Love and Decision
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

She lay beside him. It was a Sunday afternoon. He had called her over. He had just enjoyed a lunch with one of his sons and his son’s pregnant wife but seeing them together had reminded him that he needed intimacy. He called and she had agreed to come round to his house.

The fact is that Sundays could be lonely for her. On Saturday night she liked to party and the night before had been no different. As often as not it would end with sex with a stranger, but the night before had been a disappointment. She needed sex.

He had not disappointed her. He was now over fifty and a grandfather, but he was lean and fit, and his cock had been rock-hard and as hot as lava inside her. She propped herself up on one elbow to look at his handsome and masculine face and to play with the hair on his chest.

He smiled at her. It was a smile, not a sexual leer that she seemed to receive from most men, and which she enjoyed, most of the time.

“I like moments like this,” she said.

“Perhaps we should spend every Sunday together,” he said.

“That would be nice.” Their eyes were locked together, but it was not awkward – it was perfect.

“I miss not having a wife … I mean a full-time partner,” he corrected himself.

“That is not a proposal?” she teased.

“I would love to propose to you,” he said. “But you know what I want. I want to marry a woman. It would mean surgery.”

“And I have told you that I would lose an arm before losing my cock,” she said. She said it with a smile, but it was serious, and he knew it.

“It is not as if you use it much,” he said.

“You don’t know what I get up to when I am not with you,” she said.

“You’re right. And I hate that.”

“You want me to sacrifice my cock to control me,” she accused, but she was still smiling. It was not the first time they had had a conversation like this one.

“I want you to be my wife. You would probably control me.”

“You never care about that part of me when we make love … like we just did,” she said

“I have just got used to ignoring it,” he said.

“So, ignore it. Ignore it just like everybody else does”.

“Everybody doesn’t know about it,” he said. “You look so completely a woman, and have done for over a decade, that you can safely assume very few do.”

“Everyone I’ve had sex with knows. Many people at the law firm know. But they accept me for what I am. They judge me for what I do, not what hangs between my legs. Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t,” he said. “Call me heterosexual. No, call me binary.”

“I am binary,” she laughed. “Woman by day and gay crossdressing man by night.”

“You say that, but you are not that,” he said, with a serious look. “You are a woman. That is what I saw in you. You live as a woman. You have no male clothes. You present as a woman. You are more of a woman that anybody I know. It is just that you have that thing. You know that I have never liked it.”

“It is part of me. If you love me then you should love all of me,” she sulked.

“I do love you,” he said. “I want you to be with me. I want you all to myself.”

“But first you want my genitals cut off?”

“I want your genitals corrected,” he said. “I want to make love to you as a woman.”

She lay back and looked at the ceiling. She was not angry with him, although she might pretend to be. He had just said ‘I love you’. She should be thrilled. She was, but then his love came with conditions. Was that unreasonable? Was it any more than asking that she convert to Judaism? Give up bacon?

She reached down. There it was. She had taken a hormone shot that week which always left it small. If she wanted to take the lead she would need to take Viagra. But for him, he always took the lead.

Was he enough? She always said that he was not. She needed to live the way she had since her youth. She was a gay man and enjoyed gay sex. It was just that she lived as a woman in preference to living as an effeminate man. It was a practical choice. It enabled her to perform her work as a paralegal, and to be very good at it. She slipped into to the professional world so much easier than she would as an overtly gay man.

And she loved feminine things; dresses, makeup, shoes, fripperies. She liked to wear pretty things and she liked to buy things, or even better yet, have things bought for her.

She had admirers. She had people who were proud to be with her and to engage in PDA – public displays of affection, in a way that a gay man could not.

She was happy to live as a woman. She could not see herself ever going back to living as a man. Old queens never look good, and she knew what looking good was.

But time was marching on. She was now in her mid-thirties. If she was a woman she would be thinking about motherhood, just as he was thinking about his grandchildren. He was a reminder of age. She had always thought that younger men kept her young – sex kept her young.

She reached across and found his hand and took it in hers.

They had walked hand in hand. A man and a woman can do that without being stared at. There was something about holding hands that was the opposite of sexual. It was about companionship.

“I have to say they are not as important to me as they once were,” she said.

It was his turn to lean over. He looked at her with those loving eyes. They were not eyes looking for sex. He saw past her sex. He disliked it. He loved her.

“It is wrong of me to ask,” he said. “I apologize. You are who you are, and I love you regardless.”

That doesn’t mean that I can’t improve,” she said, smiling slyly.

He kissed her lightly, but she pulled his mouth on to hers. She was who she was.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2022