Chapter 1: Sam.

I woke up with a jolt as my nightmares came to a crescendo. My hand's what did it. The kick of the gun as I fired back killing in my nightmare it's like a phantom limb effect as it twitched with the remembered kick of my Browning 9mm. It's scary, and I stare at that hand once my brain figures out where I'm at. I can still sort of see the face of one of the Afghani Taliban members who had tried to kill me while I was traveling in a convoy with a unit of US soldiers. The wind had come up and blown away his face scarf. He was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years or so at the oldest. I killed a kid. It was a bad ambush and it was self defense …but I still killed a kid.

Two years later I’m still afraid, having nightmares and flashbacks. I’m more myself than ever now, I’m a transgendered girl. All the hormones running through my body really slam me with the feelings I’ve been holding back.

I roll or sort of crawl out of bed and tiredly walk to the bathroom. I start washing my face trying to wake up. It’s about four AM. I take a shower, washing my face just didn’t help much. It wakes me up, well actually washing my breasts usually wakes me up. They’re still new enough to me it’s like a reality check every time, no…not every time just a lot of the times I do.

I encounter enough stubble to give myself a frown. I hated shaving as a guy even though I’m actually shaving more now. Armpits, legs. “Ouch, shit.” I’m still new to the shaving regularly thing and I still cut myself, the soap stings, like lemon juice on a paper cut.

I dry off and stare at my torso in the mirror. Not so much at my chest but at the two roundish scars from where I was shot in the ambush.

I shake my head clear and go through the rest of my rituals. Lotion because I get dry skin sometimes. Teeth, hair nothing fancy. I’m still learning all of this and can’t really pull off fancy.

I live in my parent’s old house in Bridgeview, British Columbia about two hours drive up the coast from Vancouver. My parents are both dead. My mom, who was one of my personal heroes, died from breast cancer while I was in training. She was a RCMP officer who joined quite young and was one of the youngest women to actually make Lieutenant. She was awesome. Even as a young boy I wanted to be like my mom.

Dad was a fireman. He died while I was recovering in a NATO hospital in Germany from nearly getting killed in Afghanistan. It was then, in hospital having nearly died, I finally made the decision to transition. The fire department held a nice service for him. I couldn’t make it home for the service, but thanks to one of the fire fighter’s sons, there was a live feed set up for me to watch. My dad was an awesome guy. He died in the line of duty getting three panicked kids out of a burning group home. I still keep his spare firefighting gear out on the sun porch like he’d still be waiting to grab it when he was on call as a first responder. It’s the first thing you see when you come in my house. God it feels weird to even think that.

I go downstairs frowning at the groans and creaks of the place. I own the house but there hadn’t been a lot of cash in being a firefighter or a mountie , still I’m getting a check from being a military nurse and having been honorably discharged. I’m still kinda on psyche leave, and I’m still learning to be the me that I’ve locked up deeply and held hidden. I’m dealing with my trauma, trying to get through the loss of my dad and coming home to an empty house. I’m a bit thrown off my mental stride in a way; I’m transitioning and not having to explain it to him, not having him find out that his pride and joy, his little guy was well on her way to becoming his daughter. Messed up doesn’t cover half of me.

“I need coffee.”

I make myself some coffee, I use Tim Horton’s from the actual shop grind instead of the same labeled stuff from the grocery store. It’s all dad would have in the house. It’s brewing when the lights of the paper guy’s car come up the lane. I step outside to meet him rather than have him biff it. He passes me the paper staring at me. My hair’s in a pony tail, I’m wearing an old ratty Def-Leopard t-shirt and pajama bottoms.

It’s a small town. They know who and what I am. Word got around after I told off some asshole of a realtor who called the RCMP on me. He tried to get me evicted as a squatter because he hadn’t recognized me. After showing my Id’s and paperwork, he and maybe even the officer started telling people. I’ve had lots of grief from people who are just too?

I don’t know, threatened to understand me.

The paper guy’s like fifty or so and staring at me, at my body and my chest like he’s trying to decide, is it a boy or a girl. “I’m both right now, but as soon as I can..” I smile at him as he blanches. Yeah I’m poking the lion but after what I’ve survived I’m not scared of these people as I would have been a couple of years ago.

I give him a bright smile. “Thank you!, Have a good morning,” If I was any more snarky this morning I’d have throw in a wiggle.

