Wednesday morning I awoke without a penis again. I was ready to call the whole thing a hoax (note: I almost called it “fake news” but stopped before I did something I’d hate myself for). Only it had appeared just yesterday and also showed up in the shower.

I spent some time, water washing down my back looking at it. It sprang straight out of my mons, had no testes, and was otherwise exactly like my old penis. It seemed to only appear when it was erect, and my arousal didn’t trigger an erection every time. This looked to just be a case of system checks.

It went away before I could decide whether I was going to masturbate, the way morning wood just stops. I dried myself off and got dressed in inconsequential jeans and a t-shirt.

It was a tech day, which meant that it was a loft day, and after the roller coaster of the past two days I was very ready to get fucked.

Wait no.

Was I?

Well judging from the way my nipples reacted to the idea it was a definite maybe.

Okay, it was a perhaps.

A maybe/perhaps.

Nothing interesting happened in class, only it took a million hours.

I met the rest of the crew outside the auditorium. Autumn and Bree snatched kisses. Then Autumn said, “Ready to go?”

“I’ve been ready all day.” I had kept my tail hidden but now I pulled out a head band and scooped my hair into it. Then put my back to the wall and let my tail unfurl with a sense of relief.

Regular Dave came up to the side of behind me and scooped me into a hug. Then he held my chin for a kiss. I don’t know what my tail did, but it was very energetic about feeling his tongue on mine. “No tail in the workshop,” he said, and booped my nose.

I nodded, “I’m getting better at putting it away, and I’m not always conscious of where it is when it’s out.”

“Well tuck it into your pants, or tie it back. I’m not willing to get some gee men all over the production just because you got your tail caught in a band saw.”

“I’ll come up with a solution.”

“Everyone drink enough water today?” Rachel came up on the group.

There was a chorus of “yups” and then we all started heading for the doors. I didn’t know what water had to do with whatever we were doing, but I was willing to go along.

What we were doing was piling into cars, and holding hands, and getting out infront of Planned Parenthood. And then we were all going inside and sitting in the waiting room, because it was Free STD Testing Day. The place was popular that day. They had enough pens and clipboards, but not enough chairs. I snagged one but Regular Dave and Bree had to sit on the floor.

There were a lot of condoms in the waiting room. Just boxes of condoms in vibrant colors and clear wrappers, waiting for you to take a handful or two. There were also a bunch of pamphlets on family planning, and different kinds of birth control, and wellness checks for babies.

We had each been given a slip of paper to write down our deeply personal sexual histories. Deeply personal for me, communal for everyone else.

Like, “Have I ever recieved anal?” Regular Dave asked. Out loud and not in his head. The general agreement was that he had not.

“Have I?” Bree asked. There was a chorus of derisive, “yeahs” and someone threw a condom at her face.

“Anyone know how many sexual partners I’ve had?” Wee David said.

“Just leave it blank,” Sarah told him.

My tail was in the chair wrong, it couldn’t slide out the back. This allowed me to tip my hips to the side and put my feet in the chair, let the tail hang out; and with my clipboard on my knees no one could see that I was putting a lot of zero and no on the page.

But with so many of us there it was easy to stay quiet and let the conversation pass around me. I got up second to turn my slip in and when I came back to my chair, Regular Dave was sitting in it.

I wanted to imagine that I hesitated to sit in his lap, but I didn’t. Not even almost. And another little piece of my boyself got chipped away.

I sat in the uncomfortable chair and watched with morbid intrest as three vials were taken from my arm. I had been told I had very good veins. I spent the next five minutes not following that thread. Instead I watched a stream of my blood fill up the vial, and tried to attach it as a metaphor to my life.

A vaccutainer filling with my blood was maybe not the best schema, but for the past three months I had been picking up and discarding schema, and for the moment it seemed appropriate. The vial had been sitting there, minding its own business, when a needle had pierced its lid. I assummed a vial would find that unsettling, mabe not painful. Now the vial was quickly filling with blood, and there was nothing it could do to stop it. But for a vaccutainer vial, maybe blood was friend?

In the way therapy had trained my mind to---the way I hated---this sparked an epiphany in me. A desire I had been acting on for at least 4 weeks and never consiously recognized.

I wanted, very badly, to loose my virginity. I wanted to loose it in the loft, surrounded by other people making love---no, fucking---no...love fucking? I didn’t want to do it alone. I wanted to be with everyone.

Because...

Because I loved them all?

“You’re done, hon,” the phlebotomist finished tying the gause onto my arm.

I got down, “When will I know the results?”

“Two weeks,” she opened the door for me.

I went into the waitingroom, gave Regular Dave a hug, and had to pull him down to nip his earlobe. “Do we have time to run to Bass Pro before Tech?”

