You Can Never Go Back, But Neither Can You Stay—Part 2
Emory spent many of the days outside, on the concrete patio, in a bathing suit. She’d worked hard to feel okay about being in a bikini. She wore a standard bikini made for ciswomen, instead of a gaff made for transwomen. Even after hormone therapy, her testes were still somewhat large. Her penis was wide but would stay quite small and close to her body so long as she wasn’t highly aroused, a state which had become far less frequent after hormones and turning forty. So while she had some obvious bulge in the bikini bottom, she’d managed to accept it. If folks read her as an androgyne or even as a crossdressing man, she was at peace with that. Whatever they saw and thought was about them, she’d decided, not her.
The concrete was rough, even through the towel, but it felt somewhat good anyway. She loved the smell of tanning oil. It reminded her of growing up in the hot sun and being at the pool all the time in the summer. She knew it wasn’t safe any longer to bake in the sun, both because of environmental changes as well as her skin aging, but she did it that year anyway.
While she’d lain there sweating in the best way, she would try to imagine what might be in the bomb shelter.
Her first thought was very practical but scary. It was, in a word: snakes. She feared that the place would be just a nest of vipers and that her trespassing would immediately result in several of them launching at her, biting her skin, filling her with poison, and she’d then soon be covered in the damned things and would suffocate from it. Even imagining it made her feel uncomfortable, then unsafe, forcing her to open her eyes and sit up, to look around and confirm that she was, in fact, safe, that there were no snakes to be seen. Some days, even that was too much, and she would hurry back inside and not go back out. Other days, she could smoke a cigarette, calm down, and reset her mind, move on to another fantasy.
The second fantasy, and she thought about this one a good bit, was that the place was actually quite well preserved and had a bunch of atomic age shit in there, loads of food provisions, some guns, a ham radio—things like that. She would imagine different scenarios in which the old guy who used to live here was young then, and had a wife and kids maybe and was ready for the pinko Jonoian invasion at any moment. Or maybe he didn’t have a family, but thought he might survive a nuclear strike and find himself the only man still alive except for a lone beautiful woman that he could seduce, dominate, and mate with. She would sometimes fantasize that she was this woman, and would go inside and to the bedroom, masturbate thinking about being taken by this dude who she really didn’t like, but who would make her come just the same. It was hot enough to get her off most days. Other times, she would have to blend in additional elements, like Melanee coming home early and finding her masturbating on her bed and first reacting with shock and surprise (which would, itself, sometimes make her come) but then they joke about it, talk about their own ways of getting off, then they kiss and make love. If she hadn’t come by then, she was sure to once she thought of touching Melanee’s lips. She wondered if Melanee would see her as a girl sexually, or as a man who looked like a woman. Emory wondered that sort of thing a lot, but didn’t really have an answer.
Weeks went by and she still hadn’t even thought of when or how she might try to open the bomb shelter. It had become something of a fetish object, an enduring source of fantasy and mystery, but practically too complicated and scary to try to navigate.
Then she saw someone poking at it with a stick.
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