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Jon awoke slowly, consciousness slinking back into his mind on reluctant feet. His muscles twinged in some nameless half-pain. He had been dreaming, hadn’t he? The hazy memory pressed against the forefront of his mind. He had been walking, without aim or urgency, just stepping through buttery light and velvet-indigo shadows. It had been a soft world. He remembered that very, very clearly. A world without stolen faces or searing handshakes or books with brutality written in their pages, without the horror of his own humanity slipping out of his grasp. For a moment, he could almost believe that he was in his own bed, and the biggest concern of the day ahead of him was if he’d finally run out of toothpaste and would need to duck into the shops on the way home from work.
Then, inexorably, the last wisp of dream-comfort shivered and gave way. Georgie’s ceiling came into focus. A fluffy grey blanket had been drawn up over him.
His heart throbbed inside of his chest.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, pulling air into his lungs, releasing it, attuning himself to the gentle pressure of the blanket over his limbs, before he heard footsteps padding towards the sofa. Georgie’s shadow fell across him, followed by Georgie herself. When she saw that he was awake, a smile brightened her face. “Hi, sleepyhead.”
He returned her smile tiredly and sat up. “Hi.” Naps rarely left him refreshed; they just sort of made him feel groggy and sticky. Today, unfortunately, was no different.
Georgie was studying him. He opened his mouth to ask what but before he could, she said, “You’ve got stubble now.”
Jon’s hand flew to his cheek. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat, then laughed a little. “With everything else going on, we haven’t talked about…this.”
What was medical transition compared to fear gods and lead-pipe murders? Weighed against every other thing the two of them had discussed today, this should seem trivial. But he couldn’t stop the anxiety sparking through him. Georgie must have seen the occasional picture on social media in the intervening years, but up close, confronted with his newfound physicality—he had no idea how he seemed to her now.
“Has it helped?” Georgie asked, head tilted to the side.
“Yes,” Jon replied, another smile breaking across his face with very little effort at all. “So much. I mean, everything else in my life has gone to hell, but at least people don’t misgender me anymore, right?”
Georgie joined in his chuckles after a moment. Jon’s own laughter felt rusty, scraping the inside of his throat. He didn’t make many jokes these days. He didn’t have many people he felt comfortable joking with, either.
Not many left at all. Not anymore.
Their laughter faded. In the following lull, Jon twisted his hands into the blanket and ventured, “Georgie, do you remember the—the first time? My first major…dysphoria attack, I mean.”
He hadn’t had a name for it, then. He hadn’t had the faintest clue about how to describe the wrongness that gouged itself into his bones, leaving him with only shaking hands, shattered breath, a body that rebelled against its very flesh. He had only known that it was terrifying. But Georgie had not needed an explanation. The lack of one hadn’t quelled her one bit as she hugged him tight; and when even that comfort became suffocating, she stepped away from him, wrapped a penguin-patterned blanket around his shoulders, and forced a mug of tea into his hands. Then she’d put some dreadful fantasy series on the telly and settled on the other end of the ratty sofa.
The flat they’d shared in uni had been small. Their sofa had been small. She physically could not be on it and be very far away from him at the same time, but her proximity felt…protective, somehow. She left him plenty of room to breathe, but her body language sent an unwavering message, I’m here, I am here.
Huddling in that blanket, with voices of Americans faking RP accents emanating from the telly that never worked quite right when it rained, remained one of the few memories that Jon truly treasured. What a luxury it had seemed then: the knowledge that someone had his back, that someone would know his needs, would meet them with so much grace.
What a luxury it still seemed now.
With a soft sigh, Georgie leant her elbows on the back of this sofa—larger, cleaner, and god knew better-smelling than the one in their past. Her hand squeezed his shoulder. “Of course I remember.” She gave a little shrug, helpless, even a decade safe in the future. “I wish I could’ve done more for you, Jon.”
“You did so much.” Jon reached up and gripped her hand. Georgie tried to interrupt but Jon barreled onward.
“Christ, I’m terrible at this. You know that, better than anyone, I think”—ten-year-old mistakes sit heavy and bruising on his conscience—”but what I’m trying to say is just—thank you. Trust me, Georgie, you did everything you could. In every respect.”