I’ve always kind of been a girl in the back of my head. I’m not like some of the TG people you hear about in online stories. I was actually kind of an average guy. I didn’t cross-dress unless it was at Halloween or Sadie Hawkins day dances. I twice had girlfriends in high school, but only for a few months each time.

I did track for a year in 10th grade and was in the army cadets in junior high until I wanted to have long hair and you couldn’t have that as a cadet back then. I was an average guy I thought. Actually I thought for awhile I might be gay or bisexual.

Nothing gelled for me until I was in the army as a combat medic. I went to Bangkok, Thailand for my very first leave from Afghanistan. I met a young well spoken lady boi there called Kym and we became lovers. After a week with her, as she showed me the sights and her life, there was that Holy shit…this is me moment. I agonized over it for my whole first year and with Kym in my corner so to speak, I put in the paperwork and slowly started transitioning.

That was almost four and a half years ago. I’m five ft, nine inches, and about 150-160 lbs. Since starting to transition I’ve dropped about 25-30 lbs since then mostly in muscle mass. I was fine featured for a guy but make, I guess, a pretty average girl. My shoulders are a bit too wide and strong for many girls, and my feet are a bit big at a ladies size ten. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever be satisfied in the whole hip, waist and butt area. I guess that makes me just like a lot of girls out there. There‘s a happy thought, me just like every other girl.

The thing is, I feel so much better now in so many ways. I really didn’t know what was wrong with me. It’s like living with pain, you get so used to it and the stresses that come from it and then once you’re pain free it’s like you’re in a new world.

Probably the hardest thing I’m ever going to do is be true to who I need to be inside but I can’t go back.

I miss Kym. She was a legal secretary and part time model. She wasn’t a street walker lady boi but had five or six of the street types as friends. I was with her when we met up with them at a night club. She was killed while I was on duty, beaten to death by a tourist homophobe who tried to pick her up and didn’t like what she was. He was put into jail where he got stabbed by someone who was friends with Kym or one of her friends.

I take a deep inhale of the coffee smell and smile. I think I’m weird, I drink like maybe one coffee a day but even though I’m more of a tea drinker, I love the smell of it brewing. I love the smell of a pipe or a cigar on occasion even if I’m a non-smoker, and popcorn, I really love the smell of popcorn.

The coffee is good and I read the Bridgeview Banner, one of the two local newspapers. It’s a more artsy and liberal paper and more my speed of writing and stories and things. The other is the Bastion and it’s more conservative and old school. I got the great joy of having my perverted return to town plastered all over the editorial section from people in town who were, and still are, offended by me coming home as Sam Chase the girl instead of Samaritan Chase the returning war hero. There were even a few people who tried to get me lumped in with the likes of the sex offenders. Yeah my first year home’s been great fun. I actually get the most grief from the people in town that I had gone to school with.

I didn’t come straight home after Germany either. I stayed there for a few months in the TG community in Berlin. It wasn’t really my scene with some really weird people there and too artsy and very over the top as well. Not all of them, but enough that the place got old fast. It’s where I met Marc though. A very nice French guy and the first man I was ever with sexually. There was a lot of relief that I was straight? It wasn’t gay sex to me.

I moved to Toronto and the Danforth area and again it was just too rainbow oriented to be comfortable to me. I had a girlfriend there much to my surprise and it was mostly a lesbian relationship. Tanya couldn’t handle me though, with my nightmares and still having male bits, but mostly it was her friends in the lesbian community. If it wasn’t me not being a real woman, or at least by their definition it was the fact I was in the military. I was a warmongering baby killing freak. Yeah there were nice people there but it was the few people who were really hateful towards me that sent me home.

Trying to stay alive while the convoy you were in got taken out by a roadside bomb and ambush, and killing two young teenagers, then coming home…getting called a baby killer. My nightmares were still too fresh. After two weeks in a nice soft place after suffering a PTSD breakdown, I left Toronto for home.

I’ve pretty much been a homebody, a bit of a shut in since getting home.

God I hate mornings like this! I hate living in my head so much!

I stop even trying to read the paper and go and sit on the old sofa in the living room and finally have a good cry, my knees pulled to my chest.

A few hours later I feel lanced inside and make myself some toast with apple pie filling and chopped banana on it with a microwave scrambled egg.

