Signified

Meer (2012)

Ted Parker sits on the edge of his desk like the ivory tower youth pastor he is, shoulders slightly forward, hands clasped loosely in his lap, denim tight around his thighs, lopsided grin twisting his too-perfect features into something tantalizingly approachable.

"Looks like it's that time," he says, half-nodding at the gentle stampede of students in the hall. "On Tuesday we'll really dig into the Kierkegaard. And if any of you need support with your papers on religio, well, my office hours are still on the syllabus."

I am quick to lag as the discussion section disperses. Closing my little notepad, smoothing out all the edges, placing it neatly into my purse, coaxing the wrinkles out of the corners of the bag and making sure the zipper tab lies flat along the zipper. I am not eager for lunch. I am not eager for my afternoon polisci lecture. Mostly I am not eager to approach Ted Parker.

"Remember what you have to do," Beau whispers in my ear.

My breath catches and my eyes dart to my twin brother. My best friend, my tormentor, the asshole who forced me to sign up for this class on the rhetoric of religion with him.

"Is he looking?" I murmur, afraid of the answer, afraid of not knowing. In the quantum knowinglessness there is no Ted Parker.

But there is always Beau.

"Not respectfully," he leers. "Ope, time's up, over, blaow."

Snap back to reality. Ted Parker's shoes are still in the room, which means he is still in the room, and no one else's shoes are in evidence, which means he's waiting for us to leave. I look up and see him staring at me, always with that half-grin. He knows. He has to know.

Content with the situation he has engineered, Beau simply stands back and watches as I pry myself from my seat like old gum and begin shuffling toward the classroom exit. Toward Ted Parker, at the front of the room, the silent smiling siren upon whose rocks—

"Didn't realize you were triplets," Ted is saying, and I wonder what else he might have said to Beau while I dissociated. Is he looking at my Adam's apple?

"Quadruplets, actually." Lies are like breath to Beau. "Jason is sick today, and Meer offered to take notes for him."

"You couldn't be bothered?"

Is that a whole grin? Is Ted flirting with my twin?

"Nah, I'm the bad one," Beau avows. "You know me, I don't even take notes for myself." He runs one hand through his mop of rusty hair and winks.

Is Beau flirting with Ted?

"I'll chastise you for it when you drop below an A minus," Ted laughs.

"Good thing that'll never happen." Beau puts an arm around my shoulders. "But if you need someone to chastise..."

I flush as Ted looks me up and down, and then, with just a hint of steel beneath his carefully curated affability: "Don't bully your sister, Beauby."

"But she liiiiikes it."

Beau's grip on me strengthens in perfect sync with my body's sudden desire to turn into soft cheese. I somehow remain on my feet, and Ted shrugs and begins shoving his own books into his distressed Jansport.

"And it's not like Meer's a saint," Beau continues. "You think she came to take notes for Jason because she's some bleeding heart good girl?" Those eight letters wash over me like post-nut exhaustion. They make me too stupid to breathe, too stupid to anticipate his follow-up. "She's had a crush on you since Occupy."

Ted Parker strings a choked "hah" into an awkward, "haalright, good one."

"I know, I know, as your student, it would probably be harassment in both directions if I involved myself," Beau cheeses, not even trying to dissemble. "She can tell you herself. Tschüß!"

I wobble as he retrieves his arm and saunters toward the margins of my nightmare.

"Be sure to tell him," he says from the doorway.

"Do I have to," I hiss.

"Only if you want—!"

Everything about his manner is cheerful. The beam, the wave, the casual slip into the commotion of the hallway. But there is no joke in the conditional. It's an absolute as long as I want, and the end of wanting is the end of Meer.

Heat from fire and fire from heat. "Sorry about Beau."

"That guy is quite the troublemaker," Ted chuckles. He slings his backpack over one shoulder and jams both hands into his pockets. "Not like your other brother."

"Yeah?"

"Well, you know Jason better than I do, I assume. But he's quiet, seems diligent."

He from she and she from he. "Yeah, he, uh, yeah, he is."

Ted's smile is guileless. The hallway grows quieter, or maybe it has grown quieter. I look at the clock on the wall. Eleven past. I have dithered far too long, and Beau said I had to.

