And yet: the nights always ended with Iris, even if one of them was already asleep, and the other slid into bed past midnight. He’d awake with his arms around the soft furnace of her. Mornings they’d shower together and make out, and his clean body would get hard every time, though they never fucked in there.

Then, one night. David and Iris in David’s bed. Watching a movie, waiting for a pizza. Iris was kissing him and put her hand on his dick, nestled under his grey panties. David was usually a good sport when he wasn’t feeling it, but that night he was so tired. And besides, he’d overdressed earlier for a strangely warm day and he’d felt so sweaty and oogy for hours and he just wanted to eat the stupid pizza and go to sleep.

Iris began to jerk him off and David said, “No,” without thinking about it. How could he say something like that?

“No,” he said again. He felt—gross. He just felt gross. That, he couldn’t say.

Iris got him hard and rolled on top of him.

“No,” he said feebly, one more time, though his body had other ideas. So, David gave up and got a condom. Okay, sure, et cetera. Iris shuddered as he swelled—and then a chemical animal surged inside him, and he grabbed her hips and slammed into her. It was like they just had to start fucking for his body to remind David that David did like sex, okay, right, it actually did feel good. You know?

He came, the pizza arrived, and Iris paid for it in a robe. They ate and finished the movie and went to bed.

Next morning, they showered, as they did. But this particular time, as David stooped forward over himself to wash out his shampoo, Iris paused.

“Tilt your head back,” she said.

“What?”

“Tilt your head back, David,” she enunciated softly. “It makes washing your hair easier.”

David turned around, away from the faucet, unstooped his head toward the water, and he felt his hair fall toward the floor.

Was David gonna transition? Who fucking knew? Not him. It was a scary thought. For years, he’d spent nights on the internet, discovering how one went about this. And every night, he’d gone to bed blocking out more fears than he’d started with. The spectres of poverty and rejection and violence alone were enough to instill an understanding in his body: You only do this if you’re 300 percent sure. This wasn’t just what doctors said; it was what the transgendered people themselves said. Why go through such a hellscape otherwise? David admired those who’d made the jump; to him, the true transsexuals were some of the bravest people he’d ever seen. But it destroyed his heart to read these stories. He would start out idly searching online forums for nice places to buy clothes in his size, and soon enough, he’d be reading about a woman in the emergency room, a woman fired and evicted, a woman whose kids refused to speak to her, wouldn’t even look at her. Why the fuck would you go through all that if you didn’t absolutely have to?