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  Kyle

  The doorbell rang while I was in the shower. I’d just come back from a run and was busy thering up my crotch with bodywash when I heard the buzzing. I groaned as I climbed out of the shower, wrapping a towel around my waist and wiping my feet on the bath mat before ambling out towards the front door. I was still stewing from my conversation with O’Neil… With Rose… She didn’t seem much like Brian anymore. But she also didn’t seem like she’d accepted that yet. Fuck, this was complicated.

  It got more complicated when I opened the door and thought for a moment that Rose was on the other side wearing a dirty blonde wig, and that she’d somehow acquired a baby to help sell the bit. I did a double-take and blinked rapidly as I tried to process the sheer overp in features- height, weight, facial structure, eye color- between the person in front of me and the person I was…

  The person who I’d…

  My…

  My Rose. That was what she was. She was my Rose.

  The girl in front of me, for her part, seemed equally shocked by what she was seeing. Her baby broke the silence, gurgling happily in a way I couldn’t help but smile at. Good for this adorable little troglodyte, breaking the tension like that.

  Finally, the dirty blonde spoke: “Okay, I think I get it now.”

  “Get what?” I squinted, the metaphorical hamster wheel of my dumb fucking brain still spinning.

  “You’re Kyle, right?” she asked.

  “I am,” I said. “Lemme guess, you’re one of O’Neil’s seventy-five sisters?”

  “I am indeed,” she said. “My… Sibling isn’t at home, are they?”

  “Noting the gender neutral pronouns,” I said. “And no, she’s not.”

  “You’re calling her-”

  “Yes, but it’s complicated,” I sighed. “Do you wanna come in? I can put some clothes on and we can get ourselves up to speed?”

  “I’m just worried about her coming home. She’ll take it the wrong way if she sees me sticking my nose where she thinks it doesn’t belong.”

  “Okay. Uh, why don’t we go get a coffee. You like coffee?”

  She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she meant it in a good natured way. “Yeah, I like coffee, big guy.”

  The resembnce was almost uncanny. Repce ‘big guy’ with ‘meat-head’ and it would have been exactly the same. Even the way she said it… “Aight, just lemme get dressed. There’s a pce down the block.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, turning to her baby and smiling.

  I went back inside and pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed my coat and wallet, and stepped out into the hallway. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Ruth.”

  “O’Neil?” I asked as we trekked down the hall towards the elevators.

  She pinged the down button. “O’Neil-West, actually.”

  “Fair enough. What’s the little one’s name?”

  “Caleb,” she said.

  “He’s cute.”

  The elevator door opened, and we stepped inside. “He’s a hellion. But he’s my hellion.”

  I chuckled. “Fair way of looking at it.”

  “So, I guess I’ll just ask: how much do you know?”

  I told her, getting her caught up by the time the elevator let us out on the ground floor.

  “Wow,” she said. “She… She kissed you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s… A choice.”

  “Yeah!”

  “... How was it?”

  I rubbed my eyes as we smmed into the wall of bitterly cold air that waited for us outside the building. From the corner of my eye, I swear I spotted something, a fsh of red in a gray world, a spark of crimson that cshed violently with the flurrying snow. I shook my head; couldn’t be her. No way that would happen. She said she was going to see someone about her sore throat. No way she’d be coming back at just the right time.

  How was it? It was…

  We turned right and started the walk to the coffee shop. How was the kiss? That was the million dolr question. It had taken me by surprise, but it had been a pleasant one. Her getting forceful like that, assertive, telling all those girls throwing themselves at me that ‘no, this one is mine’, it was…

  And her lips were so soft and her tongue felt so nice wrapped around mine. Her dainty body pressing up against mine, the padding she’d added squishing against my hard chest. Her scent, like cherry blossoms and sea salt, overwhelming my senses. It was…

  “Good,” I finally said. “It was a wicked good kiss. I liked it.”

  “Do you like her?” Ruth asked me, point bnk, eyes like drills digging through the barriers around my mind.

