While Anthony wasn't in any particular rush for me to start working for him at the salon, after about a week of chilling and doing chores at his apartment while he was at work, I felt restless.
However, all the clothes I'd brought with me from my mom's place felt... wrong. I wore baggy clothes to hide my body shape as much as I could get away with - and my mom allowed that, since she was very strict about me wearing anything even a little revealing - but everything otherwise looked like clothes meant for women, because my mom wouldn't let me pick out my own clothes.
Anthony knew this, and said, "Let me buy you some clothes."
So he took me shopping. We got some casual clothes - T-shirts, long-sleeved thermal shirts, flannel shirts, sweaters, and jeans, and then some more business-like stuff like button-down shirts, khakis and chinos. Every time I tried something on and looked at myself in the fitting room mirror, I saw a guy. It was great.
The day I started work at his salon, I wore a dark grey button-down shirt and khakis. Anthony grinned as we headed out the door. "You make a cute guy," he told me.
I almost skipped down the stairs.
On the way to the salon, Anthony said, "I was thinking... with you answering the phone and meeting my customers, maybe we should use a guy's name for you." He called me by the male version of my birth name.
I didn't like my given name or the male version of it. I actually really hated my given name for a lot of reasons, and the male version of it is the same name as my fundie uncle. I shook my head. "It's not that I don't want a boy's name, but I don't want that," I explained.
"Fair enough. Well... what do you want to be called, instead? What's your favorite boy's name?"
It took me a minute, then I said, "Jonathan."
"OK. Jonathan or Jon." Then Anthony's lips quirked. "Hm."
"What?"
"Your voice. You have a deep voice for a girl, but it doesn't quite sound like..." His voice trailed off and he looked off to the side, as if he was worried he'd just offended me.
But he had a point. "Your voice will change when we can get you testosterone," Anthony said quickly. "In the meantime, maybe if you try to do a guy voice..."
I lowered my voice a few octaves. "Hey, how's it going. You here for an appointment, or are you a walk-in?"
Anthony tried not to laugh - but I made myself crack up. I sounded like Barry Fucking White. "OH GAWD," I yelled, laughing so hard I teared up, gigglesnorting.
"Yeah, that doesn't... quite sound right. Hmmm. OK, I have an idea. Try to sound like a stereotypical gay guy. Flap your wrists around, it'll be more convincing."
"Ooh gurl, you look fabulous!" I said, and flipped my left wrist. "That hair looks so. Good. Oh. My. Gawd."
"YAAAAAAAAAAS." Anthony's face lit up. "You make a good queer, Jon."
I grinned and continued in my "sassy" voice. "That's Queen Jon to you."
"Yas, honey."
I liked him calling me "honey", even though I knew it was just a gay guy thing. I remembered him calling me "cute" as we left the house and my cheeks burned and my heart beat faster, but I told myself, Don't get your hopes up. He just sees you as a dumb kid.
Three days later, my period started. My periods were always terrible but this one was a real doozy with intense cramps and heavy bleeding. My periods had been so bad that I'd stayed home from school. Now I wasn't in school but I had a job, and even though my job was sitting behind a desk answering a phone most of the day, it hurt to sit up.
The dysphoria also came roaring back with it. I had been feeling a lot better since my hair was cut, I started binding my breasts with the compression vests, I was wearing men's clothes and going by a male name. The period was the awful reminder of my biology, and I spent the morning curled up in the fetal position crying, not just from how much pain I was in with the cramps, but the anguish of my body's betrayal.
Anthony decided he would take a half-day and I could stay home, and when he came home at one PM he said, "OK, get dressed."
"What happened? Am I in trouble? Is something -"
"I can take you to Planned Parenthood and we can get you on birth control to stop your period, till I find someone who can either prescribe testosterone or a source for it on the black market."
I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to get birth control, since I was just shy of eighteen, but I got dressed anyway and we went to Planned Parenthood. Anthony pretended to be my legal guardian to sign off on it, and after my first gynecological exam, they gave me a shot of Depo-Provera there in the office. We hit a McDonald's on the way home and took it to the park to watch the ducks on a cool, overcast, foggy day - it was peaceful.
My period makes me horny as fuck, and that night I masturbated thinking of Anthony again, and after my orgasm I cried myself to sleep aching for what I couldn't have.
In the middle of the night I woke up screaming and crying. I'd had a nightmare about my mom hitting me, which morphed into reliving the time she raped me... which was in retaliation for my father raping me, after I'd told her.
I was in a cold sweat, shaking, heart pounding in my ears. Anthony came down from his bedroom. He sat on the edge of my bed. "You had a bad dream?"
I nodded. I sat up and leaned on him, comforted by his presence - and yet, still shaken. "Sometimes when I have nightmares, I relive bad shit that happened to me." I was swearing more freely now that I wasn't going to church anymore and was living with a gay man and now had even committed the mortal sin of being on birth control.
"You want to talk about it?"
I opened up about what my father had done, what my mother had done. I cried, and Anthony cried with me. "Oh god, pumpkin, I wish I'd known. I would have gotten you out of there a lot sooner -"
It didn't change the past, it didn't undo what was done, it didn't fix things, and yet hearing from someone else that what had happened to me was wrong, and that he cared enough that he would have rescued me... I fell apart, feeling a sort of relief, as well as deep regret that I hadn't tried to find him long before now. I had walked by his salon so many times as a teenager, I could have come to him, I could have escaped...
Anthony led me down the hall to his bedroom and I got in bed next to him and he held me as I cried into his chest, and he rocked and pet me, crying a little too. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, arms tightening around me. "I am so, so sorry. You're safe now. I've got you. I will never let that happen to you again. I promise, they will never come near you again."
