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  Without further adieu, here's this week's chapter.

  Kyle

  I held my face in my hands as I repyed the video for the fifth time in a row. Rachel, for her part, was pointing and ughing at Rose and I. The worst part? I couldn’t bme her. Shoe on the other foot, I’d probably do the same.

  Rose put her hand on my knee. “Kyle, darling, it’s okay.”

  “Is it, though?” I said. My frown was so steep it was like two strings were tugging it downwards. I watched the images flickering on screen of what I’d done st night, which was now on the internet for everyone to watch. Forever.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” she asked.

  “It’s embarrassing,” I said. I looked at Rachel, still ughing, and Lisa, who was clearly levying back a flood of giggles herself.

  “Is it any more embarrassing than the stuff I got up to on my st business trip?”

  I exhaled. “It’s a matter of perspective, I suppose.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And my perspective is that it’s worse,” I said.

  “Oh come on,” Rose pouted. “You can’t possibly be that thin-skinned.”

  I drew in a deep breath through my nose as the frigid tide of memories washed over me. “Briar. Look at how we started dating. I’m absolutely that thin-skinned.”

  12 Hours Earlier

  A slightly inebriated haze filtered my thoughts as Rose and I took our seats at the front row of the circus. Rose wore a green v-neck top that, alongside her push-up bra, offered a very nice view of her cleavage from where I was sitting, as well as a pid miniskirt that stopped at mid-thigh and showed off her long, smooth legs. She called it her ‘slutty schoolgirl skirt’ and I was very much an appreciator of it. Just in general, since she’d officially hatched, she’d gotten a lot more comfortable with herself and especially with her sexuality. She was always holding my hand or otherwise touching me in public, resting her head on my shoulder whenever we sat next to each other, kissing me either on the cheek or the mouth whenever circumstances forced us to part ways for even a scant few minutes. And that was without even getting into the not-so-public dispys of affection. We were fucking every day at the this point (or love-making, as she insisted on calling it, ever the nice Christian girl), and that afternoon in particur we’d spent three hours trying out different positions and activities. Her on top, me on top, side-to-side, sixty-nining, standing, in the shower, on the floor; my girl was keeping true to her promise to put my body to good use.

  And I knew she actually appreciated it. It wasn’t like it was with a lot of the other girls I’d dated, who were only interested in what I could do for them. Rose went out of her way to make sure I had as good a time as she did, making sure each roll in the hay ended with an orgasm. She’d even made good on her desire to take it raw, letting me feel her hole wrapped around me, tight on the sensitive skin of my shaft while I filled her up with my seed.

  It was amazing. She was amazing. Granted, I was sore all the time and had to shower thrice daily, but like… That was a sacrifice I was more than happy to make.

  Did I mention the blowjobs? She loved giving blowjobs, and holy shit did it show. I don’t think I’d ever gotten blowjobs as good as the ones she gave. Probably helped that she knew exactly how the organ she was servicing worked.

  I was still basking in the afterglow of the afternoon’s festivities as we took our seats and I put my arm around my woman. My woman. My Rose. God, I almost couldn’t believe this was real. That she was mine. That we could have been doing this the entire freaking time we’d known each other…

  No, no that wasn’t true. We’d had to grow into the people we were now, who were able to be with each other. If we’d tried this when we’d first met, it wouldn’t have worked for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which being Rose’s unhatched nature.

  It would have been nice, if I’d been able to put a crack in her eggshell when we’d first met, or when we’d first moved in together. We might have honestly still worked out. We might already be married, might already have kids. I might have been able to dodge the Sarah-bullet entirely. But better te than never. And I wouldn’t trade Rose as she was now for any hypothetical version of her.

  The crowd went wild as the music bred and the ringmaster walked out to the center of the ring. A tall and slender white guy with iron-gray hair parted neatly to the left and a hooked nose jutting out from his craggy face, he held a microphone in hand as his booming voice led us into the show.

  It was a thing of beauty. He led us into a knife-throwing act in which he was an active participant, rounded up by his employees and attached to a spinning board where they pelted bdes at him until he was entirely surrounded. Rose and I hammered back shots of whiskey while we watched, both of us howling with ughter while the ringmaster was taken down from the wheel by a small cadre of clowns who proceeded to get into a staged fight with the knife-throwers in which they beat them through weaponized pratfalls and rubber chickens. They eventually cleared all the throwers off of the stage, only for the strongmen to all barrel out and get into another fight with the clowns.

  Rose and I knocked back shot after shot, taking in all the strongmen throwing around clowns like they were beach balls as the ringmaster scurried off-stage. Goliath was seemingly the head of the table, instructing the other strongmen to start lifting the clowns over-head. It escated to the point where they were trying to see who could lift their clown the most times.

  One might even say they were having a…

  A…

  Look, I really emphasize, I’d had about seven or eight shots of whiskey by this point. I was swimming in a sea of intoxicated excitement as I hopped up to my feet and cried out, “No! This is how you do a lift-off!”