"Um, Mr. Parker—"

"Ted's fine."

I gulp. "Beauby was, uh, yeah. It's." He looks at me just like he does when I stumble through a question or contribution in discussion, with a patience that demands nothing but encourages everything. "I liked the, um, your speech. At Occupy."

"Really?" Ted asks. "To be honest, I don't remember it." A flicker of a flinch, the way he curls forward ever so slightly. "Adrenaline, right?"

Don't tell him it's on YouTube, don't tell him you watch it daily, don't tell him you come when the baton cracks and he screams like Jupiter—"Right." 

"Well, Meer—Meer, right?" I nod. "Short for anything?"

Mirage. Miracle. Meerkat. "No."

"Right, well. Thank you for taking notes for Jason, and for your kindness." But I'd better be off to lunch instead of waiting for your faggy ass to say anything worthwhile. "Uh, you okay there?"

I'm fine. I'm fine! If you want rings in my ears. Beau's commands are the scaffold from which I will hang, but they are also the scaffold against which I build myself. Steel from smelting, and smelting from steel. The embarrassment is its own reward, the ego death its own prize.

"I like you."

Wow, Jace. How pedestrian, how childish.

Ted is about to pardon me. I can see the apology for my own behavior formulating itself behind his eyes.

"Like," I say, to buy myself time, like what, like—

"Me too," Ted says.

"Huh?"

"I like me too." He smiles with his shoulders. What the fuck? "What? It's important to model self-love for impressionable college kids."

Kids.

We're seniors, twenty-two this March, and Ted Parker is a mighty, what, twenty-four?

Kids.

The clock says another five minutes have passed. Maybe there is an insurmountable gap between us, the weight of his patience, the feather of my conviction. I imagine returning home to Beau, commands unfollowed, advances malignantly misconstrued as precocious patter. I imagine Beau's silence, the pain of him refusing to punish me for my failure, the crop and paddle and knife eschewed for the indifference of one brother unbothered by the other.

So I say the worst thing I possibly can.

"My throat is impressionable."

Ted chokes on his own breath, splutters. He can be fazed by more than teargas. His hands leave his pockets, grasp at air, flex—I shudder—and then one goes to straighten the leg of his jeans while the other covers his mouth. He blushes like he has been caught, as though his response to my comment were somehow the bigger of the two transgressions.

The light at the end of the tunnel is Beau praising me for doing what I have to do, but it is this crack in Ted Parker's facade that emboldens me to move toward that light.

"I could show you," I offer, shy of sultry. I belatedly augment the proposition by running one rose gold fingernail along the contour of my throat.

Ted looks at me over his hand as if he is seeing me for the first time.

"Are you serious?"

Bold from coy, and coy from bold. "You were the one staring up my skirt for an hour..."

He puts both hands to his face like he might be about to scream into them, rakes over his forehead, pushes back the edges of his immaculately haphazard wolf cut. "Meer, I don't know you—"

"Take it as a badge for your service."

I try to make it a suggestion, not a plea, but something flashes through him.

"You think I got the shit kicked out of me to win a blowjob?"

"Of course not, but—"

"No, listen here." His backpack falls to the ground with a thud and he walks away, toward the windows, paces back. "I'm not a hero, Meer. You know why I don't remember my speech? I was bullshitting. Buying time."

"That's a valid—"

"Shut. Up." He has never spoken with such finality in class. I shiver. "There's someone in Classics." I must have made a question with my face, because he growls, "no, I will not tell you who. Point is, they told me they'd be at the encampment. I went hoping to get in their good graces." His fists clench and unclench. "And by their good graces I mean their pants."

I let the admission breathe between us.

"Did it work?"

"They never showed."

The primal moment to which I had nutted a few dozen times was not just the cry of a man battered. It was the cry of a man blueballed. I see the bitterness in his face: he stood up to the cops for coochie and all he got was this lousy rib fracture. I feel for his dismay, but it's also my opening. My chance to not just risk it all for Beau's delight, but to win real admiration for my accomplishment. Ted's composure is crumbling, his propriety, his boundaries. I push on the bruise.

"Dang. So you, like, don't even care about Wall Street? The 99%? Privatization of the university?"

