James kept looking at me for brief seconds, grimacing, and then looking away again, staring at the floor, at the door, at his own reflection in the mirror; anywhere but me. After a little while I stopped asking him questions and just sat next to him, gently rubbing his spine to show him he was welcome here, he was wanted here, and he was under no pressure to respond if he wasn’t able.

I briefly considered that he might be drunk, but while his eyes were bloodshot I guessed it was from crying and not alcohol: he had the remnants of tear tracks on his cheeks, he wasn’t physically pliable like drunk people can be, and he didn’t smell the way he usually did when he’d been drinking. It was possible he and Sophie had polished off another couple of bottles of wine between them and he was just hiding the effects, but I doubted it.

I wondered what had happened with Sophie after I left. For all that she’d softened on me after we talked in the bathroom, it didn’t change the fact that James, after an evening with her, was more of a wreck than I’d ever seen him. I couldn’t help resenting her for that.

Unless, of course, the mess in front of me was my fault.

“James,” I tried again, “please talk to me.”

Finally he spoke up. “I shouldn’t,” he said through a ravaged throat.

He’d definitely been crying. Nothing else would have made him sound like that. I reached behind me and blindly found one of the water bottles that were still scatted on the other side of the bed; I’d thrown the contents of my suitcases approximately everywhere when I was looking for something suitable to wear to dinner. He took it wordlessly and drank. I returned to stroking his back.

“Why shouldn’t you talk?” I asked as gently as I knew how.

“I’ll just make it worse,” he muttered.

“In what way?” I asked. When he didn’t answer, I decided to risk setting off the dynamite. “Was it something Sophie said?”

He closed his eyes. “It was something I did.”

“Tell me, please.”

He finished the water before he said anything. He must have been parched. “After dinner,” he said eventually, sounding disgusted, “I was feeling rather good about myself. About us; our company.” He often referred to MCAC that way: ‘our company’. As if it wasn’t his name on it, his money in it; I just worked there. But I thought it was nice of him, anyway.

“You should,” I insisted, when he didn’t say anything else. “We’ve done well so far.” We genuinely had. Even if nothing else panned out, the hardware we were expecting ought to lead to big things on its own, assuming we could get our software working with it.

“You’ve done great,” he said, strangely bitter. “All I’ve done is the rich-boy dancing monkey act for people impressed enough by my name and my accent to give us a shot. But you’ve been out there… going above and beyond for us.”

“It’s nothing more than Emily’s done,” I said. I felt like she didn’t get enough appreciation. Not only did she have to fend off the same crap I had to, she’d shielded me from the worst elements of it and she’d done it while effectively training me. None of that was in her contract. I’d be angling for a huge bonus for her, as well as the tryout at MCAC. I suppressed a smile; I wouldn’t have to worry any more about her encountering a boy wearing my face when she turned up at the offices. It’s a good thing I turned out to be trans after all, or the following few weeks would probably have been farcical.

“She didn’t have me… pushing her.”

Oh crap. This was about what Sophie said to him.

“You didn’t—” I said.

“I did,” he interrupted. “You know, we had a lovely dinner together. And as usual, I enjoyed it too much.” He shot me a sad smile. “Far too much. But, after, I went to the bar for a coffee to give you some space and that’s when I started thinking things over.”

“What things?” I asked.

“About my behaviour. About how I abused your trust,” James whispered. “How I pushed you into this.”

“James, you’ve never—”

“Remember when you called me out? About getting Ben to take your clothes away that first night? About taking away your agency? So you could ‘get more into character’?” I’d never seen finger quotes articulated with such contempt before. “But that wasn’t why I did it. It was just what I told Ben. The real reason was just… selfishness. Like everything I do.”

“What—”

“You work for me!” he practically shouted, gesticulating with such exaggeration he threw the empty plastic bottle across the room. “And what do I pay you? A fraction of your worth. But when it’s something I want from you…” He lowered his voice again. “Hair extensions. Clothes. I threw money at… this. All because I wanted it.” I think he would have spat the word if he could.

I was determined to get a word in edgeways. “We needed it!” I insisted. “For the company! So our work would have a chance to get recognised! We agreed!”

“Just a flimsy excuse,” he hissed from between gritted teeth. “Just a stupid idea of mine based on nothing more than…” He trailed off, and stared at nothing for a few moments. “And you! You just… went along with it. Because you are kind and helpful and good and— and—”

“James—”

“We could have sold our software without making you parade around like that. You could have sold it. We didn’t need this. It was all just… my vanity. My ego. All because I wanted it. Because I can’t tell a favour from a game from a— a— a ruinous fantasy.”

