I picked the juice bottle off her nightstand, to see where it originated—not where the ingredients were grown (surely they were from California, picked by poorly paid migrant workers), but which juice store had she gone to.

Juicemania, made in Brooklyn, Fourth Street. Park Slope.

I used to check the labels on my teacher’s cardigans when they were left on chairs to find out more clues about them: Banana Republic, how very dignified.

R came skipping back in, totally naked, her butt cheeks still red.

I pushed her against the bed with her ass facing out.

“Does my little girl want Daddy’s cock in her naughty-hole?

She moaned. She often lost verbal ability when it came to anal and, guess what, I gained it!

I slipped the butt-cock, curved without a very bulbous head, through the hole in my dildo underwear.

“Okay princess, I’m going to go slow.”

“Umph.”

I filled her up and gave her ass a slap.

A question I used to ask myself: What sort of pleasure could a trans experience using a silicone cock?

What cis people don’t know is that trans people often have the same ludicrous questions about ourselves as you do, but are simply more motivated to deep inquiry. As I fucked her ass with a cock, our pleasures mingled. We were porous, and she was held and filled, and I was holding and filling, all against the thrill of play, not pornographic because we were in motion.

In R’s apartment, I shuttered my doubts and textiles spooled from our bodies.

She came a few times and stretched out on the bed, not touching me.

“Pen, have you ever been in love?”

“I had a lover who tried to save me, back in the Midwest. He was already transitioning, and I was a young queer watching him change. Early one morning, he startled me as I was about to bite into some dry toast. I’d run out of butter and didn’t want to use any of my roommate’s because it would be hypocritical after leaving him notes about eating my cherry tomatoes and Nutella. This lover made me put down the toast while he went out and came back with European butter and an avocado from the Polish bodega. Margot, the aunt who took care of me, didn’t even eat bread. She nibbled on seeds and nuts throughout the day and when I walked up the front stairs to our house, shells crunched under my feet, as if a flock of birds had been eating out of a feeder. But as much as this lover tried to teach me such essential acts as forming attachments and folding laundry, there remained the simple fact that I stopped being attracted to him once I made up my mind to transition. I’d needed him like a child needs its peasant-mother who made the frozen-slop-bucket mornings warm with her breast.”

“Jesus,” she said, with pity.