Chapter 1

I wake up coughing and feeling….(oh crap) It takes only moments before I’m on the bathroom floor heaving my insides out. The flu, yeah I think I’ve got the flu. Of course this isn’t helped by the fact that I’ve been recently flooding my body with female hormones. I’m told it balances off, that I’ll get used to it but right now, in combination with the flu I feel really, really bad.

It takes me a few minutes to get myself together, to fight my way through the stomach cramps and the dry heaving, I even cough up some crud. (Yick) I have an OCD moment and grab the cleanser and brush and clean the toilet all shiny again before I get up and then sit to pee. I reach over and get my tooth brush and start trying to get that tasted out of my mouth.

I’m just feeling so tired, beat down tired. Drug out with feeling sick and everything else going on in my life. Can being depressed make your bones ache? I spit, rinse, brush again. Yes I don’t need to but I’ve always done it that way. My toothpaste has changed as much as I have, going from Colgate to Close up I like the fact it’s red and seems to strike me as girly.

I need a shower, I smell like sweat and stale tobacco smoke. I don’t smoke but I am walking through clouds of it at where I work. I get my shower really hot and stay in it for awhile. Just being awake and out of bed is hard right now. I’m up and it’s only been maybe twenty minutes and I’m crying actually hanging for dear life onto the safety bar left behind in the stall by a former tenant. I’m going to be that soon enough; a former tenant. My lovely asshole of a landlord is giving me the boot. He just can’t have me around.

I’m a girl in transition into becoming the person who I really am inside. But there are people who hate me and are just more than happy to still try and make my life a living hell. He’s just tired of having his place vandalized.

Alright since I’m telling this story my name is or was Jaime. It was something my mother chose with her francophone background. It was suppose to be a compressed version of Je te aime or I love you. When I was little it was pronounced “Je-em” until we moved out west to Edmonton where as soon as I was entered into school where it became James.

James Morgan.

James “Iron Man” Morgan actually. It was the nick name I earned playing junior high football. I honestly like the game, love it even and could do it all. I was known for playing iron man football after we lost a bunch of guys to a meningitis outbreak leaving us really short on players. Iron man football for those who don’t know is where a player ends up playing in both the offensive and defensive line ups on a team. I played that way my grade 8 year and we went all the way to win provincial and national champions. It was big news and the coach named me “Iron man Morgan” in recognition of my playing and because it sounded good at the time as a sound bite for the press. It stayed with me all through school or right up until about 13 months ago.

Thirteen months ago I discovered Jenna.

Jenna is the real me. I had no clue about it for most of my life actually. I didn’t have this whole I’m a girl thing since I was little. Not that that doesn’t happen. I’ve got online girlfriends and sisters that this was exactly what happened. Not me, I really didn’t know.

Looking back though my entire life I was in somekind of emotional disconnect. I just had this kind of not quite feeling here in the world feeling. Nothing really fit for me. I didn’t find a lot of things funny or moving emotionally. My life was grey, like I was colorblind. I was living in the image of what I though I should be. I was just that a reflection of everyone else’s expectations.

Then I was with Nikki one night. She was one of the wilder girls in school and liked to party and was great in bed. I’ll admit to being a man whore, I’ll even admit to using my jock king status to get laid. I was really popular and I used it. I think now it was desperation just to feel anything. She and I were in my room my step dad built for me over the garage. It was more of a mini apartment for his “Champ” and even my mom turned a blind eye to what James did. I was the epitome of manly success right? Not a good thing for any kid to get whatever they wanted….sorry…I got off track.

We were high and watching Dragnet on cable, not the old TV show but the movie with Tom Hanks in it. There was this scene where Tom Hanks admits to Dan Akroyd that he was wearing the panties of this lady cop bit/extra. And that got us going, well yeah going since we were stoned it wasn’t like we were thinking. So I ended up wearing her underpants. I wore them to school even. Hell I even bragged about it to the guys to showing them off in the locker room like a trophy or something. Oh yeah there were a few moments that a few guys called me queer or a fag but I was James “Iron Man” Morgan. Untouchable. Nikki and I messed about for a bit before I dumped her for Vanessa, the her for Cindy and so on.

I dumped the girls but kept their panties. More trophies? I wore them every night though. It got to somehow feel more real? Actually more like a patch of real. I was getting scared and freaked out enough to worry, to start to look stuff up. Panty boys and from there to all sorts of porn that just got me more and more disturbed, scared, upset, and disgusted. There’s a lot of freaky stuff out there. It took about a month before I found some TS/TG sites and story places like this one where what I was feeling was something different than the skuzzy stuff that was out there.