He was talking himself further into the pit. I put a finger against his lips so he couldn’t interrupt me, turning his head at the same time so he had to look at me.

“All this… self-loathing seems to be predicated on the idea that I had a miserable time,” I said gently. “I didn’t. Once I got past my inhibitions, I—”

“You shouldn’t have had to!” he said, through my finger. He took my hand and lowered it, holding it in both of his, and gently stroked the base of my thumb. Until he seemed to realise what he was doing and dropped it like a hot rock. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“What for?” I asked. “Sorry for being kind? Sorry for helping me through this whole thing which I agreed to do? Or is it sorry for holding my hand?” This was a risk. “Sorry for being gentle with me? Sorry for touching me at all?”

He looked like I’d kicked him off a cliff.

“I would have done it again, you know,” he said in an empty voice. “Made choices for you. If you hadn’t called me out. Would have taken your agency away any way I could, just to make you stay like this. Before we started this I thought it was going to be like how it was with Ben, just kind of fun, but as soon as I saw you all that went out the window and I just— I just needed you, Alex. Needed you to stay. Like that. I don’t know what shit I would have tried to pull, but this little voice just kept saying, never let her stop. Never let her go back.”

I took great solace in the pronoun this time. I don’t know why it had ever bothered me before. Except, I suppose, it had been prodding at wounds I didn’t know I had.

“But you didn’t,” I said softly.

“But I wanted to. So much.”

“But you didn’t,” I repeated. “And look at me; I’ve been having a great time!”

“You’re just lying to be kind,” James muttered. I shook my head firmly. “Sophie was right,” he added, after a few moments of silence.

“Did she say you were playing with me?” I suggested, knowing full well she had. “Taking advantage of my, uh, compliant nature to push me into doing things?”

“She was practically quoting you, Alex! She said I was dressing you up, enjoying myself at your expense. Which is what you said, that time in the office; you said I was playing with you!”

“And then we talked and we decided that you weren’t!” I replied, frantic. “Or, at the very least, that I was enjoying it, too! And remember what you said? That I was becoming something more than I was.” I’d held onto that phrasing in the back of my mind, apparently. My subconscious is always ten steps ahead of my dumbass regular consciousness. “And you were right.”

“But that’s just it! You were just Alex and then I came along and I turned you into— into something that I wanted, out of— out of pure selfishness.”

“You know what Sophie said to me?” I asked, trying to break his destructive — not to mention, inaccurate — train of thought. “In the restaurant bathroom? She asked me point-blank if I was going to hurt you. She asked me if I was playing a— a game with all this. And she said she was worried because she thought you’d fallen for the woman you saw when you looked at me.” I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘fallen in love with’. “And she wanted to know if I was going to string you along. If I was going to play with you.”

“But—” he said, and stopped. His brain had clearly thrown an error.

“James,” I whispered, “there’s one thing you’re right about. I was ‘just Alex’.” He suddenly looked like he wanted to defend my honour or something, so I doubled down. “It’s true, and you know it. I existed only for work; I threw myself into it. There was nothing in my life, except work. And… and you.” I swallowed. My mouth was dry and my throat was aching, as if my body wanted to stop me from saying what I had to say next. But I knew I had to keep going. Hiding the way I felt, hiding the revelations I’d had, would only harm us both. Better to put everything on the line now than wait even another minute. “You showed me there was another way I could be. You showed me this, and whether originally it was for expediency’s sake, or even for a laugh, you know what the amazing thing is? The total fucking miracle? It turns out this is me. This is who I am. The old me, the boy me, was a holding pattern, a defence mechanism; a dead end. A pit I would never have climbed out of because I didn’t even know I was in it.” I smiled at him, desperately hoping I was getting through to him. “Until you. And this whole deeply silly, incredibly wonderful booth babe thing.”

“Trade show model,” he corrected in a whisper.

“You’re damn right,” I said. “You reached into this sad boy, a boy so sad he didn’t know what happiness even was, and you found me.”

“What do you mean, ‘found you’?” James asked. He was staring at me now with an intensity I’d never seen in him. A hunger.

“I’m not going back,” I said slowly. “The old me is gone for good.” His eyebrows were still knotted; I wasn’t being clear enough. Time to stop being oblique. “I’m not taking the hair extensions out next week; I’m not returning the dresses. Sorry about the damage to the company credit card. And I’ll buy the bloody tits off of Ben until I can grow my own. I need this to never stop.”

