Chapter 1

Matt was in bad shape when we’d first met.

Not physically – though I suppose he wasn’t really fit, just thin – mentally, however, the poor guy was practically limping.

He said that coming out had been easy at first. His mom took a minute to come around, but the signs had been there for a long time and so after a few awkward questions, she returned to that love of a child that transcends all. His dad, to the surprise of everyone in the family, immediately embraced his son’s true identity. The Manchester-cum-Halifax union man of forty years in the oil and gas sector had embraced his trans son with open arms and more than a few jokes about all of the fishing and hockey that they were going to do now – the forced irony of it being that they already did that together incessantly anyway. That looks can be deceiving is still a mental leap for some, but it sounds like the family all came around relatively quickly.

Unfortunately, deceptive looks run in both directions: while he thought his coworkers would be understanding, all it took was one call from a “concerned parent” and all of a sudden his youth outreach job at the school district was in jeopardy.

Days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months until a special meeting with the parent-teacher advisory council determined that until such time that a specific policy could be made for “high-intimacy roles,” where staff would often interact with students one-to-one, they would “pause” these efforts and roll-back programs. Whether the parents didn’t want these programs to begin with, or if they genuinely felt threatened by Matt, I don’t know - but either way, the bureaucratese with which these issued this pronouncement basically made it air-tight from a discrimination perspective – it’s not discrimination if you close an entire program, instead of firing the one trans person who runs it.

With the economy back then basically in the shitter and only a diploma in social work as his credentials, Matt got creative quickly to make ends meet. He took the morning shift at Carol-Anne’s Bread Basket, a high-end pastry and bread shop that mostly did pop-ups.

The eponymous owner was a straight-laced elder Millennial who’d clawed her way out of Instagram obscurity to manage one of the city’s hottest food vendors – but who still ran on razor-thin margins and was accordingly wary of overspending on things like certified help.

Matt’s beleaguered appearance and prior experience in restaurants made Carol-Anne somewhat piteous and she decided to give him the morning shift helping her prep her nearly-industrial kitchen in her garage. The hours were grueling and he could see why this influencer-cum-baker was always at her wit's end, but at least it helped pay the bills.

I think it was about a month or so into working there that we met.

Whatever my Marxist pretensions, my Millennial affection for artisanal food was stronger. I frequently made the trip to the Halifax Seaport Farmer’s market to grab an array of homemade goods. I placated the voice that told me this was an overpriced commodification of basic goods and bit into $16.99 sharp cheddar and kept perusing the market. I’d done a good circle and was preparing to leave – I was working on a piece for my friend Aditi’s ‘zine and needed to really get cracking – when I noticed him.

Wheeling another cart of freshly baked sourdough loaves from Carol-Anne’s car, I noticed the mouse-ish form of Matt coming into focus near the rear entrance to the market.

He had a practically Dickensian look about him. His babyish blonde curls were weighed down by flour and he had what looked like dough plastered on his left temple. His face was sallow, with cheekbones standing at attention and pointing outwardly almost aggressively. His little button nose offered the only contrast, the cool November air nipping enough to give it a cherry-red tone. He was bundled – practically swaddled, in fact – in a variety of coats and scarves and all I could really see was that he was slight. Even with all of the physicality of his job, his obviously thin frame wasn’t able to add enough mass to even him out to his work.

I practically floated over to the stand where he began unloading things into the display case. Carol-Anne was serving a long line of customers and paid neither of us any mind.

As I watch him stack the bread more closely and slowly faced inwards, he gradually took notice of me and looked up with a somewhat startled expression.

“Oh, uh, did you want to see anything in here?”

I smiled awkwardly, realizing I had just followed this stranger over here without any plan.

“No, I… I was just looking, thanks.”

When he looked at me, I could see the deep hazel of his eyes. They were inquisitive, but scared, too. As I would later learn, the past few months had really shaken him – unexpectedly poor and isolated from his work, he felt sapped and unable to trust. I’ll always be thankful that those eyes told me that he was trustworthy.

His eyes were so intense I looked down almost immediately, blushing.

“It all looks good, though.”

My cheeks were reddening as I struggled to keep this interaction going.

“Do you… do you, uh, make a lot of this?”

His employer must have glared at him because he quickly went back to stacking bread and stopped his staring at me.

“I help sometimes – getting the ingredients ready, sometimes I’ll add stuff to the mixer, but mostly I’m prep and clean-up. And sometimes I help Carol-Anne with the markets like these.”

Desperate to keep going, I prodded further.

“That sounds pretty darn close to making stuff. Haha. Is this your full-time gig?”

He stacked one last loaf of bread in the case and then brushed his gloved hands of the flour.

“No, I run around and do a bunch of stuff. Gotta make ends meet, you know?”

“Uh huh! Gotta keep the capitalists happy somehow.”

He smiled for the first time at that. It was bright and rich - the way the light moved across each beautiful tooth had a texture to it. I felt like I’d watched the unveiling of a painting for the first time. A private art gallery installation, just for me.