I took a night where my folks were gone for the weekend with my little sister to a gymnastics thing. I went to my moms room and using several printed off sheets of various how to dress from a couple of TG sites I very poorly dressed and became Jenna for the first time.

It was like having a reverse out of body experience. I had no idea how strong that pull to this point had been but as soon as I was done and seen Jenna staring back at me. I started crying. Bawling actually as for the first time in my entire life I felt real. I felt like a whole person. I cried myself to sleep in my moms clothes on her bed and cried and cried and cried. I was me, I was real and alive and feeling things so unbelievably strongly for the first time in my life.

And I wasn’t James.

Everything went downhill after that really fast. I threw myself into learning everything I could about doing this. I went a bit off the deep end and got OCD about it. I just literally couldn’t help it. It was like living with chronic pain, If you know what I’m talking about. For those out there to be lucky to not know about it that then it’s like this. My life as James was hurting me, It had been hurting me all my life and I was so used to it that…that when I was Jenna, my real self the pain of just being stopped. I felt good, I felt real, I felt alive.

Three weeks went by in a flash and my marks suffered a bit as did my football. I was getting flak about it from my teachers and worried looks from my coach but he didn’t want to rock the boat for fear of my going to some other school. I’d rush through everything just to get more time alone, to read up on it online or sit in my bathroom practicing, over and over.

Then I trusted Ingrid Willshire. She was one of those drama types that gets stereotyped as stuff like you read about in fiction stories, You know the gothy, chic smart ass girl who a lot of people myself included had pegged as a lesbian. The thing was as James I was a jock, actually where I went to school King Jock really. James had a charmed life. I really didn’t get that not everyone liked James. She had this look in her eyes when I asked her to lunch in study hall. That look changed over lunch as I told her about what I had discovered about myself.

“So you’re saying you’re gay?” She asked me playing with her salad.

“No…not really it’s not like that.”

“What’s it Like then.” She emphasized the word like.

“ It’s like I’m not who everyone thinks I am, I’m not me, I’m not Jaimes, I’m somebody else.”

“And this other person’s a girl?”

“It’s not another person though, it’s me. It’s the real me.”

“And you’re telling me this why James?, Why me?”

“I don’t know, we’ve never gone out together and you seem so together and I thought…”

“You thought what?”

“Well people have like said things about you, I figured you might get it.”

“What they’re saying I’m a guy in drag?”

“Nn..no.” I’m embarrassed and turning red at that point.

“Oh, It’s because I’m a dyke right?”

I nod because it’s that embarrassing to bring something like that up so bluntly.

“I’m Not gay James.” Again she emphasizes the not.

“I’m sorry, I just didn’t mean to like.”

“Yeah it’s my image right?”

I nod again. “I know about images, people seem to be good at labeling me and I’m not the person they see everyday.”

She stares at me, long and hard. “So what do you want me to do James?”

“Uhm, well you’re hot. I mean you look good all the time. I just thought…I thought you might …”

“Might what?”

“Teach me?”

“Teach you what?”

“How to be a girl, how to be the real me……please?”

She offered to help and did show me a lot. Ingrid actually helped me polish Jenna into this perfect, or as far as I could get version of myself. We talked and laughed and had fun. We went around everywhere together. We hung out and went shopping for Jenna and I bought her things she liked along with my purchases. I fobbed off the stuff on the credit card dad had given me as buying things for my girl friend. Everyone assumed that Ingrid and I were going steady. We had a lot of great times just hanging out. She had become my best friend.

I thought we were having fun, I thought we were friends… But she took all these pictures and stuff.

And then it was all over school and the internet this one day. She never let on she hated me that much. She set me up and never gave me a clue to what she was really doing. I had no clue, no warning. People called my parents and freaked on them. My parents woke me up and confronted me. I bit the bullet and told them yes. I came out as it were. Mom freaked out on me, a French catholic she began to hit me, to throw things at me screaming that I was a pervert, a freak and a monster. That I was going to hell. It scared me to the core, I was a catholic raised kid by virtue of my mom and a practicing Christian even if a poor one through my step dad and the combination of losing her love, and my god…I mean this was my mom, she never acted like this in my life…Then my step dad got her out of my room. I was bawling just sick to the deep parts of myself, I had dreams of being Jenna and my Mom loving me regardless. Instead of her loving me, My mother…hated my guts. There is a pain from that where unless you go through it you can’t know. It hurts so much when part of your soul dies. And just to make everything complete…my phone had been ringing off the hook and going to the machine with threat after threat and accusations and taunting…it just wouldn’t stop.