And then I looked up and I saw the fire in his eyes, and I knew my father was a dead man.
I wanted him so very badly.
I took the next day off, and then I went back to work, armed with chocolate and naproxen. The next few days things were... refreshingly normal. It felt therapeutic to be introduced and perceived as male, wearing male clothes, with my male haircut and my male name and my "gay guy voice". Though one of Anthony's regulars snarked that he was "robbing the cradle", and Anthony just gave a too-hearty laugh while my face burned and I wanted to hide under the desk, hoping it wasn't screamingly obvious that I was desperately in love with him.
My birthday fell on a Tuesday that year, the week of US Thanksgiving. We were closing the shop for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, but things were really busy the two days before Thanksgiving, so Anthony said we would have a proper birthday celebration for me on Black Friday. He did, however, get up very early on Tuesday morning and I heard him puttering around in the kitchen, then while I was half-asleep on the sofa bed he said he was going out to run an errand. Just before he came back, I woke up and had coffee and took a shower, and when I came out there was a tray of freshly-baked chocolate cupcakes with frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and a dozen roses.
Once again, I tried not to get my hopes up - it was a nice gesture for my birthday - but I couldn't help hoping a little that the roses meant something, and those hopes got a little stronger when he danced with me between customers, as a sort of celebration before the celebration.
Anthony usually spent Thanksgiving with his family but we both knew it was going to be awkward with his nephew, my ex-boyfriend Mike there, and his very traditional Catholic family already had a problem with the gay black sheep of the family, never mind a "girl" dressed up like a guy, using a guy's name, and he didn't want to force me to be a "girl" for the day. So instead we volunteered at the local soup kitchen, and that night he made us a low-key-but-still-nice Thanksgiving dinner with Cornish game hens, stuffing, potatoes and green bean casserole. He was a good cook, which just made him even more attractive to me.
Though Anthony was a lapsed Catholic and I hadn't been to church in weeks, we still said grace this time and he asked me what I was thankful for.
"You," I said.
"Yeah, same here." Anthony smiled. "It's nice having you around."
The next day, we went out to dinner for my belated birthday, at the steakhouse I liked. While there was no dress code, Anthony still thought it was proper to look presentable. He wore a black button-down shirt and black chinos with a purple paisley tie, and I wore a white button-down shirt and black chinos. Then he brought out a plain black tie for me, and he put it on me since I didn't know how to tie a tie. Feeling the proximity of his body and his hands on me - smelling his cologne, feeling his breath - made my body tingle, my nipples hardening under the compression vest, cunt twinging.
Then his left hand reached up to tenderly brush my cheek. "You're a really handsome guy."
I almost came in my pants.
On the way back it started raining. "You're quiet," Anthony said, glancing over at me. "You OK?"
"Yeah," I lied. Just gonna die from sexual frustration, is all. But I kept that thought to myself.
Anthony raised an eyebrow - he knew I wasn't. When we pulled into his driveway he pressed again. "Did you get everything for your birthday you wanted?" He'd given me some gift cards besides taking me to dinner.
"Not everything." The words came out before I could stop myself.
"Oh?"
"Ah, shit. Never mind -"
"No, tell me. I might not be able to make it happen for your birthday, but Christmas -"
"No, it's not... anything you can buy."
There was a long, awkward pause. I knew he wasn't going to let this go. I felt cornered, and my heart was beating faster again, my mouth dry. I thought about the customer who told him he was "robbing the cradle" and the dirty looks people were giving us at the steakhouse, assuming we were a gay couple, and I had a feeling it was obvious I had the hots for him and he was just politely dancing around the issue because he thought of me as a dumbass kid and maybe if I cleared the air we could laugh about it and move on. "I wish I was your boyfriend," I mumbled.
Anthony said nothing. I got out of the car, and hurried through the rain to the entrance and the steps. I was fast [at that age], but Anthony was fast too, right behind me. I felt like I was going to be sick, that he wasn't just going to reject me once we got upstairs but he was going to tell me I couldn't live with him anymore and -
I was crying a little once I got in, and I started down the hall, hoping I could just lock myself in the bathroom for awhile and he'd leave me alone. But he grabbed my wrist, and spun me around, then shoved me up against the wall and kissed me passionately, taking my face in his hands.
I moaned into the kiss as our tongues played together, and again as I felt his rock-hard erection press against me. I ran my hands down his chest and the kiss deepened, heated. Then he started kissing and licking my neck, and I whimpered, my knees buckling. My cunt felt like it was on fire now - I was so wet and we'd barely gotten started.
He took off his tie and threw it on the floor, then guided my hands to unbutton his shirt. I sighed appreciatively at the sight of his hairy chest, his hard nipples, the treasure trail. He guided my hands again to feel his bare chest, then his hard bulge. We kissed again, and as we kissed, he undid my tie.
"I'm still a virgin," I told him. I'd been raped when I was twelve, but that wasn't sex. His nephew Mike and I had made out and done some petting, but we'd never gone further than that - not even handjobs or oral; Mike was Catholic and I had been a good Christian "girl".
Now I wanted to be bad. I wanted to be very, very bad.
Anthony smirked. "Hi Still A Virgin, I'm -"
"Oh goddammit, Anthony."
We kissed again, laughing, and then Anthony stroked my face, looking into my eyes. "I kind of figured that. We don't have to if you don't -"
"I want to, I'm just... telling you I don't know what to do." I was surprised he even wanted this. "And I don't have a dick."
"No, but you're still a guy. And you have a hole, and I'm a top." Anthony took me by the hands and began leading me towards his bedroom - our bedroom, now. "So, you want to unwrap your birthday present?"
"Yes, please."
I didn't know what the fuck "a top" meant... but I was about to find out.
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