Nothing But the Truth: Chapter 9

Author's Note: It's Wednesday!! That means two things: 1. wrestling is on tonight, and 2. new Nothing But the Truth chapter!!! Thanks so much for reading, and if you haven't already, please consider picking up the special Halloween short story bundle me and some other authors put together!

STWL Presents: Costumes and Masks by Cassie Sandwich and 7 others - itch.io

Now back to the show!

It Just Takes Some Time

Alicia

5 Years Ago

Home alone on a Friday night, our family’s apartment empty as it overlooked Chicago, I took a deep, nervous breath. Police sirens blared on the streets below, and I stood outside of my sisters’ shared bedroom and repeatedly bunched and unbunched my fists as I contemplated giving into the thoughts, the desire, the need, I could not escape. 

Kendra had just gotten her costume for a friend’s Halloween party next week, a Princess Glinda dress. It was hanging in her closet, and it was pink and sparkly and poofy and fucking mesmerizing. Everything in me screamed to put it on. 

Puberty had slammed into me like a truck last year, banishing me to a nightmarish otherworld of body hair and low voices and constant sweat. The only relief I felt was when I was able to sneak my way into my sisters’ clothes while home alone. Every other second of the day, of my wretched, shameful existence, was one where my skin was sandpaper on my bones, where my blood was sewage and my brain a malfunctioning computer. I woke up and I desperately fanned a flame inside me to keep my soul from freezing to death amidst an endless blizzard. And the flame required the same fuel, every time. 

I tiptoed into my sisters’ room, and I took the dress off the hanger and brought it to my own room across the hall. I pulled off my horrible boy-clothes, my sweatpants and the oversized anime shirt I wore. My chest and face and arms and legs were all freshly shaved earlier this evening: doing it every day was a pain in the ass, but it beat the hell out of the time I’d dressed up without shaving and nearly puked. Never again. 

The silky fabric brought warm relief to my skin and bones, expanding the tiny flame keeping my soul alive until the cold numbness left me altogether and I finally felt like myself. I finally felt like Alicia. I don’t remember how I’d picked the name. It just… Came to me, the first time I’d dressed up, and it stuck with me ever since. I’d clung to it for dear life as my body twisted beyond my recognition. It was all I had. 

I spun on my heel and watched the filmy pink skirt spin with me, fluttering about as I danced on the hardwood floor. There was no music, but I didn’t need it. As long as I had this, I would dance. 

I pulled a book off the shelf, ‘The Marvelous Land of Oz’, so I could read it aloud to do my vocal exercises. It had been this book, the story of a princess who’d been forcibly turned into a boy as a baby, been branded with a name and a life that was not hers, that had first made me realize I was supposed to be a girl. That I was one inside. But there was no magic spell that could give me my life back like there’d been for Ozma. If I wanted that kind of life, I would need to make it happen myself. 

And that meant surviving the next few years. 

As soon as I sat down, however, my phone buzzed. 

Kendra was downstairs. She’d forgotten her key and needed me to let her in. 

‘Was about to shower. Let me get dressed,’ I replied.

I’d never been caught before. I didn’t plan to start now.

I took off the dress and hung it back up, fussing with it a bit to make sure there weren’t any wrinkles or dust contaminating it. I put my boy-clothes back on, and it felt like bathing in floodwater. Hobbling downstairs, I tried to fend off an inner choir of dissociative static with little success. By the time I made it to the front door of our building and let Kendra in, I could barely feel anything. 

“Finally. What took you so long, idiot?” Kendra sneered. 

I didn’t say anything. She kept talking, reaming me out for keeping her waiting, but the words didn’t reach me. Nothing did, except for the pain of being denied who I was. 

I didn’t know how much longer I could keep doing this. 

Now

“See anything you like?” Caden asked me as we walked down the Santa Monica promenade. It was so gorgeous: beautifully built marble shops and a perfect stone road buzzing with shoppers and vendors and street performers. Behind us, a woman played anime theme songs on a cello, while ahead of us, a magician did card tricks for a crowd of awestruck children. To our sides, exquisite designer fare draped over mannequins filled display windows, while delicious-smelling food aromated the air from restaurants and carts. 

I eyed a pink gown that reminded me of the Glinda dress Kendra had worn for Halloween a couple years back, the one I’d snuck my way into whilst home alone. 

