Chapter 53
Montana was cold in July.
Not the postcard cold of snow and Christmas lights, but the thin, high-altitude cold that got into the walls of the little two-bedroom rental on 3rd Street East in Kalispell, the one with the peeling white paint and the radiator that clanged at 2 a.m. and the kitchen linoleum that curled at the edges.
It was a long way from the Singapore penthouse.
Lance had gotten a job — a real job, like he'd promised — as a project manager for a construction firm in Whitefish, $78,000 a year, no trust fund, no driver, no assistant. He wore Carhartt now instead of Tom Ford. He came home with dust on his boots and tired lines around his blue eyes that Brett had never seen before.
Brett tried to make it a home.
He hung the wedding photos — the one of Lance lifting his veil at CHIJMES — on the living room wall with a nail from the hardware store. He kept the white silk robe folded on their secondhand bed. He wore the Mary Janes to the grocery store like Lance had joked, and the old ladies at Smith's smiled at him.
But he didn't refill the hormones.
The estrogen — the expensive, compounded, private-clinic estradiol injections from the Seattle endocrinologist that Richard Sullivan's money had paid for — ran out three weeks after they landed in Kalispell. The vial was empty on a Tuesday. Brett held it up to the bathroom light, turned it over, tapped it, like there might be one more dose hiding.
There wasn't.
The refill was $1,200 a month. Cash. No insurance. The pharmacist at the little clinic on Main Street had said it gently, apologetically, looking at Brett's shaking hands and his D cup breasts in the thin tank top.
Brett had left the prescription on the counter and walked out.
He didn't tell Lance at first.
He told himself it was temporary. That they'd save up. That one month wouldn't matter.
But by week two without it, his mind started to... shift.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't like a movie where he woke up one morning and was "Brett" again. It was slow, insidious, like fog rolling in over Flathead Lake.
He woke up one morning and Lance's stubble — the five o'clock shadow Lance now had every night from the construction site — didn't look rugged and sexy anymore. It looked... rough. Unkempt. Brett found himself pulling away slightly when Lance tried to kiss him good morning, turning his cheek without meaning to.
He noticed it and hated himself for it.
By week three, the fog got thicker.
He was standing at the bathroom mirror, brushing his honey blonde hair — it was getting greasy faster now, he needed to wash it every day instead of every three — and he caught sight of his chest in the tank top. His breasts, his beautiful D cup breasts that Lance had worshipped in Singapore, that had filled the La Perla balconette so perfectly...
They looked wrong.
Not smaller — not yet — but foreign. Heavy. He found himself crossing his arms over them when he walked to the kitchen for coffee, hunching his shoulders, like he could hide them under Lance's oversized flannel.
He started wearing sports bras instead of the lace. Then just baggy t-shirts. Then hoodies, even though it was July.
"Girl parts," he thought once, bitterly, looking down at the swell under the cotton, and the phrase stuck in his head like a splinter. Girl parts. Fake parts. Not mine.
He started feeling self-conscious in the shower. He'd turn the water as hot as it would go and face the wall so he wouldn't have to see his own body — the hips that were softening back, the waist that was thickening, the tuck that felt more and more like work every morning.
And Lance...
God, Lance. Lance who still looked at him like he was the bride at CHIJMES, who still tried to pull him into his lap on the secondhand couch, who still whispered "Mrs. Sullivan" against his neck at night.
Brett started seeing him differently.
Not less handsome — Lance was still Lance, tall and broad and blue-eyed — but less... magnetic. The pull that had been there since Montana, the ache that had made Brett say yes to hormones, to heels, to a wedding dress... it was dulling.
He'd watch Lance take his boots off after work, his t-shirt sticking to his back with sweat, and feel nothing. No flutter. No heat. Just a flat, tired sort of affection, like you'd feel for a brother.
It terrified him.
One night in early August, Lance came home and found Brett sitting on the bathroom floor in the dark, in sweatpants and one of Lance's old hoodies, his hair unwashed, his face bare, his arms wrapped around his knees.
"Brielle?" Lance said softly, crouching down, his work-rough hand gentle on Brett's back. "Baby, what are you doing in here?"
Brett didn't look up. He couldn't. He was staring at his hands — his hands with the chipped pink nail polish he'd stopped bothering to redo, the platinum wedding band loose on his finger because he'd lost weight in the wrong places.
"I can't do it anymore," Brett whispered, his voice hoarse and low — lower than it had been in months, he realized with a stab of panic. "I can't... I can't be her."
Lance went very still. "Be who, baby?"
"Brielle." Brett finally looked up, his blue eyes red-rimmed and dead. "I don't feel like her anymore, Lance. I look in the mirror and I see... him. I see Brett. And I hate him, but he's coming back, and I can't stop it, and I don't want you to see me like this."
Lance's face crumpled. "Hey. No. Don't say that."
"It's true," Brett said, and the tears finally came, hot and ugly and silent. "Without the hormones, my mind... it's shifting back. I don't think about dresses anymore. I don't want the Mary Janes. I look at you and I don't feel... I don't feel that pull. I feel self-conscious. I feel like a man in a bra. I feel like I'm lying to you."
The word depression didn't need to be said. It was in the way Brett hadn't gotten out of bed until noon for three days straight. It was in the way the wedding photos on the wall made his stomach turn. It was in the way he'd stopped answering Nico's texts.
Lance pulled him into his lap right there on the cold bathroom tile, holding him while he shook apart, his big hands rubbing Brett's back through the hoodie.
"Listen to me," Lance whispered fiercely into Brett's greasy hair, his voice breaking. "I didn't marry your estrogen levels. I didn't marry your cup size. I married you. Brett, Brielle, whoever you are today, tomorrow—"
"But I don't know who that is!" Brett sobbed into his chest, clutching at Lance's flannel like a lifeline. "I don't feel like a girl anymore, Lance. I feel like I'm... I'm going backwards, and I'm scared, and I'm so ashamed of these—" he gestured wildly at his chest, at the breasts he now hated — "these girl parts that aren't even real without the shots!"
Lance cupped Brett's face in both his hands, forcing him to look up, his blue eyes blazing with tears and love and fury.
"They are real because they're yours," Lance said, low and shaking. "And I love them because they're part of you. And if you want them gone tomorrow, I'll love you flat-chested. If you want to be Brett again, I'll love Brett. If you want to be Brielle again next month, I'll love her. Do you understand me?"
Brett stared at him, his breath hitching, his whole body trembling in the circle of Lance's arms.
"I don't find you attractive anymore," Brett whispered, the most terrible truth, the one that had been eating him alive for weeks. "Not like I did. It's the testosterone, it's coming back, and I look at you and I feel... nothing. And that kills me, Lance, because you deserve someone who looks at you like you hung the moon."
Lance closed his eyes for a long second, pain flashing across his face — real, sharp pain — then opened them again, clear and sure.
"Then we'll figure it out," Lance said simply. "We'll find a way to get the hormones. I'll work doubles. I'll sell the truck. I don't care. But even if we can't, even if you never take another shot in your life, you are still my wife. You are still the person I watched walk down the aisle in a hundred-button dress. Nothing in your blood changes that."
Brett collapsed against him again, sobbing so hard he couldn't breathe, his self-consciousness, his shame, his shifting mind, his depression all pouring out onto the bathroom floor of their little rental in Kalispell.
Lance held him through all of it, rocking him gently, whispering "I've got you, I've got you, I've got you" over and over, while the radiator clanged at 2 a.m. and the Montana cold seeped in through the windows.
The money was gone. The hormones were gone. And Brett was slipping away from himself, one day at a time.
But Lance didn't let go.
Not once.…