“What are you saying?” he said, eyes wide.

“James, I’m transgender. I’m a transgender woman. I think I always have been, but I never knew. There was always something wrong with me, something missing, but I never worked it out. Just assumed that was the way life was. That it was how everyone felt all the time. Until this. Until you.”

I closed my eyes. It was finally out there. No take-backs.

James ruined it, naturally.

“But I still pushed you, because I—”

“No!” I interrupted, raising my shut-the-fuck-up finger. “You said yourself, back before we left London, you’d never seen me come out of my shell before. You said it was like I was a different person. So if you were pushing me, and yeah, I’ll grant that maybe you were, it’s because you saw something in me I hadn’t yet seen for myself!”

“Don’t make me out to be so noble,” he said, still miserable. “Just last night I was trying to tell you you shouldn’t switch back. And I wasn’t being kind, in that moment; just selfish.”

I frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

He smiled weakly. “You were falling asleep. I said I thought you didn’t want to go back to how you were. And you just rolled over and smiled and shushed me. I don’t think you heard a single thing I said.” He balled his fists. “And after that, you were just lying there, looking at me, with your eyes almost completely closed, and you were so beautiful, I couldn’t help myself. I started… fantasising about what it would be like if you had always been this way, or if you never had to change back.” He closed his eyes. “More than fantasising.”

I almost hiccuped in surprise. “James Ian McCain!” I exclaimed. “Are you saying you masturbated to me?”

His cheeks burned red, and a part of me liked letting him be the one who was embarrassed for once. The rest of me simply hated seeing him so miserable.

“It wasn’t the first time,” he whispered.

“Is that why you’re feeling so guilty?” I asked, hooking a finger under his chin and raising his head until he opened his eyes and looked at me.

He didn’t say anything. Damn. Breaking him out of his guilt was going to require me to lay everything out. Not just trivial stuff, like the seismic shift in my self-concept; everything.

“You know the first night?” I said quietly, a little unable to believe I was about to tell him what I was about to tell him. “After the whole measuring me thing? When I went to get changed and you fell asleep on the sofa?” He nodded. “Do you remember kissing me?”

He groaned. “I thought I dreamed that,” he said.

“Nope. I covered you in a blanket, and you grabbed me and kissed me. I didn’t really… process it at the time, and you were mostly asleep so it was this whole sloppy mess, but even so it was the first time a kiss had really made me feel anything.”

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“Afterwards,” I continued, “I slept in your bed. Everything around me smelled like you, and I loved it. I fell asleep thinking about the restaurant, thinking about the kiss; thinking about you. And I dreamed of you touching me. James, I dreamed of you fucking me.” He was just staring at me now. “And the next night, alone, in my own place, I kind of made the dreams happen myself.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, apparently unable to look away from me.

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” I sighed. “I wanked over you, James. I fantasised about touching you, about you touching me — me as a woman, I might add. I imagined you hoisting me up on your desk and finger-fucking me right there in your office.” I leaned closer to him, and I couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “And you were so. Good. I mean, at the time I was too confused about what the hell was going on to really understand why I was doing it — and why I needed to imagine myself as a woman to get off on the idea of being with you — but I knew I desperately needed to do it and I didn’t want to stop.”

James looked like he was trying to form words but couldn’t for some reason.

“All I want,” I said, “when I’m around you, is to touch you, and to be touched by you.”

“Um—” he started, but I interrupted him because I needed him to know the truth, without doubt, in the simplest possible terms.

“James. I’m a woman. And I’m in love with you.”

~

I don’t know what I expected. Probably near the bottom of the list, especially considering the way James had been since he’d shown up at my door, was for him to burst out laughing.

“Oh my God—” he gasped out, between wheezes.

“James,” I said, juggling options as to whether I ought to be mortally offended or mortally wounded, “I’m serious.”

“Oh no,” James managed, “I totally believe you. I don’t. Know why. I’m laughing!”

I needed to take charge of the situation. I started running one hand up and down his spine again, to calm him as gently as I could. With the other hand I took his, which was in his lap, and squeezed it.

He got control of himself.

“Fuck,” he summarised.

“Yeah,” I said.

