Announcement Okay, take 2! This will be the new version of BGC going forward! The original drafts of the first 4 chapters are behind the paywall on my patreon, but this is the new canon version of the story. I also have the second and third chapters of this version up on Patreon as well!

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  Brian

  I puckered up in the bathroom mirror, applying a waxy coat of crimson lipstick to my lips, the finishing touch on the masterpiece of my fully made-up face. Not a blemish or hair in sight, save for the crowning glory of auburn waves cascading down my back and the thin arches I’d gradually sculpted my brows into. I tugged up my push-up bra ever-so-slightly, letting my bountiful chest jiggle a bit and smirking in spite of myself. I smoothed my dress, a sexy blue number with a high hemline and a plunging neckline that complimented my dark red hair and abaster skin beautifully. I fastened the diamond studs into my ears, checked my pearly-whites for lipstick stains, took a quick selfie and uploaded it to my socials with #datenight as the caption. Now, you may be wondering, how does a completely heterosexual, cisgender man wind up in this situation, dressed to the nines and waiting for a man to take him out for a night on the town? Well, I promise you, there’s a perfectly normal, heterosexual, cisgender expnation for all of this. Let me take you back in time.

  I’m a businessman, a greaser of palms, a mover and shaker, someone who specializes in closing deals and making sure the breadline stays long. My company -- a major one that you’ve no doubt heard of -- will often send me traveling from my home city of Boston to various locales throughout the U S of A, and occasionally abroad as well. As a result, I’m not home too terribly often, but even a jetsetter like yours truly needs a pce to call their own. And they need someone who will keep the pce orderly while they're gone, a true neat-freak who doesn't mind having the pce to themselves for extended periods.

  Enter Kyle Duggan. We met at a hockey game, my John Harvard Pilgrims versus his Boston University Terriers. You know the type: big man on campus jock in the business school, hoped to own his own gym someday, smarter than he looked, stand-up guy with abs you could grind meat on and arms that could lift up three girls at once. Had no trouble attracting the dies with his All-American good looks and endearing, quiet charisma. He and I had connected in grad school and, as our final years of higher education came to a close, found we were both looking for living arrangements in our beloved home city of Beantown. He always had a girl, some gorgeous beacon of femininity who clung to him like the Adonis he was. As you can imagine, he was entirely okay with me not being around too much, and only having one person to clean up after made his life all the easier. Every time I came home from one of my trips, our loft was so clean you could have filmed a commercial in it. And every time I came home, I found one of Kyle’s test conquests sauntering around our pce in varying states of undress.

  So you can imagine, dear reader, my surprise–nay, my UTTER BAFFLEMENT AND CONCERN– when I returned home from my test voyage one Thursday night in the cold, bleak New Engnd winter to find Kyle and I’s shared apartment in such a state of disarray one might suppose it had been robbed by clowns on acid while a tornado blew through it and several hot-dog eating contests had occurred simultaneously.

  Kyle, that hulking tower of golden-haired muscle, jaw chiseled and ever-smoldering eyes bluer than the ocean on a clear day, sat naked on the couch, sobbing his eyes out amidst a swollen river of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles, his eight-pack abs and nine-inch hog (we’d measured each other once, long story) on full dispy.

  “Um… What’s going on?” I said, tilting my head to the side as I stepped in and stripped off my hideously uncomfortable loafers.

  “Hey, dude!” Kyle said, rivers of tears flooding out his eyes. I tried to focus on his face, but it wasn’t exactly easy. I’d always envied Kyle’s action-figure bod -- it was much more impressive than my short, emaciated frame. It was hard not to get mesmerized when it was all in pin view like that.

  I groaned. “I thought I told you not to call me that.”

  “Oh, right, sorry, my bad,” he sobbed. “I’m just a little out of it because… Because…”

  I goose-stepped around the garden of debris and sat down on the couch. “Because?”

  “Sarah dumped me!” he wailed.

  “Oh,” I said, my face scrunching up, my eyes narrowing, my tone fttening. “Is that all?”

  “Is that all?!”

  I bandied my hands about. “I mean… Which one was Sarah again?”

  “Dude!”

  I gred.

  “Sorry. Brian.”

