Big Flipping Deal Ch. 06

[The story so far: Thanks to an odd provision in a will, Nick begins remodeling a house with the gorgeous transsexual Lindsey, whom he finds increasingly attractive even after learning that she has the same thing between her legs that he does. In a hostile encounter with Lindsey's bigoted father, Nick is knocked silly and ends up kissing Lindsey while he's incoherent. A few days later, after a short workday on the house, the two go bowling. Nick then works up the courage to ask her to attend his cousin's wedding with him, where sparks unexpectedly fly over desert. Lindsey takes Nick back to her place, and they wind up dry-humping spectacularly. The experience overcomes most of Nick's reservations, and he decides to ask Lindsey out on a real date.]

The next couple of days went by with no weirdness whatsoever.

Well ...

Unless you count me spending about half the day at work with a raging boner Monday. And again Tuesday. And again Wednesday.

And unless you count me spending a hundred percent of our remodeling time with an even raging-er boner.

And unless you count me fantasizing about sucking Lindsey's cock every night as I went to bed.

Somehow, up until our post-wedding dry-hump, I'd managed to do all my whacking off to porn. Yeah, I did my best to find videos of t-girls who looked like her, and yeah, I spent a lot of those videos thinking, Does her cock look like that?

But after that Saturday night, when I agreed with her suggestion that we shouldn't go to bed, when I let her drive me back to my place with her cum staining my slacks, I didn't even turn on the computer. I had no interest in watching other trans-women and wondering how much Lindsey was or wasn't like them. I'd gotten within one flight of stairs from sliding under the sheets with her, just one conversation from seeing her naked, from knowing, and being with, and touching the reality. And now I couldn't get it out of my head.

How much different would it be, to put my hand on her bare shaft instead of feeling it through her dress? How much different would it be taking her in my mouth, compared to that dream I'd had where I sucked her off?

I noticed her glance at my crotch and smirk more than once during Monday and Tuesday's renovation work. But she had the decency to not rib me about it - and once, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her look and briefly touch her tongue to her upper lip.

Tuesday got us through re-flooring the master bedroom, and it also got me a text from Sam: Sorry I was a dick about your date Saturday, man. Anything I can do to make it up to you?

I texted back: Pick me up on your way to work tomorrow and let me borrow your car for a couple of days.

Surprisingly, he agreed, and when Lindsey got ready to head out for the night, I told her I'd collect her at her place around six the next evening. She looked puzzled and asked if I'd gotten my car fixed, I told her about Sam trying to make amends, and I think we both parted for the night feeling a little better about humanity.

Then I walked to the grocery store and bought myself a package of bratwursts and spent about half an hour working up the courage to see how many inches of sausage I could take into my mouth.

If our date hadn't been for Wednesday night, there's no telling how far I would have gone with those bratwursts.

* * *

It's a good forty-five-minute drive from Dallas to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. Forty-five minutes for me, I mean - Lindsey would probably have shaved five or ten off of that in her BMW. Most of the trip was the Irving/Euless/Bedford corridor along 183, wall-to-wall metropolitan area except for the vast tract of DFW airport right in the middle. Lindsey fiddled with the radio in Sam's Nissan until she found something danceable, then kind of relaxed into a nodding groove, looking over at me occasionally and smiling. She talked about an indecisive client who was giving her fits with one change of plans after another, back and forth and back and forth.

"I swear, I've returned and re-bought the same bathroom tile four times. The tile contractor is going to stop taking my calls."

"His loss," I said, with a glance her direction. I meant it to show how much I thought she deserved to be appreciated, and I think her smile said she caught that. But she looked out the window at the traffic and the suburbs sliding by and twirled one finger slowly in her hair, so I couldn't tell for sure.

Fort Worth is called Cowtown (among other things), and Dallasites tend to think of it as a rural bump over on their far western border. But it's the sixteenth-largest city in the country, and the Modern Art Museum there is a pretty respectable institute of higher culture. Not that I was over there every weekend or anything, but I'd been a few times and always enjoyed it. Well, except the one time I took Carmella and she bitched through the whole thing.

