A Beginner's Guide to Gold Digging: Chapter 22

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A Beginner's Guide to Catfishing by Helena Stacy

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A Beginner's Guide to Convalescence (Part 1)

Lily

Two Weeks Later

Weakness. Weariness. Exhaustion. But also a deep and powerful sense of rightness, as if some sort of tumor growing out of my body and sucking away my life-force had been cut away, dug out root and stem and replaced with what I was always supposed to have; as if a demon had been exorcized from me- a false, darker self that I’d never wanted to be, that had infested me, tortured me, twisted me, now forever removed from my personage so that I could reclaim the truth of myself and bask in the warm light of God; as if I’d had a lock cutting into my body, sealing away my happiness, but I’d finally, mercifully, found the key and freed my joy from the hideous flesh-prison. 

But also DEAR GOD ALMIGHTY AND ALL THE ANGELS AND SAINTS, I felt like I’d run a marathon with a ten-pound weight tied to my back.               

I laid in bed, staring up at the white ceiling of my room through half-opened eyes. I groaned softly, reaching my hand between my legs to remind myself that yes, it was really truly gone, I really truly had a vagina. 

Holy shit, I had a freaking vagina!   

The early morning light streamed in from the margins of my blinded windows, the ceiling fan and the air conditioning both fanning me with cool relief as our house struggled to fight off the swampy humidity outside. I was just glad to be home: I’d been going stir-crazy in the hospital for the past week, the only relief being strung out on morphine for large swaths of it. Void slept on the floor by my bed in his indoor-hutch, and the door creaked open to reveal Crispin walking inside soaking wet and clad in only a towel. I could have spent hours counting the individual droplets hanging off of his body hair, sliding down his rugged chest, glistening on his skin. 

A brief phantom feeling shot up between my legs but subsided immediately, instead replaced by a warm and resonant lust vibrating up through my midsection. Oh God, I was gonna have to live with this hunk for two months and not be able to fuck him. This was gonna be hard. Ugh, and I was so weary and battered that I couldn’t even do sit-ups or something, channel the energy into other physical activities. Dammit. 

Crispin smirked at me as he realized I was awake. Bastard. “See something you like?”

“N-no,” I blushed. 

“Oh, really? So you won’t mind if I do this?” 

“Do what-”

He stripped off his towel, revealing his gloriously naked lower half, his spear hard and dripping wet. I gulped as I imagined it slipping inside me, between my legs, thrusting upwards to Christen my new sex; lodging inside, swirling around and sliding back and forth, splattering cum all over my inner walls-

He ran the towel over his hair as he walked over me, planting a kiss on my forehead. “Don’t get too excited, angel.”

“Mmmm. You seem pretty excited though, you hypocrite,” I groaned, then poked his nose. 

“I was hammering one out in the shower, yeah.”

“So unfair.”

“Does it help if I say I was thinking about you while I fucked my hand?”

“... A little,” I said, the pink tint to my cheeks turning to hot crimson.

“What if I told you that me thinking about you while jerking off is the whole reason this all happened for us in the first place?”

“... Are you serious?”

“Serious as the Battle of Camlann, beautiful.”

He stood up and let me stare at him as he continued toweling off his naked, sculpted man-body. God, it was ridiculous. He may not have had the same full-on superhero physique as Kyle, but my guy was fit and fine as fuck and I was gonna go crazy not being able to bang him for at least a month and a half. 

“Feeling… Frustrated, Lily?” Crispin asked, still smirking. 

“Douchebag,” I muttered, reaching for his dick and gripping it. 

He shuddered with delight. “Lily… I gotta get to work.”

“Ugh, fine,” I rolled my eyes, letting go of his handle before he could get fully hard again. 

“Also, we can still find ways to get you off while you recover,” he added. 

“I know, I’m just… Excited.”

“Good,” he said, stepping into a pair of briefs that hugged his package delightfully close. “It’s something we both have to look forward to.”

“You know what will help, though?”

