Chapter Text
“...Abigail.”
“Ew, no.”
“Nora.”
“No.”
“Hazel?”
“Do I look like a grandma to you?”
“Alyssa.”
“...Gesundheit.”
“Riley.”
“I don’t want you to change my name for me-”
“█████.”
Carson blushed. Upon hearing that name, his body shuddered slightly. He asked himself why that felt so overwhelmingly correct, but he didn’t want to acknowledge that thought. He then realized that he was staring into the distance hard enough to have gone silent. “I- okay, m- maybe.”
“That’s █████, that’s my friend █████. That’s my girlfriend █████. She’s really cool”, Leah said, beaming.
“I- I don’t like it when you do the pronoun game like that! It feels so fake. And I don’t- know if I’m ready for you to call me your girlfriend yet.”
“Partner, then?”
“Sure.”
Doug lived between his near-campus apartment and the Hy-Vee, as well as the Starbucks that was under his building. He could smell the burnt beans from his room.
Despite the kind of place that Ames was, he didn’t have a car. He lived on Lincoln Way, though, so he could just take the 3 bus even though the summer schedule sucked. The whole city, if you could call it a city, felt way more empty when the students were away. Even the bus system was called the CyRide, because it was for the Cyclones. All the bus stops had the university logo on them. But he’d been here forever, and so going here for college was just the obvious choice.
He liked hanging out with Cyrus, Ezra, and Casey in the Discord server. They did Jackbox sometimes, but most of the time people tended not to find his jokes funny, so he gradually started moving away from that type of thing. He was much more of an orchestrator than a participant. He tended to run weird one-shot tabletop games for the group, the kind of experimental stuff you’d find on itch.io with only a few downloads, because he liked the style of prose in it. It was very matter-of-fact. Systematic. Rule-abiding.
The worlds in them appealed to him. He could use them as a way to get out of here. He’d actually grown up in Ames, but his mom died about a year ago and his dad was absent, so he was on his own, using the inheritance money and the life insurance to pay the rest of the way through college. Given that, being in a “luxury student housing” building wasn’t the best idea in the world, but he appreciated the amenities and how close it was to campus.
Usually, Carson and Leah were in the calls, at least the Jackbox ones. Carson wasn’t really much for roleplay and always seemed to space out, so he skipped that stuff. Doug tried to teach him what derealizing meant once, but Carson just ended up making a joke about how the word was too long, and so therefore using it was ableist.
But the two of them hadn’t joined for about a week, and he was getting a little bit concerned. They still texted, of course, but it was about nothing. Carson mostly just talked about movies he’d seen recently going through his gargantuan Letterboxd watchlist, but his infodumps were getting less elaborate. He watched the MonsterVerse movies recently for some reason and said it was like going through an abandoned theme park. But that’s all he said.
He made another pack of Mi Goreng noodles that night, and fried an egg to put on it. Even though he had roommates, they weren’t around in the summer, so it was just him, alone, in this apartment, in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere else to go.
The thing that confused Carson the most was what he had to ask for, and what he didn’t have to ask for.
Leah said she was experienced, but not with dicks, and wanted to make sure Carson felt safe around her. However, every time she asked Carson what he actually wanted, he’d just reply with “...dealer’s choice”. So what she did was try things on him. The forcefem was obligatory, of course, because that was basically the only way that she could get Carson to actually try on clothes that he might like. For Carson, it just cemented the artifice of it all.
Leah recently read the Mira Bellweather zine Fucking Trans Women on the Internet Archive, and it gave her some good ideas, but since Carson wasn’t on estrogen or anything a lot of the moves didn’t work. This time, she was trying muffing, where you jam one of the testicles up inside… that place where they go for tucking. But the second that Carson had his balls touched, he just started sobbing uncontrollably. He said something… he said something about how it felt like she was just fingering a pussy he didn’t have. The sensation felt almost like she was trying to rip something out of him, but he didn’t know what it was.
While he cried, Leah talked about how she really wanted a dick, but couldn’t really do anything about that since phalloplasty was useless. She proceeded to get a harness and a strap-on from out of a locked chest on the floor. Inexplicably, there was also a Jax plushie in the chest, which she threw to the wayside; it landed underneath the bed. At this point, she wasn’t really thinking about that show anymore. The finale kind of killed it.
So she tried to do anal with a strap, but Carson’s hole was too tight because she forgot the lube, and he started screaming about 2 seconds after she inserted. She had so little experience with anal that she forgot to tell Carson to douche and the rest of the details are too disgusting to put into prose.
The stars on the walls continued to shine bright. Carson sobbed and stared at the grody dildo.
The texts Leah exchanged with Doug were really sparse. She was always bad at responding to text messages, but this was something new. Doug figured that the three of them would be hanging out more over the summer, given that they were the only ones still here, but the texts gradually turned into “nah, I’m with Carson, I have to show him around”, which didn’t make much sense, because Carson had lived in Ames for 2 years at that point.