Hours later and smelling of booze he came into my room with his belt in his hand and locked my door. I know it made it worse as I screamed like a girl as he used his belt like a whip over and over as hard as he could with one of those big cowboy belt buckles at the end of it. He ranted and screamed at me. Then he told me. “If you want to be a little bitch then I’ll give you what you want!” Then he raped me. Beat me some more and raped me again.

I hurt so f-ing bad in both body and soul I tried to will myself to die.

Hours later he threw me and my girls things out of the house. It was 1:09 in the morning as he took everything James owned and began to douse it with gas from the lawnmower jug. And burned everything right out there in the yard. Him and my mom both saying I..or rather James was dead. He was drinking and she was screaming at me in French. Then she grabbed the gas jug and began to splash me with it.

The neighbors called the cops. They yelled at my folks and said they were coming and the fire department too and with both of my parents in a screaming match with them I ran. The cops picked me up four or five blocks away. They looked at me like I was a freak but almost grudgingly took me to the hospital. There I was put through a rape kit and treated decently I guess…?

It got better when the social worker came. She had to call the psychologist on call. They put me in a ward under suicide watch.

I refused to press charges then, I was still too much in shock, I didn’t want to admit what happened. Boys don’t get raped right? It didn’t happen. I hid everything away inside. I think there were charges pressed at my family on my behalf with what everyone saw about me last night. Beaten, raped covered in lawnmower gas I guess they came up with their own conclusions. I was in there for weeks before I really began to move about and even telling me my story to the therapists was hard, as hard as anything I’ve ever done. I got put into a group home and spent about a month there getting tested, talked to and my therapist got me to let my guard down and become Jenna again. He confirmed a diagnosis of me being transgendered.

I was slowly getting my feet back under me, even if they were in strappy sandals instead of football cleats.

I am lucky as far as being TG goes, I’m young at nearly 16 and tall and wasn’t too built going more towards this runners build and very lean. I’ve got long legs or so I’m told and with my long hair which is okay and was kind of a French blonde thing definitely helps my look when dressed. I can pass but then I was still easily made. I was still too much a football player, and still had too much muscle built up in the wrong places.

I was put on meds and given hormone blockers to stop my male growth spurts and other hormones to start me on my way. The house parents at the group home were really decent and Shannon the house mom really got me started.

But the other kids in the house weren’t as kind. The gay guys though I was wrong for wanting to be a girl and not just being gay. They hit on me too much. I wasn’t remotely ready to be sexual with anybody. I had similar problems with the lesbian girls who where hostile to me, even violent when they could. They said I was stealing from them as women. I spent a lot of hours in my room hiding from the world, crying, reading and living on my computer learning more about who I thought I was to be.

Then someone in the house Id’d me. It was a lot of quiet jumping on the bandwagon of lets hate James and how the mighty have fallen thing. A lot of them though it was the greatest thing in the world that this was happening to me of all people. I left like I said after a month.

I quit school and tried to get a job and a place. My id doesn’t match me on the outside. So I’m working or been working waiting tables at this smokey bar well strip club. I don’t dance but the number of pervs that want me scares the hell out of me. I carry bear spray now after people kept getting too “friendly” It was another hard lesson after a couple of harsh beatings when I wouldn’t put out even for money.

Now somehow people from school have found me again. My place has been getting vandalized even though I’ve just tried to stay home, or at work. I don’t go out, I just barely get by enough to live here in my little bachelors apartment in an old building in one of the poorer areas of town. Schools been back in for two months now and I know they’re losing games without James. There’s people going out of their way to find me and make me pay for being me.

…..So now I’m getting kicked out not because of my land lord hating my guts or anything, if anything he’s been good by letting me rent without a damage deposit. But now things are getting trashed and spray painted…with stuff I’m not going to write here.

I finish my shower and get dressed as it were. Jeans, underpants and a satin halter top under a t-shirt.

I make a piece of burnt toast and a black tea. It’s something one of my neighbors a nice little old Croatian lady told me will help. Nona…I’d starve if it wasn’t for her. Rent, bills, groceries I had no idea things were going to be so expensive in the real world.

I sit curled up on my bed well mattresses on the floor staring off into space. I had a few choices. I could go back to the group home. I could try to move which I couldn’t afford or I could do what a lot of T girls my age do and go and turn tricks. (shudder) or the last option…I’ve looked for him for years. My real father.