“All this time,” he said, smiling, “I’ve been looking at you, talking to you — fuck, lusting after you — and feeling guilty, and then feeling confused because I’ve never been into guys in the slightest, and then feeling double-confused because I didn’t think I was into you in a guy way, and thinking of you as a woman and feeling guilty again because in my head it was me who was making you do that…”

“Believe me,” I said, “it’s been similar inside my head, too.” I let his hand go so I could finger-quote. “‘Why am I so attracted to James?’ ‘Why don’t I hate dressing like this?’ ‘Why don’t I fancy Emily or Vicky or Sophie?’ and especially, ‘Why am I dreading going back to being the old Alex?’ What a fucking rollercoaster.” I sighed. “What a pair of fucking idiots,” I added, unable to stop myself from giggling.

“I can’t believe we’ve just been chewing over all of this completely separately,” he said. “We’re supposed to be friends, but—”

“Let’s make a deal,” I interrupted. “Next time one of us starts going crazy, we bring the other one into the loop early, so we either go nuts together, or we figure it out together.”

“Deal,” James said.

I let myself flop backwards onto the bed. James followed me and we lay there staring at the ceiling for a few moments before I felt around for his hand and took it in mine, finger-by-finger. And for a while, lying there, sharing our body heat, enjoying the single point of connection between us, was enough.

Until it wasn’t.

I let go of his hand and rolled over, so I was facing him. Purely for the purposes of keeping my balance and with no ulterior motive whatsoever, I put my arm across his chest and my head on his shoulder. His chest, rising and falling in time with his breathing, warmed my fingers. I watched him watch me.

“Do you mind if I—?” I said, terminating the sentence because I wasn’t quite brave enough to finish it.

He grinned at me, the bastard. “Do I mind if you what?” he asked.

I gave him a look but he remained unrepentant, so I shrugged. I leaned over to him, putting more of my weight on his chest, and kissed him on the cheek. He was a little stubbly and it tickled my lower lip, which was such a delightfully odd sensation that I kissed him again on the jaw, running my lips gently over a couple of centimetres of skin. I let myself rest against him for a moment and then pushed away, still watching him, almost completely certain that what I’d just done was okay but with a little nagging core of me that was terrified it wasn’t.

He propped himself up, moving to lie on his side so we were facing.

“Alex Brewer,” he said quietly and teasingly slowly, “what do you think you’re doing?”

Screw it. “This,” I said, and pulled myself towards him, closing the distance between us to nothing and closing my mouth over his. As my lips pressed against his, his free hand found the small of my back and pulled me even closer. Both our lips parted and his tongue entered my mouth at the same time I realised the pressure against my leg was his burgeoning erection.

The realisation made me break the kiss. I pulled away, giggling.

“What?” he asked, smiling but confused.

“Um,” I said, pointing crotchward with my eyes. He didn’t seem to get it, so I repeated myself more firmly: “Um.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, finally realising just how much dick he was pushing into my thigh. “Sorry,” he added sheepishly.

I kissed him on the lips again, just a quick peck this time. “Not looking for an apology,” I said. “It’s nice to know I merit a proper stiffie.”

“I mean,” he said, “it’s not the first time. If you’ve seen me walking funny recently, that’s probably why.” And he kissed me back.

I snorted, which was a dreadfully attractive thing for me to do while he was kissing me. And then I sat up, hooking a hand around his neck to encourage him to follow suit. We sat next to each other, James perched on the edge of the bed again, me practically in his lap.

Keeping eye contact with him the whole time, to make sure it was okay, I slipped a hand down to his crotch and located his dick. God, the thing was massive! Well, actually it was probably just kind of normal-sized, but it was my first dick, so it didn’t have any competition to speak of; it was massive in a field of one. Through the loose, thin material of his trousers, I massaged his penis and felt it twitch under my fingers.

My own dick, trapped in my underwear, responded in kind.

Fuck, I realised. I almost fell off his lap.

“What’s wrong?” James said, responding instantly with a steadying hand on my back and a concerned look on his face. “Too fast?”

I swallowed. “No,” I said, my heart sinking as I realised what it was that had killed my mood. “Not too fast. I… kinda remembered I have one of those, too.”

I must have looked as miserable as James had when he’d first come into the room, because he embraced me with both arms, practically picked me up — wow, he was strong — and laid me back down on the bed. He lay down next to me; we were arranged more or less as we had been before.

“Talk to me,” he said gently. “If you can. If you want to.”

I looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know if I can,” I said. “I don’t know if I can talk about this with you.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, sounding a little hurt.

