Announcement Hello, lovelies! Just a reminder that you can read two chapters ahead on this story and three ahead on Trade Paperback Romance by becoming a paid subscriber to my Patreon!

  Helena Heissner's Patreon

  You can also buy my books here:

  https:///dp/B0DK5C1T3F

  https:///dp/B0DBVTS3RV

  And follow my socials here:

  Helena Heissner | Instagram, TikTok | Linktree

  Kyle

  I closed my ptop, and instantly my overjoyed expression shifted into one of cold focus and colder anger. It had been a truly fantastic video-call date. Except for the part where my roommate was fucking catfishing me! Unbelievable- unbe-fucking-lievable! What in the actual hell did O’Neil think he was doing?! And more importantly, why?!

  … Was he a ‘he’ though? This wasn’t exactly textbook cisgender behavior. My best friend in the whole world, Rachel Schwartz, was married to a trans woman named Lisa, and the pair of them had expined a lot of this stuff to me over the years. Namely the protracted period in college in which Lisa had been regurly dressing up en femme but still insisting she was a boy because she was afraid to start transitioning. She would take literally any excuse she could find to wear dresses and makeup and heels, Halloween or April Fools Day or Pride Month ‘out of solidarity and allyship.’ What had she called it? Her Dense Egg phase?

  Could Br… Could O’Neil be… Had I been living with a trans woman the past five years?

  I stood up and started doing squats, the blood flow and deep breathing and burn in my core helping me think. Okay, Kyle, let’s run a py-by-py. O’Neil was on the offensive right now, attempting to make a bee-line for my proverbial endzone. But what was in that endzone for him… Her… Them… Let’s go with her for now. Seems easier. O’Neil’s py was catfishing, getting me to think she was someone else so that I would date her. Why? What kind of formation was she running?

  Formation A: O’Neil was a trans woman and was doing this to get me out of my funk. She’d come home from her trip and found me a complete travesty after I’d been dumped, and concluded the only way to get me out of it and back to my old self was for me to go on a date. And since O’Neil didn’t have any female friends except for maybe his (admittedly very sexy but also very married) boss and (equally sexy but equally married) older sisters, that didn’t leave a whole lot of options. Still, there were other, vastly more logical, vastly more cisgender solutions to that dilemma than offering herself up, especially in an act of altruism.

  Which led me to Formation B: this was about something far more practical. A simple matter, to which O’Neil, who viewed everything in terms of business transactions, had applied her usual fwless logic of ‘give them something simple that they want to get them to agree to complete bullshit.’ But that only made sense if there was a transaction to be closed. There had to be something actually in that endzone for this py to be worth making. So what did they want out of me? The only thing I could think of was…

  No. No, it couldn’t be. There was no fucking way that she was doing all this to get me to clean. That was completely insane. Not to mention the flimsiest pretext to ‘pretend’ to be a girl imaginable. And just in general an utterly asinine way to conduct yourself in an argument with your roommate regarding the cleanliness of your shared apartment. Nobody was that freaking banal-

  It was then that I remembered a time when the two of us had ordered pizza and the delivery guy and I had had to stare at O’Neil for five literal minutes before she coughed up her end of the tip. At which point, she’d done so entirely in loose change she spent twenty minutes gathering from around the apartment.

  Did I mention her end of the tip was twenty dolrs?

  So yes, she would absolutely do something that banal.

  I stood up from the final squat, taking off my shirt and shorts, letting my nuts bounce about freely inside my boxers as I fell forward into a push-up position and started on those. My arms burned and my breath settled inside my chest as I went up and down.

  The only other possibility was Formation C: O’Neil liked me, and she was trans, and this was all an incredibly eborate way of coming out to me and cozying up to me romantically without having to go for the fully-exposed vulnerability of doing both at once while we were in the same space. Now, obviously this was bullshit. There was no way in hell O’Neil liked me. I may not have known what her type actually was, but I wasn’t it. She was a snob, through and through, with her high-falutin nguage and taste in music and the fact that she only drank Italian coffee with beans actually grown in Italy (with no awareness whatsoever of how that affected the environment- for shame!) And what’s more, if she really thought I would buy this bizarre ,pink-white-and-blue tinged song and dance number, then it confirmed something I’d long suspected but had never been able to confirm:

  My friend thought I was stupid.

  It made sense. She was distant around me, talked up her Ivy League nonsense, and looked surprised when I used big words. Her nickname for me was ‘meathead’ for crying out loud. That’s all I was to her. Just a big dumb meathead jock, all biceps and no brains. And she thought she could get away with pulling one over on me.

