“What can I do?” Taylor asks, standing up when Jessica is finished.
You can stop taking her to festivals. You can stop dancing to loud music like I assume you were just doing. You can help me make sure Jessica understands that all these risks are real andserious and life-threatening. You can stop giving her a taste of honey she’s never going to enjoy for more than a minute or two without serious repercussions.
“Nothing.” I sigh.
Jessica turns her body to press her forehead to my chest and I feel so much in the move. I feel her succumbing to being taken care of. I feel her exhaustion weigh her bones down. I feel her run out of whatever little energy she had left to fight me. And I could be totally wrong, but it also feels a bit like an apology.
I wrap my arms around my little sister, my hand brushing up against the hard white circle that is her CGM, her Continuous Glucose Monitor, on her upper arm. Jess is pretty good at managing her Cystic Fibrosis Related Diabetes herself thanks to this device and her being a lot more chill about needles than I am. I like to play my part by making sure she eats right and ensuring our fridge is full of the best ingredients. “I came up to tell you both dinner is nearly ready, and to find out if Taylor wants to stay and eat with us.”
“Sounds good!” Taylor’s face moves and I know she’s smiling, hard. She’s not a bad kid. Well, she’s not a kid at all. She’s twenty-six, like Jessica, and although more often than not she’s in joggers and a T-shirt at our house, when she’s standing in front of me now in the skirt suit I assume she wore to work today, this morning’s make-up still on her olive skin and her dark brown hair pulled back into a messy bun on the top of her head, I can see the adult she really is.
The kind of adult I don’t think Jessica will ever get a chance to be.
Another bolt of discomfort stabs me in the gut as I pull back from Jessica to get an answer.
She looks up at me with her big brown eyes, her slim frame feeling almost fragile in my hands and she nods, making her tight curls bob around her heart-shaped face.
“That would be nice,” she says.
“It’s fish tacos.”
That draws out a smile. Jessica pulls back and turns toward Taylor, who steps closer to us. “They make the best fish tacos.”
“I don’t need any further encouragement. Sign me up!”
“Five minutes,” I say and I subtly take the bag out of Jessica’s hand. “Wash up!”
As I start descending the stairs, I glance back and see my sister slide her hand into Taylor’s. It’s such a small action, and I’d normally think nothing of it, but then I look up and see the way they’re looking at each other and out of the blue, I start to wonder if I have a very different problem on my hands.
*****
Two hours later and I am alone again. Blissfully, happily alone. Dinner was a success – my sister ate three and a half tacos – and Taylor told us all many hilarious stories about the homes she’s recently been involved in selling. My mom’s phone didn’t ring until we were stacking plates afterward and she quickly left after dishing out forehead kisses to us all. The kitchen has been cleaned up. Taylor left to go to the gym and I tried to ignore the way she and Jessica were holding hands again as they said goodbye. I sat with my sister as she did her last vest physio of the day, did her insulin injection and took her meds, and then I checked the house was locked up before I took a shower in the house’s guest bathroom.
But now I’m back in my cabin. Back in my cabin, clean and fresh and slipping a cream silk negligee over my head. I exhale deeply as the cool, smooth fabric kisses my skin and I look down at myself. The definition of my stomach and pectoral muscles pressing up against the silk has me running a hand down my body. The outline of my penis and the way my thighs stretch thematerial has me feeling sexier than I did in the scene I filmed with Miko and Harley.
As something of a self-professed sexpert, I should have an understanding of why I feel so sensual when I wear clothes like this. As someone who came out as non-binary over three years ago, I should be able to vocalize why indulging my feminine side, in my stereotypically masculine body, feels like a deeply spiritual act. As somebody who has been doing this – wearing clothes deemed only suitable for women by society – since their formative years, I should maybe be more comfortable with this side of my gender expression, so comfortable that I share it with the world… but I don’t.
As always I don’t dwell on the reasons why that is any longer than I have to. Too many bad memories that threaten to take away this high I’m feeling. A high I tell myself I’m happy to keep to myself, where it’s safe and protected. Instead I focus on the freedom I feel moving around the cabin toward my bed as the feather-light material that caresses my thighs and the thin spaghetti straps rest on my collar bones.
A year ago, I stopped taking my phone to bed with me in a bid to have more clearly established on and offline time, but this last week, I’ve undone those good habits and I’ve slipped under the covers with my device in hand, just like I’m doing now.
Once comfortable, my fingers move without my conscious thought and I’m only mildly surprised when I’m looking at Maeve’s profile. The kick of excitement I feel when I see she has a new video is possibly something I should be concerned about, but I’ve been quite successful dismissing potential concerns this evening so why not just continue.
“Alright, time to try sell you all something again!” she declares to the camera, her face all done up and her hair in a too-perfect arrangement of waves around her face and down her chest. “And I have to be real with you. This was the last product I thought I’dever try and sell you but it’s actually turned out to be one of the most interesting and almost, you know, fun.”
She goes on to explain that she’s just had her birth chart tracked through an app and that she’s discovered she’s more than just the Cancer sun sign she knew she was. She now knows she has a Gemini moon and her rising sign is in Pisces. After she reads out more about her birth chart and what each sign potentially means for her personality and the trajectory of her life, she puts the device she’s reading from down and fixes the camera with a firm stare.
“I mean, obviously, it could all still be utter bollocks, but it was kind of fun to explore a little bit, to understand better what so many people are rightly or wrongly convinced is gospel. And hey, why not have something to blame for how irritated the general population often makes me. It’s because I was born when Capricorn was in Mercury.”
I couldn’t stop my fingers if I tried as I open our chat in my inbox. After ignoring the way she has yet to respond to themessage, I start typing.
Chapter Eight
Maeve
“Jesus fucking Christ, it’s too early for this horseshite,” I say with a groan after I read their message.