  I blinked rapidly as we came to a crosswalk, barred from further movement by the red light. A small troupe of street performers walked by us, all wearing matching parkas; there were five of them, one howling away on a sousaphone, another lugging around and pounding away at a giant bass drum, another still shredding on a vio, a fourth rocking an accordion, and a fifth and final performer making sweet, sweet love to their saxophone. Sexophone. Whatever. My eyes tracked a ginger movement, darting behind the performers as they settled in front of us. The performers absolutely mangled a big band number, failing to so much as py in time with one another. But they barred something, someone, from view as they stood between us and a parka shop. Which was presumably where they got those matching gray parkas with the white fur lining on the hoods.

  My eyes must’ve been pying tricks on me. There was no way that I saw what I thought I’d seen. It was just that she was on my mind, and I was seeing her everywhere, couldn’t avoid her even when she wasn’t around, couldn’t stop thinking about her in general because I-

  “God, this is longest fucking red light on the pnet,” I grumbled.

  “Language,” Ruth gred at me, covering baby Caleb’s ears.

  “Shit, sorry-”

  The gre deepened in severity. I could practically feel my hair turning gray under the weight of it. “Sorry,” I tried again.

  “You still haven’t answered the question,” Ruth said. “Do you like my sister?”

  “I mean which one, you have like a hundred of them-” “Kyle.”

  “Look, sorry, I just can barely think with all this noise,” I said, angrily gesturing to the terrible performers.

  Ruth rolled her eyes and fished a dolr out of her purse, chucking it in the general direction of the performers. They all fell over each other trying to grab it all at once. Wait, were these guys in a band or were they just separate musicians in matching outfits who’d all run into each other and were competing for space on the same street corner? This was so confusing.

  Either way, once they’d taken the dolr bill, they began to stick away. All six of them in their matching gray par-

  Wait a second. There were only five of them. And one didn’t even have an instrument!

  I started to reach for the smallest of them, the one who didn’t belong, until Ruth tugged at my arm and said, “C’mon, light’s finally green. Let’s go.”

  I breathed out and shook my head, but acquiesced and crossed the street with her.

  Once we were safely on the next street, she asked the question again: “Do you like Rose?”

  If the kiss was the million dolr question, this was the hundred million dolr one. I thought about it, hands shoved in my pockets, fingers bunching and un-bunching repeatedly. “She drives me crazy,” I said.

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That was exactly what I said about this one guy when I first met him. I still say that about him sometimes. Wanna know who that guy is?”

  “Is he your husband?”

  “He is, in fact, my husband, yes,” she said. “My husband of seven very happy years, father of my three children. And he still drives me crazy, but also I’m crazy about him, and him about me, so it basically bances out.”

  We walked past the section of town where the geysers were, a series of waterspouts on concrete that, during the summer, shot up massive columns of water for children to frolic in. Except, for some reason, they were running today, in the dead of winter, while it was snowing. The result was a massive sheet of ice covering a small section of the city. It was boxed by wooden pcards, heavily monitored by a number of people, while others still skated all around it. Various hawkers were gathered around, selling hot chocote and kettle corn and frankfurters and, in one case, hockey masks and skates.

  A short, gray-parka cd form trailed behind us, and when I turned around to try to catch them in the act, they leapt behind one of the hawkers. I groaned, then stomped over to the hawker.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth asked.

  “Trying to force the issue,” I said while grinding my teeth together.

  By the time I made it over, the parka-wearing stalker had leapt out onto the ice, wearing skates and a helmet, and was gliding over the frozen water. She weaved around the various children and parents and young couples skating about, jumping into the air and doing a double-axle for good measure.

  “Oh, come on!” I shouted.

  “Kyle!” Ruth said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just- she’s- there’s-” “You’re avoiding the issue!” she snapped, her baby chuckling in that baby-way as he pawed at his mother’s face absentmindedly. Ruth tugged on my sleeve and dragged me away while I groaned and moaned and whined.

  We cleared the block and made it to the st crosswalk, where, mercifully, we were allowed across. A peddler stood in front of the coffeehouse, pushing a wheelbound storefront advertising cotillion gowns. “Cotillion gowns! Get your cotillion gowns! Embrace your inner Scarlet O’Hara! Just fell off the truck this morning!”