  I groaned internally. I usually went by my st name -- O’Neil -- but this beautiful disaster had always found that too stiff. Far too casual for his own good, this one was.

  Kyle continued, “I mean… You honestly hadn’t seen too much of her, so fair enough. She and I were dating for the past year, exclusively for the past six months. And tonight, I-I-I did something crazy.”

  I leaned forward, pinching the bridge of my nose and wincing. “What did you do?”

  “I asked her to marry me.”

  My jaw hit the floor and, as long as I’m speaking hyperbolically, it also went straight through it and tore through the roof of every apartment below us until it plummeted directly into the Earth itself. “You did what now?”

  “I know, I know, I should have bought a ring first--”

  “You proposed to a girl who you’ve only been seriously dating for six months, and you didn’t even buy a ring first?!” I said, rising to my feet and throwing my hands up into the air.

  “And then she dumped me.”

  I wanted to tell him ‘of course she did, you idiot’, but looking at him there, drowning in a sea of his tears and filth, I just didn’t have the heart. I sighed heavily, then reached with my free hand for his shoulder. I somehow wound up at his cheek instead. I leaned into it, though, took both his cheeks in my hands, and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Do I look okay?”

  “Yeah, that was a dumb question, nevermind,” I said. “When did all this go down?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Two weeks?! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You weren’t home,” he said.

  “Right. But you could have called or texted--”

  “You don’t like it when I bother you at work,” he said. “You’ve told me this multiple times.”

  “And I forgot to tell you when I was coming home, so you didn’t clean, right,” I said.

  “I mean… That was just because I was sad,” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But you’re not gonna be sad tomorrow, right? You’ll clean this pce up tomorrow?”

  “Dude?! I’m grieving a serious retionship here!” Kyle snapped.

  I held my palms out and backed up. “Right, right, of course. You, uh, grieve. Is there anything I can get you? To, uh, speed the process along?”

  That was when his blue eyes, normally so terribly kind, became the regur kind of terrible instead. His harsh azure gre made my knees buckle. “Brian. For fuck’s sake. I’m going through a crisis right now. I am not in the mood to deal with you being your usual anal-retentive self.”

  “Anal-retentive?!” I said, aghast.

  “Yes, anal-retentive!” he said, standing up, towering over me by a full foot, a literal mountain of muscle casting a shadow over my puny, pallid ass. “Amongst other descriptors I’d apply to you, like smug, infuriating, posturing, pretentious, self-absorbed, and malnourished!”

  “You are way out of line here, Duggan,” I said, gritting my teeth and doing my best not to flinch.

  “You want the pce clean, do it your damn self,” Kyle said, storming off and giving me a clear view of his bare ass in the process. He smmed the door to his room, leaving me alone amidst the garbage dump that our living room had become.

  Needless to say, I didn’t clean the pce my damn self. I went to bed and stewed in my unyielding rage. Anal-retentive, smug, infuriating, MALNOURISHED?! HOW DARE HE?! What gave him the fucking right to talk to ME like that. I paid two-thirds of our rent and let him make my home into his own personal love-nest six days out of every seven. And he had the gall to talk to me like that when he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain?! I mean, SURE, we’d never formally agreed that he’d handle all the cleaning, but it was an unspoken understanding between MEN who respected each other. Was his unuttered word worthless?!

  I barely slept that night, and pointedly didn’t speak to him as I navigated my way out of the trash heap and went to the office. It was an enormous skyscraper in downtown Boston, though as something of a modern-day traveling salesman and deal-closer, I wasn’t actually there that often. I fully expected to receive my newest assignment to fly off somewhere else as soon as I walked into my boss’ office, to find the flight details already in the inbox of my work email instructing me to have a bag packed for tomorrow morning.

  Unfortunately…

  “What do you mean you don’t have anywhere for me to go?” I said, my hands pnting on my hips reflexively.