We pulled into the parking lot maybe half an hour from sunset under late September skies, just a few high, sparse clouds overhead. I killed the engine and got out first. She didn't wait for me to get her door, but opened it and climbed out into the still-warm air of early evening, which moved her hair with a hint of breeze. Watching her round the corner of the car to join me, I marveled at the absolute perfection to which she'd dressed herself - casual enough to say she wasn't trying to knock me off my feet, sexy enough to let me know she could if she wanted to. She had on a blouse of deep rose with the crisp, pointed collar unbuttoned to mute its formality. Her dark grey skirt hit a couple of inches above her knees, and I think her boots were the same calf-high stilettos she'd worn the first day I met her. A simple golden chain spanned her throat under the collar.

I thought she had a bit of an odd expression as she drew even with me.

"You're not nervous, are you?" The idea of someone who looked like Lindsey being nervous about a date with someone who looked like me - it felt good, to tell the truth.

"Surprisingly, no," she said, half-bursting my bubble - though I don't know why she'd say 'surprisingly.' She turned her face away, and I got ready for the full bubble-burst. But what she said was, "I'm kind of ... trying not to be giggly?"

Giggly struck me as a thousand times better than nervous.

"Oh, that's bad," I said, lowering my eyebrows dramatically when her face came back into view. "We're supposed to be going for a disaster date, aren't we?"

By this point, we'd joined the flow of people approaching the museum entrance - a combination of highbrow socialites and granola types, with scattered mundane sorts like myself here and there. Maybe it was just my imagination, but Lindsey seemed unique in the crowd. I felt like everyone ought to be turning and looking at her in amazement, though of course, no one did.

I caught some guys ogling, though.

"It doesn't quite have to be a disaster," she said as we neared the door. "Just nothing special. A couple of friends at the museum. Ordinary."

"Gotcha," I said, holding the door for her. "You know I'm never going to think you're ordinary, don't you? I mean that in a good way."

"Don't play dumb," she said once I'd let a few old ladies in and gotten through the door myself. "We don't need to be ordinary ... you and me. You're weird and I'm transgender. But that's me and you. What needs to be ordinary is us, together."

The Modern seemed busy tonight - we had some lines to deal with, probably because this exhibit was new. But it gave us time to talk as we waited and shuffled forward place by place.

"How exactly am I weird?" I asked.

She laughed. "You're a straight guy crushing on a t-girl, for one thing. That's weird. And you're weirdly nice - nobody's that nice. Like the way you apparently spent so much time hanging out with my crazy old aunt and her cat. That's pretty weird."

"Mrs. P wasn't cra -" I stopped myself. "No, I guess maybe she was. This whole thing was her idea, you know."

She gave a puzzled frown in the sedate crowd-hum of the museum.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you, but part of the reason she gave us the house together was that she thought I needed a girlfriend."

That tickled enough of a laugh out of her to make the other patrons turn in line and look at us. Lindsey gave a wave of apology, working to swallow her giggle-fit. "Oh God," she said. "That is so Neena. She really didn't understand how the whole transition thing works. I'm sure she thought I was all girl and you'd never know the difference."

"Maybe," I said, shrugging. "Or maybe she thought I'd get to know you and it wouldn't make a difference."

"Uh-huh, sure. Let me tell you some stories about Neena."

She proceeded to narrate a series of anecdotes about her silly aunt's naive side. I listened and watched the way her expression lit up with happy fondness for the old lady. A few stories in, she seemed to have forgotten that her purpose was to show the unlikeliness of Mrs. P having an accurate bead on how the two of us would hit it off. She might have circled back eventually, but we made it into the exhibit hall before that could happen.

"Indecorous Object," read the banner above the archway into the gallery. We passed beneath it and found ourselves surrounded by the paintings of Diego Carvalos, to the vocal accompaniment of that peculiar art-museum muttering - the kind that manages to sound reverent and analytical and baffled all at once.

"Damn," Lindsey whispered to me, "this guy's a fucking loon. Really good, though."

At a glance, I could see a dozen or so paintings in this bend of the gallery. Other patrons partially blocked my view of some, but Lindsey's assessment was spot on. Even from a distance, even with a column in the way here and a tall guy's cowboy hat in the way there, Carvalos showed an incredible versatility of media and styles - oils, watercolors, impressionism, expressionism, pontillism, photorealism, collage, glasswork ...

And all of it toilets.