  The helmeted, parka’d individual who was very obviously Rose was behind us again, and this time, Ruth noticed her before I did.

  “Wait a second. Maybe you’re right,” she said, turning around as we stood in the doorway to the beanery. She walked over, and the figure hid amongst the wracks of fancy dresses, quite literally attempting to bury herself in the sea of fabric. “Okay, seriously, you need to come out now. This is ridiculous.”

  “Hm?” the peddler, a short, plump woman in her te-middle years, gray hair spilling out from under a purple knit-cap, a luxurious blue-yarn scarf wrapped around her beefy neck, said. “To whom are you referring, ma’am?”

  “I’m referring to the… Person… Hidden amongst your wares.”

  “Where amongst my wares? I don’t see anyone wearing or exchanging the necessary wherewithal for my wares,” the peddler said.

  “She was just- she was JUST RIGHT HERE!” Ruth moaned, parsing through the gowns to reveal a complete ck of a certain short, redheaded gremlin of a catfish.

  “Be that as it may, ma’am, if you keep handling my merchandise, I’ll have to ask you to purchase something.”

  Ruth sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Never mind. Just… Never mind.”

  Baby Caleb wouldn’t stop giggling and gurgling at the two alleged adults angrily stomping into the coffee shop. Christ. At least we were out of the cold.

  Once we were seated by the fire with two coffees in hand- one bck for me, one non-fat mocha with no foam for Ruth- we stared at each other with a mix of consternation and solidarity. We took long, sustained sips and held unblinking eye contact with each other, and when it was over she smmed her drink down on the table and raked a hand through her hair before resting her cheek on her free hand. It was kind of amazing how many mannerisms she shared with Rose. Not with Brian, but with Rose specifically. Maybe when she was en femme, Rose mimicked what she considered a good feminine role model? Made sense.

  “Okay, look,” Ruth said. “You still need to answer my question. But there’s something you need to know about Rose. Or Brian. Brian-Rose. Whatever. I originally wasn’t gonna tell you, but after that nonsense, I think we’ve crossed the threshold.”

  I looked over her head and saw someone across the room, sitting at a table pressed against the wall near the exit, their chair pointed at us and a newspaper covering most of their frame. And they were wearing ice skates.

  “What would you like to tell me about Briar?” I said with a modest grin, projecting my voice across the room using powers honed by years of substitute teaching at a rich kid school. Fine, if Rose wanted to py it this way, I could py it right back. Time to run a defensive formation.

  “Briar?” Ruth said, tilting a well-arched eyebrow. It was probably the most pronounced difference in facial features between her and her young sister.

  “Like Briar Rose,” I said. “Figured it’s a good middle ground given where she’s at right now. She’s not, uh, fully awake yet, methinks.”

  “So what, do you think you’re the handsome prince who’s going to wake her up from her slumber?” Ruth said in monotone.

  “... Can we hold all pertinent questions for me until after you tell me whatever it is you’re gonna tell me?” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my objectively comfortable seat.

  “So, when we were kids, Briar… She used to dress up in my clothes. In all of our clothes, actually. She would rush home from school each day and we would py dress up, and she would just… Come alive. She would go from not being there at all to being this ray of freaking sunshine. Mom and Dad… They tolerated it. Well, Dad tolerated it. Mom was less than thrilled with the concept- she really liked having a son to dote on. But Briar was never that. She was only happy when she was… Well, when she was her.”

  I wrinkled my brow, holding a deep breath in my chest. That… “That puts a lot of things in a different light.”

  “I would certainly imagine so.”

  “What changed?”

  “Our dad died,” Ruth said, looking at her baby with maudlin affection. “This little guy is named after him. Briar was fifteen when it happened, and Mom… Mom started leaning on her a lot. Telling her it was time to grow up, telling her it was time to man up. Dad was gone, and she needed her ‘son’ to be the man of the house. And Briar… She did as she was told. Donated all the girl’s clothes she’d bought for herself and never looked back. Literally made a vow in front of Dad’s grave that she would never do that again. And I watched her die inside, inch by inch, day by day. The only time I’ve ever seen her happy since then, truly happy, was a few days ago, when I was doing her makeup and helping her into a dress.”