“What?” 

“If you start dressing slutty around the house.”

“Pfft, alright. What does that entail, exactly? Every girl who’s asked me to do that has a different idea of what ‘guys dressing slutty’ looks like,” Crispin said, now putting on a pair of khakis. “You want me to roll up my sleeves? Wear v-necks? Crop-tops? Cargo-shorts?”

“How are cargo shorts slutty? Those are, like, the opposite of slutty.”

“Not when you cut an inch of fabric off the legs and let them shrink in the wash a bit. Not so tight as to be uncomfortable. Just enough to give you a… Broad outline, shall we say?”

The picture his words painted in my mind… Definitely did something for me. Damn. Okay. This was something we could explore. “Yes.”

“Yes to what?”

“Yes to all!”

He chuckled as he started covering up that delicious chest of his with a button-down shirt. “Well then, anything for my angel. I draw the line at piercings, though. I don’t do those.”

“Valid. You’d look like a poseur with piercings,” I said.

“And no more tattoos, either. The one I have is embarrassing enough.”

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. Why do you have a tramp-stamp that says-”

“I lost a bet in college,” he cut me off. 

I scooted out of bed and walked over to him, wrapping my arms around his body as he finished buttoning his shirt. “What was the bet?”

“Whether or not I could sail to Portland and back while high on edibles.”

I laughed. “Goddammit, why would you agree to that?”

“Hubris.”

“Ahh. That makes sense. Who was the bet with? One of your frat bros?”

“No, actually. It was Rose.”

“Pffft. That makes sense. Also, do me a favor?” I said, batting my eyelashes.

“What?”

“Touch my boobs, please?”

“Uh-”

“Cris, I just really wanna feel sexy for a second.”

“But you’re always-”

“Dahling, please!” I whined, busting out the accent. 

I felt him stiffen through his pants. “You evil, evil woman,” he said as he honked my boobs, pinching my nipples and kissing my mouth.  

I followed him downstairs, nothing but a pair of panties and a yellow shirt covering my form. Rob and Heather were at our kitchen table, munching on donuts and sipping coffee. Heather, it turned out, worked a remote I.T. job, so she was currently dividing her time between her place and ours during the workday while Rob hung out with her. They seemed to be getting pretty serious in their own right- good. I was happy for him. My big brother was far from perfect, but he was also one of my favorite people and I wanted him to have someone special. 

“Good morning,” I said, sitting at the table and helping myself to several donuts (one jelly-filled, one coconut, and one glazed blueberry) while Cris poured us both some cold brew coffee from the apparatus we kept in the fridge. 

“Good morning to you too,” Heather beamed at me. “How you feeling, girly girl?”

I shimmied with joy when she called me that. It was who I was, and screw it, I was done hiding it or being ashamed. I was hyper-feminine and I fucking loved it. “Weak, but good.”

“Fair,” she said. Heather had taken quite the shine to me now that we were properly acquainted. It was honestly kind of nice: I found her attractive, yeah, but it was a friendship that wasn’t tangled up in lust like I had with Julia or Lisa, or envy like I had with Rose. It was nice just to be friends with another girl and not have any caveats to it for a change. “Whatcha up to today?”

“Uh, probably just gonna read.”

“Whatcha gonna read? More comics?”

“I do have a few I wanna get to, but I was actually thinking I’d borrow one of Cris’ mythology books,” I said with a small smile. 

“Really?” Cris said as he sat at the table. 

“Yeah,” I said, cutting my coconut donut in half and handing one of them to him. “You read my stuff, I’ll read your stuff. I’ve time to kill.”

“Cool,” he said, prompting a cheek-kiss. 

“Aww,” Heather said, putting a hand over her heart. 

Rob just groaned. 

“What are you gonna do all day, bro?” I asked. 

“Meeting with the union rep. Gotta assure him the money is gonna keep coming while we’re on hiatus,” Rob said. 

“Need me to do anything?”

“You still have those notes from last time you met him?”

