DECEMBER 13, 2024: 

 

“She wants to pay for bigger bazongas for you?!” my wife shouted back, flabbergasted.

 

“Ummm…yeah?” It sounded as ridiculous as ever coming from Rachel’s mouth, but it was technically quite true, airhead verbiage aside. 

 

“Holy poop, girl! Are you going to say yes?” 

 

“Uh…you don’t…sound like…you’re trying to discourage me?” I asked back, a little confused by my wife’s response.

 

“Girl, like, you’re always staring at my booba, I know you’re jealous of them.”

 

“Hey now, I am attracted to women, you know!”

 

“Me too, which is why I know a horny stare from a, like, not-horny stare, omigawd!”

 

“Okay, okay—listen, even if I said yes—”

 

“You said that she was, like, offering you $40,000 to take time off and recover, baby. Like, holy shit, we could finish getting electrolysis and tons-’n-tons of clothes for that!”

 

“Well, yeah, I know that,” hesitation crawled back into my voice, “B-but…what if she’s, like, expecting…y’know?”

 

“What?” the teed-up bimbo asked, completely oblivious.

 

“What if she asks for, y’know…‘sexual favors’?”

 

Rachel stared back at me, blankly, for a moment, “...I mean, you’ve done some before already, haven’t you?”

 

“I—wait, what are you implying?”

 

“Like, Jenni, we’re hawt as fuck girls and we work at a, like, rich person club! Are you seriously telling me that you haven’t sucked a few cocks, too?”

 

“‘Too’?! ‘Too’?!! Jesus fucking CHRIST, Rachel!! You’ve been sucking cock?”

 

Tears of horror began to well-up in my wife’s eyes, but the anger, the humiliation and the sense of failure was too much for me to think rationally.

 

“I—I, like, come on, Jenni, all of this costs so much money, how else was I going to make sure we didn’t wind back up on the streets?”

 

“By fucking talking to me about it first, Rachel! For fuck’s sake, my wife’s been sucking dick behind my back to pay for my fucking electrolysis and she didn’t even think to consult me about it?”

 

I shouldn’t have said the d-word. Fuck.

 

“What the fuck does it even matter?” Rach shouted back, suddenly sounding even more hurt than before. “You, like, won’t even call me your fucking wife in public?! How the fuck do you think that makes me feel, Jennifer?”

 

With just a single line I felt like I was suddenly on my back foot. Defensively, I retorted: “If people knew we weren’t strai—”

 

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Jennifer, I hardly hide that I’m bisexual. You’re the one who doesn’t ever want to—goddamn it, I don’t even give a fuck all about that bullshit, I just want to be able to tell the world I love my wife, but you won’t even—” Rach cut herself off and sat back down in her camping chair to sob into her hands in the middle of our inconsistently decored living room.

 

And suddenly, I felt like the most thick-headed bitch on the planet. 

 

***

 

March 30, 2023:

 

It was the oddest thing in the world being able to afford to buy food now. Okay, to be more specific, it was the oddest thing in the world to—after a little over seven months on the streets after living the life of your average teenager—to now have to go to the grocery store to fill a pantry. But here we were, walking down the aisles of a certain brick-and-mortar store that we had kept in our safe zone of stores that we wouldn’t steal from, with a shopping cart littered with both food and—my goodness, at last—toilet paper. 

 

And I was doing it in a dress. 

 

That was not something I could have foreseen a year ago. 

 

Then again, I don’t think I had foreseen actually confessing to Rachel, but I’d somehow had the balls to do just that.

 

The day before losing my balls.

 

Great choice of words there, Jennifer.

 

As Rachel and I made our way down the baking aisle idly, just to get some exercise in to wake ourselves up, I noticed her staring intently at a box of pancake mix.

 

“Feel like pancakes?” I asked, positioning our cart as close to the shelf as possible to avoid being one of those people that just left it in the middle of the fucking aisle to block traffic while they looked at the shelves.

 

“Ugh, I hate pancakes,” Rach replied, her face contorting with conflicting displeasure and interest.

 

“Then…why look at it?”