The corners of Georgie’s mouth tilted upward. “I’m happy to hear that.” She walked around the sofa and sat down next to him, resting her chin on her palm. “Do you want to talk more about everything that’s happened, gender-wise?”
Jon did. He fumbled for where to start. After all these stories, Jon, you’d think you’d know how to tell your own. “Um. Well, as you know, I came out when I was twenty. It surprised a lot of people, remember? I was always fairly femme.”
Jon rubbed his fingers over his elbows; long-ago insecurities pricked under his skin. “So I abandoned femininity like it was a burning building. I changed my wardrobe, my name. We broke up, we graduated, and shortly afterward I finally felt ready to start HRT. I was able to get top surgery a few years later. And it took me a long time to, well, stop giving a shit.”
Georgie snorted.
“About how people perceive my gender presentation, I mean. I started wearing skirts again, I re-pierced my ears, I grew out my hair. It was like…like my body was just some hotel room I was living in for years, and then I went and turned it into a real home, and then later I realised fuck, I can put up whatever wallpaper I like.”
Jon swallowed. He hadn’t talked so personally to anyone besides a tape recorder in months. Longer. “I guess I was afraid of…getting a bad grade in being trans? Which is ridiculous, I know that, but I felt it all the same. I realised that I was putting myself in a cage all over again, just one made out of a different metal.”
He stretched out his legs, rearranged them, tucked his hands beneath his thighs. He felt raw. He hadn’t kept contact with many people who knew him pre-transition, certainly not anyone who had seen the brutality of that journey’s beginning as intimately as Georgie had. Laying it all out for her like this seemed to draw him back in time, drop him back at the feet of the scrawny, seeking, scared twenty-year-old that had been Jonathan Sims once upon a time.
God, how much had he really changed?
“You still with me, Jon?”
Jon blinked and jerked his head. “Sorry, yes. Just been a long day. So, that’s the story. This is…me.” He gestured awkwardly at himself.
Georgie smiled at him, bright with such fondness and pride that Jon couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m happy for you.”
“Th-thanks, Georgie.”
She stretched out her hand to cup Jon’s face—a gesture of affection, sure, but also to guide him to return her gaze. She still knew his vulnerable points. Leaning in, she pressed a kiss to his stubbly cheek. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you to shave with while you’re here.”
Jon chuckled softly and reached up to touch the back of her hand with his fingertips. “That’s all right. I won’t mind sporting a proper beard again, it’s been a while.” Those last few sentences seemed to drain the rest of his energy. He slumped back into the cushions.
“Jon,” Georgie said quietly, “you don’t look well.”
“I…” Falsehood sprung to the tip of Jon’s tongue. He forced himself to wrestle it down. “No,” he said, the word falling limp and fractured into the room. “No, I’m not.” Haven’t been for a while. “But that’s not important right now.”
“Oh, Jon.” That was all Georgie said aloud, but the watercolour of emotions on her face spoke legions: frustration, concern, love, all running together in bittersweet brush strokes. It was a horribly familiar expression. Witnessing its return ached in the pit of his belly.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as he had said too often before and yet not often enough, never often enough, and the ache blistered.
Georgie did not reply, did not berate him nor absolve him. Instead, she just opened her arms.
Jon did not know how to reach for her. He did not know how to allow her to reach for him. Neither action had ever come easily to him, but in the wake of recent events they had surpassed difficult and become a battleground. He faltered, at war within himself. Then, in a moment, he lost to himself—or perhaps he won, he couldn’t say—but the result was the same: he crumpled forward. He buried his face in Georgie’s shoulder and felt her wrap steady arms around him. She was warm. She smelled like citrus. And surrounded by that lemon-tinted warmth Jon’s body began to shake, to shake and shudder and make awful choked noises as everything began to tear itself out of him, the panic and mistrust and torment that had been festering inside of him now being wrenched out into the open air, laid out naked and ugly to stand or fall by the hand of the last person in the world who still loved him.
Georgie held him as he shook, and she was not soft. She did not coo assurances or tell him that everything was going to be all right. She did not tell him that it was okay, because she knew it wasn’t, and she did not tell him that he was safe, because no one could promise him that. But Jon did not want any of that. What he wanted, what he needed, was given to him. With grace, once again.
Georgie held him in an unwavering embrace, and she did not tremble at the sight of the crooked things that burst from the ragged clench of bones he called a chest.