“True.”

Rachel and Aiden started inviting us over more. The wedding was only a few months away, and Rachel was trying to plan something so that her relatives were subtly disgusted. Stone was happy to help. They had a venue, a charming-yet-haunted inn up the coast that Rachel’s mom had just booked, but their wedding planner promised that all of her vendors could work on an expedited timeline.

“Our hope is that we will send out the invitations late enough that some of my family will not be able to make it,” Rachel said.

Once Stone and Rachel retired to the living room to wedding-plan, Aiden and I would check out the construction and the garden or box each other in the yard by torchlight. When I punched him, I knew my arm and its connection to my core. I became real to myself in a corporeal way. I decided to start lifting—something I’d thought was the dumbest, most masc waste of time—so that I could punch harder, feel my own strength.

We fought each other, guarding our bodies, and yet the lack of pretense opened us. After we’d kicked each other’s asses one night, we sat in the moonlight, drinking tea and feeling hot inside our bruises.

Coyotes wailed as we lounged on a high-backed wicker outdoor couch. Aiden told me about his decision to marry Rachel.

“She asked me not long after that construction guy cornered me in the bodega. He was right. I’d made a livelihood out of being known as a hot trans guy, but how long could that last? How long before my sponsors found a younger, hotter trans guy? I know you looked down on me for my fame-seeking, but how else would someone from my neighborhood, my family, with no college degree, gain access to anything?”

Ugh, I felt bad. I had thrown all this shade at Aiden when I was seeing him in the wrong light.

“I was a doofus. Projection, you know.”

The coyotes’ laments paused.

“Yeah. So now I care about Rachel—I love her—and this is all more than I could have imagined.”

Over in the living room, Rachel would be regaling Stone with stories about her wedding planner, Alicia, who did not touch princess wedding fantasies involving cakes shaped like Cinderella’s slipper or the requisite incestuous rituals of handing a daughter from the king to her new prince.

Alicia had planned a wedding with Rachel’s friends in which they eloped during their Scandinavian ceremony and were taken straight to a taiga. While the guests waited in a chilled cathedral, the couple was loaded onto a sleigh pulled by white blurs that looked like wolves.

“I don’t give a shit about vinyl tents, china, sauces, or how to explain to the B-listers that a setting has opened up for them,” Alicia had said to Aiden and Rachel when they first came into her vine-draped atelier. “So amuse me.”