I sighed. “I want you to see me as a woman,” I admitted. “And that’s such a big turnaround from how you’ve always seen me, before all this. I worry it’s temporary. Fragile.”

“Alex…” He shuffled closer, put an arm around me. “The moment I started seeing you as a woman, days ago now, you stopped making sense as a man. Being reminded of certain facts about your anatomy isn’t going to change that.”

“It’s that simple, is it?”

“It’s that simple,” he confirmed, and sealed it with a kiss on my cheek. “And you should know that. It’s why I’ve been beating myself up for days. Which, thank you, by the way, for putting a stop to that; the bruises were getting a bit much.”

I sat up suddenly. “Bruises? Where—?”

“Metaphorical bruises,” he corrected me, pushing me gently back down onto the bed. “But your concern is appreciated,” he added in a slightly mocking tone.

“You sod,” I told him.

“You can talk to me about anything,” he said. “It won’t affect how I see you.”

“It’s confusing,” I admitted. “So much of this is new to me. It’s like—” I thought for a moment, looking for a way to put it into words, as much for my own benefit as for his. “It’s like I’m opening all the doors and windows in my apartment all at once and seeing light for the first time, and the light is wonderful, but it’s not just the light I can see; it’s showing me exactly how dusty and dirty and broken all the stuff in my flat is and has always been…” I frowned. The metaphor was getting away from me.

“I think I get it,” he said. “You mean, you always should have thought of yourself this way, and now that you do, it’s like every time you encounter an old habit or instinct or whatever, you’re seeing it through new eyes. Like everything’s recontextualised.”

“That, and I really hate my shitty apartment,” I said. “I think you’re getting this faster than I am, to be honest.”

He smirked at me. “Hey, I’ve been hoping you’d want to stay like this for days now. I, uh, did a little reading online.”

Oh God. “Oh God.”

“Sorry,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry.

“You probably know more than I do, then,” I said. “I chatted online with a nice trans guy who helped me sort through what I wanted, in the big picture sense. And that was really useful. But since then all I’ve done is skim a ‘what next’ FAQ. I have lots of questions for myself about surgery and lifestyle changes and stuff that I haven’t even begun to answer.”

“What do you want to do about…?” He didn’t finish the sentence, but pointed down with his eyes, the way I had earlier.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still sorting out how I feel about it, I guess.” He smiled at me, gently, encouraging me to keep talking, to pick my way through this topic at my own pace. God, it was nice to talk about this stuff out loud, to someone else, and not simply stew about it inside my own head. Because inside my head is where I keep all my idiocy, and even sensible thoughts get corrupted if they spend too long in there. “Right now… I kind of hate it. My prick and stuff.” A horrible word for a thing I wasn’t too fond of. “And, thinking back, I’ve never really liked it much. Never liked to touch it, never liked to use it.” I laughed bitterly. “And I think I might have just clued you in on why I could never keep a girlfriend.”

“Poor Alex,” he said, with humour. “I’m glad I don’t have any competition, though.”

I groaned. “I do,” I realised. “How many women have you been with?”

“None like you,” he said. “None who know me like you do.” He pulled my top up a little and started stroking my exposed belly with a finger. It was nice. “So if you hate it,” he continued, “do you think you’ll get rid of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wonder how much of hating it is bound up with how I don’t like my body at the moment. You know, that first night when I went back home alone? I tried to shower but the moment I saw myself naked, without the… the helpers—” I poked myself in the tit, “—I felt really, really weird. I couldn’t shower after seeing that. Didn’t want to be naked any more. Looking back, that was a pretty big clue.”

He surprised me with another kiss on my cheek. I’d been staring at the ceiling again and didn’t see him come in. I smiled, and reached over to kiss him back before he could escape. We stayed like that for a few moments, gentle pressure on each other’s lips, but I let him go in the end. I wanted to keep talking. Keep thinking.

“If I liked my body more,” I said, “it’s possible my feelings about it might change. Or they might stay exactly the same. But people say going on hormones can really alter your self-image, so who knows?”

“You’re planning to go on hormones?” James asked.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “It’s the one thing I’m sure about. I was this close to loading up an online pharmacy when you knocked. You can go through the NHS for them but apparently it can take years.” I made a face which James echoed. “And you can get them from a private doctor which is much quicker but expensive, and still slower than just buying them online.”

He frowned. “Won’t you need blood tests and stuff?”

“Yes,” I said, “but not as much as I need to stop what’s left of my male development in its tracks. The more I think about it, the more freaked out I get that there’s testosterone in my system doing a little bit of damage every day. I’m getting away with it now, but I know it can’t last.”

