other dalliance he’d attempted as a heterosexual man had disconnected his body and mind, fostering an inability to display real excitement or joy even as he performed all the necessary acts, until eventually, his partner took that disconnect as indifference and let go of him. When that happened he’d drift away without effort, like in shipwreck movies, that ubiquitous shot when the lover’s body floats slowly down into the oceanic void. But not Katrina; for Katrina and her bossy games, he was fully here, electrified, daydreaming about it even when they were apart. Amazingly, his desire hadn’t faded over the whole of the five months they had been together. If anything it had grown, gotten wild: lush unruly green life that overran the tidily landscaped paths and garden beds of proper behavior.
He suspected that, although Katrina was too proud to openly say so, they had been having a type of sex that she had long craved but never before known to ask for. That this was the first time in her life that she was experiencing the mind-scrambling effects of good sex—the kind of sex where you travel across the country for just a couple hours together, after which you talk about buying property, or moving in together, or just generally entwining lives in a way logistically unjustified by a short period of intimacy. In short, the sex that Katrina and he were having was in the category that meant that when a pregnancy test comes up positive—keeping the baby is very much an option.
Except for two caveats: First, she didn’t know that he was once a transsexual, and second, after all his mental gymnastics, after all the lessons of transition and detransition, fatherhood remained the one affront to his gender that he still couldn’t stomach without a creeping sense of horror. To become a father by his own body, as his father was to him, and his father before him, and on and on, would sentence him to a lifetime of grappling with that horror.
God, he’d hidden so much of his past from her, a past murky, half-spoken, all of it covered by the pretext that he was trying to protect their relationship from the office. It tired Ames, despite erasure having become a second nature mode of dealing with his past.
* * *
—
In his office now, Katrina scoots forward in her chair and takes his hand. “Ames, help me,” she says softly. “What do you want to do? I’m not asking you to decide anything for me. I surprised myself by finding out I’m excited. I feel vulnerable saying that, so please, give me some sense of what this means for you.”