But just like that it faded as he looked down and grabbed hold of the cart again. Carol-Anne was giving him dirty looks again and he took the hint. He smiled in a more subdued way this time, only those beautiful lips showing, and began to walk away with a nod.

“Nice chatting with you,” I said as he walked away.

He turned just his head around and affirmed this with a nod.

I didn’t see Matt for a few weeks after that. I decided to make my trips more frequently there to see if I would catch him again, but didn’t have any luck.

The next time was not at the market, in fact, but at the local grad student bar. I was (endlessly) trying to finish my thesis, a critical reexamination of the work of Peter Sloterdijk and how it relates to the creation of artificial intelligence. Because – or perhaps in spite – of how far I was falling behind, I often invited a coterie of friends to bat ideas around with while we drank bad beer.

I was deep in an argument about the definitional limits of “anthropotechnics,” when a slight voice “erhmed” next to us and my finger-pointing waned for a moment.

“Hey there, folks, your server is just signing off for the evening, so, I’ll be taking over. My name is Matt.”

Suddenly and without warning, there were those beautiful eyes again, piercing right at me with what I knew must be recognition.

I was wearing almost exactly the same navy blue button-up and black slacks as when I met him the first time and being a six foot-three half-Arab guy in Halifax made me more recognizable than most.

I smiled awkwardly again and thanked him for coming over. We looked at our half-empty glasses and all agreed that anthropotechnics needed at least another round until it was sorted.

Matt dutifully brought our next round, and then another one after that.

My friends decided to call it after the third beer, but I stuck around saying that I wanted to “eat and think” a little longer – naturally omitting that I also wanted to flirt.

When Matt came to drop off my food, I was sufficiently boozed to ask him if we’d met before.

My suspicion of recognition proved accurate and we began chatting in what was a mercifully graveyard-like night at the bar.

He mentioned that he was still working for Carol-Anne, but that he’d finally be able to ease off the morning shifts now that he’d gotten this gig. It was tight, but getting better since he’d lost his job.

I inquired about that and found him, perhaps because of the exhaustion, strikingly candid. He told me about coming out and the subsequent blow-up at work.

“Sorry, I must be crazy telling this all to a stranger.”

“No, of course not. I asked – and I am truly sorry, as well. That’s fucked up that they did that to you.”

He smiled again, that brilliant artwork on display again, just for me.

A few more customers walked in, interrupting the next part of the story, but I ate each French fry at a glacial pace and waited for his next pass-by.

The story picked up again as he caught me up through the trials and tribulations of working for the sometimes generous, always awkward Carol-Anne. And that brought us to now, where he’d secured a part-time server role at the campus pub.

I decided that he was going to stay and I was likely to encounter him here at the bar going forward, so, I didn’t go hard and ask him out right away, but did say that I hoped we’d see one another again.

My gut was right, and I saw Matt at least weekly as November rolled into December, and then the Christmas break hit. It turned out both our families were still local, so, I found a reason to pop out “to keep from getting bored” and stop in at the pub.

It was just before New Years when I asked him out. A few days, I think. Some friends were having a warehouse party and the idea was that we needed as many bodies as possible to keep us all from freezing inside. Matt was not only a living, breathing human, but extremely cute to boot, and I decided that he would make the perfect date.

I didn’t exactly know if he was queer, but I shot my shot, as the kids say, and it worked. He smiled bashfully, that smile and those eyes already making me feel as warm as if we were embraced, and said that while he “wasn’t a big party person,” he’d be happy to be able to spend some more time with me.

We met at the warehouse, an old fruit storage space that hadn’t yet been turned into condos, with the rest of the city’s hipsters, communists, ravers, and a few suburban kids desperate to find a scene.

He arrived in a notably different outfit then I’d seen him in before; even in the cold, he still crushed it: it was an old jumpsuit, probably for dock workers, that he’d altered himself with patches and a splash of colour across the back. It was strangely thin, I guess because it was some kind of performance wear, and let me see his slight frame in all of its glory.

He was still mouse-ish, but his face looked a little fuller now, less sallow. His eyes were a little brighter, and he smiled less self consciously. He looked cuter than ever, I decided.

The party unexpectedly included a ramshackle hot tub that someone had built out of an old industrial freezer and filled with boiling water. My friend Kelsey was an electrician and deemed it “sketchy as fuck, but not deadly” and so I managed to cajole Matt into joining me in the tub.

I absolutely intended to be a gentleman, but when Matt stripped off his top and pants and I could see his waifish physique, it was all I could do to resist taking him home and force-feeding him while swaddling him in a blanket. His skin was thankfully less sallow than when we’d first met, but otherwise everything about him looked reedy to the point of discomfort. Below his healthier-looking face, his clavicle was boney and had the striations of muscles that extended down past his binder and into craggly abdominals that had a clear, wiry strength to them, but none of the heft I’d have expected from someone who lifted and carried things all day. Below his simple black boxer briefs extended beefier looking legs.

He smiled self-consciously as he saw me trying hard not to undress him completely with my eyes. He patted his disproportionate quads with a laugh and said that one of the upshots of being poor was you got strong legs from having to bike everywhere.