  “Did I stutter?” said my boss, Mrs. Violetta Diaz, a tall, statuesque Puerto Rican woman in her te forties, tastefully adorned by a sleeveless, knee-length violet dress, lips and nails painted fever-red, lines on her olive-skinned face and threads of silver in her raven hair only serving to make her look more distinguished. She’d been Mr. Santiago when I first started working here five years prior, but that hadn’t sted long, and the sheer amount of power and charisma she’d begun exuding since starting her transition had only made her more formidable in the business world. And that had only grown exponentially more so in the three years since she’d met and married her husband. She cocked a wry grin in my direction and continued in her mesmerizing contralto, “O’Neil, you’re aware that you accrue vacation time by working here, yes?”

  “I’m aware--”

  “Do you know how much paid vacation time you’ve accumuted in the five years since I first started you in the mail room?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Yes, yes it is. You’ve quite literally never taken a paid vacation. Not even the week off we give everyone for Christmas -- you spend the entire time flying around Thaind or Japan or the Philippines closing international deals for us. You could literally take a year off and not lose any money.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am, are you telling me you want me to not come into work?”

  “I’m saying I’m worried about you,” she said, pointing to the chair in front of her desk that I hadn’t remembered to sit down in. I was just awkwardly standing in front of the door with my hands fiddling together behind my back. “Frankly, we’re all worried about you.”

  “Who’s ‘we’, in this situation,” I said, reluctantly sitting in the pleather chair that was far too big for me. Everything was too big for a scrawny little shrimp like me. I was just grateful Mrs. Diaz wasn’t standing up: at six foot one, she already towered over me without heels. I don’t think I’d seen her in fts ONCE since she’d begun transitioning. I don’t think I’d seen her in anything less than stilettos!

  “Well, my boss, on the tenth floor, for one thing,” she said. “And her boss on the eleventh floor. And his boss on the twelfth floor. Not to mention every single one of your fellows on this floor. And my husband.”

  “Carlos is worried about me?” I said, the horror of causing that sweet, sweet man any duress spping me across the face.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Diaz said. “As such, I would like to ask you, as a personal favor, to take a vacation. Two weeks. Fully paid. And you can use your frequent flier miles and hotel points to stay wherever you want. Or you can just stay here, spend some time with your friends--”

  “What friends?” I ughed.

  She stared at me, mouth opened, eyes wide.

  “What?” I said.

  “You… You have no friends?”

  “I mean, I have work friends,” I said. “Also, I was being self-deprecating.”

  “I know you were, but that doesn’t make it less disturbing,” Mrs. Diaz said. “Don’t you have a roommate? Spend some time with him. Or, I dunno, go on dates. I can recommend you some singles bars if you want--”

  “That’s… That’s alright, ma’am,” I said, suddenly feeling profoundly uncomfortable with the direction this conversation had taken. “So, uh, I guess I’ll just… Go, then.”

  “I think you’d best,” Mrs. Diaz said. “I can also recommend you a therapist if you--”

  “That’s quite alright,” I said, standing up in a sudden, jerking motion, my joints creaking as I rose. I winced at the sound of it. I knew I wasn’t in the best shape, I knew I spent the overwhelming majority of my days sitting in chairs of various levels of comfort, but that was… THAT WAS…

  Maybe I did need a vacation.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks, then,” Mrs. Diaz said, waving as I left her office.

  I dragged myself out of the building and started walking down the streets of Back Bay, the frigid mid-winter air running through me like water through a filter. I didn’t actually own a car. I didn’t actually own… Much of anything, come to think of it. I was always traveling. The main items that belonged to me were my duffel bag and suitcase and a few identical gray suits. What the hell was I supposed to do now? Go home to the disaster area that awaited me? Deal with Kyle loudly hating my guts for a reason I couldn’t even deny the validity of? He was the closest thing I had to a friend, and I barely ever interacted with him. Going home right now… Felt wrong.

  I had to make it up to the guy.

  And I wanted a clean apartment.

  How could I accomplish both?

  A mid-height white man, with a knit-cap and a pleasant face, approached me on the sidewalk, handing me a slip of paper. “Come to drag bingo night at Barrel House Z! Meet the love of your life! Defy gender conventions!”