So he started to call her, and about half the time she would pick up the phone, but the voice would be all wrong. A little bit less nasal, a little croaky, a little panicked. Nothing too off, but he could definitely hear it. There wasn’t too much to actually do in Ames at this point in time, anyway. Studio 13 was open now, but Leah said that going there would be a bad idea for some reason, so the three of them decided to meet at London Underground on Main Street. Carson didn’t actually participate in the conversation. Leah communicated his schedule for him.
But a few hours before, Leah canceled, because Carson was “busy”. What “busy” meant was dubious at best, but Doug figured that it was going to be okay, whatever it was.
It wasn’t important to him, after all. He couldn’t have known what was going on. Nobody told him. He was always a bit dense, wasn’t he?
That night, Carson listened to an album a Discord friend had sent him, and he started sobbing through it.
My mouth is filled with his ovaries
I hold them: here, between my teeth
O! Get these bird's nests out of me
Dentist, get these bird's nests out of me
How do you fertilize what cannot be?
How do you fertilize what cannot be?
Dentist, get these bird's nests out of me
At the time, he didn’t really know why this spoke to him. He didn’t have ovaries, after all, if anything he wanted those, but maybe he didn’t, because he didn’t really want to think about his cock, or think about his parts, or think about his body, or think about any of that. What he knew was that being with Leah felt good, but Leah didn’t like thinking about her vagina either. Carson wished to himself, just for a split second, that the two of them could exchange bodies, that he could be asphyxiated until he turned green. Then, he felt the most guilty he’d ever felt in his entire life.
“...You good in there?”, Leah asked, knocking on the door.
“You can come in”, Carson answered, frantically clearing up his tears and pausing Divorce Laywers I Shaved My Head.
The door to his room opened up with some effort; due to moisture, the doorframe warped over the years, and the two of them didn’t bother contacting the university to try and get a maintenance guy in to come and fix it. It was just one of the quirks of the place that they’d learned to deal with. Carson wasn’t wearing a shirt. “I just- I just want to apologize about last night”, Leah said.
“What, about the balls thing? It’s fine. Didn’t really bother me, in the end”, Carson said. Stay in character.
“You started sobbing, Carson! You started sobbing in the middle of sex, and I take that seriously-”
“It’s not the end of the scene, y’know?”
“What”, Leah responded, with a completely dead tone.
“I didn’t call red. You were fine to keep going.”
“...What? You- you aren’t really the kind of person I took for being into that.”
“There’s a first for everything, right?”, Carson asked, as he laid back nonchalantly in bed. His room was covered in dirty clothes, and his hamper was full of clean laundry, because he hadn’t bothered to actually put everything away. It was just such a hassle to do at this point, since he was going to have to do his laundry soon anyway.
“I don’t- I don’t know if I’m comfortable doing that kind of thing with you yet. I’m sorry.”
“...Okay. I understand.”
“I still like you”, Leah said with immense concern.
“I don’t want to hurt you, you know? I don’t actually want to hurt you. I think I want to get hurt. I dunno.”
Leah, at this point, didn’t really want to question why Carson had a sudden interest in masochism. On some level, she probably knew, but she figured that would be a conversation for another day. “Okay. I can do that, if you’re- if you're into that.”
“I want to get better for you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“You- you know I appreciate it, but I don’t want you to feel like you have to get better for me.”
“I want to try, at least.”
“Okay”, she said with half pity, half love.
It was at that point that Carson decided that he didn’t want to get better anymore. He decided to stay in character.
As Leah left the room, he turned the album back on.
Made myself a map of folds to fuck and feel and feign as meat
And all my bronze is breathing, blind painting, my body's a
disease
During the summer, Doug liked to stand around on Welch Ave near campus. Usually, on Thursdays, he’d see this place get absolutely packed full of students, himself included, as classes winded to a close and people went out to get pizza or something. But right now, it served as a signifier of things that were around at a different time and place. He’d be lucky to see ten people here today.
He liked to stand around in liminal spaces like this because they served as good inspiration. He tended to set the stories he wrote in unassuming places, because it kept the reader on their toes. It meant that they were never sure exactly what to expect.
Anything can happen when you’re nowhere. Nothing is sacred.
It had been a month since he actually managed to meet up with Carson and Leah. He didn’t even see them at the grocery store, where one of their cars was sometimes pulled into the lot. He was getting kind of desperate.
He had nothing that he could say. He would take the 6 bus up to their apartment, wait next to the door, and then leave. He didn’t call, he didn’t text, he didn’t provide warning. He just wanted to see what was happening. Sometimes, through the window, he would see a litany of empty take-out boxes that needed to be thrown out.
“Can you come in here?”
“...Yeah.”
“I just… do you ever get the feeling that none of this is real? Like, like you aren’t-”
“All the time, but I try not to think about that. It’s kind of bad for me.”
“But you do get it, right?”
“The last time I talked about that, I was in the hospital for a week. They- had to inject me with sedatives, and I woke up in this weird swirl of colors, and laughing, and I just… don’t want to see that again. I don’t want to get like that again.”
