Author’s note:

I was halfway through writing this when something else got in the way. I know its too late for the contest but no worries there, even if I did win I would insist it go to someone else.

With that said I hope you enjoy my tardy little drabble.

Abby

The Crush: School Daze

Rod was a loner. Not in the sense of bad boy loner, more like the guy who can’t figure out how to talk to people and has given up trying. He often thought it would have been nice to be someone or something other than who he was or even to be simply tongue-tied around girls for instance.

Reading didn’t help, nothing seemed to have any relevance to someone who had a magnetic air about him and attracted girls like flies to honey but couldn’t manage to engage in any sort of dialogue with them. It wasn’t about attracting others to him, just about what to do once they were there and that invariably turned into a disaster.

To be fair, it wasn’t any better with other guys.

Those that weren’t intimidated by him just thought he was a bit slow and treated him accordingly. No one dared to actually say anything to him, he was 6’8” and all of 380 pounds, most of it muscle and bone. The phrase “Shoulders an axe-handle wide” would have needed another axe do him justice. Those that went up against him on the football field knew he could pick up a 200 pound quarterback and throw him a good five yards.

They knew this because he’d done it in his freshman year and won the State championship for his team although it took Jim a while to forgive him.

He wasn’t a workout freak or anything like that, just a farm boy who grew up working harder that most athletes ever even think about. His parents were the total package. Brains, brawn, confidence oozing from every pore.

His father was only an inch shorter and very nearly the same weight, although part of that was a smallish(On him) beer belly. His mother was only 6’4” and was a bit squirrely about her weight if asked but she used a digital scale(Totally hackable) so he knew she was 190 to 195 pounds. No beer belly on her, not even an ounce of spare fat that wasn’t in the perfect places.

It probably helped that she liked to run triple triathlons for fun. He’d run his first with her when he was 12 and almost the same size and weight and that had become their thing, mother-son bonding time, time to move in silence or to talk in words interspersed by breaths.

He valued that as it gave him a chance to think about what he said before he said it. She knew he had a hard time communicating verbally with others and was endlessly patient, never pushing him for more than he could give at any moment.

He especially enjoyed the times they would speak entirely in mathematical lingo, trading ideas and parsing their finer technical points. A blackboard or paper was never needed for either of them as they were gifted with near-perfect eidetic memory and could correct or add to each other’s theories on the fly without either of them losing anything.

Between them they had worked out some amazing theories and even though the scientific community as a whole disparaged many of their concepts they were beginning to be proven by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Both of their names were on several papers that had been peer reviewed and found to be bunk until they were proven correct.

He was of course secondary, as was only proper since he was barely a postgrad student. Still, they were well on their way to building a functioning Warp Drive. The math worked but the engineering was more than a little tricky and this was where he spent many of his crowded waking hours.

Fortunately he only needed about 5 hours a night to sleep. He’d tried to sleep longer but was only able to reach 7 hours when sick. That worked for him and for the whole family dynamic as his mom was a total morning person and his dad was a night owl.

His father was a different story. He was a molecular gastronomist who was looking for the perfect foods. Every nutritional need fulfilled with any taste or texture desired. He spent endless hours in the kitchen but equal amounts of time in the barns and labs, breeding the best food animals and ground crops.

They had done their best to help him become a social being but nothing mattered. He was still the kid with the giant brain who couldn’t manage to talk to anyone and because of this they only knew him as the kid with the giant… well, self.

None of that mattered to him as he stared at the links he’d found on Jim’s tablet… or maybe he should call her Ayla.

Transgender story links, research links for trans related articles, receipts for hormone blockers and hormones… Chat rooms and forums and the clear evidence that his only friend was a girl.

Things that explained why Jim… Ayla… had dropped almost 30 pounds in the past year and gained the shape that made him have to change sheets in the middle of his short nights. Things about him… Her… that distracted his mind into sinuous curves that somehow described space-time perfectly and gave him the clarity to complete his calculations.

The equations she had written… the music… spoke to his soul…

What an amazing way to look at the reality, everything variations on sounds, themes, a universe singing itself into existence…

“Holy crap!” he muttered as he opened another file and gaped at the screen. “She figured out the notation!!!”