  I held the slip of paper in my hands while the stranger with the impeccable timing walked away. An idea whip-cracked inside my mind, something completely deranged, yet no doubt effective. If there was one thing I knew about Kyle, it was that he was always happier when he was attached. Women were his greatest motivation in life: they pushed him to succeed, physically, academically, financially. Without one, he was lost. And especially if this Sarah girl had truly meant so much to him, he was beyond lost. I could try to set him up with someone… No, no I couldn’t. The only women I knew besides my sisters (all of whom were married) were the ones I worked with, and they were all either also married or not nearly hot enough for him. Or both.

  I blinked a few dozen times and grinned as the deliciously mischievous idea solidified. I bit my thumb as I started chuckling, chortling, CACKLING. A homeless man panhandling on the corner stared at me with concern, then tossed me a quarter and said to seek help. I rolled my eyes and tossed it back to him, then took off my suit jacket and threw it at him.

  The man handing out fliers and the homeless man exchanged a look, long and confused and pitying. “What?” I said to them, holding out my hands. “What?!”

  “We’re worried about you,” the homeless man and the man handing out fliers said in tandem.

  I grinded my teeth together, sucked in my cheeks, and stormed off without saying anything. I kept on walking as my pns spun about in my mind like a hamster on a wheel. I made it three blocks before I saw a billboard advertising an online therapy service with the tagline ‘we’re worried about you.’

  I threw my hands up in frustration and gave a shrill screech as I made my way home.

  Kyle was at his substitute teaching job that day, so I traversed the obscene mess of our apartment and made it into my room. I downloaded a dating app for the first time in my thirty year old life, and pulled a profile pic from a fashion magazine I found online: a short, slender redhead with long, cascading hair and frosty blue eyes, someone who I could have pusibly been in another life but who was very obviously much hotter than my pitiful reality.

  She needed a name. ‘Rose’ was the first one to pop into my mind, something I’d long gravitated towards. My older sisters said it was what Mom and Dad would have named me if I’d been a girl, so it made sense. For the surname, I went with ‘Underhill’, my mother’s maiden name. Filling out the various entries took some more time: Rose needed details, hobbies, a job. I thought long and hard, all while pondering the kind of girls I’d seen Kyle with over the years. They were all smoking hot, all conventionally feminine, often looking like the long-lost descendants of Ginger Rogers or Myrna Loy or Katherine Hepburn. They were all successful in their fields. Rose needed a job that could convey all of that information and give her enough in common with Kyle that he’d have an actual interest.

  I went with ‘influencer.’ Seemed like something that could be faked, and something that would give Rose a work schedule that was generally in flux. Plus, what the hell even was an influencer? It was so nondescript a term that it could mean basically anything at this point.

  Okay, hobbies. Rose needed to enjoy some girly things, so I put down the obvious ones like haircare and shopping and wine tasting, but Kyle was a salt of the earth man’s man type, and the best lies were half-truths anyway, so I put down sports. Hockey and football in particur- those were his favorites, and while I strongly preferred hockey, I’d picked up enough about football from living with him that I could find a way to fake it. A few other ones that would help: travel, seeing the world, going to exotic pces. And fighting games. That one was all me, and besides, it signified me as a woman of culture.

  Rose. Signified Rose as a woman of culture.

  You know what I mean.

  Finally, it was done. I set the location range to a mere one mile, selected ‘men’ as who Rose was interested in, and sure enough, Kyle’s was the third profile to come up. Right I did indeed swipe, and within two hours, I was greeted by the notification that he and I had matched.

  I wasted no time. The pn was simple: engineer a ‘babe come over’ scenario so that Kyle would clean the apartment, and once the pce was back to being spotless, say a work thing came up for me and that I had to bail. Easy peasy. And the big lunkhead never had to be the wiser.

  I made the first move, typing, “Hey there, hot stuff! How’s your day going?”

  “Pretty good! Especially now that I’m talking to you ;).”

  “Fttery will get you everywhere.”

  “That’s good, because I can take you pces you’ve never been.”

  “Coming out swinging, huh?” I typed, smirking as I id atop the sterile, starchy beige bedspread inside my barren, uncarpeted, undecorated room. I had no posters, no shelves, no books, and all my clothes– a series of identical, ill-fitting suits– were folded and stowed inside my brown duffel bag. “I like a man with confidence.”

  “Well that’s good, because you’ll find no short supply of that where I’m concerned.”