  I rose from my final pushup and lumbered over to the whiteboard in my room, every inch of it covered in football pys, and flipped it over to the other side. I grabbed one of my dry-erase markers and started on a new defensive formation. If O’Neil wanted to py a game, then I’d py right back, and I show her what she got for thinking she was oh-so-clever.

  Admittedly, all of this was hinging on my assumption that O’Neil really was a girl. But frankly, I found it extremely unlikely that she’d take things this far if she wasn’t.

  Okay, game pn for Friday. I take her to the bar. We knock back a drink. And then we escate it. Turn it into a pub crawl. Get as bsted as humanly possible, then wait for loose lips to inevitably sink the proverbial ship. She’d slip up, fess up, and come clean. And I’d get to be real smug about it for at least a few months.

  Simple. O’Neil’s formation, whichever of the three it was (probably the second one), was complicated. Best to go with something simple but effective in response, get an interception and bring it to her endzone instead. Do a victory dance while I was there. God, this whole thing was so messed up, so insulting, but the look on her face when I caught her in the act would be more than worth it.

  There was one thing to do in the meantime, though: wait for O’Neil to get home. I don’t know where she’d gone for our video date, but the fact that she wasn’t here had eliminated any doubt from my mind. So, I stripped off my boxers and took my sweaty ass into a shower, then waited in my towel in the living room for O’Neil to get back.

  It took until after midnight, but finally, the tumblers on the lock clicked open, and through the door she walked. No makeup, hair at its normal length, cd in one of her suit and tie combinations that made her look like a sad Irish funeral director. The only tell was the despondent expression on her face, to which a slim yer of shock was added once she registered my presence.

  My nearly naked presence.

  Before you judge me for this, try to remember that O’Neil and I had seen each other in vastly more compromising positions than this. I sat on the couch, dry but still with nothing but the towel around my waist, reading a newspaper. Yes, I have a subscription to a physical copy of a newspaper, what of it? I also bought all my books at an actual brick and mortar store. Physical media is forever; buy paperbacks. “Well hello,” I said, offering up a wry grin.

  “Uh… Hi,” O’Neil said, his usual monotone wavering ever so slightly.

  “How are you on this fine evening?” I asked.

  “Technically it’s morning,” O’Neil replied.

  “Well then ‘good morning good morning, we’ve talked the whole night through-’”

  “Good morning, good morning, to you!” she automatically broke out into song. There it was- Singing in the Rain was her favorite movie in the whole world, and that was her favorite song from it. It was the strangest thing: normally her voice was ftter than the surface of a desk, but when she sang, it all changed. Intonation and inflection and feeling were infused into her song, one that reached a lot higher than you’d expect from someone who’s speaking voice was so low, and her face lit up automatically. I’d always found it endearing, if perplexing. Of course, if the current working hypothesis turned out to be correct…

  Yeah, it would expin a lot.

  She gulped, her eyes darting back and forth as her face and voice smooshed themselves back into their usual ftness. “How, uh, how are you? Did you have that video call date?”

  “I did indeed,” I said, putting the newspaper aside.

  “How’d it go?” she asked, not making eye contact while she went over to the cupboard, retrieved a gss, and filled it with water.

  “It was amazing,” I said, leaning forward, smirking.

  “Amazing, you say?”

  “I do indeed say!” I procimed, standing up rapidly, just barely catching my towel before it fell free from my waist.

  She gulped.

  “Rose is absolutely beautiful,” I said. Wasn’t even a lie: O’Neil made for a pretty girl. She’d done a great job with her makeup, and the wig had been convincing. And honestly, the way her face had moved and emoted even when she wasn’t talking: it was like how she was when she was singing. Just lighter and happier and bubblier.

  It dawned on me then that if I was working under the assumption my roommate was trans, then, even if she was pying a mind game with me (which she obviously was), I had to make it clear that I accepted her and would validate her identity. Even if I was gonna rub it in her face when I sprung her trap.

  “Oh yeah?” she said.

  “Oh, she’s drop-dead gorgeous,” I said, looking her dead in the face while I said it, watching it turn tomato-red in real time.

  “You don’t say,” she squeaked.

  “I do indeed,” I said, jaunting over to my roommate. “We’re going out again this coming Friday. Gonna take her for a pub crawl.”

  Another flinch, this one born of recognition and a hint of confusion. Good. Throw her off base, force her to concentrate on what information she had in each identity. “Congrats. Gd you’re getting back on the horse.”

  “Thank you,” I said, putting my hand against the wall she had her back to. “So, how was your evening?”

  For a second, her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide, but she regained composure after only another second. “Good,” she said.

