Adam (27 page)

“Do you like to use, like, a dick?” she asked.

Adam slowly nodded.

“I mean, I have one. Unless you brought one?”

Adam shook his head.

“Would you want to use mine? I really want to feel you fuck me like that.”

Adam found himself nodding again.

Gillian grinned and leaned over the side of her bed, groping around underneath. She pulled something out of a box and showed it to Adam. A large, black rubber penis and the strappy thing it must go in. Sam had tripped when she put hers on.

“You can put it on in the bathroom,” said Gillian. “I'll wait.”

In the piercing fluorescent light of Gillian's tiny bathroom, Adam stepped out of his jeans and boxer briefs. His dick, aimed straight at the ceiling, was the size of his forearm and purplish in color. Pre-come was smeared all over the head.

Think, Freedman
, he said to himself.
Figure this out.

The drag queen at Bound had looked like he didn't have a dick at all.
“Bitch has one fierce tuck.” “Push it up into the crack.”
Adam tried pushing his dick down and up against his balls but it was too hard and sprung back. Part of him knew he should just beat off, just get it over with. But he didn't want to. He didn't know how yet, but he wanted to come with Gillian. At least in the same room with her, looking at her, somehow.

Think. Think. Think.

Adam opened the medicine cupboard over the sink. He hadn't known why he did it, but as soon as he did, he saw the box of Band-Aids. He grabbed the box, quickly unwrapped a Band-Aid, and stuck it over his dick, pressing his dick flush up against his stomach. He would need a bunch of Band-Aids to get the job done and hurriedly started unwrapping and sticking until his dick was completely strapped to his stomach in a swathe of Band-Aids, only the head poking out by his bellybutton. He pulled his briefs up high over everything and then stepped into the strappy black thing, pushing the black rubber penis through the hole in the front. He could feel the base of the rubber penis pressing up against his dick and it felt good. He tugged the straps tight. He then stepped into his jeans, pulling them up high as well, buttoned the top button, and pushed the black rubber penis out through the lower open buttonholes.

You can do this.

Adam walked back into Gillian's shadowy room. He could see the dark mass of her lying on the bed. He felt terrified and silly with the black penis dangling out the front of his pants, but this was what she expected. This was the way it was supposed to be, right?

Gillian looked over at him, her eyes lowering to his crotch. She smiled.

“You look really hot,” she said.

Adam climbed onto the bed and over Gillian. She was completely naked, and he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. They started kissing, and her mouth still tasted and smelled like the amazing wetness below. His dick, which he hadn't thought could get any harder, strained against the layers of Band-Aids, briefs, and jeans.

Gillian reached down and ran her hand gently over the black penis.

“Oh, hold on,” she said. And she leaned over and took a condom out of the drawer on her bedside table. “I just use these when I haven't remembered to boil . . . gross, sorry.”

“Cool,” said Adam. He ripped open the condom and, making sure the right side was facing up, slipped it over the black penis. The way he had practiced a million times alone in his room. As if practicing would get him closer to the moment of it happening.

“Put it in my mouth,” said Gillian.

Adam inched on his knees over Gillian, and she took the black penis and put it in her mouth. She moved it in and out, licking the head and shaft.

Adam felt one of the Band-Aids break loose.

“I don't even think we need lube,” she said. “I'm so turned on by you.”

Gillian spread her legs wide around Adam. He moved back on his hands and knees, and taking the black penis in his hand, aimed it at her open, glistening hole.

This is it. This is it.

The black penis slid right in, and Adam moved his hips, pushing it in and out, but not too fast, for fear something would go wrong.

“You feel so good,” said Gillian, and Adam moved a little quicker. The head of his own dick was rubbing up against his stiff jeans and stomach, and the way it rubbed felt so amazing that he pushed even faster and sweat was dripping down his body and he could feel the Band-Aids breaking off, but he didn't give a fuck, and he rammed the black penis into Gillian harder and harder, and the friction felt so fucking good.
I'm doing it
, he thought.
I'm having sex
,
I'm actually having sex
, and in that instant his balls clenched up and come shot from his dick all over his pants.