  “Kyle, no!” Rose cried out after me.

  I ignored her as I grabbed one of the clowns and hoisted him overhead.

  The other performers looked at me with mixes of shock and outrage, but Goliath… Goliath held up a hand to keep them at bay. He gestured for me to continue, and we nodded at each other solemnly.

  And then, the lift-off began. I bent my knees and lifted the clown once, twice, thrice as Goliath worked to keep up with me. This sted about ten reps before I managed to fall over onto my drunk ass, catching the clown and breaking his fall but still being greeted by a ughing crowd.

  It made my blood boil, but it wasn’t because of the people ughing at me. It was at myself for doing this in the first pce. I deserved to be ughed at for doing something like this. Something so stupid. Stupid stupid stupid, I was so fucking stupid!

  The other clowns gathered around me, pcing a crown atop my head and dubbing me ‘King of the Losers.’ I exhaled a beleaguered sigh as I was marched back to my seat.

  Rose gave me a comforting pat on the arm, while I grabbed the tablet stationed next to us and ordered more booze to soothe my ego.

  Now

  I bore the brunt of Lisa and Rachel’s ughter as I handed Rachel back her phone. That fucking video, titled ‘Drunk Idiot Crowned Clown King’ had been up less than ten hours and already had three thousand views.

  “Well, that is… Probably the single most humiliating moment of my life thus far,” I said.

  “Hey, fame is fleeting,” Lisa said.

  “But the internet is forever,” Rachel said.

  “Babe, read the room,” Lisa said to her wife.

  “I refuse,” Rachel said.

  Rose, meanwhile, was conspicuously silent as she sat next to me. An inscrutable smile was on her face while she stirred her coffee with a spoon. I sighed again, then said, “Penny for your thoughts, Briar Rose?”

  “Honestly?” she said. “It was adorable.”

  I blinked. “Um-”

  “No, seriously. It was really freaking cute,” Rose said. She was giggling, but I got the sense that she wasn’t ughing at me.

  “You’re not embarrassed to have a boyfriend who does shit like that in public?”

  “Kyle, darling, who do you think you’re talking to right now?”

  “Uh… Are we doing this again?” I said, suddenly nervous.

  She rolled her eyes. “I have done so much publicly humiliating crap in my thirty-one years it sprints past comedy and straight into the realm of the depressing. I’ve made front-page news doing so. Literally. This is nothing. You’re competitive. It’s part of who you are. It’s part of what I love about you. And yeah, what you did was stupid, but it was just so… You. So completely and utterly Kyle Duggan in every way. How on earth could I be embarrassed by you just being yourself?”

  My jaw dropped as her words sunk into my brain. She didn’t care. She really didn’t care that I was an overgrown idiot jock who couldn’t stop showing off or making everything into competitions. She didn’t care that I couldn’t help myself, that I went too hard and too far. She saw me, and she accepted me. And she loved everything about me, even the parts I didn’t love about myself. “God, I don’t deserve you,” I said, breathing yet another sigh, this one of relief.

  She ughed, and this time it was definitely at me. “Oh please, I don’t deserve you.”

  Now I ughed at her. “No, I don’t deserve you.”

  “No, I-”

  “I’d say you both deserve each other,” Lisa said with a grin.

  “Seriously, you’re so cute together, it’s nauseating,” Rachel said.

  Rose didn’t say anything. She just rested her head against my bicep. My Briar Rose. She fit perfectly. “God, I just hope we didn’t get Vegas Married st night to assuage my ego,” I groaned.

  “You two got Vegas Married?!” Rachel said.

  “We… Might have,” Rose said.

  “Dammit! I wanted to be a bridesmaid,” Lisa said.

  “I wanted to be a grooms-woman!” Rachel said.

  “You do rock a tuxedo,” I nodded.

  Rachel snapped her fingers. “Damn right.”

  “Look, even if Kyle and I accidentally got married st night, we’re still gonna have an actual ceremony for it back home at some point,” Rose said. Then she looked at me and added, “Right?”

  “Absolutely. I’m giving you a fucking fairy tale wedding for the ages,” I said.

  She kissed my cheek and nuzzled my neck. “Love you.”

  “Love you too,” I said. And I meant it. Rose was the best thing to ever happen to me. And I wanted to make her the happiest woman in the world.

  “Why hello there!” A high-pitched voice came barreling towards us. Juniper and Goliath had arrived.

  “Hi,” I said, awkwardly shifting in my seat as Rose got up and hugged her sister.

  “Quite the show you helped us put on st night, Duggan,” Goliath said.

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry about that,” I said.

  “Don’t be. The crowd ate it up,” Goliath said with a shrug. “We are gonna need the crown back, though.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh yeah, the King of the Losers is something we bestow upon people at almost every show,” Juniper expined. “We only have the one crown, though.”