God, I wanted it. 

“I see,” Caden said as we stood in front of the display window together. I clinged to his arm, resting my head against his bicep. He just fit perfectly, and I felt comfortable with him, around him, wrapped around him (not like that! We hadn’t… Gotten that far yet). 

It was a Saturday afternoon. The remainder of September had flown by with him at my side. We made it a point to go far off campus when we had dates, and short of that, we hung out at Caden’s house. He’d explained everything that had happened with him and Big Dog and Dixie, and so it made sense that if he wanted to stay out of the line of fire he would need to avoid being seen with me too much. 

I got it.

But also, it was making my job harder. 

But also also, I needed to tell him the truth. The only reason I hadn’t was because I’d barely written anything for my article yet. I had exactly three sentences on my word processor:

‘Women such as myself often wind up at the center of crises of masculinity and sexuality. In no case is this truer than in a particular fraternity, the affairs of which I was sucked into by a beautiful liar in desperate need of climbing a corporate ladder before he’d even graduated. As such, I found myself at the center of a war between a broken boy, confused and stubborn and in need of saving, and a man who wanted to strip everyone of agency and dignity.’

 It wasn’t much, but I thought it was a good start. Unfortunately for me, I’d barely learned anything outside of what Caden had told me, and most of it… Most of it was about all the humiliating shit he’d personally been put through by Big Dog. How Big Dog seemed to almost literally get off on making Caden grovel, how he’d completely literally forced Caden to beg on his hands and knees once it came to light that Dixie was using Caden as a side-piece. How Big Dog had laughed at his willingness to be subservient to him, how Big Dog had laughed at Caden for ‘lowering himself by letting a woman control him,’ how he constantly blew up Caden’s phone to make sure he wasn’t coloring outside the lines again. 

It was all what I needed, in theory, but… Actually writing it and submitting it without my pseudo-boyfriend’s consent would be a serious violation of journalistic ethics to say the least. Not to mention a brutal betrayal of a man who had… 

A man who sincerely wanted to… 

Guilt gnawed at my stomach lining, threatening to send acid spilling out to dissolve my innards. I had to tell him. I needed to come clean. But at this point, I didn’t know how. 

“Alright, let’s make it happen,” Caden said, resting his chin on top of my head. 

“What?” I said, finally dragged out of my internal shame-spiral by his sweet voice and kind words. 

“The dress. Let’s make it happen.”

“I, uh- I…”

“Do you not want it?”

“No, I very much do. I just don’t think I can afford it.”

“Okay. So?”

“Well, I don’t think you can afford it either, Cade-”

“Cade?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning my head to look up at him. My Cade. My sweet, sweet, country-fried Cade. Whom I was lying to. Manipulating. Using. “Is that okay?”

“I like it,” he nodded. 

“Okay,” I said, nuzzling his chest, feeling his heart. He said I could have it, at least for the time being. Maybe he… He wanted to see what I would do with it? 

He’d lied to me. He’d tried to use me. He’d come clean. He’d let me hold his heart in my hands. What did I want to do with that? The past month had been amazing: any second we weren’t in class or working, we were together. His place, mostly. I didn’t sleep there as much as I did in that first week, mostly because then the whole sex issue might come up and… 

It didn’t feel right. Not telling him. If we were gonna… 

Then he needed to know. 

I had to tell him. 

Fuck. 

Caden… Cade… My Cade… He deserved to know. But how the fuck was I gonna tell him? Maybe I… Maybe I needed to find something else to write my article about. Just drop the whole thing. Surely there were other forms of corruption in this city I could cut my teeth on. 

And then… Then he never had to know. 

That could work. That had to work! 

So why didn’t it make the festering maggots of shame eating through my insides go away? 

He retrieved his cellphone from the pocket of his jeans, snapped a picture of the pink dress, then led me away.

“Where are we going?” I asked. 

“On adventure, gorgeous,” he said, giving me that goofy grin that had probably made several dozen sets of panties drop over the past few years. And if I wasn’t careful, it would make mine do so as well… 

Which would mean I had to… 

Fucking fuckity fuck-

We rounded a corner, walked a few more blocks, still draped over each other. Finally, we found a thrift store. “We’re here,” Caden said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I’ve been here lots of times. I got my tux for senior prom here. Kira’s probably gonna get her wedding dress here,” Caden said as he opened the door and beckoned us inside. 