I get changed into my camouflage track suit and grab my backpack. I always carry a few must haves. I live five miles from town and yes there are bears on occasion, so there’s bear spray and an air horn as well as some nylon rope, two bottles of water, a compass and a multi-tool as well as a good knife and two MRE’s and a small first aid and camping survival kit. I hike a lot and bike a lot as well as jog. I’m still enough of an army girl that I feel better having it than not. I fasten my arm and leg weights on and head out for a jog up the road away from town.

I love running in the early morning and stuff. It’s a hold over from being in the army. A good breakfast and morning base run and calisthenics. It’s an old habit. I use the endorphins help me fight off the depression and the blahs. I take my pills, my hormones and my women’s blend vitamins and some ginseng and ginkgo what’s it too oh an my anti-depression med too.

I love running. The way my more correct body moves, the sway of everything from my butt to hips to ponytail. I feel right in minutes and just concentrate on eating up the road, mile after mile soaking myself in sweat. I haven’t got a single drop of Native in me but I always think of it as a sweat lodge thing, like I’m getting all the negativity out of myself as I run. Not to mention that it’s healing just by virtue of where I am; jogging up the road way passed my house heading out of town. The woods around me smell of evergreens and off to my left the mountains rise up barely an hours ride away by bicycle. As I gain elevation I can see the Pacific ocean away on my right. Sometimes the world can be so beautiful I can actually feel at peace with my place in it. I get to feel better and free, more like myself.

I’m good, my day’s getting better as I turn around and head for home. Today I’ve gone about five miles each way. Sometimes I do more, sometimes I do less, It depends on how much stress I’ve got built up. So I was thinking. I’m doing good today, right up until I get home, sweaty and tired, just before lunch. Then I see it. The grass in my front yard was all torn up from someone doing doughnuts. My mom’s little white picket planters that line the driveway are broken and the words ‘LEAVE FAGGIT’ are sprayed over the side of my house in florescent orange spray paint, the kind that‘s used all over here for tagging lumber and trees.

I’m just pissed and a bit disgusted by the whole thing. I take out my cell phone and call the Mounties.

I’m sitting in the cab of my dad’s old truck drinking one of my waters. I see a bunch of vehicles pull into the old Ferguson farmstead across the road. A flat bed truck with two cars on it, old antique 70’s muscle cars. Two more trucks with rail/shipping box containers. There’s five or six bikers with them and funny enough the RCMP are following right behind them.

I’m a little pissed, they’re obviously here more for the bikers than my call. I walk to the end of my driveway where they parked watching my new biker neighbors. I knock on the window making the two mounties jump. One rolls down the passenger window. “Jesus, what the hell did you do that for!”

“The vandalism I called about twenty minutes ago is this way guys or is there another car coming to handle it.” My arms pointing up the driveway and I’ve got every ounce of female scorn I can manage running through my body right now.

They give me a dirty look. They both know about me and aren’t fans but they nod. “Yeah okay show us what they did Mr. Chase.” I could push my legal status but it’d just cause more grief that I don’t need and push the investigation back a bit further. They take some pictures and walk around until I see another RCMP officer come up the lane.

I don’t recognize her, she’s higher ranking, a sergeant. She’s got a box kit and passes it to one of the corporals. “I want photos, tire tread casts and paint scrapings.” She opens a pad and reads some notes before walking up to me. “Sorry that I’m late Ms. Chase, I’m new here and I’ve been going over your file and complaints from the other instances.”

“Uhm thanks, I’m not really used to getting…”

“Yeah the proper treatment.”

“Uhm..” I’m a little more than blown away by being treated like a decent human being.

“We’re supposed to be Mounties and we are supposed to treat everyone with the same rights and respect under the law no matter what.” Her voice raised on that first supposed as she stared at one of the mumbling and complaining corporals.

“Uhm, thanks,” I wipe off my sweaty hand and offer it in a handshake. “Sam, Sam Chase.”

“Hi, I’m Cass Cavanaugh,” she shook my hand in a decent strong woman with nothing to prove grip.

I liked her immediately. Really liked her, with a seldom felt stirring. A woman in uniform, vest, belt, and capable….Yay?

Cass, uhm Sergeant Cavanaugh, went over and began to run the investigation. She made sure they did everything by the book and didn’t let them slack off. I took some time to watch them do their thing then watched the bikers acrossed the road.

They’re a rough looking bunch and now there’s a pick-up truck with a U-haul and three native guys there. They all seem to be backslapping and warrior arm clasping one guy. Big, long dark hair, leather biker jacket and jeans, heavy boots. He’s got a pair of sunglasses on. I’m a little nervous of them, these guys could be nasty neighbors if they find out about me. I slip inside and bring the Mounties out some fresh made coffee.