  “B-but I earned it!”

  “Darling, not five minutes ago you were saying how embarrassed you were by the whole thing,” Rose pointed out.

  “...”

  “Kyle, for fuck’s sake,” Rose rolled her eyes.

  I gave her shit-eating grin. “I thought you said you loved me no matter what.”

  “I do, but that doesn’t mean I won’t clown on you, you meathead.”

  “Hm. Perhaps we can make this into a competition.”

  “Everything is a competition with you, huh?” she mugged.

  “You’re fucking right, everything is a competition,” I ughed.

  “I am so gd we stopped you two from getting Vegas Married st night,” Juniper smiled.

  “Wait, what?!” Rose and I said in unison.

  “And the thick plottens,” Rachel said while Lisa drank her tea.

  “You two really don’t remember it?” Goliath asked.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Yeah, we found you after the show to party a bit, but y’all started saying you should just get the formality taken care of and worry about the rest ter,” Juniper said. “I don’t know which of you suggested it- the wheels were already turning by the time we found you, but we had to talk you out of it. Figured my baby sister wants a proper wedding in a church.”

  “You figured correctly,” Rose said.

  “But yeah, we were able to talk you out of it by pointing something out.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I told Rose that if she got married tonight, it would say her deadname on the paperwork,” Juniper said.

  Rose’s eyes went wide. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “I’m a mad genius!”

  “You’re a mad something, alright,” I chuckled, starting to put the puzzle pieces together myself.

  ***

  Rose was born in Nevada, and that meant the state had her real birth certificate. And, as Goliath had expined to us, if you were born here, it was incredibly easy to get your name legally changed. Almost as easy as getting married.

  We sat in the lobby of the courthouse, a crowded mass of people standing in line atop a gray linoleum floor while neon signs directed people to the different types of courts. Rose held the court order and the new birth certificate and stared at them like she’d found a tome of lost lore. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I can,” I said, holding her tight and kissing her temple. “You can make anything happen, Briar Rose.”

  “No, I can’t believe my legal first name is Briar. I love it as a nickname, but I don’t know if I love it being my first name.”

  “In your defense, you were really drunk when you filled out those forms.”

  “True. I guess it also could’ve been way worse. I could’ve made Briar-Rose my first name,” she said.

  “Is that allowed?” I quirked an eyebrow.

  “If you hyphenate it, yeah. Like naming your daughter Becky-Lynn or Cindy-Mae or something.”

  “Have you met people with names like that?”

  “Some of Veronica’s sorority sisters at Harvard, yeah.”

  “Were they from the deep south?”

  “Yeah, actually.”

  “Huh. Fair enough.”

  “Still, I guess I can just be one of those girls who goes by her middle name,” Rose smiled.

  “That you can.”

  “You, though… You can call me Briar or Briar Rose all you want,” she said, kissing me. “I love it when you say my full name like that, but I can’t bear to hear it from anyone else. You’re the only one who gets all of me, Kyle Duggan.” I beamed at her. “I think I can live with that arrangement, Briar Rose.”

  She squealed. “Hm. Yeah, just like that.”

  I kissed her on the mouth, funting the public dispy of affection for all to see. It was a Vegas courthouse, after all- we were hardly the only ones here celebrating good news. Her lips were so soft and her tongue was so warm. And now she was legally her real self, something that clearly made her happy.

  The way we’d been talking when we were afraid we’d accidentally tied the knot, though… We both just treated it as a given that we were marching down the path to marriage hand in hand. It was practically a forgone conclusion. And I still had the ring in my pocket. I never let it off of my person, just in case the right time and the right pce happened upon me. Maybe the right time and pce could be here and now. Maybe we could make it official, start pnning the wedding when we got home. There was a part of my brain cautioning me that this was way too fast, that I was falling into the same trap I always did, but usually when I did this I didn’t have the girl on the same page as me. I didn’t have a girl who wanted to be with me as badly as I wanted to be with her. At least until now. And admittedly, it’s difficult to listen to common sense when your girlfriend’s tongue is exploring the inside of your mouth.

  “Briar,” I breathed into her ear. “There’s something I need to ask you.”

  “Yes, darling,” she whispered into mine.

  I reached into my pocket.

  “Brian Caleb O’Neil, what the hell do you think you’re doing?!” A shrill voice cut through the otherwise pristine hallmark moment.

  Rose was always pale, but I’d never before seen her as pale as she turned at that exact second. Her eyes went impossibly wide and her fists clenched and she drew in a sharp breath. My eyes followed the trail of the voice, and found Sarah aged up twenty-five years, marching towards us. Same short haircut, but all gray. Same pantsuit and high heels fashion sense. Same angur face. Same eyes. Same scowl.

  Rose turned to face her and, with fear exploding off of her voice and tears of sorrow and panic filling up her eyes, said, “Mom.”