What Emily Wants...

But she wasn't me and I couldn't forget it. If I did, I risked losing myself in this life. And everything was already confusing enough as it is. I could barely make heads or tails of where I was and where I needed to be, no sense adding to my disorientation by trying too hard to fit in.

So I did the only thing I could do. I did the right thing. Right? Clean break.

The dress went back in the box and the boxes got sorted into piles to try to get a handle on things. Dividing everything into piles based on what belonged to both of us and what belonged to only her. I made a commitment, almost verbal, to keep those boxes closed. To keep the things that were hers alone out of sight and out of mind until I was able to walk away from here. Until I could find the woman who’d put me into this position and make her put me back into a world that made sense.

This one? It didn’t fit the bill.

I’d been trying so hard to ignore things for so long but there was no sense denying it anymore, something about this body and this world was drawing me in slowly but surely. There was something here that didn’t want me to leave, that wanted me to keep on exploring and keep on trying to make it work. A power outside of me that couldn’t bear the thought that I would walk away.

It was the only thing that made sense, the only explanation I could find for the odd dreams that I’d been having. Those visions that came to me in moments of stress, triggered on by the touch of a person I ought to have known and showing me a vision of a future that was as compelling as it was ultimately unsatisfying to me.

When it had first happened with Rachel I assumed maybe this spell was breaking. That it was only going to leave me in my past for so long before it caught up with where I had been before only in the life Emily had lived, not the one that I had lived through. But then it pulled me back and I thought that maybe the vision was just a preview of my inevitable future instead only to have that certainty scuttled with the second vision, and the ones that came after only made it all more confusing.

Truthfully I was pretty sure what they were. I think there was only one reasonable explanation. I think they were just options, just possibilities for the future.

The old woman had almost described it as such, right? She’d used that metaphor of the sewing project to explain things, talked about decisions being stitches in a tapestry or some such thing. So maybe those futures were only futures where I’d decided on a single option, but they were all possibilities.

All of them potential futures, but none of them absolute.

That idea was a little comforting to me. In each one of those futures I’d found some measure of peace and happiness, but in each one something had been lacking. Rachel had been a friend and a lover, but not a love. Blake and I had our troubles, more than our fair share, and a wobbily uncertain future. Eddie, well Eddie had been a complete and utter mess of need and want and submission and giving and I couldn’t say that future didn’t make me excited in the moment, but the aftermath left me with a taste in my mouth that was more than a little unpleasant. And then Lucas, dear Lucas, who could get me so close to happy but not all the way there.

But if all those futures were just possibilities then it meant that there was a future out there that would make me truly happy. That I wasn’t stuck barreling down a track with all the decisions made for me. It meant that I could steer the ship.

And I knew where I wanted to go.

I wanted to steer it far away from here. I wanted to go back, back to the life I had and the world I lived in. I didn’t want to be in this confusing place filled with ideas I couldn’t wrap my head around.

I didn’t want to feel the way I did now. To want the things that I wanted.

This body had needs, it had urges. It had appetites that I could barely even recognize. It wanted to touch and be touched and it wanted to relax into the body of another person.

And god the glimpses that I’d felt, they were so alluring. Hard to resist and harder to ignore. Even the darkest ones had a kind of temptation to me, but I had to ignore them if I wanted to preserve the truth of myself. Maintain the version of me that I used to be.

Sex and sexuality and sexual appetites are as much a part of a person as any other part of them. You are what you do and what you think and what you want and this body wanted things that I never had.

It wanted, it yearned, for a touch that I had never found appealing, that I had never found interest in. I knew that now.

Emily wanted the touch of a man. She wanted to feel them on her and inside of her. She wanted to be stretched to her limits, to gasp at the pleasure that they could give her.

She wanted women too but that was beside the point for me. Even being touched by a woman, as a woman, was foreign. Nowhere even close to what I’d known before.

I was a man. I was a man and I was straight and I- No. Wait.

I am a man. Present tense. I am a man, present body to the contrary.

I’m a man, but god I don’t feel like one right now.

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