Page 81 of A Little Bit Naughty

“Laundry day,” Remi surmised. Good boy.

“What are you up to?”

“Laying tile. The contractors made it in on Friday to deal with all the mess, so I just get to do the fun stuff.”

Like be manly and hot, knowing how to build a bathroom. There was a streak of white powder across Remi’s cheek, and Isaac was treated to a view of Remi’s muscles flexing as he did… whatever it was that laying tile involved off-screen.

“What do you think of this color?” He held up a dark blue tile that still somehow glowed with an opalescent, rainbowy sheen.

“Ooohhhh… that’s lovely.”

“The rest are just white. This is just for the accents.”

“Makes sense. A whole wall of that would be too dark.”

“Mmm-hmmmm…” Remi leaned forward, putting the tile somewhere and then doing something with a few extra movements.

“Could you turn the camera so I can see what you’re doing?”

Remi’s brow furrowed for a moment, and Isaac had an irrational worry that he’d assumed too much.

“Let me go get a stool from the kitchen to put the computer on. Then you should be able to see everything. I knew the sink was too close. If you want, I’ll talk you through it.”

“Yes, please!” Isaac was feeling more excited than he expected to be.

For the next fifteen minutes, he was treated to a demo of trowels and spacers; a mini-lecture on the differences between mastic, mortar, grout, and caulk; and Remi being sexy and competent with all of them. He made it look so easy, but he’d popped in stories of just how much he’d screwed it up the first time as he talked Isaac through some of the more subtle points.

“Next time, you can try it yourself,” Remi concluded, placing another tile against the wall with perfect precision.

“I would love that.”

“You never did any home repair projects like this as a kid? With your parents?”

Isaac shook his head. “My parents were the type to call someone in. I used to try to watch, but my mother didn’t want me to be in the way. Looking back, it was probably a gender thing, too.” Isaac felt a little squirmy saying that, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hide.

It just wasn’t something he’d talked about much with Remi. All of the stories of his childhood, really up to a few years ago, he’d kept very carefully gender neutral. But while being socialized as a girl was all in his past, it was still a huge part of his past that he tried to ignore most of the time.

“I’m sorry,” Remi looked up from his work to catch his eye. “That’s crappy. Everyone in my house is pretty handy, and Dani might have been the person who taught me how to use a drill. I’m not sure I remember now, but we didn’t have a lot of strict gender roles around stuff like that.”

“I sure did,” Isaac huffed.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Remi asked gently. “About your journey to be who you are, or anything else?”

Isaac folded a t-shirt—a men’s t-shirt from the men’s section of the store—while he considered. Did he want to tell Remi about it? He knew he could just say that he didn’t want to talk about it, and Remi wouldn’t press.

But the thing was, he did want to talk about it. Remi had handled everything pretty well so far. Not just that, but he’d been here with Isaac so many evenings, talking and listening, sharing himself. They might call this “just friends,” but Isaac was really hoping this was building into something bigger.

It had to be, didn’t it?

He must have waited too long to answer because Remi gave him another soft smile. “No pressure, Isaac. Nothing you tell me will change how I see you. I have to be honest and say that I want to learn everything about you, but only share what you’re comfortable with.”

Isaac found himself smiling back. He’d kind of known all of that, but it helped to hear Remi say it. He could feel that extra layer of care from the man he still thought of as the most perfect Daddy.

“I think I do want to tell you,” he finally answered, though his stomach was still a wobbly mess. This felt like… maybe not the final hurdle, but a big one. Like if he could just get this out, and know that Remi was fine with it, he could let one more layer of resistance around Remi go.

Still, talking about it with someone for the first time was always harrowing, the dysphoria rising up to meet him in unexpected ways sometimes. Maybe it was less about how much he trusted Remi, which was a lot despite his niggling fears, and more about how he felt about himself.

He folded a pair of socks together and started talking, just letting the words flow. “I never quite know when it started. Like, a lot of trans guys say they always knew, but it wasn’t that clear to me for a long time. At first it was just about clothes. I’m not sure how much you know about Jewish culture, but there’s this whole thing with wearing skirts with sneakers like they’re jeans, and I didn’t really question it at the time. Nobody stopped me from climbing over the banisters or crawling around under the tables at shul, and I just figured... denim dresses were play clothes, and some people wore them if they were Jewish.