Jonathan Powers, age 38, a lawyer, and artist. He lives in this town called Red Rapids in northern California. He’s even got a website where he sells his artwork mostly paintings and stuff but he does clay sculptures and pottery and even stone works. He’s talented in a way I’ve never felt about myself.

I had the basics of his personal information from finding it in my mom’s things and stole it. She always told me that he cheated on her in university. She broke with him and got with my step dad before I was born. She really hated him too. He found out that she was pregnant with me and took her to court to get himself listed as my father. She got full custody because he had cheated on her and they moved away from him and yet still took his child support payments. The stubs from these payments helped me find him. I’ll say this you can really learn a scary amount on the computer.

The whole Jaime is a tranny freak has it’s own website.

So what should I do? I’ve never met the man in my life, or even my life as James. I’m very easily the worst possible choice for any father to have. I’m so never going to be his son ever again. I’m not real, I’m not a real girl so I can’t be his daughter could I?

I sit in my room in the daylight but in the dark of it. Nothing turned on but my alarm clock. I sit and stare at my phone, and my laptop. Do I dare?, Do I try? I hunch over them hurting inside and really considering it. But I’m also considering the bottle of sleeping pills I’ve got or the obsessively sharpened chef’s knife on the edge of my bathtub.

What should I do?

What should I do?

I need to get out of here. My shitty little apartment isn’t helping the things I need to think about. I throw on a dress and my Mary Janes and a used baggy T-shirt over my dress and grab my beat up old jean jacket and pull on a ball cap. I shove the bottle of sleeping pills into my jacket pocket and take my purse.

I leave heading out and just wandering around the neighborhood and a bit beyond that. It starts to rain and I keep walking not caring and actually liking the whole walking in the rain thing. I’ve never done it before.

I’m getting soaked and chilled when I smell food. There’s a diner with its neon flickering in the grayness of the day. It’s in the bottom of this old brick store front building that has this old faded bakery sign on the side of the building. I go in and see it’s like right out of the 50’s with the booths and jukebox with real records in it. There’s a few people there and just a guy behind the counter. He’s a teenager like me maybe 17 no more that 19 or 20. He’s young and has long blonde hair and very well built like he works out. I notice he has this dizzying smile as I sit at the counter and start looking through my change.

“Morning.”

“Huh?” I wasn’t expecting to be talked to. I look at him.

“Good morning.” He tries again.

“Not really.”

“Oh?”

I roll my eyes at him. “I’ll just have a coffee.”

“Alright, how do you like it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I see him give me this raised eyebrow, just one, like Spock. He turns and takes one of those big white coffee mugs that’s like a bowl down and runs it under this hot water tap then adds a drizzle of something light brown like caramel into it then cream. He pours and stirs at the same time. I’ve never smelled a coffee like this before.

My stomach growls a bit, I’m hungry now but I’m broke. I’m always broke because my hormones and stuff cost a lot of money. No I’m not getting any for free. Alberta heath care doesn’t see it as something they should cover.

He set’s the coffee in front of me. “How much?”

“The coffee’s free.”

“Free?” It’s more of a snarky I don’t believe you sounding comment. “How do you make any money giving out free coffees?” I’m suspicious and kind of really leery of people not being shitty to me. I don’t really pass sometimes, I know I don’t. My body has had too much James the Jock training. I’ve lost a lot of muscle and weight but I’m a stick, kind of girl. Flattish, just out of budding…no hips or butt and shoulders that are just too big. I know I don’t pass sometimes and I keep to neighborhoods like this. It’s just better not to feel the scornful looks from people in more trafficked areas of town.

It’s also made me wary of strangers being nice to me.

“Six hundred dollar doughnuts.”

“Huh?”

“Six hundred dollar doughnuts.”

“What?”……..”Oh…” It’s not that funny but he’s trying. He’s trying to be nice.

He goes back to doing stuff at the grill and stuff, it’s all behind the counter and not behind a wall like some places. I sip slowly at the hot coffee and get up and take a booth so I can look out the window. I lose myself in thought going over everything that’s going on in my life trying to just figure out what went wrong.

I like the coffee, mild from the cream and there’s this caramel but not caramel flavor that’s not overly sweet but blends into the coffee.

I watch the cars go passed and the trains and people that work around here with the business from the train yards. I get to watch the trains and stuff too. I’m playing absently with the bottle of pills. I could just drift away. Sleeping would be nice, just to let things go away. To let me dream until I just stop. Maybe I could be really Jenna in my dream. I’ve always been raised to think suicide is a sin. That’s back when I actually had a scrap of faith left. It’s felt ever since I got thrown out of home, since I was outed and raped and nearly set on fire that I’ve lost my god.