 

“So…” her voice trailed for a moment as she kept looking at the box of pancake mix, “...basically, it’s too flat. And the syrup is always, like, really stuck in your mouth with an aftertasty-taste-taste, y’know?”

 

“I mean, I guess, yeah?” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, though.

 

“So, basically, like…I like eating the taste of the pancake…but not the taste of the syrup.”

 

“Then eat it without syrup?”

 

“You can’t!” My wife shouted, turning to look me in the eye against her usual instinct, “It’s pancakes! You don’t eat those without, like, syrup! Everyone knows that! An-and, like, the syrup doesn’t always taste bad at first, ‘cause like, it’s sweet! And sweet things are sweet!”

 

Rachel was taking this very seriously.

 

“Okay, so? Be your own woman, then.”

 

“No, no, no, you—omigawd, Jenni, the feel of the thingy is so…ugh!” Rachel contorted her face into more disgustingly disgusted shapes than I figured that she could. Just remembering the texture of a pancake was sending the rest of her body language into a frenzy.

 

“But…you still eat them?” I asked, trying to push the conversation along so that Rach would get over it sooner.

 

“Yes! They taste good!” Rach sighed, dropping her shoulders. 

 

An idea popped into my head, “So, basically, you just need a pancake that has a sweet flavor without being too flat?”

 

Rachel nodded, seemingly overwhelmed.

 

“O…kay, then why not just mix chocolate chips or blueberries in, that should make the pancakes less smooth and not leave as bad an aftertaste as syrup, while also making them sweet.” 

 

Rachel brightened at my strategy, before dropping her shoulders yet again, “Ugh…that seems like so much work, though…”

 

I hated seeing Rachel suffer like this. Whatever prevented her from just doing things the way that she wanted tore at my heart. I’d seen it grow worse-and-worse for her over the years, and while she had managed to push through it a lot recently, she still had moments when she would shut down and simply do without, rather than get the wherewithal together to do what she wanted. 

 

Watching her suffer was torture, even if I just loved hearing her talk to me.

 

I just wanted to hear her voice again, so I asked, “Does this dress really look good on me?”

 

“Of course it does!” Rachel said, bringing her line of sight up off of the ground slightly, “I’m glad you bought it!”

 

“Well, you did say that I looked good in it,” I laughed, motioning us along by pushing the cart forward and then around the corner to the next aisle. We’d begun shopping at the back of the store, since the perishable food was up front, so as to preserve our food from going bad. It kind of boggled my mind that so few people did this. “It’s still scary, though. Y’know, wearing uh…dresses out.” 

 

Honestly, I was still acclimating to the fact that it fit me. That I didn’t see a man in a dress when I looked into the mirror anymore.

 

“Honey,” Rachel said, her mood improving, “As your wifey-wife-wife and a former Instagram influencer, I’m insulted that you would think me a bad choice of taste.” Rachel ended her little self-appraisal with a silly ‘ohohoho’ laugh that she’d picked up from watching too much anime. Normally, I would have found it cringe, but the more time I spent with Rachel and the more I learned to see my feelings for her across our entire lives, the more I’d realized that I loved every part of her, the silliness included. 

 

Even if it meant my attractive blonde girlfriend squeezing herself into a hot pink tube dress just to grocery shop drew even more eyes to her by having such a loud voice.

 

Then it occurred to me: it meant less eyes on me.

 

What an incredible woman.

 

Finally, Rachel and I arrived at the frozen food section and I set my plan in motion, “What do you think about these?” I pulled a yellow box out of the cooler.

 

Rachel marveled, “Frozen pancakes with blueberries?!” My wife snatched the box out of my hand and stared at it intently.

 

“The texture shouldn’t be as, uh, ‘flat’? These should be easier to make. Probably not as healthy, I guess, but everything only ever seems to go to your boobs and ass, anyway.”

 

“Hippy-hip-hips, too!” Rachel cackled triumphantly, shaking the box of pancakes in her hand. I’d seen her do that with stuff before, and I could only imagine that she liked listening to the different kinds of sounds.