  I looked at the figure hidden behind the newspaper again. I could’ve sworn I heard a sniffle. “That’s… That’s a lot.”

  “I know,” Ruth said. “So you can see why I’ve expressed… Shock and perhaps a bit of concern with how she’s been acting tely.”

  “She’s just been looking for an excuse all these years,” I said, eyes narrowing as I locked onto the newspaper across the room. “And now she’s trying to fool herself. And me.”

  “I mean… I hate to say it, but I’m not entirely sure this is about you.”

  “And yet I was the one who triggered all this,” I said. “I’m the one she’s using as a pretext. She’s using me, and she thinks she’s pulling the wool over my eyes while she does it. Unbelievable.”

  “You really shouldn’t take this personally.”

  “That just makes it worse,” I said. “That would mean she doesn’t care about me.”

  Ruth sighed. “Okay, then let’s say this is about you. She’s doing this as much for you as for her. Sure. Why not? What do you wanna do with that? Do you like her?”

  Did I harbor romantic feelings for my roommate? That was the three-hundred and seventy-eight million dolr question. An image sparked in my mind, and with it came an avanche of emotions, desire and bliss and contentment and raw, animalistic lust: I was coming home from work, my dream job of owning my own gym, no less; I was tired and sore but riding the endorphin high from a good workout and a generally productive day; I opened the door to my apartment, and there she was. Long red hair tumbling past her dainty shoulders and spilling down her back, legs crossed as she sat on the couch, naked as I’d been that fateful night she’d come home. A trail of petals (her namesake, naturally) guided the path from the doorway towards her, in all of her glory. I guess in this situation she’d already gotten on hormones and had the surgery, because I saw her with two glorious globes of breasts on her chest and a soaking wet, clean-shaven slit between her legs. Lips red, eyes wide, a ring on her finger. A full dinner was in a pot on the stove, but she hopped to her feet, her breasts bouncing about freely, as she strutted over to me with wiggling hips and threw herself into my arms. Her lips on mine, her tongue in my mouth, my hands on her tight little ass. ‘Wanna work up an appetite before dinner?’ she whispered into my ear, in that sultry, breathy voice she’d used st night. And I didn’t even need to respond. I simply kicked the door shut while she ripped off all my clothes. I started fingering her as we made out and nded on the couch together, my free hand running through her beautiful hair, every moan and cry she made bringing my libido to new heights-

  I blinked rapidly, summoning myself back to the coffee shop. Back to reality. The one where Rose and I weren’t yet dating, weren’t in love; where I was simply having a revealing conversation with one of her four hundred and ninety-eight older sisters that confirmed beyond a doubt that she was a trans woman. And I found myself nursing a cold, dull sensation of disappointment as I accepted that I wasn’t there, in that perfect future, that happily ever after with Rose. Because she hadn’t woken up yet.

  “Well?” Ruth said.

  I didn’t answer. I simply rose to my feet, and I marched across the room and yanked the newspaper out of the hands of my roommate… Only to find it was not my roommate. It was the parka, the helmet, the skates, all stuffed with more newspaper and propped up! God fucking dammit!

  “She’s getting away!” Ruth said, pointing out the door at a short ginger in a white ball gown embroidered with (what else) red roses rushing out of the door.

  I stood there a moment, double-taking between the decoy and the door where the genuine article had retreated. Differing emotions warred inside my dumb fucking brain, but the one that won out… Well, let me put it this way: I threw my head back and ughed. It took over my chest and exploded out my mouth, pushing out the frustration and the anger and resentment. Everyone stared at me with concern, with the sole exception of baby Caleb- the little guy just cpped along.

  Okay, Rose. This game isn’t just for me. It’s for you too. And if I won, I wasn’t just winning it for me: I was winning it for you as well. I was gonna wake her up. Game on, Briar Rose. Game on.