The first one had the look of the Dutch Masters - dark tones and bold shapes, colors in deep, earthy contrasts. It showed a fine ceramic chamber pot in the corner of some Enlightenment-era mansion bedroom - smooth-grained wainscoting behind bright, clean porcelain that created a sense of art in front of art within art.

Flowing onward with the crowd, we passed a sun-drenched watercolor of a bathroom done in white tile with hints of daisy hues, centered on an impeccably clean domestic toilet. Then a chiaroscuro masterpiece appeared, devoted to some nineteenth-century train station stall full of splendid brass and dark wood paneling. Next a men's room Monet. Then a Lichtenstein loo.

I spent as much time watching the mixture of perplexity, awe, and amusement on Lindsey's face as I did looking at the paintings. She just couldn't get over the guy's obsessive devotion to toilets as high art.

"I mean, these are not cheap knockoffs of a bunch of famous painters' styles," she said in a hushed tone. "This guy really knows what the fuck he's doing. Look at that color blending! But what the hell is going on in his head when he's painting these things?"

"Maybe he owns stock in a plumbing company?" I joked, but found myself as impressed and confused as she was. Or almost as impressed. "Some of these would have been better if he'd been painting one of your bathroom designs, though."

She rolled her eyes and we moved around a bend into the next section of the exhibit. The couple ahead of us pointed and murmured at the first painting there.

"Huh," I said as we came up to the piece and looked it square on. It had a certain Degas quality to it, ethereal and light, a blue tile bathroom decorated in a '40s or '50s style - but a tiny yellow circle on the rim of the bowl pulled my eye in as soon as I looked.

"That's a piss drip," I said, startled to realize that every inch of every bathroom in every painting before had been immaculately clean.

"Yeah," Lindsey agreed. "Huh."

As we proceeded around the room past cubist and pop art and post-modern renderings of gas station bathrooms and rest-stop shit-cans, the toilets grew steadily dirtier, stained, hard-water streaked, even cracked. The phantasmagoria of art styles continued, and every painting popped with technique, but by the end of the room, you could almost smell the filth. The last one before the corner gave a harrowing view into an ill-kept rustic outhouse with corn cobs for wiping.

"Okay, gross," Lindsey said. "I don't know if I want to see what's in the next room."

"Well, we've come this far."

So we rounded the bend and entered the home stretch. Here, the paintings hung farther apart, and depicted washrooms and sanitary facilities long past use. First, a spiderwebbed stall within an unlit building, presumably abandoned or condemned. Then the remnants of a mobile home bathroom seen through a hole ripped by a tornado. Then a single toilet standing half-destroyed amidst the rubble of a bombed-out building in a war zone. By the end of the hall, we found ourselves looking at a pile of shattered, crap-stained toilet parts in a junkyard, rendered in stark slashes of paint that gave everything a thick, clotted, decayed look.

"I'm starting to wonder if this was really the most romantic date idea I might have suggested."

"Hmmm."

We turned the final corner of the exhibit. At the end of about a twenty-foot hallway hung a single painting - striking blue sky over an uneven, dusty field where stands of green grass swayed to some unseen wind or breeze. As we got closer, a cracked rim of porcelain showed itself, peeking up through mounded dirt and rocks near the painting's center. Within its oval curvature, a single pale-petalled wildflower grew, the leaves and blossom raised patiently toward the cloudless vault of sky overhead.

"Holy fuck," Lindsey said. It was exactly what I was thinking.

* * *

On the way out of the exhibit hall, we both stayed quiet, except for me checking my watch and suggesting we head to the museum cafe.

"I reserved a table."

"Oh, good thinking."

We still had to wait a bit. Once Lindsey's ideas about Carvalos' work settled down, she started talking.

"I wasn't expecting that last flower painting at all," she said. "It was so sad."

"Sad?"

"Yeah, didn't you think so? I mean, the whole point of the exhibit came out there. People make things and use them, and for a while they take care of them, and then they let them go to hell. Everything rots and falls apart and turns to crap, and it's not until you get the people out of the way that something nice happens again."

I opened my mouth, but she kept going, one hand closing on air as she looked off through the floor-to-ceiling cafe windows at the wide reflecting pool beyond.