  “Good to know,” I typed, scratching an itch on my lower stomach.

  “So, I see a beautiful girl with a love for my favorite game, I gotta ask, what are your teams?”

  “Oh, I’m a Boston girl, born and bred,” I said, the itch trending lower as I breached the threshold of my pants and began pawing at the beginnings of my crotch. He called me beautiful. I mean, he called Rose beautiful. Good. It was working. That made me happy, warm and contended and confident. “So I wave the local fgs. Patriots, Bruins, all that good stuff.”

  “Oh hey, same!”

  “Good. Means we don’t have any conflicting loyalties. That’ll help with arguments.”

  “I could never argue with a gorgeous girl like you,” he typed.

  “Heeheehee, good to know,” I replied. The itch kept getting lower and lower, until I found my hands around my extremities attempting to rub away the sensation. This was good, he thought Rose was gorgeous, and that made me… Made her feel gorgeous.

  He asked, “So, what are you looking for on here? Hookups? Dates? A retionship?”

  I blinked and clenched my hands, inflicting a spike of pain upon my family jewels in the process. Shit, hadn’t thought that far ahead. Okay, let’s think about this logically: Rose is the same age as me, she’s a social media personality, she’s looking for a good time, she travels for work a lot. Probably not in the mood to get tied down, more in the mood to get dicked down by a hot stud.

  An image fshed before my mind’s eye of Kyle pinning me- ROSE, pinning ROSE- to his bed, hands pressed against the headboard and plowing her like a field during harvest season, his massive unit thrusting back and forth-

  It was at that moment my unit sprung to attention, and the grasp my hand had around it began to feel like something other than errant scratching. My eyes burst wide, and I yanked my hand away. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t really catfishing him, that was… That was all kinds of wrong. And besides, I wasn’t like I LIKED him or anything. I was straight! I was a guy! I was a straight guy! I’d settled that debate years ago and I wasn’t about to reopen it now!

  I needed to get this ball rolling before I crossed any unforgivable moral lines and before I did any regrettable backsliding. Hastily typing, I answered, “I think mostly I’m looking for hookups, but I’m more than happy to get into a retionship if there’s a real spark there.”

  “Well I’d be more than happy to be the spark that lights your fire, hot stuff,” Kyle responded.

  The IMAGE sparked- more like exploded- inside my mind once more, and with it came a pungent, nauseating flood of shame that pumped through my blood vessels like sewer water. It was almost enough to make my boner die down. Almost.

  Fuck. Okay. I was close. This was working. Stay the course, Rosie. You got this! “Don’t threaten me with a good time, stud.”

  “I can and I will.”

  Fuck. He was good. Not that I was surprised- he’d probably had more sex than any human being in the entire commonwealth. “How’s tomorrow night sound?”

  “Tomorrow night sounds perfect.”

  “Your pce okay?” I asked. “Mine is in a bit of a state right now. It’s pretty embarrassing.” The best lies, and all that.

  It took him a minute, but finally, he responded with, “Yeah, I can have my pce ready by tomorrow night. I’ll send you my address.”

  “Until then, beautiful.”

  “Back at ya.”

  I clicked my phone off, then held it against my chest while staring at my ceiling with wide, terrified eyes. This was wrong. What I was doing was wrong. But…

  But…

  I needed it.

  He needed it.

  Our home needed it.

  I silently stalked over to the bathroom and took as cold of a shower as I could stomach in this weather, letting the frigid temperatures finally, FINALLY force my throbbing, hideous erection down. After that, I returned to my nondescript little room and stared at the wall, forcing any dangerous thoughts back down like I was whacking them with a hammer. I tumbled down the bottomless abyss of my consciousness, an eternal freefall beset by cold, biting winds that shed at my pitiful excuse for a soul. I clutched at my chest, pinching the skin to try to pull myself out of the descent into the darkness below; breathed heavily through my mouth, unblinking as I kept holding the skin above my heart between my trembling fingers; clenched my jaw and grinded my teeth together to feel something, anything, other than the whipsh from my spinning head. Eventually, my cortisol supply burned out, and sleep mercy-killed my panic.

  I eventually woke up to the sound of the front door opening.