“Yeah, they’re in my room. I’ll grab them for you before you leave.”

“Thanks, kid,” Rob said. “What about you, Crispin? What’s on your docket?”

“Uh, sorta floating on various assignments right now, helping with negotiations with some of our clients,” Cris said. “Gotta keep Rose’s contracts on-lock. They might have me travel at some point in the next month, just a heads up.”

I pouted. 

“It’ll only be temporary,” Cris said, squeezing my knee.

“It better be,” I said, leaning into him. 

Ten Days Later

Crispin

“How many more of these do we have?” I groaned as I slumped back into the passenger’s seat of Adam’s car. It was a well-maintained Mini Cooper with a green paint-job and white leather seats, and he had one of those heat-shields draped across the front and back windows to keep the thing from turning completely into an oven while it sat in the hot sun.

Adam checked his phone. “Three more today.”

“Goddammit,” I said. It was already two in the afternoon, and given we were out in western Massachusetts, we were looking at a two and a half hour drive back after quitting time allegedly came at five. “Why are we investing in farms, anyway?”

“I have no idea, man,” Adam said, pinching the bridge of his nose before starting the car and blasting the air conditioning. “What does our company even do?”

“God, I can hear Rose saying ‘what don’t we do’ right now,” I laughed, letting the air conditioning blast me with cold relief from the schvitz-like weather outside. 

Adam shuddered. “Seriously, though, we’re like, venture capitalists, right?”

“I think?” I said. 

“God, why did I take this job?” Adam said. He’d taken out his nose-stud while we were working, rolled down his sleeves. Made him look a lot less intimidating, according to him. I didn’t see it, but Lily did, so I guess that was a thing for her. 

“I have no idea, man,” I said. “I got hired because Rose owed me a favor.”

He started up the car and backed us out of the driveway of the dairy farm we’d just renewed our investment contract with. “I… Just needed space.”

We drove onto the clear road, farmland on all sides as we started driving towards our next client. “Space from what?”

“Eh… My family, mostly.”

“Are they not cool with you being bi?”

“They don’t know,” he said. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way. Need distance to maintain that, though. Figured three thousand miles would be enough.”

“You’re from California?”

“Los Angeles, baby. City of Angels. Culver City born and raised. But I went to school here in Boston. Got the internship, internship led to a job, job led to not having to move back in with my parents after I graduated.”

“Fair enough,” I said as we cleared one swath of farmland and neared another. This one was mostly corn, acres and acres of it… Several of which looked like they’d been set on fire. What the hell…? We neared the front of the farm, a simple red house with a sign out front that read ‘Gutierrez Family Farm.’ And it had a trans pride flag hanging from the front porch… Which looked like someone had knifed it at some point. 

“Pull over,” I said, rage snarling inside my soul. 

“Why?”

“I think we might have some business to conduct here.”

“You sure-”

“Our next client is twenty minutes away but we aren’t supposed to meet them for another hour. We have time. I know we both wanna knock off early, but just… Please indulge me?”

Adam hesitated, but then gave a shallow nod and pulled over to the side of the road and parked. We both got out and walked up to the front door of the farmhouse. I knocked, hoping someone would be home to answer. After a few minutes of Adam tapping his foot impatiently, someone finally opened the door from the other side. 

She was tall, with dark brown skin and curly black hair worn short. She wore a pair of overalls and a white shirt underneath it, and was sweating like she’d been out in the sun all day. 

“Hi there,” I said, trying for my friendliest smile. “Are, uh, you Senorita Gutierez, by any chance?”

“Si. I’m Camilla Gutierez,” she said in Spanish, probably hoping it would make us leave. Thank God for Juanita’s lessons. 

“I’m Cris Winfield, and this is my business associate Adam Kurosawa,” I replied in Spanish. Granted, it was Dominican Spanish rather than what this woman spoke (Mexican Spanish, if I had to guess). “We’re with Van Der Ahe Consolidated-”

Her voice came from low in her chest, and it throbbed with anger and fear as she spoke. “If they sent you to threaten me-”

“They didn’t send us,” I said. “We were just passing through. We stopped because I noticed someone tore up your flag, and it looks like they set part of your field on fire. Did they?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“Because this kinda thing pisses me off.”