Bass Pro Shop in Northfield is the Casa Bonita of camping supply, hunting supply, fishing supply, hiking supply, and camping/hunting/fishing/hiking fasion supply. Did you know that Lu Lemon has an outdoors line? Well you can buy it at Bass Pro. While you’re there you can choose from over 3,000 different hunting rifles, grab a 100 pound draw compound bow, a utility knife that’s basically a Zord, and the same backpack worn by a corpse on Everest. As long as you’re at it, take a break in the full menu Starbucks in the middle of the store, look at the fish stocked in the aqaurium, and sketch one of the 100 trophy animals laid out in the store.

Like Casa Bonita it has a waterfull.

Unlike Casa Bonita it has a cyclops skull.

Regular Dave pointed it out as we went up the stairs to the camping department by saying, “Check out the cyclops skull.”

I stared at it for a few seconds before I said, “Oh! It’s a---”

“Cyclops. Yeah I said.”

“No it’s a---”

“I mean, you can keep saying it’s a cyclops skull, and I’m just going to keep agreeing with you.”

“But it’s---”

Regular Dave put his finger to my lips, in a way I found uncertainly arousing, “If someone showed up with one of those in your tiny European villiage, seven hundred years ago, how could you have any doubt that it was a cyclops?”

I took his finger away, got a little hot as I imagined sucking it into my mouth, and used it to take the rest of his hand and lead him up the stairs. “I was just going to say that you’re right of course. It’s a cyclops skull.”

The rest of the group had scattered on contact with the buildings air conditioning. Autumn, and Sarah had gone for the knives. Wee David and Rachel were watching Rachel pick out black leggings. And Big Davey had gone to look at flies.

I took Regular Dave, looking a little perplexed, to the camping supplies. There were only 3 different kinds of foam sleeping pad there. The rest were air. I considered the foam pads for awhile. Regular Dave considered the air pads just as gavely. Finally I checked the dimensions on one box and asked him, “How big is the loft again?”

“The sitting area is eight foot by twelve.” Then, “Oh! That’s a really good idea. We can just screw them down with---”

“Hush you pretty face,” I told him. “This is my plan.” I picked up the box and looked around for someone in a vest. I waited too long and was balancing the box on top of my head when a man in a vest caught my eye and came over. “Do you think we could feel the material?” I asked him.

The employee kniffed the tape off the box and pulled the whole pad out in a roll. Regular Dave came over and squished it between his fingers, the shrugged at me. “Not what I’m looking at, doll,” I told him. Then I laid my whole hand on the foam and lifted it up. My hand was dry, but the foam still made sticccch, sticccccch, sticccccccccccccccccch noises, as I pulled my palm away.

Regular Dave managed to convey the sentence “Oh, I see,” using only his eyebrows.

“Can we look that this one?” I held up another box.

I think the employee felt a need to defend his wares, “You aren’t going to hear that noise. Unless you intended to sleep on it naked.”

Regular Dave and I exchanged a look, and at the same time had to swallow back a snicker. It didn’t go unnoticed, but it did go unremarked upon. The employee opened up the next box. This foam didn’t have whatever glossy saran wrap finish the other pad had.

And because some effects happen before causes, the foam was a material that wouldn’t be on the market for another 5 years.

“Good thing too,” Rachel said. She had come up behind us and was much faster on the uptake than Regular Dave. “The only other brand is made in Texas.”

We all gave the box on the shelf a cool once over. Denver was a smaller city than Housten, and we were technically city folk. But the worst outdoorsman in the city of Denver was a better outdoorsman than the best outdoorsman in the state of Texas.

Rachel grabbed a box of the good stuff, looked at the dimensions, and began mouthing numbers.

“We need nine point six,” I told her as I grabbed another box. “But I don’t think anyone will be under the couch, so I think we can get away with eight.”

“That sounds fine,” She said, as she gathered a second. “We’ll need a place we can take off our shoes too.”

Regular Dave trailed behind us as I said, “I was hoping we could find bins for them. Or those mesh laundry bags?”

“I think we’d want to go to Target for those,” Rachel said. She checked her phone, “And Tech starts in...two hours and twenty three minutes ago?”

I looked at the early morning sun pouring in the East windows, and looked at my own clock, “No, it starts in four hours and...seventy two minutes?” We compared our phones with Regular Dave’s. His was 31 minutes slower than mine and Rachel’s at the same time.

Autumn and Sarah came over as the sun set behind them, their phones were no better. When we caught up with Big and Wee Davey and David, and got even more contradictory data; the consensus was that a satalite had been knocked out of the sky by God’s left testicle, and this gave us a perfect excuse to be late (and stay late) for Tech.

I paid for my sleeping pads with the USPS issued bank account chip in my hand, Rachel paid 3 tarnished farthings for her pants, and we all walked to Target while I tried to figure out if something weird was going on.