The guy takes the pills right out of my hand while I’m lost in thought.

“Hey!, those are mine!”

“No.”

“What the fuck do you mean no!, they’re mine, that’s stealing.”

“No. You can’t go out like this.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know a lot about it.”

“Yeah you don’t have a fucking idea of what my life’s like! You got any idea what it’s like to be me! Do you know what it’s like to suffer just to live? Do you?” He gives me this look and this sad sweet smile and pulls out this folded up paper and walks back from my booth to do something else. I’m still mad as hell but unfold the papers.

Dear Mr. Taylor Winters

We are sorry to send you the unfortunate diagnosis but after the biopsy and tests were done we’ve concluded that your tumor is indeed inoperable and we unfortunately can offer you is six to eight months to live. If you come into for treatment we maybe able to treat you better and perhaps extend the amount of time you have.

The rest of it is just a bunch of stuff like all the technical medical stuff and options he was allowed to have and how they were going to extend his life. It all sounded like it was stuff from some Frankenstein novel. It was dated July 8th 2007.

I look up at him and he’s setting down a bowl full of somekind of soup and freshly baked bread rolls. He sits with me and takes back the papers and folds them up. We stare at each other for awhile. He’s got these steel blue eyes that bore into me. Okay…I get it, I think. There’s people who’ve got worse lives than me.

I look at him. “I guess that changed everything for you.”

“Yeah it did, I guess I learned and figured out a lot of things.”

I tear a roll apart enjoying the fresh bread smell a lot and butter it. “Like what?”

“We get one life, one shot and if we don’t give it everything it’s wasted.”

“Yeah I thought it’d be something like that.” I’m still being sarcastic.

“And.”

I look at him because he’s staring at me. “And what?”

“And you’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Huh?”

“We’re all going to die one way or another, one time or another. There’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t do the things we want to do or be who we want to be after all there’s really nothing to lose.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it’s not, I know, I’ve been fighting and trying to be me for over a year now and it’s not that easy, hell It’s not easy at all!”

“Why?”

I guess at that point I cut lose on him. It wasn’t a screaming fit or anything like that but one of those all day stories that turns into a day long conversation about everything in my life from my old life as Jaimes and some of the stuff about my mom and my step dad and stuff like how much I had been hurt by Ingrid and other things.

I get caught up in it.

The soup was good and filling with diced veggies I’ve never eaten and stuff but as poor as I’ve been lately it was great.

I ended up following him around as we talked. “Here, you’ll get dirty.” as he passed me an apron and a bandanna.

I end up helping as we talk and he tells me to “Peel these, Chop that, Those are artichokes, that’s eggplant.” The entire time we still talked even through the supper time rush where I waitresses and bus tables and we still talked and even bantered…

Talked about just stuff after awhile, TV, movies, music, what we wanted out of life, who we though we’d be when we were younger and how we never seem to end up fitting any of the images we see ourselves as.

Before long he’s turning around the we’re closed sign.

I stay and help clean up.

I made $43 dollars in tips.

“I should get heading home…”

“Hey I’ll drive you, thanks for the hand with the supper crowd.”

“It’s cool thanks for listening.”

Taylor drives me home in this seen better days Ford F150. I give him directions and before long I’m home…

And all my stuff’s in the dumpster in the alley…

I can’t help but start to cry.

I get angry then too and scream and throw things around in the alley scaring the rats. I storm into the building and to the landlords apartment.

I beat and hammer on the door hurting my fists, I bend my rings, I kick to door and hurt my foot and I swear at him screaming.

He opens the door abruptly. “Listen Morgan, I know yer pissed but I didn’t have a choice.” He shoves a homemade pamphlet in my face.

It accuses me of being a pervert, and a freak and deviant. It’s printed up with sick pictures of gruesome TS/TV/TG porn and warns people and parents of how people like me are a danger to their kids….It hurts and it’s sickening and …I’m running outside to get sick. I …

“Jenna?”

Taylor’s still here.

“Jenna.”

I look up at him, blurry through my tears. He’s standing by my things. “What do you need? What can’t be left behind?”

I try to tell him but just end up falling onto my butt and crying.

I cry for awhile and point at things, sobbing while nodding yes or shaking my head no.

Taylor loads up everything I own which isn’t much, some things are gone, picked up by others or the homeless or just stolen….