I felt my heart pitter and patter.

Once we were in the hot tub, we began working our way through the remainder of a bottle of Smirnoff that I’d found in the reading room. Later, he and I slowly inched closer, an initial explanation of my interpretation of Sloterdik’s non-dualistic thinking leading us to talk about the differences between the things we desire and the things we act on.

It was as if he was daring me to kiss him.

The clincher came when he said that I was being too dogmatic that all dualisms inevitably collapsed. Choice, he said, was an important part of the equation.

“What if I wanted to kiss you, but felt like it was inappropriate? Or I wasn’t sure how you’d react?”

I felt like my face went slack-jawed.

“I could let that tension remain; let the question go unanswered. What erases the dualism of what is, and what could be, is what I choose. And that’s not pre-ordained.”

Trying desperately to stay cool, I tried to prompt this further.

“And what if you knew I wanted you to kiss me? Maybe it was pre-ordained after all?”

He furrowed his brow, eyes ever-piercing.

“Are you trying to talk me out of kissing you?”

“No…. in fact, I would like that very much.”

With a casualness and poise that felt were at odds with his mouse-ish persona, he reached in and kissed me. Playful little advances soon became pitched battles between our mouths and tongues as we wrapped our arms around one another and started to get a little handsy beneath the water.

We weren’t the only ones trying to have some fun on the sly, but when I reached under his bando and started tweaking his nipples, one of our hot tub compatriots tapped me on the shoulder and, with a bemused smile, pointed their thumb outside.

We smiled sheepishly and got our things to leave. The air was frigid, so, we got ourselves together quickly and agreed that a sojourn to my place was the perfect next step.

We didn’t fuck one another that night, but he stayed over, finally swaddle-able in my bed, as I wrapped every inch of myself around him to keep him warm and safe.

This became a common occurrence as he stayed over more and more often into the deep of winter. I couldn’t have been happier.

In March I formally invited him to move in with me, saving him from living in his parent’s basement and me a little money.

We slipped into domestic life seamlessly. He was a notable minimalist, but gradually our bathroom began to fill up with the material residue that a partner tends to leave behind them. First it was a cute little bottle of curl-friendly shampoo. Then a few brushes and skin scare products. Matt still wore a little blush or from time to time, so, our little make-up collections meshed together, too. And around the house, a few of his books here and there made their way, not displacing, but certainly diversifying my shelves full of old dead white guys. I felt the stress and uncertainty of many years slowly being shed; a coming home in more than one way.

In the year since the dismissal from the school, he’d let go of the brutal shifts at Carol-Anne’s (who gave him a teary goodbye and a $500 bonus for all of his hard work that year) and taken up working as an elderly assistant at an elder care facility. It wasn’t quite social work, but he took to it like a fish to water. Soon his face was cheerily coming home every night with stories of the sheer fuckery and mischievousness that his charges could get up to – not to mention the drugs.

We snagged more than a few bags of sweets from his notional employers, but, given that it was illegal there, we justified ourselves by never taking their whole stash. Their living agreements didn’t allow for any illicit substances, so, it was a “use it or lose it” policy that Matt sheepishly enforced.

The more stable job and living situation really let Matt bloom in every way possible. He was happier, more outgoing, and seemed more and more comfortable in his body. Now, I was over the moon for the general nature of his happiness and increasing stability, but there was one part of this blooming I found myself particularly attracted to:

As we passed our six-month anniversary and got into the summer, I noticed that Matt’s pants weren’t quite fitting him the way they used to. He wasn’t an orderly at the care home, so, he usually just wore slacks and a button-up. But what used to be pancake butt was now shaping out into something more rounded - it even had a little bit of a bounce to it. A bubble-ier butt also partnered with wider hips to make it increasingly difficult to make one clasp of his pants find the other.

His cheeks were also thicker, losing some of that starvation chic he could have claimed when we first met. The full ruddy colour that had come to him now gave him a somewhat elfin quality, and it was all I could do not to chomp his chubbifying cheeks right off sometimes.

When we came to our one-year anniversary that winter, Matt looked positively edible as he came down the stairs in his suit. It was a single-button affair he’d gotten on sale a month or so ago, striking that beautifully androgynous balance between tapering and looseness. The navy blue looked incredible against his eyes, and the lapels puffed out proudly to either side of his chest. Also puffing out, however, was the little belly that had made it impossible to button his suit closed and which was stretching a few of his shirt-buttons tight enough to see a few slivers of flesh if one caught him at the right angle. His hips had continued to expand and now you could see his babyish love-handles also fighting at the edges of his pants and looming just over the edge of his belt at some parts. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his blazer and I could just make out the start of the sleeve he’d been started laying out on his left arm – an old man with a cane swinging it wildly, surrounded by flowers. His delicate, tapered wrists, though, made the contrast of his softening arms more apparent.

Our date involved a recklessly large meal at our favourite Afghani place, the plates continuing to come long after we’d had our fill. Despite my size, I tapped out first and watched as Matt ate his way through half of another platter before finally waving his napkin in surrender.