“Why’s that? I didn’t think rich gringos from the city gave a shit about that sort of thing.”

I gestured to the flag. “My wife,” I said. Fuck it, it was basically true at this point. “She’s like you. And if she were here, she’d tell me to stop and knock on your door to see if there’s anything I can do to help. Can I?”

“... Why don’t you two come inside. My wife is in the fields right now, but I can bring her in so we can talk some more.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said. “Thank you.”

She left the door open as she walked back inside. 

Adam grabbed me by the sleeve before I could go in. “What were you guys talking about, exactly?”

“I may have just found us a new client to invest in,” I said. “You’re from Los Angeles but you don’t speak Spanish?”

“No, I… I took Korean in high school. I wish I’d taken Spanish, but there was a girl I wanted to date and… You get the idea.”

“Did you get the girl?”

“No, but I did lose my virginity to her brother.”

“Huh. Good for you, dude.”

We walked inside the farmhouse, and started our discussions with the ladies of the house. The long and short of it was that they’d had to lay off a good amount of their migrant workers after someone set fire to their field in the middle of the night. And the police, naturally, refused to fucking investigate it as anything other than a freak accident, despite the flag getting shredded sending a pretty clear message. I told Senora and Senora Gutierez that I couldn’t promise anything, but I was gonna talk to my boss about securing some funding for them to hire back their staff, as well as to hire some private security to stop this from happening again. 

By the time we left, the ladies looked just a little less scared and a little less pissed off, and that alone felt like a good start. Not nearly the end, but a good start. 

We got back into the car, Adam starting it up and cranking the air conditioner once more. “Hey, listen. I’m very on board with what we just did- frankly, what’s happened here makes my blood boil- but with the position we’re in right now, that you’re in right now, I don’t know how easy it’s gonna be to sell the boss-lady on it.”

“No, Rose will go for it,” I said as I stared out the window, watching the Gutierez farm fall out of view as we traveled further down the road. “Trust me. I’ve known her for a long time. She’ll go for it. And once we have her, it gets a lot easier to convince Violetta, because Rose is a mama’s girl and Violetta would do anything for her. The board might have some problems with it, but if we can renew every other contract on this list, then that’ll help a lot.”

Adam glanced at me, then nodded solemnly and cranked up the speed on his car. “Well then, I’d say we’ve got work to do. Let’s fucking go!”

“Hell yeah,” I said. 

10 More Days Later

Lily

‘You almost home?’ I texted Cris. I laid on one of the living room couches, bored out of my skull. Rob was at Heather’s that night, and Cris was supposed to be back from a contract negotiation with the Gutierrez Farm. He was doing good work, and I felt selfish for wanting more and more of his time when he was keeping our lights on right now, but still… 

I was lonely. It was just me and my rabbit in this big empty house. There’s only so much lying around a person can do without it getting to them, especially when you couldn’t even masturbate to kill time. The closest I got was dilating, which was starting to hurt less, and had mostly stopped bleeding, but had yet to reach the point where I would call it pleasant either. 

My phone dinged. ‘One more hour away. But I sent some people over to keep you company.’

I furrowed my brow, but, as if on cue, someone knocked on my door. 

I lumbered over and opened it, to find Lydia, Claudia, and Preston on the other side. Lydia carried a tote bag over her shoulder, and was smiling like crazy. Claudia was dressed as beautifully slutty as always, and wore a bemused smirk not unlike the one Cris wore so well. And Preston… Preston looked like shit. He’d gotten even skinnier, to a worrying degree, and the bags under his eyes were bigger than the actual eyes. Bone-deep exhaustion comparable to my own radiated from him, his smile completely failing to reach his eyes. 