I’m wallowing until I see him stop and rest against the truck with his forehead pressed to the cap of the truck. He looks in pain. He looks like his head’s splitting open.

Everything we talked about kind of comes to a head there, right then.

I’m here whining and freaking out about stuff that really does suck but on the other hand here’s Taylor helping me and he’s dying.

He’s really dying and is just here on borrowed time.

I wipe my eyes and sober up. And go over to him and hug him from behind. “Thanks, thanks for being here Taylor.”

He smiles through the pain and I can’t keep my fingers to myself, and move some of his hair out of the way of his face. It’s such a different gesture for me, way out of my comfort zone. He turns so I’m hugging him and pressed into his chest. He smells like a guy and oven baked bread and hints of Dawn dishwashing liquid. It’s nice.

We just stood there until the pain went away and I could feel the tension drain out of him. He gave me this sweet, look. “Come on Jenna I know where you can stay.” We got back into the truck and I notice he opens the door for me and I get in as much like a girl as I can.

We go back to the diner and he pulls in out back of the place and up to the loading dock. He opens my door and helps me out of the truck. It’s nice, It makes me feel nice. He opens up for us and leads me through the back rooms that he uses for storage and the office and the bakery, he’s kept the old ovens here to make his own bread. We get to the stairs and he shows me to his place…

“You want me to live with you?”

“Sure, I own the whole building and there’s plenty of rooms I’m not using.”

“But, I…I could bring trouble down on you like what’s been following me around.”

“Jenna, it’s okay. We’ll deal with it okay? Nothing to lose remember?”

He moves my stuff in and I’m using his washing machines and his dryers to clean my clothes from the junk and filth that’s gotten over them. The laundry room is on the second floor acrossed from his offices. There’s three rooms he’s not using plus his bedroom, master bath room, a linen closet and a kitchen and he’s cleverly turned the hallway into a living room. It’s clean here, dry and warm. I lost a lot of things, He lets me have the bed while he plans to sleep on the sofa….I’m not going to let him sleep on the sofa with him dying…

“Taylor you take the bed I’ll sleep here.”

“Jenna I’m not going to let a woman sleep in my place on a old lumpy sofa.”

“I’ve slept in worse places.”

“So have I.”

“You don’t have to be all gallant about this.”

“Jenna this is me, It’s the way I am.”

“Fine, then sleep in the bed with me.”….Did I just say that?

“What?” His tones matching the question I just asked myself in my head.

“It’s your bed, I’m your guest, or roommate or…Come to bed, I won’t bite.” I’m still not sure I’m saying these things.

Taylor does get up and follows me into his bedroom. He starts undressing and It’s so different than being back in the locker room. He’s tanned and has several tattoos and he’s very good looking. I’m starting to notice more and more things I like about him.

God I thought I’d never feel anything ever again as my nipples and chest are sending me these dizzying feelings unlike any I’ve ever had.

I get to have a bath and cleaned up, Taylor does this thing where he grated lemon zest into the water? Okay it smells really nice and he makes me this tea for my cough and the flu that I’ve still got only it’s kind of worse now that I’m stopping. It tastes funny with herbs and honey and mint? It loosens up the chest congestion and by the time I’m dressed in my ratty looking bed sweats and T-shirt I’m yawning my head off.

I slip into bed with him and try to relax enough to sleep. I’m exhausted, inside and out.

“Taylor, are you really okay with this? I’m not a real girl you know.”

“Jenna real girls don’t want anything to do with me.”

“Why?” He seems like a real great guy.

“Because when the find out I’m dying, that I might not be around tomorrow it’s to real for them.”

“So you’re settling?”

He rolls over and drapes an arm over my side. He quietly says “No, I think you need somebody to just be there. I need someone to be there too.” He shakes just a little and I can feel it through his fingers.

“You’re around my age and here alone, don’t you have any family Taylor?”

“No, I’m the only one left. There was a car accident when I was nine, this was my uncles place and he left it to me.”

“So you don’t have anyone?”

“Just you….”

There’s no talking after that, there’s nothing sexual that’s happening between us even though my body is sending me signals of this is right. I lean into his arms being around me and fall asleep being held. It’s a warm, safe feeling that I can’t really put into words. There’s another feeling too as I can feel him hanging onto me as he sleeps with this hint of need and desperation…He doesn’t want to die alone.

I’ve never pictured this.

It’s the last thing I’ve ever pictured in my life.

I wonder what’s next?

I let myself dream and let the images of what may be form in my head.