He revealed row after row of clothes, neatly divided into aisles over a white tile floor that stretched for as many yards as a football field. “You certainly know lots of cool little places,” I said as we approached the dresses aisles. 

“Side effect of living here for a decade,” he shrugged, looking at the photo on his phone. “Now let’s see if we can find a close enough match. I know it won’t be exactly the same, but…”

“But?”

“I think you’d look super pretty in that dress,” Caden said firmly but gently. “I want to see you in it.”

My heart skipped a damn beat, and no, I don’t mean that metaphorically. “W-why do you-”

“‘Cause you’re so fucking beautiful, ‘Licia, and I get the sense that you don’t always see that,” Caden said, his southern accent coming out in an almost maudlin twang, “And I want you to see it. Every day. All the time. I want you to see what I see. And from the way you were looking at that dress, I think that would help.”

I could practically feel my panties sliding down underneath my long red skirt. “Well… I… So, the thing is…”

“Yeah, sugar?” he said while rifling through the dresses, looking for something pink and poofy.

‘Sugar.’ That word. With that accent. From this man. My nipples went hard, and the desire to tear off all his clothes in the middle of the store was almost overpowering. 

I swallowed it. I stared at the ground, fixated on my feet. “So the reason I was staring at that one specifically is because it looks like this dress my eldest sister, Kendra, wore for Halloween one year. A princess Glinda costume. I, uh… I used to wear her clothes when I was home alone. Sometimes I’d wear my little sister, Lita’s, clothes as well, but not as often because she was smaller than me. Kendra… She got our mom’s fuller figured genes like I did.”

“You wanted to wear it for Halloween,” Caden said, understanding instantly.

I nodded. 

“Okay. Then let’s make it happen.”

“S-seriously?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“I mean, what would I even wear it for-”

“Didn’t you say the comic shop you work at is having a Halloween party?”

Dammit. I did say that. “Yeah, I wasn’t gonna go-”

“Why not?”

“I… I… I have no idea. Just… It scares me. Finally getting to celebrate the holiday the way I want. I’m sure that makes no sense-”

“My parents didn’t let us go trick ‘r’ treating growing up,” Caden cut me off, turning to face me. “At all. They thought Halloween was, and I quote, ‘Satanic’, and that letting us get candy from strangers was no different than begging for handouts. Which they thought was for… Uh… I won’t repeat exactly what they said, but it was super racist. That’s the important part.”

“What?” I said, only half-believing him. But then again, this was some of the most he’d revealed about his parents so far, so I didn’t have a reason not to believe him. Still, that was… I mean, my own parents were pretty conservative but even they weren’t that hardcore. 

“It was far from the worst thing they did, trust me,” Caden said with a sad smile. “But still… When I was ten I finally got to dress up and go out on Halloween, finally got to know what I’d been missing, and… It felt nice. Getting to have something everyone else had. And I want that for you as well.”

Oh, fuck it. I grabbed a handful of his shirt and put my mouth to his, slipping him tongue and guiding his hands to my butt. Goddammit, why was he so fucking sweet!? How the hell did a boy as nice as him get caught up in all this bullshit in the first place!? It wasn’t fair! He deserved more than this. Frankly, he deserved more than me. But a month in, I knew that he would be offended if I said that. So I kept quiet about it and felt his stubble tickling my cheeks. His beard was growing out a bit, and his hair had gotten shaggier, and honestly it worked for him. I drank in his musky scent and let his hair up top and around his mouth flit across my skin as my leg popped and he pinched my fat ass on each cheek. 

His cock tented his jeans, and my eyes went wide as frisbees at the side of the bulge. Oh God, but that looked tasty. I wanted to reach for it, grip it, guide to my mouth-

Caden caught my hand before I could make contact. “Not saying ‘no,’” he clarified,  “Just not right now. Exhibitionism isn’t on my list of kinks.”

I gulped. “And, uh, what is on that list, exactly?”

He laughed quietly. “We can talk about that tonight.”

“Tonight?!”

“Yeah. It’s Saturday. You usually crash at my place on Saturdays. Were you not gonna do that tonight?”