“I just don’t know who else I can really talk to, I’m sorry.”
“...Then talk to me now.”
So he did. And he did, and he did, and he did. He never mentioned a single thing that actually happened, but he would always talk about how he felt, like he was supposed to, like the good bunny he was. He finally seemed like he was hatching.
Doug couldn’t get himself to do anything yet.
When Leah tried to touch Carson’s genitals again, always at his request, he started sobbing. This continued for weeks. Every time, Carson refused to acknowledge it, and Leah continued.
Carson liked movies because they were devices that he could use to travel in time. He could lock himself in a theater and see things that occurred years ago, see people on the stage being parrots to some screenwriter. He could see people who remembered who they were, who remembered who they had to be, in that moment, in that time. He could see their faces contort into shapes that the actor behind that character may never do. It was exaggerated. Cartoonish. Cringey, if you have to talk about it like that.
That night, he drove over to the Cinemark to go see Backrooms. Leah wasn’t there, and he thought about how it was the first time he’d actually been without Leah in over a month. He worried about her a lot, even though it hadn’t even been an hour since the two had separated paths.
After he walked out, he thought about the horror of non-places, about finding a place that felt like it was behind everything, dead malls, endless parking lots, comfortable nowheres with lighting that looked like it was designed to make you want to kill yourself. Thank fucking god he didn't live in a place like that, he thought as he walked out into the strip mall. Thank fucking god he had people who wouldn't let him die in a pit to a monster, who wouldn't let him turn into a mess of eyes, who wouldn't let him get experimented on by scientists. Thank fucking god he didn't live near any furniture stores. Thank fucking god he had her.
He wondered how much he would be apart from Leah if he drove more. He wished for a world where he would never have to drive again.
Doug finally knocked on Leah’s door while Carson was at the movies. Leah rolled off the couch, removing herself from watching pirated episodes of The Wire. She was still in her pajamas that she had been wearing for days, with a stain of pizza grease against her leg.
She opened the door, and saw him. “Hey, Kaufy.”
Doug said his usual generic greeting, and Leah invited him in. He sat down on the couch under the fairy lights, and Leah paused the TV. He cracked some dumb joke about how long it had been since they had seen each other in person.
“Yeah, I probably should get out more, but I’m kinda busy and all.”
Doug didn’t know about Leah and Carson’s relationship, so he questioned why the two of them were spending so much time together.
“He’s just… going through a lot. It’ll be okay. I don’t want to bother you with any of that stuff.”
But Doug continued to pry, and eventually Leah’s tongue slipped, and she referred to Carson with the wrong-right-wrong pronoun, and the gears finally turned in his thick, empty skull. Leah put her hands over her mouth almost immediately, and Doug realized that she had said something that she didn’t mean to say. He promised to forget it.
“No, that’s not- I don’t know. I wanted him to… I just, don’t think he can right now.”
Doug, being as fragile as he was, wondered to himself why Carson didn’t feel safe around him in that way, but he guessed that Carson and Leah were just especially close. He couldn’t have possibly guessed anything further than that with the information he had at this point in time. He would later feel like the chef in The Shining, the movie, not the novel, like he went all this way just to realize it was too late. But that hadn’t happened yet, so instead he mentioned that he just wished that Carson could trust him.
“Trust you? You’re barely present.”
He pushed back on that, because he had to. He’d been trying to reach out for weeks, he said. He’d invited them to bars on Main Street, he’d tried to get them to go out to the movies, which he knew Carson loved, and he’d tried to even just come over normally, announced. But he couldn’t get through to either of them, and half the time he wouldn’t even get a response.
“Look, sorry, but it’s just a lot, okay? It’s just a lot! I just need to deal with a lot right now, and then I’m going to be fine, and we’re going to be fine-”
It’s then that he said that Carson was corrupting her.
“Corrupting WHAT? Corrupting what. Do you think that- he needs this.
I don’t know if you understand, if you can get it through your thick
f
ing skull, but he needs this. He doesn’t have the kind of cash to
go to therapy right now, and nobody in this fing town is EVER going
to deal with some confused trans kid, because we live in hell, and we’re
stuck here, and it’s- do not even START-”
He then tried to retract his statement and say that he just made a slip of the tongue, but he started sobbing. He looked at Leah like she was going to hit him.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I definitely oversh-”
He said he was scared, and he ran away. Leah chased him out of the building in her PJs, and got a few blocks down before she realized that what she was doing was not a good look. Doug ended up making it to the bus stop, and Leah didn’t try and follow.
Instead, she walked back to her apartment calmly, and got out a trash bag, and started throwing away the take-out containers. One by one, she rounded them up, and tied off the bag, and brought it to the curb, just to make everything look normal.
She went up the stairs to look at the shelf on the wall, and stared at the photo of the three of them, together, sharing drinks at the Starbucks underneath Doug’s apartment.
To nobody at all, she said “fuck, this is bad, it’s- it’s really really bad, it’s bad, it’s-”, in a loop, over and over, like she was standing outside a house in flames.