 

“Pancake, pancake, pan~cake!” Rachel buzzed with a sing-songy intonation, “Everybody loves pan~cakes!” Then, suddenly, Rachel’s eyes shot open wider and she turned to face me directly. “We gotta go get syrup!!”

 

“B-but you hate syrup?” I returned, stunned.

 

“Argh, I know, but—oh, wait, that’s what the blueberries are for! Ooh, you said they do chocolate, too, right?!”

 

Rach shoved her head inside the freezer and stood there, ass-out, for several minutes trying to decide what boxes of pancakes she wanted. 

 

At that point, I was just happy to listen to her muffled voice as she talked herself into buying whichever box looked prettiest. 

 

Listening to my wife was the best part of the day, really.

 

***

 

DECEMBER 13, 2024: 

 

“Rachel, I’m sorry for yelling,” I whispered. She’d set up one of our spare air mattresses to sleep by herself in the living room for the night. I was completely wiped out from the lack of sleep and the exhausting set of days I had been going through, but I still didn’t want to leave things with Rachel off like that, so I dragged myself out of the surprisingly empty-feeling mattress that we usually shared together and walked to the living room to confront the woman I loved.

 

Rachel didn’t reply, although I could still tell that she was awake given the quiet whimpers she was trying—and failing—to stifle.

 

“Rach, I—you’re right.”

 

Still nothing.

 

“I’ve been really insecure about myself and my body for a long time—especially after what happened…down there. And I’ve been insecure about—Jesus Christ, you’ve been trying so hard to make me feel comfortable being me, but I’ve just—okay! Listen! Thank you. Thank you for giving me the time and space and opportunities to figure out whatever you must have seen was going on with me. But please, for the love of fuck, tell me when my wife is going to do sex work so that I know to look out for you. Do you even—it scares the fuck out of me what might happen to you, Rach. I don’t even know if I have the right to feel that way or not, but I do and I just—I don’t want to lose you.”

 

“Do you trust me?” Rach finally asked, back still turned to me. 

 

“I—of course I do?!”

 

“I know, y’know,” she whispered. “I know that you think you have to always, like, watch out for me like I’m your retarded daughter or something.”

 

“Rach, I—omigawd, please don’t think that I—I’d never—”

 

“Never resent me for it?” she asked back. 

 

My throat was dry, “R-Rach, honey, listen, I just—”

 

“We’re partners, Jennifer,” Rach repositioned herself so as to face me. “I get it, you’re worried about me. I know that I…like—what’s the word—dissociate and other stuff around you lots. But, like, it’s because it’s you that I feel safe doing that.”

 

“Wait…what?”

 

“What, do you, like, think I’m bimbo-moding all the time now?” she giggled, the light coming back to her eyes a little. Seeing her like this was like an oasis in the middle of a desert. 

 

“Rach, you don’t have to call it—”

 

“Let me be goofy about it, Jenni,” Rachel whispered, suddenly serious again.

 

I paused to let the moment settle.

 

“Anyway, like, Jenni—actually, get under here, first!”

 

Following my wife’s invitation, I joined her under the covers. Gawd, I missed the warmth of her body.

 

“Like, so, uh…basically, I’m jus’ tryna say that I, like, er…I just want you to understand! Y’know?”

 

And I think I did, “You…you really are amazing, you know that?”

 

With a quick kiss on the lips, “Like, duh!”

 

I broke into a fit of giggles as I laid against my wife, arms wrapped around her to pull her closer. Her larger breasts pressed against mine, and I suddenly understood why the differences in our sizes always bothered me. Even before I was on HRT. Even before I had been given a forced orchiectomy. 

 

I had gender dysphoria.

 

About my chest.

 

About how I related to women.

 

Other women.

 

And about…that.

 

I laughed to myself, even as a look of confusion drew itself on Rachel’s face.

 

“Hey,” I opened, readying myself to ask a pretty big question: “Do you—would you be okay with me accepting Miss York’s offer?”

 

Taking a moment for her brain to process what I had just asked, my wife finally caught up with the question and grew a big ol’ grin: “Can we go shopping some place high-end?”

 

“Fuck no, we’re getting a real bed, first!”