The Freakshow by Athena Vasquez – Adult Content

Before we went inside, Christian and I sipped on some coffee he had ordered at Starbucks and conversed in his car. 

“She was livid,” Christian said. “Slammed the window wiper on the windshield and busted a headlight with her boot.”

“Because you invalidate Otherkins?”

“Yeah.”

“But she’s okay with you being a Trump supporter?”

“Yeah,” Christian laughed. 

He knew I found ways to drop in his affiliation with conservatism and right-wing politics. It excited me to be wanted by someone that simultaneously hated me.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Make that bitch pay. I would. I get being Nonbinary or transgender…but people claiming to be a fucking animal or some other inanimate object, nah.”

“Exactly what I said.” Christian said. 

“Hate those kinds of people. They want to lump in everyone in the transgender category. They make real transgender people look bad. Call me a transmedicalist, but there are specific qualifications to being transgender. And that’s not one of them.”

“What’s that?” Christian said.

“What? A transmedicalist?”

“Yeah.” 

“Basically a gatekeeper.”

I never said it out loud, but even though I didn’t want Christian, it bugged me that his most recent exes were transgender women.

We went into my room to lie on my white leather futon. From behind, Christian spooned me, nestled his chin on my shoulder, and inhaled deeply as if I were a bottle of perfume. Only I released the smell a nervous woman who’d lathered her body in a rose-scented lotion might emit when her natural body odor fused with the smell of roses. 

Christian  had driven from Irvine to East LA to cuddle. I had established through text messages before his arrival that nothing beyond cuddling was to happen. But once he felt my guard slightly drop and my body quiver with involuntary excitement and nervousness, like an opportunist, he took advantage.

“Spread your legs,” Christian said.

“I can’t,” I said.

It was partially true. Part of me simply didn’t want to show him my abnormal-looking penis. It was a mutation, I was told. Like a three-eyed fish or conjoined twins. It was a premature penis or an overgrown clitoris; or both. The other part of me that wanted to show Christian was solely motivated by hope. Hopes of hearing a “that’s normal” or “I like you.” But I knew the moment he saw what I had going on between my legs that I’d go from being a lady to whatever image he’d conjure up in his mind. He wouldn’t have told me what the image looked like, and I wouldn’t have cared to know.

 I tried again to do as he said and spread my legs open, but my legs shut tight like a clam.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let me see.”

“I’m trying,” I said.

Christian stood there towering over me, an eager man with a coarse beard that covered three-fourths of his face and the remaining covered by his thick, black-framed spectacles, waiting, waiting, waiting, for an opening. I reached to scratch an itch on my right inner thigh and a slit developed between my legs. Catching me off guard, he shoved his fingers through the slit and forced my legs open the way you forced open the doors of an elevator to let someone in. 

 Picking up his iPhone from the floor Christian pointed the flash toward my penis. It was dark in the room, except for the bergamot candle on top of the black mini fridge which he lit up to make me feel more comfortable. A spotlight. There was a spotlight on my penis. As if it was the main attraction at the freakshow in Venice boardwalk. “Come in,” the host would say, “come get a close look at the world’s biggest clit!”

Christian was a devout Christian. But, unlike Alice, his piety didn’t gleam off of him.

I hadn’t been able to say no to Christian. I was there but not there. I had always astral projected myself out of any sexual encounter. Like the time Bernardo refused to take no for an answer when he asked to enter me raw.

All I could think of was the story he told me in his car about the extreme leftist transgender woman that he broke up with two weeks prior for causing a scene at an Arco. I wondered if she was comfortable with Christian seeing her penis.

Gently, I pushed Christian’s forehead away from my breasts. He had made his way from my penis to my breasts, the ones he claimed were his. Ownership? He hadn’t endured the pains of going through the budding stage. He hadn’t been the one to tell his friends, as a twenty-four year-old, that he couldn’t hug them because even a light brush on his sensitive breasts felt like a sucker punch.

“Sorry,” Christian said. “They’re so tasty.”

“It kinda hurts,” I said. 

I felt the burning sensation of what would later become a scab on my right nipple. My right breast was bigger than the left. Christian liked this.

Bergamot wafted through the room and I was glad. It covered Christian’s sweaty body odor, the equivalent of three-day-old damp clothes. Húmedo is what we called the smell in Spanish. Not terrible–but unappealing.

After Christian finished on my belly, he said “Next time I’m getting you pregnant.”

“I have work tomorrow.” 

And, like most men that I’d let fuck me, there wouldn’t be a next time.

When Christian left, I walked to the bathroom mirror and stared at my throbbing right nipple. I felt the kind of burning sensation that you got from the friction of skin on rug. My right nipple had tooth marks and was bleeding. This, to me, explained why my right breast was always bigger, fuller, and heavier.

Athena Vasquez

Image: Pixabay.com – a rumpled bed made up with white bedding against a black background.