“Mostly…” came from behind him in an airy contralto.

His heart sank and he stammered, trying to apologize for snooping and unable to actually form the words.

“Close your mouth, you’ll catch a fly.” She chided gently, gliding around to look him in the eyes.

“I left it there and open for you to see, for you to understand… You don’t seem to be able to make a move so I did… will…”

His eyes finally wandered from her face, the face that haunted his dreams.

For the first time he saw how she was dressed, a light lavender kimono so diaphanous it was semitransparent in intriguing ways. It ended just below the tops of her thighs and displayed long, tanned legs while hinting at further glories.

Glories which were coming into view as she untied the sash and shrugged, letting the kimono slide from her shoulders to form a silken puddle at her feet.

She was clad in the briefest of bikinis, hiding absolutely nothing from his incredulous gaze.

“You... You’ve got, um…” he gestured at her chest.

“Boobs?” she quirked the familiar lopsided grin at him.

He gestured mutely at her crotch.

“Yes, I have one of those too. Its called a vagina…”

“But… I’ve seen you naked for years! How… When…?”

“You haven’t seen me naked for the past 2 years. No one but my doctors and my mom have. I started my transition almost 2 years ago but these things take time. My graduation trip, I told you we went to Phucket and we did… after Mom and I stayed in Bangkok for a month so I could recover from surgery.”

“That was my 18th birthday gift, to finally become whole.”

She stood in front of him, 6’4” and 170 pounds of lithe curves and satiny smooth skin.

“Is that when you figured out the notations on the mandalas? Have you done the Kalachakra yet? I always thought those were circuit diagrams!” The words spilled out of him in a torrent, piling on one another in his haste.

She laughed at him, an unexpectedly high pitched, almost raucous sound that stirred responses in his swim trunks.

“I built it…”

“Is it what it looks like? Cause it looks like an inertial damper!”

Her expression fell a little as she mumbled. “Damn thing doesn’t work. The energy requirements are so far beyond anything I could access. I’d have to have triple humanity’s total daily energy output just to turn it on…”

“ZPMs!!!! Mom and I are almost done with the first prototype! If our figures on potential outputs are right an array of a hundred or so could easily give you 30 or 40 times that amount of power sustained and 10 times again that in millisecond bursts!”

“Zero Point Modules? How the hell are you able to make the planes? What’s the projected efficiency? How do you start it?” She was pacing around the room now, mesmerizing him with the sway and jiggle he was trying to wrap his head around and making the issue with his trunks rather pressing.

She looked over at him and noticed, blushing prettily and causing him to do a first rate lobster imitation.

“Oooh, did I do that?”

He could only nod, all power of speech stripped from him by her deliberately exaggerated sway as she strutted over to him and reached up to pull him gently into a searing kiss. His hands stole around her waist and she pressed her body to his, shimmying her hips a little to lightly grind against him and causing him to groan into their kiss.

She responded by rubbing even harder against his bulk until suddenly his whole body stiffened and he made a strangled noise that sounded a bit like an elephant trying to hold back a sneeze.

Knowing exactly what was going on, she continued what she was doing while holding the kiss till they were forced to break apart, gasping for breath. He got a guilty look on his face and started to turn away, ashamed of his own involuntary reactions, mortified that he couldn’t control himself.

She held on to his arm as he turned, being dragged right along with him.

Standing in his way, she looked up into his clear green yes and held them with her own hazel fires.

“I’m sorry…” she began, to be cut off by his own stammered apology.

“You have nothing to apologize for. Actually I’m flattered… but I shouldn’t have done that to you, made you feel ashamed of yourself. I got a little wound up in what was going on and it just sorta happened.”

“Isn’t that my line?”

That same peal of raucous laughter rang in his ears again.

“Relaxed a little now?” she grinned at him.

“Um… surprisingly yes?”

“Good! Now hit the shower so nobody can see the wet spot…” she ran a finger over the slightly sticky sheen that had leaked through his suit, causing him to twitch in response. “And when we get back from the beach you can take me to bed properly!”