  “You were out te,” I probed, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, I was just… Out drinking.”

  I leaned in a little closer to her and gave the air around her a sniff. “Funny, your breath doesn’t smell like booze.”

  “I, uh, popped a breath mint.”

  “Doesn’t smell like that either,” I said.

  She squirmed, looking ready to throw down a smoke bomb and flee with her arms filing behind her back. “Dunno what to tell you.”

  “You could tell me where you were.”

  She blinked. “I was on a date.”

  “Oh? Must’ve gone well to keep you out so te.”

  “I think I’ll see them again.”

  “Them? You were out with an enby?”

  “Her. I meant her.”

  “Uh-huh,” I drawled.

  “D-do you not believe me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I said.

  Her eyes kept darting back and forth, like she was watching the world’s fastest and most competitive game of checkers. “Because you’re acting weird.”

  I pulled my arm back, guilt scratching at the inside of my skull. Dammit. She was right. This was way too much; I was clearly making her uncomfortable. “Sorry. Dunno why I did all that.”

  “Well could you back up please?” she said, head hanging low as she stared at the floor, her face still red, her hands bunched into shaking fists at her sides.

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I’d overdone it, and now she was…

  My hand moved automatically before I could stop myself. I cupped her chin and raised her face so I could meet her eyes. And I saw Rose. Even without the makeup, even without the wig, I saw Rose. I saw a scared young woman with an expressive face, who was overwhelmed and maybe a bit ashamed by what I was doing. “Hey. I’m sorry,” I said, staring straight into her eyes.

  Her lips trembled for a moment before she said, “Thanks. It’s okay. I’m just a little sensitive about all this.”

  “I understand completely-”

  That was when my towel hit the floor. Because of course it fucking did. It wasn’t on purpose, I swear!

  We both stood there in unblinking silence for about ten seconds before she retreated into her room, and I did the same with equal haste.

  Great job, Kyle. Really nailing that winning strategy.

  ***

  I wound up getting a few full days of substituting in a row, mercifully allowing me time out of the apartment to clear my head, and I doubled down on it by hitting the gym straight after work each day. On Wednesday, I stood in front of the wall-mirror in my gym, pumping dumbbells for bicep curl after bicep curl, each one offering a fleeting relief from my rapidly growing anxiety and apprehension about this game I was pying. I wanted to win it. I needed to win it. But I was also terrified about one or both of us getting hurt in the process.

  Still, she was pying the exact same game as I was. She knew the risks the same as me. And she couldn’t get away with thinking she could lead me around like some big dumb ox that existed purely to serve her.

  “Hey there, stranger!” came a familiar contralto. The worry dissipated as I turned around and saw my best friend approaching me. Rachel and I had known each for a few years now by dint of both frequenting this gym. She was a short, olive-skinned, absolutely shredded woman just north of thirty with her curly hair dyed purple, including her shaved sides. “‘Sup, bestie?”

  “Uh… A lot. Like a lot,” I said, gently lowering the dumbbells onto the floor.

  “Oh yeah?” she said, grabbing her own set off the rack. “In what regard?”

  I reached down and touched my toes. “So you know my roommate.”

  “Brian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?” she said, beginning her curls, left, right, left right-

  “Well, I went on a date with her the other night.”

  She held a massive dumbbell (seriously, it was bigger than her damn head) aloft while she stared at me with utter bafflement. “Beg pardon?”

  I gripped my hands around my dumbbells again and resumed lifting. And then I told her what the past few days had been like for me. She and I began lifting in time with each other while she shook her head attempting to process all of this. “Rache?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Still processing.”

  Her pace accelerated, outstripping me while the growing soreness in my arms and slick sweat on my palms began to slow my onsught. I wasn’t about to be outdone though, so I put the bells back on the wrack and repced them with ones ten pounds heavier than what Rachel or I had been working with. I brought it back over and began pumping, gritting my teeth through the pain as I tore through my limitations like tissue paper.

  Rachel noticed this, side-eyeing me with a look that quickly grew into one of shock and determination. “Very well then, mortal. Challenge accepted,” she intoned as I cleared five reps on each arm.

  By the time I got to ten, I was a flooding river of sweat pouring off a body of groaning muscles, and Rachel had returned with an additional 20 pounds of iron. By the time I got to fifteen, she’d already caught up to me. “Aren’t you supposed to be processing?” I grunted.

  “This is processing, pretty boy!” she hissed with a rapturous smile.

  By the time I got to twenty, she was at twenty-five.

  “Oh, that does it!” I snapped. “You’re only so fast because you’re using baby-weights! This is how you do a real lift-off!”