"Or it's like our lives - we start fresh and clean and bright, and things seem nice even if our spot in life isn't the most glamorous. But then time goes by and the dirt and nastiness piles up. Things get uglier and uglier. We realize how shitty everything is, and we break down, and eventually we've got nothing left. We're done. And once we're gone, maybe, nature can come back in and make something out of our bones."

I could buy those theories. And Lindsey's expression as she rolled them out - intense, disturbed, wounded, but also strong in her commitment to her own ideas and interpretations - put such awe and fascination in me that I could easily have nodded and agreed.

Except that Lindsey had come into my life now, and as believable and familiar as those cynical, nihilistic ideas were, I no longer wanted to think that way.

"Maybe it's simpler than that," I said, carefully. She looked at me and waited, and I tried my best to keep her eyes on mine, where maybe she could see what I was seeing. "Maybe he's telling us there's this thing, and it's surprisingly pretty as long as people take care of it. Only they don't take care of it. They piss and shit in it. But eventually it gets past those people and finds the right place to fit in. And once it does, something really beautiful can grow inside it."

For a few beats after I finished, she kept her eyes on mine, blinking a little, breathing, and nothing else. Then she took a half-step closer, put her hand on my cheek, and leaned in to kiss me - a soft, brief touch of her lips to mine - and when she stepped away, her hand found mine and she took it.

Almost perfectly in time for the hostess to tell us they had our table ready.

* * *

Dinner went very date-ishly. We compared favorites from the exhibit (we both liked the daisy-themed watercolor in the first room), talked about which paintings did the best job of capturing their respective styles (I voted for the Degas-esque pee-stain picture, Lindsey couldn't decide between a surrealist port-a-potty and a urinal schematic patterned after one of DaVinci's notebook sketches), and then stumbled across the fact that we'd both had the same professor for Art Appreciation at UT. I had some pan-seared scallops, Lindsey ordered vegetable lasagna and hated it.

"Why the hell did I order this?" she asked, a couple of bites in. "Lasagna is not supposed to be healthy."

"Do you want to trade? I think yours looks good."

"You're a liar," she laughed. "I halfway think I ought to teach you a lesson by taking you up on it."

I egged her on a little more until we ended up switching entrees. She definitely got the better deal out of it. But I enjoyed watching her eat scallops as the final light of dusk reflected off the pool outside the cafe windows.

Back at the car, I was able to get ahead of her at the last minute and open her door, which she smiled at. Once I settled into the driver's seat, I looked at her and asked what she'd like to do next.

"Get a drink somewhere? Find a place to do a little dancing?"

"No," she said. "I want you to drive me home, and on the way there you can talk to me about what you said earlier - that if you got to know me, it might not make any difference what I have between my legs."

"Sure," I replied, starting the car and getting it into reverse. "If I'm convincing enough, do I get to come in once we're at your place?"

"You get to come in whether you're convincing or not. I'm pretty sure even if I don't buy a word of it, you're going to be so cute trying that I'll want to fuck the shit out of you."

With the car out of the space, I took a second to eye her for signs of sarcasm.

"What?" she asked.

"I'm trying to see if you're serious."

"Ha," she said, smirking. "You're looking in the wrong place."

I followed her eyes downward and saw her slouch and roll her hips to momentarily break the flat lap of her skirt with a telltale bulge.

"Geez, Lindsey," I said, heading for the parking lot exit. "Does art always get you this hot?"

"It's the shellfish," she said wryly. Then she turned a little in her seat to watch me as I drove. "It's not the shellfish. So come on, tell me why any straight guy ever would say me having a cock might not make a difference."

"Okay," I said. "So obviously, I have to start by saying of course it makes a difference."

"Damn, I was hoping you wouldn't give up that easy."

"Ha, ha. Anyway, a lot of things make a difference. You're blond, and my dream girl's always been blond. That makes a difference. But I've dated lots of women who weren't blondes. The hair color thing didn't make enough of a difference to keep me from dating them."

She snorted in a congenial way. "Blonde, brunette, vagina, penis. Really, it's hardly worth noticing which one a girl comes with."

"Hey, I'm going somewhere with this," I said, heading up the street toward a traffic light. "We're not even out of the room where I've hung up all my pretty toilet paintings yet, much less to the one where I make my flower-toilet point."