Neither Here Nor There - 2. Chapter 2

Hudson

I awaken reluctantly, trying to make sense of my uncharacteristic lethargy. With difficulty, I dredge up the past 24 hours. My eyes pop open as memories of the previous night return. This emergence from delta wave sleep isn’t solely a jet lagged reaction to the 15 hour flight from Sydney. I hadn’t come straight home from the airport yesterday, and I hadn’t come home alone.

I sweep my leg across the bed, exploring before rolling over, but already I know Tango is not only not in bed, e isn’t here at all. Throwing off the blankets and the disappointment, I order myself to be relieved. You hate awkward ‘mornings after.’ Be glad the cute little queer took off.

Rolling from bed, I head down the stairs and into the loft’s main living space. Tango was unquestionably gone. My eyes follow the path we’d taken from doorway to bed. With a delicious throb, my cock reminds me of the embrace in which we’d been locked as we entered my place last night. Urgent was too polite a description for the kisses. Trousers had come off first for both of us, a feat we had managed without removing our lips from each other’s bodies.

I feel another insistent pulse and resist the urge to reach my hand down in appeasement. It wasn’t actually a cock throbbing of course. The surgical alterations to my genitals hadn’t gone so far as to construct an entire phallus. The arousal, however, was very real, centered in the bundle of nerves that made up my hormone enlarged clitoral shaft.

More memories from last night wash through me, this time Tango’s uninhibited exploration of my body. Definitely a sensualist, just like I’d suspected when I saw em in the crowd at the bookstore. E’d been wearing a mishmash of fabrics, from soft fleece to buttery leather, and moved as if consciously enjoying the fabrics' caress on eir skin. A whimsical scarf sewn from velvet and satin threads topped the ensemble, hanging enticingly on eir epicene frame. I’d watched Tango’s fingers dance through the silky ends of the scarf, twirling the fringe flirtatiously as if it were a substitute for long hair.

Later that night, those same fingers had danced over my torso, tracing the contours of my chest, my flattened nipples and smooth scar lines. E’d tested my responsiveness, noting where surgery had muted sensation and where nerve endings flared again, craving the contact. Eir fingers had trailed further down, boldly running over the tight curls and small scars at the top of my pubic bone, rolling the sensitive flesh they found with firm confidence. They’d moved unhesitatingly, curious to learn my body. The dimensions of my testicles, implanted in the stretched, sensitive flesh between my legs, were exquisitely explored, probed, handled. Once eir fingers were satisfied, eir mouth had insisted on intimacies that had me bucking into em, grasping the sheets as e mapped my body’s erogenous zones.

That, I concluded, is why I was so disappointed at Tango’s disappearance this morning. Not just the sex act, but tools e’d brought to it - eir instinctive touches, eir curiosity, eir generosity. Those all too rare qualities had slipped out the door far earlier than I would have liked.

The uncomfortable thought crossed my mind that I may have failed to deliver an equally intensive experience. I seem to remember inhaling Tango’s wrenching groan as we kissed, eir smooth body shuddering as moisture flooded over my fingers. Still…maybe e always came that hard. Shrugging, I turned toward the kitchen. E was cute; e probably had a lot of opportunities for crazy, uninhibited sex with the gender free-for-all queers in this town. Clearly, e’d just been ticking off another box on eir sexual scorecard when e’d come home with me. “Get with an FtM who’s had lower surgery.” Check.

I stuck my head in the fridge, found nothing that wasn’t expired, and drew a glass of water from the tap.

Shoot a text over to em. The thought was immediately followed by the realization that I had no idea how to reach Tango. We’d met in person, no emails or phone numbers involved. E’d watched me so intently at the bookstore. Pale blue eyes tracking me when e thought I wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t intended to pick em up for the night. Not at first. I was interested, sure. I was also jetlagged. The only reason I’d shown up at all is because I’d made the commitment to the author long before the business crisis that had taken me to Sydney cropped up. I didn’t want to flake on her.

In the end, my presence made little difference as far as the panel questions went. She introduced two MtF lawyers, an FtM restaurant owner/chef and me, a biochemist turned entrepreneur. The lawyers did most of the talking. My mind was free to wander. I watched Tango from the corner of my eye. I’d pegged em immediately as a genderqueer, a two-spirit perhaps, gloriously unmarried to either gender and unconcerned by the fact. Dressed as e was, e could easily have passed for either a female-to-male transsexual or male-to-female transsexual in some stage of transition.

Except that nothing about em indicated e was on the way TO anything. E simply was. E was a contradiction and e was confident in that contradiction. I like confidence, and I like contradictions.

Blue Eyes, as I’d identified Tango at the time, was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bookstore when I’d walked out. The faux hawk e’d attempted with eir short, mousy hair had half collapsed. Suggestive eyes and the tousled appearance drew me over; my fingers itched to smooth the baby fine locks. We’d shared a short exchange about the reading but our eyes were conducting an altogether different conversation than our mouths. Finally, I’d asked em “Do you want to finish this at my place?”

E had and we did. We’d kissed, murmured, grappled, talked, gasped. We’d finished each other, right up until the long flight caught up to me, I fell asleep and e left.

Shaking my head loose from the images of last night, I again determined to put Tango from my mind. I was peering in cabinets, searching for anything that could pass for breakfast food, when I noticed a sheet of paper on the open counter separating the kitchen from the living room. It gleamed whitely on the stainless steel surface. A spark of hope that e’d left behind a note had me scooping up the paper. Definitely not a note. There was no phone number or email on the page…what e had left was both better and worse.