“Heyyy!” Lydia said, going in for the hug right away. I smiled and hugged her back, then gestured to the others to come inside. “Hope you’re in the mood for a surprise party!”

“I certainly wouldn’t say no,” I smiled as I led them towards my living room, Void scampering about to rub his face on the new people. “Cris sent you?”

“Yup,” Claudia said, her voice sounding a bit tipsy. Must’ve come here from work. “Priscilla says sorry she couldn’t come, but she didn’t want to.”

“Lovely,” I grimaced. Then I turned to the boy. Well, possibly a boy? It remained to be seen. “How you doing, Pres?”

“Surviving,” he said, visibly struggling not to slip into a thousand-yard stare. 

“Relatable,” I grimaced. 

I sat on my couch, Lydia next to me, Preston and Claudia across from us. 

“How are you holding up?” Lydia asked. “You know, post-surgery?”

“Honestly, pretty well,” I said. “I’m mostly just bored and feeling distinctly not-pretty.”

“Well, I can help with that,” Lydia said, holding up her bag and letting spill out a makeup kit, products like foundation and mascara and lipstick and eyeliner and blush, and a few hair tools as well. “Who wants a makeover!?”

“Well, I have finally accepted that I’m the kind of girl who will never say no to a makeover, but also it feels a little weird getting gussied up with nowhere to go.”

“Lame,” Claudia said. 

“Beg pardon?” I narrow-eyed her. 

“Sometimes it’s important just to feel pretty for your own benefit, not for anyone else’s,” Claudia shrugged. She gestured to her black tube-dress and perfect hair and manicure. “I didn’t have to do all this just to come here. I just felt like it.”

“You’re… You didn’t come here from work?”

“Lily, babe, nobody is out clubbing at 7 PM on a Tuesday.”

Pushing aside the tiny fluster I got at being called babe (because I very emphatically did not need to start getting horny for my fiance’s little sister), I shrugged and said, “Fair enough. So, what are we thinking?”

Lydia grabbed my face, which was not helping either. “I’m thinking some contours, maybe some wing-tips, some smokey-eyes. Oh, and we can tease your hair a bit if you want, get it big and tall like Karen wears it.”

I giggled at the mental image of me sporting a Karen-like beehive. “Don’t think I’m quite blonde enough for that. Should I be? Should I go blonde?”

“I would advise against it,” Claudia said, walking over and sitting on the other side of me while I middled the couch. “Your color is perfect for your skin tone. Like, maybe some gold highlights would look good? But trust me, you don’t wanna do the platinum plunge.”

“Agreed,” Lydia said. “I tried it in college and it looked good on me but was a total pain in the ass to maintain. I’m talking weekly salon trips, and eventually it just fried my hair so bad I had to cut it wicked short to let it reset.”

“Ew, no thanks,” I squirmed. “I am never going back to short hair as long as I live. That chapter of my life is finished.”

“Good call,” Claudia said warmly. “I could straighten your hair for you while Lydia does your makeup, though.”

Heh. Straighten. “Let’s do it. I wanna see how it looks.”

“Yay!” Lydia clapped, then started digging through her bag of magic tricks. “Do you want me to plan around what you’re wearing? That sundress is adorable, by the way.”

“Thank you. And, uh, no, I don’t think so- do whatever you think will look good, and I can find an outfit that’ll match. Then maybe once I can wear it out, I’ll try to pull the whole look together myself?”

“Ambitious! I respect that,” Lydia said as she started swirling a makeup wand into a container of foundation. Then she looked across the room, where Preston seemed like he was making an active effort to vanish into the couch. “Hey, Pres, remember when we used to do this to you?”

Huh. 

Preston shimmied in his seat. “Uh… No? No, I don’t think I do.”

Claudia laughed as she started applying a flat iron to my now shoulder-length curls, the heat caressing the back of my neck. “Oh please, yes you do. You used to throw these massive tantrums, but then after you wore yourself out you always let us.”