“No, no, I am, just… I don’t know if… I mean I want to, I really do, and I think about it constantly, I just-”

“Not sure we’re ready,” he said with a knowing look. 

I closed my eyes tightly and nodded. Furiously so, at that. 

“I get it,” he said, going back to rifling through the dress wrack. “We got together under unusual circumstances. And we’ve moved very fast. And… Okay, cards on the table?”

“Go ahead,” I said, self-loathing settling in and cooling the fire of my libido. 

“I tend to jump into bed with girls way faster than is advisable,” he said, eyes downcast. “And it’s not just Dixie. She’s the latest entry in a long list of terrible decisions I’ve made with my sex life over the years.”

“Caden, you’re twenty. How could you have-”

“Lost the v-card at fifteen,” he shrugged. 

“Holy shit, seriously?” 

“Yeah. I was at a party my freshman year of high school. Captain of the wrestling team’s house. No parents, the whole bit. I made varsity as a first-year, so I was given a bit more respect than the other new guys. And then the captain’s sister-”

“You banged the team captain’s sister?”

“Yeah. His twin sister, too. A fellow senior.”

“Oh my God!”

“Relax, she was seventeen and I was fifteen, nothing illegal happened.”

“That wasn’t what I was… Never mind, go on.”

We kept walking down the aisle, until we came upon an entire wrack of pink ballgowns. We both started looking through them, trying to find a close match to the one we’d seen. 

“So I’m fifteen and fucking stupid, and this super hot older girl just rocked my world after I’d won us an important tournament,” Caden continued. “I caught feelings basically right away, which she wasn’t about to return, so she told me to keep my distance and I spent the summer nursing a broken heart.”

“Ouch.” 

“Yeah. Big ouch. And then a year later, something similar happens with the sister of another guy on the team. Except it’s his younger sister-”

“Oh no!”

“Yeah. A freshman and sophomore really isn’t that bad, but of course my teammate doesn’t see it that way and… You get the idea.”

“Any others?”

“Yeah, actually,” he grimaced. “Junior year I got my first girlfriend. Her name was Tina. She… I thought things were going really well. She and I had a lot of friends in common, and similar interests, and we could just talk and go back and forth for hours and hours. I introduced her to Kira and everything. And then we start having sex, and… I took all the feedback I’d gotten from the last two girls and I applied it and…”

“And?”

“Have you ever heard the term ‘starfishing’?”

“No, but I can guess what it means.”

“Yeah. She just kinda laid back and spaced out, and when I eventually called her on it she started reaming me out, saying girls didn’t actually like having sex ,they just tolerated it to keep their men happy.”

“Jesus. Yeah, so, those are the words of a girl who’s never had an orgasm in her life.”

“Yup. It gets worse, too.”

“Oh God, how?”

“She eventually broke up with me because her parents didn’t want her dating someone with a lesbian mom,” Caden scowled. 

“This girl sounds like a travesty,” I pointed out, putting my hand on Caden’s shoulder. “I’d feel bad for her, but also she hurt you, so like-”

“Yeah,” Caden nodded. “After that I was basically celibate the rest of high school. Well, except this one time I tried it with a guy-”

“I’m sorry, what?” I said, my brain going to some very, very dirty places.

“Yeah. We didn’t get too far, though, because I realized my heart wasn’t in it,” he said in the most nonchalant tone imaginable. “Like, I’m out with a friend, guy who swings both ways, and we’re both stoned out of our minds, and he basically plays the ‘well how do you know you don’t like guys if you haven’t tried it’ card. And I’m so high I can’t come up with a counterargument. So I tried it, but somewhere between second and third base I was just like ‘yeah, I know now. I’m like, ninety-nine percent straight.’”

“Only ninety-nine?” I asked, unable to get my head out of the gutter.

“Yeah. Sometimes I’ll see a guy and be like ‘he can get it.’ But it doesn’t go further than that for me.”

“Well, you’re straighter than I am,” I said. 

“That right?”

“Yeah. I’ve had sex with two girls. One cis and one trans. It was fun, and I’m glad I did it, but after the second one and I started cuddling post coitus I just… I dunno. I wanted to be somewhere else. I find some girls hot, for sure, but I don’t want to date one.”

“So you’re… Shit, what did Aimee call it… Hetero-romantic?”