  “A lift-off? Was that a pun, Duggan?! You know how much I hate puns!”

  “Good!” I shouted.

  She upped her weights to match mine, and we began racing each other to forty, screaming like maniacs all the while. My blood boiled with adrenaline and dopamine and a howling sense of purpose. Alight with drive and determination, I strived for the impossible, shattering limitations and forging a better, more powerful version of myself out of blood and iron!

  Behind us, I heard someone sigh, “Oh God, these two are at it again.”

  Another person added, “Someone get a staffer, please?”

  Rachel might as well have been glowing with a golden-orange aura for all her raw, screaming strength. As we closed in on the endzone, I felt my arms about to give way, but I pushed through the pain. Just weakness leaving the body. Once it was all gone, I’d have proven myself, and that was a far greater balm than any physical one.

  We both reached forty at the same time, the same moment. We both went silent, gently lowering our dumbbells onto the ground before promptly colpsing onto blue workout mats in a pair of sweaty, panting heaps. “Still processing?” I asked between ravenous gulps of oxygen.

  “Still processing,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” a familiar young white man with shaggy brown hair and an acne-ridden face, cd in bck sweatpants and a blue gym shirt said while approaching us, “Could you two please lower the volume? You’re disturbing the other… Oh, it’s you. Color me not remotely surprised.”

  “Hey, Maurice,” Rachel and I both deadpanned in tandem.

  “You’re both absurd. You know that, right?”

  “I’ve been called worse,” Rachel said.

  “How would you like 20 in exchange for not telling your managers about this?” I said, before adding, “That’s double what I gave you st time!”

  Maurice sighed. “You’re both supremely lucky I’m poor.”

  “Yes, yes we are,” I said from my position on the ground.

  We both made our exit from the workout room and headed towards the men’s and women’s showers respectively. When we both exited and met each other at the front of the gym (after I slipped the good attendant a twenty, naturally) and I said, “Still-”

  “Still fuckin’ processing, big guy. This one is a lot,” she said.

  I groaned. “Anything I can do to speed the processing along?”

  “Coffee?” she shrugged.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” I shrugged back.

  We made our way to a pce near my apartment (ironically, one that O’Neil had shown me in the first pce) and both ordered bck coffees and their specialty protein wraps consisting of scrambled eggs and chicken sausage in a whole-wheat tortil. We sat in fine faux-leather chairs in front of the burning hearth. I took slow, careful bites of my food, while Rachel absolutely devoured hers.

  “Okay,” she said after gingerly wiping her mouth with a napkin, having finally finished her protein packing, “Done processing. What did you say the name she gave was?”

  “Rose.”

  “Gotcha. So, uh, Rose is almost certainly trans, you realize?”

  “The thought occurred to me, yes. Though I’m convinced this is all an eborate mind-game to get me to clean the apartment.”

  “Yeah. I got that,” she said. “Look, I barely know her, but I will say, this is all a lot of egg behavior.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But do you seriously think she’d do all this to get you to clean? That thing you do anyway? I mean come on, who would be-”

  “O’Neil.”

  “Kind of a low opinion to hold of your best friend though.”

  “She’s not my best friend. You’re my best friend.”

  “Awww, thanks,” she smiled, putting a hand over her heart. “But who do you see more often? Me, or her?”

  “You. I see you at least two or three times a week. Most of the time I only see O’Neil once a week.”

  “... Touche. I guess I have to ask then: how well do you really know her?”

  I blinked, slowly and carefully chewing and savoring the sweet and savory taste of the breakfast burrito. I swallowed, then took a long, warm sip of coffee. Ah, hot and bitter. Just like me. “Maybe not as well as I think I do.”

  “So maybe her intentions aren’t as bad as you think?”

  “But what’s the alternative? She’s still lying to me while trying to date me. That’s not great.”

  “No, it’s definitely not,” Rachel admitted, raking a hand through her neatly-trimmed curls. “But, uh, have I told you about what Lisa and I’s first date was like?”

  “No, why?”

  “So, she was still an egg at the time. And she asked me out. I informed her that I’m a lesbian. And the next night she shows up at my dorm room completely en femme, dressed like she was going to a photoshoot, and said that her brother had sent her because she heard a beautiful lesbian was looking for a hot date. And every time I broached the subject, she pretended like she didn’t know what I was talking about until she got really drunk and started crying about the whole thing at the end of the night.” “Wow. That’s uh… Wow.”

  “Yeah. And she still spent six months insisting she wasn’t trans after that.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not. She had a lot of insecurities about her identity. Called it ‘the brain worms.’”