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, don’t tease him, Claudia,” Lydia said. “He’s probably embarrassed by the whole thing.”

“Y-yeah! That’s it. That’s all,” he said in the most unconvincing tone of voice imaginable. 

Huh!

“Still, you were a good sport about it in your own way, and we appreciate that,” Lydia said affectionately. “We just liked the idea of messing with Crispin by pretending he was surrounded by sisters on both sides.”

Preston looked very intently at the carpet, then busied himself holding Void. I kept on eyeing him suspiciously. Something was distinctly not-cisgender in the state of Preston Winfield, and his family didn’t suspect a thing. I don’t even think he did, either.

Crispin

“I’m back,” I called out as I crossed the threshold to Lily’s… Our house. I was still getting used to thinking of it that way, but it was becoming easier. Did I miss the mansion? Sometimes. Mostly I just missed spending time with Juanita, with Trevor, with Naomi, with everyone… But still, this place was cozy, and everything here smelled like Lily. Plus, she’d grown up here and it was nice to be a part of her world in such an intimate way.

“Say the thing,” my fiance’s voice called out from upstairs. 

I grunted. I really needed to have a talk with her about this at some point, but I guess it couldn’t hurt to indulge her a little. “Honey, I’m home!”

And then, traipsing down the stairs, followed by three of my four siblings, was Lily. She wore a teal evening gown, no shoulders and a low neckline and a slit running up the left leg. Her hair was straightened, which put it down past her shoulders and framed her face beautifully. And her face… Her face, holy shit… And her legs, and her boobs (which I was convinced had gotten bigger in the past month)...

“Hot damn,” I said as she approached me, traipsing in heels that brought her up to my chin. She put a hand to my chest and kissed me real hard, and the fact that my family was here was the only thing that was stopping me from bending her over and fucking her against the front door. 

“Hello, dahling,” she cooed. 

Thank God she was standing in front of me, otherwise everyone would have seen my bulge. “Hey, angel,” I growled as Lydia and Claudia approached. “Where did you get the dress?”

“It was my ma’s,” Lily smiled. “I’ve been eyeing it for a while. Lydia and Claudia did my hair and makeup, and when I saw the end result, I just knew what would pair perfectly with all this. How does it look?”

“Like if God made a girl prettier than you, He must’ve kept her for Himself,” I said from the deepest wells of my heart.

Claudia, clearly more than a little tipsy, laughed hysterically, but not mockingly. Maybe I’d been too hard on her: initial passive-aggression towards Lily notwithstanding, they seemed to get along great these days, and I’d even gone to a few of Claudia’s DJ gigs to start seeing her more often. Moving out had frankly made us closer, since now we had to choose to spend time with each other. Crazy stuff. Maybe this was something approaching what normal families were like.

Lydia, meanwhile, just gave me a noogie and said, “You’re welcome, little bro,” while wearing the shit-eating grin I’d learned by watching her.

“Hi, you two. Good to see you,” I said while Lily clinged to me. I should have broken it up, hugged my sisters too… 

And then I noticed my brother, looking like roadkill, trying to avoid taking up space at the base of the stairwell. 

When was the last time I hugged my brother? I combed through the filing cabinet of my memories, looking for something, anything… 

By the time Lily guided me into the kitchen, where a dinner of pasta salad and red wine was waiting for me at the table, I finally found an answer: I was sixteen, and he was eight. Some girls at his school had started mocking him when he tried to talk to them about My Little Pony, and when I got home from sailing practice that day he was sobbing his eyes out. So I gave him a big hug and sat with him on the couch, watching his shows with him. Poor kid had always been… Well, sensitive, for lack of a better word, to the point where he was genuinely bad at being friends with boys, kept trying to be friends with girls instead. But kids were assholes, especially to other kids, and so the girls weren’t very nice about him liking girly stuff. The upshot was that he didn’t have very many friends… At all, really. 