“Ohhhh,” he groaned; it felt like the come would never stop, an endless spewing of hot streams all over his stomach and jeans.
Fuck—it might show!
And Adam quickly grabbed the mug off Gillian's bedside table, and in pretending to miss taking a drink, spilled the water over his lap, masking any come that could have seeped through.

“Oops,” he said, laughing. And Gillian, sitting up, laughed too.

“Give me some of that,” she said, and took the mug and drank the rest. “That was great,” she said, looking him in the eyes.

Adam grinned at the print on the mug in Gillian's hand, then looked back up at her, beaming.

“I love New York!” he said.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS
, Adam had become the preeminent expert on anything and everything trans. He knew more than Casey. He was pretty sure he even knew more than Boy Casey. He was almost positive that if he were playing
Jeopardy!
and all the categories were Trans, he would go home with a million dollars. Every moment of his life that wasn't spent with Gillian was devoted to researching, memorizing, and internalizing all things trans.

He knew that a “packer” is what you call a soft, realistic-looking dildo that you wear in your underwear during everyday activity to have the feeling of a penis. He knew that testosterone could be delivered to the body three different ways; injectable (of which the dosage varies between 50 mg and 300 mg per injection, depending on the ester and regimen), transdermal (available in both patch or gel/cream form), and oral (though this method didn't always have all desired effects, such as cessation of menstruation). There was also research into a subcutaneous testosterone pellet, replaced every three to four months, though no one in the “community”—trans guys on the Internet—had tried this themselves.

Adam knew that Buck Angel was a famous trans man porn star and that many people enjoyed watching his videos where he is fucked in his vagina (“cockpit,” “mancave”). Adam knew that some trans men were OK with being fucked in their vaginas, liked being fucked in their vaginas, but others were not and this area was off-limits (Adam was the off-limits type). He knew that gender identity and sexual orientation are
not
the same thing and that you could be straight and trans or gay and trans; you could be like Hazel—a girl who used to be a boy but now was a masculine butch lesbian. Sometimes when people transitioned, they found their orientation shifting as well. Adam, who had always been, and still only was attracted to women, was a “heteronormative” trans man.

He knew that True Spirit used to be the big trans conference everyone would go to and was where a bunch of community members got to meet for the first time (Adam never got a chance to go) but that it was over, and newer conferences like Philadelphia Trans-Health and Gender Odyssey were gaining popularity. Southern Comfort was also still going strong.

Adam, post-op on his chest (double-incision/bilateral mastectomy) but pre-op on the bottom, was well versed in all the options for FTM genital reconstruction surgery. There was metoidioplasty (cutting of ligaments and removal of tissue that releases the testosterone-enlarged clitoris), there was scrotoplasty (inserting testicular implants into the labia majora and joining the two labia to create a scrotal sac), and there was phalloplasty (the construction of a penis using donor skin from other areas of the body) of which there were several methods: pedicled pubic flap, pedicled groin flap, free tissue flap, forearm free flap. He was familiar with the risks and costs of a hysterectomy and how it is one of the few surgeries that trans men are able to have covered by insurance. He knew that if you were going to have surgery, you should absolutely—no
if
s,
and
s, or
butt
s—quit smoking.

He knew about body dysphoria, and lo-ho and no-ho, and why you should say “cisgendered” instead of “bio,” and what it means to be “stealth.”

Adam knew all these facts and spent hours boring them into his brain and looking up words like
pedicled
on www.medterms.com, not because he would spew them out at Gillian in moments of spastic trans panic, but because just knowing them made him feel safe. He acquired information like artillery. All these facts, meshed together inside him, formed a bulletproof vest. If Gillian or one of her friends
did
ask him about any of them, he would be ready. If he wanted to casually drop a reference into a conversation, he
would
be able to do that.