"Of course I care," he snaps. "Just not enough."

"Not enough for her, or—"

He power walks past me to the door, coming so close I feel his heat. I am about to apologize, about to beg, when the door slams shut. The bolt strikes. He is still in the room.

"You're more like Beauby than Jason," he says, turning back toward me. "Trouble."

"Yet crucially different from both," I simper. "I'm not your student."

Ted takes a deep breath and returns to his perch at the edge of his desk. He is still flushed, with want or anger or both, and his bulge is noticeable. I worry I have oversold my throat prowess, but Ted Parker is not the person I need to impress. He leans back, fingers straining against the desk top. "Why are you still here?"

"I'm waiting for you to make an impression on me."

"I will not fall for these sophomoric provocations, you brat."

This is a game I know well. "But you're still here."

"Are you recording this?"

"Should I?"

His eyes narrow. "Give me your purse."

I do, and he looks through it. Notepad, pen, house keys, Jason's cellphone carefully cloaked in a cutesy case. He takes out that last and hands it to me.

"Unlock it."

I do, and hand it back to him. He fiddles with my open apps—thankfully just Apple Music and a Safari tab with some outfit inspo—until he is satisfied and places it face-down on the desk.

"Cardigan," he says next.

"Are you asking me to disrobe, Mr. Parker?"

"No, you are proving that you are not here to en_trap_ me, and nothing is going to happen between us unless you make it happen."

"Fair enough."

I slide my cardigan off my shoulders and turn out the meager pockets of my dress. I spin for him, approach him on command, allow him to run his hands down my sides. I squirm, and he digs his fingers into my back to keep me still.

My breath is coming fast and shallow, and I am so thrilled by the velocity of our dalliance that I almost forget to keep him from running his hand over my crotch.

"Mouth," I say, when he raises an eyebrow.

"Mouth," he confirms, and his hand makes its lazy way up to my head.

I wait for him to notice as his fingers find my roots, but today's hairdo passes muster, and his grip tightens with confidence. He drags me down to my knees, pushes my face into the worn flannel of his abdomen. My chin touches his belt buckle.

My hands spider up his legs, coming together just below my face. His fly opens easily, the zip effortless. I look up at him and he looks down. Late winter sun filters through the early-budding gingko branches outside Dwinelle Hall and glints off the white marks on the chalkboard, backlighting Ted Parker with a halo of notes about Cicero. My fingers slip through the fly of his soft boxers and brush the trunk of his cock. He smells like sandalwood and sweat and oh god this is really happening.

Ted Parker's cock is thick and warm and just soft enough to fish it out without too much difficulty. I kiss it, then press my cheek against it. The head brushes past my ear, and Ted takes a sharp breath in as we both realize just how deep into my throat it is going to go. He is hardening to full mast by the time I angle it up and rest it against my forehead, my lips trailing saliva along the length of the frenulum.

"Show me." His breathing is appreciative, but his voice is still harsh. "Mold yourself to me."

I circle the base of his cock with my thumb and forefinger, then pull back just far enough to position the tip in front of my teeth.

Breathe out, and open so it's silent.

Just the wind in the branches, just the distant murmur of hacky sackers, just the grinding of Ted's teeth as I take him with quiet ease. Fullness aches and forces hormones out through my eyes, watering just as quietly as he fills me. I am still looking up at him, and I reach for the hand not in my hair, pull it down to my throat, make him feel the bulge of sheathed cock. His fingers interlace with mine and pull at the skin of my neck.

His eyes are unfocused, his voice the meandering of a dreamer. "Holee shit... Meer..."

My tongue doesn't have much leeway but I move it as best I can, slithering under his girth, caressing him minutely as I hold him for a twenty count. In this agonizing nearstillness he tenses, his breath a voiceless "ffffffh" over his bottom lip.

I am intent on showing him just how completely I can contain him, maybe even milking him like this, drawing out so much of him that he can never look at Beau and Jason the same way again, when we are interrupted by a deafening buzz, and then another, and another, intermittent shocks through Ted's body into my teeth and throat and brain.

He releases my head and I draw myself off him, and it still takes us both another second to realize what is happening. It's my phone ringing, its vibrations amplified by the hollow desk. Ted picks it up.

