🚎🚏🏃‍♀️🏠STAY🏠🏃‍♀️🚏🚎

"I wish you'd stay just a little longer."

She does this every time. I come over, we make dinner, we watch a movie, we sleep holding one another, and then morning comes and she waits until I'm one single step out the door before she tells me she wants to have sex. And I always come back inside and we have another twenty minutes together. Then I get dressed, kiss her goodbye, get on the bus and feel this shame. This guilt.
I lay my head against the window for an hour and two transfers and think, "I'm having straight sex again." I've been out for six years now and I'm back to having the straightest sex a person can have. And I'm just going along with it every time.
Truth is I don't trust her to fuck me like a girl. She's terrified of that. I'm her starter woman. Baby's first girlfriend. It's pathetic. It's pathetic to be in this situation from either side.
So I went over one night and I said to her, "The sex we have feels pretty straight to me. Does this feel like gay sex to you? It feels straight to me."
She nodded in agreement. "Yeah, it does."
It made my heart break in my chest. I tried to hide it, but she picked up on that. I know because a couple of weeks later we fucked and she told me it was the gayest sex she'd ever had.
I went home and told my friend about it and her response was, "Well no duh, her ceiling is our floor. Why are you doing this to yourself?" Because I love her. I do.
I went back to my girlfriend's house that weekend and we talked and laughed, which was unusual. Typically there's some friction there, some leftover soreness, something I'm trying to fix or work out, like a sore arm. Like a dislocation. We're not dysfunctional, we're dislocated. You can pop it right back in at any time.
Last time it was because someone glanced at her on the bus when we were together. I told her she's beautiful, that she's always turning my head, but it only made her angrier. She said that men have followed her off the bus before, and I apologized. She was mad at me for the rest of the day, but by the next morning you could feel the sensation of the arm being corrected, the pop of it being right back where it belongs.
Tonight though we're talking about how vulnerable I am, how hard I've been trying, and she sees it. I see it in her, too. Usually she crosses a boundary and she picks at it, but I don't budge and she tells me, "Someday you'll let me in, " or "you'll trust me eventually," or "I'm gonna earn it," and lately I'm starting to believe her.
So I think, tonight's the night. I'm going to tell her. The part of me I keep from everybody, I'm going to show her and that will solve it. She'll know me and I'll be known and it won't feel like a bear trap when she wraps her legs around me, because she'll see me. I'm a woman, too. She grew up rough. We both did. She'll understand.
I look inside myself and I see broken glass and alarms, fire, fire, fire, holding my brother in my arms, and I shake my head and look out again. I tell her, "I've been struggling. I've been struggling to work up the courage." Not the gall or the nerve. Courage. The stomach. The spine.
Her eyes grow and I can see myself in them. How small I am. It looks almost like we are the same height.
"When I first started transitioning I moved away from the South, from home, and I wore a dress outside for the first time." My heart is in my mouth. I feel so afraid.
"I was out East. And I ate at a diner alone after a doctor's appointment. I walked to my car and was closing the door when this man's hand stopped it, and he leaned in and dragged me out." She's nodding along.
"We fought and once I got on top of him I just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. I got up and I kicked him once or maybe twice in the head. I don't remember exactly. And then he stopped moving. Just didn't move anymore." I fight to keep from crying or vomiting, from showing any weakness at all.
"And I got in my car and I left. I drove all the way back home, the whole fifteen hours back to Mississippi."
My girlfriend takes a moment to digest what I'm telling her. She stares through me and waits to see what I do, and then she does what I'll always remember, for the rest of my life. She smiles.
"You're funny."
It's like a bullet. The words drip with spite. I don't say anything and just look at her, confused.
She continues, "Do people really fall for that? Come on." I push it down.
"Yeah, " I smile. "Yeah, they do." I'm laughing now. I'm pushing it down and I'm laughing - We're both laughing.
She walks me to the door and says, "You're so easy to read."
"I am." She kisses me.
"I know you so well." She never will.
"Yeah, you do."
"Do you want anything?" It was a good effort.
"Nah, I should probably head out." Truly.
"Yeah?" Honestly.
"Yeah."
"Okay."
"I'll see you when I see you, Kat."
I take the first step through the doorway and out into the city when she grabs the sleeve of my jacket. I turn around mechanically, habitually, as she works her way down to my hand and squeezes, and then I look up like always to see her eyes, to see myself in them. I don't think I've ever looked so small in all of my life.
She smiles gently, both her hands around mine now, thumbs running over my knuckles and says, lovingly, "I wish you'd stay just a little longer."