  “Huh. That’s certainly evocative.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So what? You think Rose has got those?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility. I’m just saying, you might not know her as well as you think. And maybe she doesn’t know herself as well as she thinks, either.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What should I do here, Rache? This is all so damn confusing.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to know for sure that my friend respects me enough not to lie to my face,” I said. “I want to know that she doesn’t think I’m some kind of idiot she can manipute by batting her eyeshes at me.”

  “...”

  “What?”

  “Is that something that’s happened before?”

  “Not with Rose, but-”

  “But nothing. There’s only one thing you can do.”

  “What?”

  “Go on the date and find out,” Rachel said. “O’Neil- whatever it is she identifies as- is the one who can answer this question for you. I can only make educated guesses.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” I said, tilting my head upwards and blinking at the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling.

  “It is,” she said, taking another loud slurp of her coffee. “And it isn’t. If you want, I can talk to the Mrs. about this-”

  “Please do.”

  “But you’re the one who’s gotta make the tough calls here, bestie,” Rachel said.

  I met her eyes again and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So? What’s it gonna be?”

  “Well, it looks like I’ve got a date on Friday.”

  “And are you gonna be direct with her and ask her point bnk what the meaning of all these weird games is?”

  “Hell no,” I said, smming back the remainder of my scalding hot coffee. “I’m gonna beat her at her own game, get her to fess up.”

  “Fuck’s sake!” Rachel facepalmed while giving a tired, only slightly bitter ugh. “You’re your own worst enemy, Duggan.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I said with my wryest grin.

  ***

  The next few days passed without anything resembling pomp or circumstances. O’Neil, tellingly, was nowhere to be seen while I was home. I could take a wild guess what that was about: probably concocting pns within pns, wheels within wheels and all that. Friday night finally arrived, and I drove myself down to the Pot O’ Gold, the mostly gleefully stereotypical Irish pub you can possibly imagine: a neon green leprechaun and a simirly neon pot of gold fshed amidst the (you guessed it) neon rainbow sign, while indoors was a kaleidoscope of barkeeps in verdant suits and waitresses in emerald miniskirts while patrons chugged frothy mugs of beer atop shamrock-shaped bar-seats and Celtic-tinged punk music pyed bred the speakers. I’d have been offended if the pce weren’t so damn fun and the booze weren’t so damn good, but hey, life is about compromise.

  I sat down at the bar, checking my wrist-watch and waiting for the game to start. Not the hockey game on the television- though that did certainly look exciting- but rather the battle of wits soon to be waged. Two brilliant minds about to come to blows, only for a certain ginger to be guaranteed defeat before the might of my great and powerful cerebellum! I’d get this one over on her once we started going from bar to bar, once the booze started flowing freely, and I’d get to be real smug about it for a while. And then after that, I’d be able to have an honest talk with O’Neil about her gender and we could figure out what it meant for us, and everything would be fine-

  A tapping on my shoulder interrupted my devilishly brilliant train of thought. I turned around to find…

  Rose.

  I wanted to say O’Neil, but I couldn’t, because that just wasn’t who I was looking at. Once again, I saw Rose, and I was blown away by what I saw. The woman I was looking at was clearly the one I’d had the video call with the other night, but somehow more so. The long crimson hair that flowed freely from her head down to her breasts looked softer and silkier; her smooth, angur face was sharper and more delicate at the same time, with those lips, redder than her crowning glory, offering an invitation that was hard to ignore; she wore an emerald green gown, sleeveless and with a high neck and a string of pearls completing the ensemble; what had to be padding rounded it all out for her breasts and hips, but even then, they were far too convincing for their own good. I saw Rose. And Rose was beautiful.

  There was no cisgender expnation for all this. There was no way a cis person would do all this. But did she know that? I needed to know. I needed to get her to fess up to what this was, on several levels. I had to outsmart her.

  But then she opened her mouth, and even amidst the onsught of sounds coming from every side of the room, I heard her soft, airy voice loud and clear. “Hi there, Kyle. I’m Rose. It’s nice to meet you face to face.”

  As soon as I heard her, I knew the pybook I’d written up was useless. She’d come prepared. She sounded nothing like O’Neil. She barely looked like him; I had to squint to make out my roommate underneath that makeup and that dress and that wig and that stunning smile and piercing blue eyes and effortlessly feminine composure. My heart caught in my chest for a moment as I drank in the sight of what was, undeniably, a devastatingly beautiful, irrefutably feminine, and utterly brilliant woman.

  Fuck, I thought. This is gonna be wicked hard.