"It's your brother."

"Which one?" I remember to ask after putting both hands around his cock and squeezing it to the beat of the buzzer.

"Beauby."

I lick Ted's length slowly, never breaking eye contact. The ringing stops, then starts again.

"It's him again," Ted says. "Think trouble's in trouble?"

The only one who could be in trouble would be me, but I'm doing great. Exceeding expectations. I focus on what I need to focus on: getting Ted's cock back in my throat. I close my eyes as I stretch myself onto him, and when I open them again he has put my phone to his ear.

"Yes?" He sounds too composed, so I tighten everything, and he grunts. "No, sorry, what? She just left her phone in the classroom... Mm... I'll—" He clenches his eyes shut, clenches his abdomen taught, clenches the rim of the desk with his other hand, buckling down around the tight-wound spring of his need. "I'll look for her, I think she was—"

I think it's likely that Beau can tell what's happening from the noises Ted is making, but I need to know, I need to hear it, I need the validation, the praise, the witnessing.

So I pop Ted out of my mouth and call "hey Ted," loud and clear enough for it to go through the receiver. Ted's eyes and nostrils flare and he winces.

"Yeah she just—yeah—here, I'll, I'll..."

He trails off and waves the phone in my direction. I take it. "Hey bro."

"Sounds like someone didn't miss his chance to blow."

I don't know how much I can say, beyond what line Ted Parker will freak, but I am in control of his cock and Beau is in control of me, so all is right in the world. I just hum a self-satisfied "mmm."

"Good girl," Beau says, and I feel the twin throbbing twitches in my heart and cock.

"Thank you."

He is quiet for a moment, and I kiss Ted's cock noisily.

"Meer..."

"Yes?"

"Show me his dick."

Electricity arcs through me and the room spins. "I—I can't—"

"Are you telling me you can't do what I ask of you?"

"No—"

"I would never ask you to do something you actually can't do."

My eyes flick upward. Ted Parker seems almost lost in his pleasure, but he was very clear that he didn't want this recorded. "He won't—"

"Get his consent."

I shiver. "Do, do I—"

"Only if you want, Meer. Game's over whenever you say it's over."

Cold dread grabs my gut. The threat behind every one of Beau's commands, the reminder that he holds the trump card in our little game. The ultimate punishment he can bestow upon me. The release of his control, the uncaring return to normalcy and a brotherhood bereft of submission.

"I want," I say, volume and pitch both lowering. "Please, I—"

"Then do it."

The path before me unfolds like a todo list with too many atomized steps. Hang up. Put the phone down. Ask Ted. Beg Ted. Lie to Ted. Cajole Ted. Convince Ted. Pick the phone up. Take a photo. Check the photo. Send it to Beau.

I feel the scruple, the religio, the threshold of the taboo. Jason could write his term paper about this moment, kneeling like a supplicant, sinning like a revolutionary.

"Give me that," Ted says, and Beau laughs, and something connects in my cock-addled brain: Ted put the phone on speaker before handing it to me.

He claims my phone with a tender roughness. His other hand leaves the desk, takes a fistful of my hair, and draws me forward and onto him. I forget to open, so he opens me. It's harsh, and frothy, and I choke a little. I feel wetness everywhere, cheeks, chin, center.

"Look up," he says, and then he pulls back to get an appreciable length of his cock in the frame before it disappears between my swollen lips.

The shutter clicks. And it clicks. And it clicks. And then he thrusts forward and my brain gives up, and he thrusts again, and again, fucking himself on the raw ruin of my throat, and I become nothing but a hole with Beau's hand on my shoulder. There is nothing to want, nothing to have to do. Ted Parker plunges me, scrapes me clean, then he stops—the room stops, the universe stops, and my nose is squashing against his belt buckle and he's as deep in me as he can get and he's pulsing, grunting, twitching and cussing and then my phone drops to the floor like a pin and Ted shoves me off and reels back onto the desk.

I still feel him when he's gone. My senses return slowly with my fingertips first, creeping up my neck, feeling the swelling, the impression of Ted Parker.

His cock is hanging out his jeans, reduced somewhat, and he is panting, staring at me, flushed and ragged.