But while knowing these facts helped Adam feel secure, and the very physical act of researching and memorizing quelled his anxiety, they were ultimately not what made him able to sustain the lie. What he quickly realized, after the night he and Gillian first had sex and he knew there was no turning back, was that in order to lie effectively, he had to believe the lie himself.

And the thing was, there
were
elements of being trans that Adam related to. Trans people often saw transition as the start of their real life, their true life, rejecting who they were before—and this was exactly how Adam felt. The person he was back at EBP was dead to him. Fuck that loser! That wasn't the real him—
this
was, with Gillian. Gillian, who said, “You're so sexy,” and
“
Your weirdness is like a hidden jewel,” and who the other night had whispered in bed, “You're my sweet boyfriend.”

And the way Adam treated his body around Gillian
was
the way a trans person might. He never took off his shirt or pants, and she knew never to ask him to. During his trans research, he had learned that trans guys who had not yet or did not want to have top surgery would often bind their breasts. The best method was an official “binder”—a tight, thin undergarment originally made for men with gynecomastia (larger-than-average male breast growth), but some trans men used ACE bandages, which they would tightly wrap around their breasts and safety-pin in place. The community warned that ACE bandages were very dangerous and could restrict breathing or lead to fluid buildup or broken ribs, but their mention had given Adam an idea. As a solution to the problem of his erections, every time he hung out with Gillian, he preemptively ACE-bandaged his penis up against his stomach, so that when it got hard, it wouldn't stick out and was barely noticeable under the layers of bandage, underwear, and jeans. When he and Gillian had sex with the strap-on, the friction of his own penis against his stomach still made him orgasm, but the bandages were thick enough that they absorbed most of the come.
“I know I could never be with a bio guy. I'm just not attracted to them.”
That's what she had said.

Of course, alone in his bed, Adam fantasized obsessively about actually sticking his real penis inside Gillian. He had completely forsaken Internet porn for the repeated fantasy of this singular physical act. He would conjure exactly how the inside of her vagina felt on his fingers—slick and hot and slightly bumpy, but supple—and enclose that mental sensation around his penis as he made himself come, ejaculating into every crevice of her insides. He thought about Luke Trevor and his YouTube videos about wishing he could ejaculate inside his girlfriend when they had sex, and Adam, sometimes despising with all his heart the black rubber penis that he and Gillian always used, commiserated along with him.

And out of these elements of truth, Adam constructed a reality in his brain in which he was trans. A different
kind
of trans, an Adam-only trans, but “trans” nonetheless. And if this was true, then it wasn't really a lie, and it wasn't a deception, and what he and Gillian had together was pure.

And in fact his being trans rarely even came up. She knew he didn't like to talk about it, so it was almost always avoided or hopped over in conversation, like a wobbly-looking stone when trying to cross a creek. They talked about everything else. They would order Indian from the place around Gillian's corner, always getting the same thing—lamb tikka masala and vegetarian samosas—and they would report the latest with their roommates or tell each other about their families. Adam told Gillian how his mom was incapable of not squeezing at least one criticism into a conversation (“Sometimes in the middle of the day, I'll just randomly hear her voice in my head saying, ‘Adam! Elbows!'”), and Gillian told him how her parents were the opposite, “aggressively supportive” (“They were, like, obsessed with me and my high school girlfriend; it's like they wanted to climb into bed with us”) and how that was smothering in its own way. Then they would fold themselves up in Gillian's bed and watch a movie on her laptop, talking through the whole thing, making fun of it, or addressing the characters. Adam had never seen Gillian cry for real, but she cried easily during pretty much any movie. They once watched this teen movie about a girl moving away from home to go meet her true love or something, and Gillian had started bawling during the opening credits, just music over the girl packing up her childhood room, before anyone had even said anything. He'd made fun of her all night for doing that, and she would just laugh and punch him and say, “I hate you,” with her giant dimpled smile.