The eight year age gap had meant Pres and I had never been super close. Dad was always busy, and while Karen dotting on him helped a bit, it also meant he was terrible at interacting with people his own age. I did what I could, but he was never interested in any of the stuff I was. I tried to play catch with him, and he bitched and moaned until I let him go inside. I tried to take him sailing, and he got seasick. I took him to the library, and he darted off in a million directions and I had to spend the whole afternoon chasing him down until we both got kicked out. I was just grateful he’d discovered horseback riding in middle school, or he’d have spent every free minute holed up in his room bidding on anime merch in online auctions. 

God, maybe that was how he wound up in Olivia and Chuck’s orbit: desperation for literally any kind of social connection. It was a miracle he wasn’t a full-on incel or something… Actually, I didn’t know for sure that he hadn’t been at one point. It would certainly explain the transphobia. 

But he was here now. And by the look of him, he was either at rock bottom or working on tunneling deeper. 

So I did what I did back then, and what I frankly should have done way more often: I got up and I put my arms around my kid brother. 

“Hey, bro,” I said. “Been a minute.”

He stiffened, and slowly, slowly hugged me back. “Y-yeah. It has.”

I turned to the girls and said, “Hey, do you mind if I borrow him for a minute? Little man-to-man talk outside?”

Preston cringed, which I was deeply confused by, but whatever. What confused me even more was the pitying look Lily had towards him when he cringed. But Lydia and Claudia gave the thumbs-up, so I pulled Preston outside with me through the sliding door in the kitchen and shut it behind us. 

“Hey,” I smiled as Pres shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at the garden. I’d added a row of my own, and my corn crops had already started growing. Seeds courtesy of the Gutierrez Farm, I was proud to call myself their customer. 

“You already said that,” Pres replied. 

“Yeah, I know, I just… How are you doing, man?”

He cringed again. What was up with that? “I’m… I got nothing to report,” he said. 

I raised an eyebrow as I sat on a wooden porch chair. I pulled out another one and pointed at it, and he reluctantly sat down next to me. “Seriously, little brother,” I said, then noted another wince. Had he always done that? “I need you to talk to me. Please.”

“About what?”

“Well, what have you been up to? How are you feeling? Where are you staying? Are you eating, because it looks like you aren’t-”

“I am,” he insisted. “I promise, I am. Just not as much as I should, but… I don’t know how to cook anything, and I keep burning through money on takeout, so I can’t always eat three meals a day-”

“Are you at least eating twice a day?” I said, eyebrows shooting up. 

“Sometimes,” he said. “When I have the money. I also started taking ritalin, finally-”

“Wait, ritalin? You have ADHD?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I didn’t mention that,” he said awkwardly as he scratched the back of his head. “I got diagnosed a couple years ago, but-”

“Years ago?” I said. “Did you tell anyone?”

“I was going too!” he said, voice raised a notch, shame leaking out of his tone. “But then I… Didn’t. It’s… Well, that’s kinda what the condition is like, honestly. But I’m getting better: ow when I wake up, I only spend an hour doom-scrolling social media instead of three!”

“You used to spend- okay, okay, this puts things in perspective,” I said. “The medicine is helping?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you get the prescription after you were first diagnosed?”

“Oh, I did. I had the pills and everything but then… I… Uh…”

“You got distracted?” I said gently. 

He nodded. 

I patted him on the back gently. “Oh, little brother.”

Another wince. What was I saying that made him do that? It was so lost.

“But I’m taking them every day now,” he said, smiling for the first time in months. “I even set up an alarm on my phone so I don’t forget!”

“That’s good!”

“But it also kills my appetite, so sometimes I don’t eat… Uh… At all. For like an entire day,” Preston said. 

I rubbed my eyes furiously. “Okay,” I breathed out. “Where are you staying? Because I’m still unclear on that part.”

He shook his leg while remaining seated. Had he always done that? Shit, how much had I missed because I was too busy boning every consenting woman in New England? “I told you, I’m staying with a friend of mine from college.”

“Which one?” I said. Please don’t say Olivia, please for the love of God don’t say Olivia. 