“Uh, yeah, actually, that’s right. When did she-”

“Aimee’s like you in reverse,” Caden explained. “Bisexual, in that she likes both men and women physically, but homoromantic in that she’s tried to date guys but realized pretty quickly she only likes women as serious, long-term partners.”

“Huh. And Kira?”

“Kira is hilariously gay,” Caden chuckled. “Like, holy shit, you think I’m down bad when I see a hot chick, she is the most unsubtle person on the planet. I once heard her say ‘awoogah’ when we were at the beach together and a busty redhead in a bikini climbed out of the water. Literally ‘awoogah’, like a freaking cartoon character.”

“Like mother, like son, eh?” I laughed. 

“Something like that,” he said. He stopped at a specific dress, then pulled it off the wrack and held it over me. “How about this?”

“This is… Holy shit, this is really pretty!”

“Yeah? It’s only twenty bucks.”

“Thank you, I…,” I started, then furrowed my brow. This dress was gorgeous, and I’d probably look good in it, but it wasn’t quite… There was something…

“What’s wrong?” he asked. 

“This is good, it really is,” I said. “But it’s not mine. It’s my sister’s. I guess because of the connection I have to the costume, it feels like I’m finally getting to celebrate Halloween my way and more like I’m celebrating it Kendra’s way.”

“Okay. I don’t think I entirely understand, but I’ll go with it. What would be your dress, then?”

My brain spun like a hamster on a wheel, until I remembered the other part of that night all those years ago. I held up a single finger towards Caden, then pulled out my phone and searched up the character I connected to much more than I did Glinda. I showed Caden the photo and grinned. 

“Okay,” Caden smiled. “Who’s this?”

“Princess Ozma. She’s introduced in the second book. She was cursed as a baby to be a boy, and when she’s trying to find the lost princess of Oz, Glinda tells her that that’s her, and then turns her back into a girl so she can take the throne. And she’s a little freaked out by it at first, but then as soon as she tries it she’s like ‘holy shit being a girl is the best thing ever’ because on the inside she always was one.”

“So she’s… She’s trans?” Caden squinted. “Weren’t those books written like a hundred years ago?”

“Hundred and twenty,” I nodded. “Yeah, I have no idea how some cishet white dude born before the Civil War pulled off better trans rep by accident than most people today can pull off on purpose, but he did.”

“Okay. So, white dress and… Is that a tiara on her head?”

“Yeah,” I said. 

“Well, we can probably find the dress here,” Caden said, gesturing to the white dresses’ wrack a few feet down. “The tiara is gonna take some work, though. If we can find something cheap online, though, maybe we could have it fasttracked for delivery?”

“But the school delivery room always takes an extra five days to process every package they receive,” I pointed out. 

“So then we’ll have it delivered to my place,” Caden shrugged. 

“You… You’d really do all that for me?”

He turned to me and cupped my cheeks in his rough hands, looking at me with an unblinking sapphire gaze. “Sugar, after what I did, I am so damn lucky to have you that I will probably spend our entire relationship doing shit like this. Because I need you to know that you were never an assignment. I took one look at you and it got very real. I wanna take it slow because I’m serious about you, because I don’t wanna make the same mistakes I did in the past, and because I don’t want you to think there’s anything else untoward going on with me now that the big thing is behind us.”

His thumbs drew circles on my cheeks, and on instinct I reached for his palm and kissed it, then put it back over my face. 

“There she is,” Caden said, moon-eyed with a goofy smile. “That’s my girl.”

“I’m your-”

“If you want,” he said, stroking my hair and kissing my neck. “I don’t expect you to answer right now. Just think about it. But if you want to be my girlfriend, well, it’s a standing offer. Sound good to you?”

TELL HIM THE TRUTH YOU FUCKING BITCH! My conscience screamed. But I couldn’t force the words out. He just kept making these perfect moments and I couldn’t bring myself to ruin them when he’d worked so hard for me. But soon. Very soon. 

“Halloween,” I said. “I’ll have an answer for you by Halloween.

“Perfect,” he crooned, and I wasn’t, but he kissed me anyway. 

All I could do was make the next few weeks as good for him as possible, and maybe, if I could find something else to write about, or if I was very lucky, he’d still kiss me like this after I told him.