“Hmm,” he said. I hoped dearly he wasn’t going to fight me on this. “What if you got some online but saw a private doctor as soon as possible? I can help with the cost if it’s too much money.”

I think my eyes bulged out of their sockets. “You’d do that?” On the one hand, I was handing even more power over my life to him; on the other, he had the money and I didn’t. And it wasn’t like I was anything but ride or die for James now, anyway.

He laughed. “Of course! What can it cost? A couple of thousand?”

“Um, I think more like a couple of hundred,” I said sheepishly. Rich boys!

“That,” he said, breaking the sentence up by kissing me again, “is more than fine.”

~

We hugged for a while. I think my mini-freakout had drained all the sexiness out of the room, but there was still something special about just lying and holding each other. He was gentle with me, and I clung to him like I’d never had a boyfriend before. Which, yeah.

“Ugh,” he said, breaking the silence, “it’s getting late.”

I made an unhappy noise that was muffled by the way my head was buried in his chest. “Don’t wanna go to sleep,” I said childishly. “I like this too much.”

“Sorry,” James said. “We have to sell stuff again tomorrow.”

“Sucks,” I mumbled.

“Go clean your teeth,” he ordered.

Reluctantly I extracted myself from his embrace and plodded off to the bathroom to clean my teeth, inspect my hair, stare blearily at myself in the mirror and wonder how dark my under-eye circles would be in the morning, et cetera. I was halfway done when James entered the bathroom, carrying his overnight bag.

He was naked, except for his boxers.

Jesus…

I think I dribbled some toothpaste down my chin. The man was a fucking demigod; I had no idea what he saw in me. Maybe it was just that I was easy to tease: he grinned like a lunatic when he saw the effect his naked body had on me.

I nearly spat the rest of my toothpaste at him. But my vengeful instincts were calmed when he stood next to me at the sink, loaded up his own toothbrush, and kissed me on the top of the head before he started on his teeth. Mollified, I leaned against him and finished up. Bless him, he even handed me a towel when I got done washing my face and was still blinking water out of my eyes. And when I finished drying myself he wordlessly handed me a tube of moisturiser.

Yeah, fine. I’d keep him.

I couldn’t resist running a hand across his back on my way out of the bathroom.

Alone in the main room, I shucked off my jeans and top and dumped them on the floor. I didn’t mean to leave them in a crumpled heap — Ben would have words, I was sure — but I caught sight of myself in the mirror, almost naked but with the tucking knickers and the bra still on, boobs still nestled in the cups, and it started me thinking.

I examined myself critically, wondering how HRT would change me. I had pretty narrow shoulders but my hips were even narrower. I knew I could expect some fleshiness around the butt and thighs, and probably a rounder belly; hopefully it would be enough to fill my lower half out and balance it against my shoulders. I was trying to imagine what home-grown breasts would look like on my frame when an arm snaked around my waist, taking me by surprise.

“Hey, beautiful,” James whispered into my hair. “Come to bed?”

Suddenly self-conscious, I tried to pull away, but he held me firm.

“James!” I protested.

“If you’re thinking anything other than, ‘James thinks I look incredibly sexy,’” he said, “then you’re so very, very wrong.”

“I look weird,” I said, frowning at our reflections. Next to him, I looked scrawny and unfeminine. In that moment I could not have more wanted to look in the flesh the way the boobs and butt pads made me look under clothes.

“You look beautiful,” he insisted.

I turned away from the mirror, choosing instead to look up at his face, in case it made it easier to believe him. It certainly made it easier to kiss him.

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t believe it, but thanks.”

He put both arms around me and lifted me again — I was starting to think he just liked doing that — and put me down on the edge of the bed.

“Then believe this,” he said, looking down at me and smiling. “Looking at you, right now, all I want is to touch you, and to be touched by you.”

He was a charming little bastard, I had to give him that. I let him usher me into bed and pull the covers over both of us. He turned out the light and gathered me up under one arm, which he cinched around my belly. I fell into the little divot we were making in the middle of the mattress. Giggling, I arranged myself so I was facing away from him. He let me wriggle and fidget until we were spooning and then kissed me on the back of the head.

“Goodnight, Alex,” he whispered, and kissed me again.

I covered his arm with mine, squeezing it against my stomach.

“Goodnight, James,” I replied, and gradually fell asleep, guided by the gentle in-out rhythm of his chest against my back.