I’m waking up from top surgery. For the first and last time, it wasn’t a dream.
When my bleary eyes focus on the nurse by the bed, she smiles. “How are you feeling?”
My pitiful groan ends in a gasp of pain when I move too fast. With a sweet but firm smile, she reaches for a lever on the side of the bed. “You took a long time to wake up, honey. Let’s get you sitting so you can have a sip of water.” I was the last surgery of the day, so I’m probably holding everyone back from going home to their families.
The room spins when she raises the head of the stretcher, then becomes steady again. Another nurse holds a straw to my lips so I can sip water from a paper cup. The cool liquid feels like bliss on my parched tongue, but she pulls it away. “Take it slow, or you’ll get sick in the car.”
I glance down at my chest to reassure myself my breasts are really gone, but it’s enveloped in a thick, black binder that looks and feels the same as the ones I’ve been wearing for four years. Sayingare you sure you actually got rid of themsounds unhinged, so I try to focus on something else. “Where’s Mallory?” When I almost chickened out at the last minute, she hugged me and promised she’d be right there, cheering and crying and doing all the celebrating I’m too worn out and confused to do myself.
“Well…” The nurses exchange a glance, and I immediately tumble into a disoriented panic spiral. “Your friend had an emergency,” she continues hesitantly. “She couldn’t come back, so she called her father to pick you up.”
Even in my anesthesia-induced haze, my heart drops and my stomach clenches. I’ve only seen Mr. Watts once since that night in the rain; our eyes met across the auditorium at graduation, while he was taking pictures with Mal and her mom. But I’ve thought about him approximately ten million times. Sometimes it’s sweet, pretending he’s a replacement dad for the one who disowned me after I started transitioning. Sometimes it’s just a confused, horny crush on the memory of his eyes and voice, the feeling of his hand on my neck. Things that no one should feel for their best friend’s father.
Before I can beg someone not to let him see how awful I look right now, the door swings open and a man in black chinos and a navy turtleneck sweater steps inside. Those green-gold eyes widen a little, and he stops on the far side of the room with his arms crossed. He can’t possibly remember anything about my appearance besides my flaming red hair and freckles everywhere, but I look different in a million subtle ways after three years of hormones. I pass as male almost all the time now.
If the testosterone injections hadn’t killed off my ability to cry, I might break down like the last time he saw me. Mallory and I planned this for months; we read lists, shopped for supplies, and researched potential complications. She took notes at my consultation and my pre-op and took time off from the hospital to be my personal nurse.
But she’s not here.
“What’s going on?” My voice cracks plaintively. “Is Mallory okay?”
“She’s fine,” he answers in that low, comforting tone I remember so clearly.
Before I can open my mouth, one of the nurses appears with a wheelchair and the other checks the time on her phone and grabs the black zip-up hoodie Mallory must have left for me. “Let’s put this on and see if we can get you somewhere more comfortable, alright, Kota?” I can’t even move my arms, so she slips one sleeve on, then the other. The instructions weren’t kidding when they said I won’t be pulling a shirt over my head for a while. She lifts the hood to cover my unruly hair, then zips up the front and pats my shoulder. “Can you stand up, sweetie?”
Absolutely not—but if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s defying my own body. I force my legs to support me just long enough to move from the stretcher to the chair while I cling to the nurse’s arm. She sets my sneakers in my lap instead of putting them on my feet. Before I can catch my breath, I’m being whisked through the back hallways of the medical facility. After a short elevator ride, a door pops open to reveal a parking lot bathed in sunset light. A faint breeze slips under my hood to cool my sweaty skin.
Mr. Watts’ legs stride past the nurse and lead the way to his car. Half of my scrambled brain notices that he’s wearing bright pink socks under his monotone outfit, and the other half observes that his butt looks really stunning in those pants. What the hell is wrong with me?
We stop next to a low-slung silver BMW that doesn’t look designed to transport invalids comfortably. “Stand up one more time for me, Kota,” the nurse chirps, helping me shuffle from the chair to the leather passenger seat. The jolt when I sit down makes me whimper in a burst of pain. She pats my shoulder, confirms their emergency number with Mr. Watts, hands him my backpack, and bustles away.
Still fighting the edge of unconsciousness, I prop my head back and close my eyes. I hear him carefully close the door, then circle the car and get behind the wheel. “Seat belts on.” All the details of the voice that changed my life come back to me, the silk and grit of it. At first I assume he’s kidding, but nothing happens.
I force my eyes open, angling my head toward him. “I can’t move my arms,” I manage to croak out.
“Oh.” Most people would apologize, but he just says, “That makes sense.”
“I have…” I take a deep breath and search for words. “A pillow. In my backpack. To protect…” Nope, it’s too hard. Trailing off, I close my eyes again.
Something rustles, then the plump softness of a pillow presses against my abdomen. A rush of rain and cedar smell surrounds me as a larger body stretches across mine and pulls the seatbelt into place.
Already drifting in and out, I feel the car moving. In less than a block, I’m gone, almost as deep as I passed out under the anesthesia.
A hand squeezes my arm, dragging me rudely out of sleep for the second time today. I squint painfully at the row of steel and glass condos Mallory and I visited four years ago. The huge windows reflect a pink sunset stretched across the partly cloudy sky, but it doesn’t make the facade any less grim.
“Wait, why are we here?” I rasp.
Mr. Watts is crouching by my open door, looking up at me with a guarded, uncertain expression. His soft, loose brown curls have more silver threaded through them than before, and the scruff on his jaw looks less carefully-groomed and more like an accident. “Because I live here?”
“No, no, no.” I try to move, but a stab of agony takes my breath away. “We need to go to my apartment. All the supplies are there.” I’m mostly desperate for my blanket and my flamingo stuffy, but he doesn’t need to know that.
His forehead creases. “You’re in no condition to take me there, and I can’t stay at your place and take care of you. I have work to do.”
“But I—”
“Stop, Kota.”
If I wasn’t such an absolute mess, the firm way he enunciates the syllables of my name would turn me on. Instead, I lean over and puke half a cup of water and a bunch of Pedialyte all over the floor of the car, the smooth, clean driveway, and his expensive shoes.