“... Josh,” Preston said, after a brief hesitation. 

Josh Lopez was an answer that, had I believed Pres was telling the truth, I would have been immensely relieved by. He’d been a senior when Pres was a freshman at Yale, a scholarship student who was mostly there to play polo. Pres was a walk-on for the team, and they’d bonded right away over how they’d rather just be racing horses instead. They’d wound up living together for Pres’ entire sophomore, junior, and senior years at Josh’s place in New Haven. But they’d had some kind of messy falling out right after Pres graduated. I’d never gotten the details, but I did know it was the whole reason Pres had moved back home instead of staying in Connecticut to work the equestrian circuit. Which in turn, brought us back to ‘my kid brother was definitely lying about staying with Josh.’ 

“Isn’t he still in Connecticut?” I asked gently.

“No, actually, he’s working at a horse ranch on the Cape,” Pres said, a little too hurriedly for me to buy it. 

“So are you working there, or what?”

“No, uh, they don’t have any openings,” Pres said, tucking a strand of his shaggy blond hair behind his ear. “I’m just kinda… Freeloading right now. Professional parasite, same as ever. Just a fucking worthless brat. Can’t fix stupid, you know?”

“...”

“What?” 

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about yourself like that,” I said softly. 

“All I’m doing is telling the truth-”

“Bullshit,” I said. This, this right here was the other reason we’d never been close: he avoided things, and I didn’t. I had no filter, and he was all-filtered all the time. I was honest… And Preston regurgitated whatever lie he’d convinced himself of most recently. “Look, dude, you’re not perfect, but neither am I. Could you be better? Yeah. But you also aren’t gonna get better if you keep beating yourself up-”

“I’m not gonna get better, though!” Preston finally snapped. He stood up, planting his fists on his hips and staring me down while I stayed seated. “How do you not get that? There’s a serious fucking cap on how much better I can get, so why bother?! Surviving is more important than trying to be something I can never live up to!”

“And what’s that?” I said, not blinking, meeting his furious gaze. “What, exactly, do you think you’ll never live up to?”

“You, Crispin! Obviously, I can’t live up to you! I’ll never be as good as you!”

“Nobody is asking you to be me, dude,” I said, incredulous over the idea of him even wanting that. 

“Dad is,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets again and looking away. “He always has. He thinks I’m a disappointment, and honestly, he’s right.”

“Okay, counterpoint: Dad is a fucking idiot. Yes, he’s our father, and I love him in my own way, but I don’t respect him and neither should you. He’s an obnoxious lunatic who thinks with his wallet, and people only give him a pass because he talks a good game when it comes to being better than the average rich asshole.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Preston snarled. “You’re his favorite.”

I rolled my eyes. “You cannot be serious. Dad has never approved of anything I’ve done in my entire life.”

“Yeah, but you’re your own man,” Preston said, blue eyes downcast. “And as much as he bitches and moans about you defying him at every turn, he respects you, because you’re a real man. And that’s something I’ll never be.”

I blinked. Wait a second. Pres had it in his head that he’d never be a real man… And he flinched whenever he got a masculine aphorism lobbed at him… And he’d always been in touch with his feminine side… Was he… A she? 

No, no it couldn’t be. He was a recovering transphobe- if anything, his relationship with femininity was even more tortured than his relationship with masculinity. It couldn’t be. Could it be? Maybe… Maybe I should pull on this thread a little. “You know that… You know that you don’t have to be a man, right?”

Preston blinked. And then he ran. And ran, and ran, and jumped over the fence, and kept on running until he vanished into the darkness of the summer night.

Huh. 

I went back inside, more confused than ever, to find Lily and my sisters drinking wine and laughing raucously. 

“Hey,” Lydia said. “Where’s Pres?”

“He… Needs to clear his head,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting down at the table. 

“You alright?” Lily asked. 

“Uh… We can talk about it later.”

And we would. But for now… For now, I needed to process all this.