As I was making it I heard the corporals giving Cass the low down and dirty about me in hushed tones. I was putting the cups on the tray with some pre-packaged doughnuts when I hear her whispering to them angry like. “Look you assholes, I know you guys get to a new town and try to get in good with some of the locals. I get it. It makes life and the job easier. But you gotta lay the fuck off of her.”

“Why sergeant like the sign says…?”

“Why? Because she’s one of us. Her mom was one of us, a Lt. It don’t matter what she has turned out like she’s a cop’s kid. What would you do if people were fucking with one of your kids? Thompson? Don’t you got a boy with Downs syndrome? What if the spray paint was on your house and said ‘Retard’ instead?”

There was a few minutes of quiet and I had to recover from my own embarrassment. I take out the coffee as they’re getting done.

“Hey guys uhm there’s coffee. I’m really sorry for blowing up at you guys like that. It’s just after everything since I’ve come home it kinda gets to you.”

We make some small talk for awhile and the two other RCMP seem to thaw a bit towards me. I actually get to shake the hands of all three of them before they leave. They thank me for the coffee and Cass gives me her card. “If you get any more problems call me, my home phone’s on the back.” She smiled as she got into the truck and left.

I’m cleaning up the dishes when I notice the big biker guy in my yard looking around. Nervously I walk out.

“Can I uhm help you?”

He looks up at me. He’s…hot?

Six foot even and broad shouldered with about 240 lbs on him. Yeah he’s carrying a bit extra but nobody’s perfect. Lot’s of muscle too, it makes his jacket tight in some places around his shoulders. Long dark brown hair, tanned, black t-shirt with a red plaid shirt on over that under the jacket and those old faded blue jeans that are like a second skin…he’s uhm well uhm..blessed in the manhood region.

He looks like the dangerous biker type. He was surveying the damage until I spoke up.

“Looks like you had some trouble?”

“Uhm…” My god I’m doing that a lot lately.

“Look” he takes off his sunglasses and rubs his eyes a second before putting on a pair of nice looking normal glasses. Geek, biker?

“Look, miss, I’m just moving into the neighborhood and I’m fixing my place up so I just though I’d offer to fix some of this up for you, seeing like I’m just doing the same over home.”

He’s looking at the message spray painted on the side of my house. I swallow my fear and decide to tell him up front now that I’m good with the RCMP I think.

“Yeah you might want to reconsider that..”

If I don’t tell him and warn him off then he finds out later he’ll be really pissed. Guys don’t like being tricked, Hell It’s not really any of anyone’s business who I am unless we’re dating…

“Why?”

I stare at him just more than a little scared. He’s more than strong enough to snap me in half. He just verbally stepped in, interrupting me, throwing me off my mental stride.

“Well It’s just I’m really not all that well thought of…”

“Brandon, Brandon Page.”

He did it again…that pushy so and so. Alright buster here, let’s see how you like a dose of the truth about the town freak.

“Yeah, okay look, I’m a transgendered girl, so you might want to uhm not want to be seen over here and stuff, you know people might get the wrong idea.” He’s walking towards me, staring at me intensely and I’m back to being scared in a rush all over again. I back away just a bit and I’m reaching inside the sun porch for one of my dad’s old golf clubs. He stops about six feet away and looks me up and down.

“Hmn, good choice.”

WTF, did he just say? No he couldn’t can’t…can he, could he?

“Are you gay!?” oh dear god open mouth insert foot, leg.

“Nope.”

“Uhm what?”

“You say that a lot.”

Instant blush, he smiles teasing me. “I’ll be over in an hour or so to get this stuff fixed up.”

He leaves walking down my driveway and lane.

“It was nice meeting you miss!”

“”Sam!, my name’s Sam!”

Wow…what just happened?

He’s not gay. He didn’t freak out and try to kill me.

He’s very hot in this really different way…my nipples are aching enough to make me cover my chest with my arms.

“Oh god, he said an hour and I’m all sweaty and groddy and stuff.” Yes I said it out loud even though I’m the only one here in the house. I talk to myself all the time. I babble to myself when I’m nervous. I’m also a bad nail chewer and a pacer too.

* Chapter two will be Brandon’s introduction. I hope you all liked this.