An understanding follows that is easier than words. He does not know what came over him; he does not know what came over me. I am used, I am injured, I am fulfilled. Halcyon completion glazes the classroom as Ted's eyelids droop, as his jaw slackens. Everything is quiet, and gray, and still: the marine layer has curled up outside Dwinelle Hall like a cat, desaturating the afternoon and muffling the lunchtime campus din. The Cicero on the blackboard is authoritarian and vulgar.

Ted moves to put his cock away, but I stop him. I kiss it, gently, dry it on my cardigan. Instead of forcing it back into its den I ease the journey: undoing the belt, undoing the button, untucking the shirt, restoring everything with tidy reverence. From there my lips roam upward through the soft hairs above the waistband of his boxers, and thence up to his belly button, lifting the hem of his shirt—and he winces and doubles over, and I suck in my breath.

His belly is a canvas splattered purple and green and blue.

"This happened in November," I hear myself murmur.

Ted shifts to the side, rights his clothing, looks away.

I wipe my mouth, my cheeks, dispensing with my affected whorishness as concern for a man I genuinely like takes hold. I see him taking the blows, doubling forward, falling to the ground; I've watched it so many times. "Ted, if you're still bleeding three months later..."

He looks back at me and there's nothing wild about him, nothing frenzied, just a twenty-four-year-old graduate student instructor who's really into Aldo Leopold. Just a wounded idiot who did a performative activism to impress someone and went to jail before the hospital.

"Ted?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine," I insist, and there's a question in his eyes. Shit. Healing from pain, and pain from healing. "Rib injuries are serious, you—"

"No, like, I was fine by Thanksgiving," he says. "I, uh, I went back, to the camp in Oakland..."

"Miss Classics still stringing you along?"

"What? No!" Ted sighs. "No. That's over. Non-starter, doesn't matter. But, I don't know, see the void in a pig's eyes while he's breaking you, changes something." He walks to the window and presses his forehead to the glass, gazing off at the Mario Savio Steps outside Sproul. "I guess it was just my 'there comes a time.'"

And then he is silent and I hate myself.

Every prod, every goad. Everything I have done in this room has ground into Ted Parker's confused wound, that tableau of hematomata and rage wrought by months of confrontations with the iron fabric of our state. The paper Beau made me write for him last semester on Barthes and Eco surfaces—the signifier can lie, but the lie can also lie. What was signified by the video of Ted's beating was his revolutionary earnestness, and it is here, it is tangible, it is real despite the false premise of his participation in the November protest.

The silence stretches and the room seems to expand. I want to hold Ted, to ice his belly and comb his hair and kiss his bruises. But I can't, because this is a mirage and I am his student.

I pick up my phone and shuffle toward the door.

"Meer," he says, still facing away, breath fogging on the pane.

There are a million things I could say to make this worse. I successfully utter none of them. If he says anything else as I unlatch the door and step into the hallway, I don't hear it over the throbbing of my throat.

I am halfway across campus when Beau calls me again.

"Thank god," I gasp, another scruple profaned. "Please, bro, tell me I did good, tell me—"

"What?" I hear the tongue click. "No pic, no praise. Game over, Jace."

"No! No, no, n—wait, wait, I'll send it now—" I send Beau to voicemail by accident as my sweaty fingers fumble their way into my SMS app and send the pictures Ted took. The pictures, and—wait, there's a video? A bonus treat just for me, I think, right before my scattered brain decides to remind me that I will never jack it to Ted Parker ever again. I delete all the local media and call Beau back. It rings once, twice, three times. God, fuck, please—

"Hmm... guess these pass," he says. Relief hammers my chest like a miracle and I feel lightheaded. "Unlike you."

Shit.

"I'll do better," I swear. "I'll do anything—"

"Anything?"

"Yes, if you tell me what to do, I'll—"

"Make an appointment with your GP," he says, and the dizziness intensifies.

I find a bench along Strawberry Creek and collapse onto it. My cardigan is balled up under one arm, my phone slick with sweat and tears against my face. I am missing my polisci lecture.

"Meer."

"Yes?"

"Would a good girl make me repeat myself?"

"N-no..." I take a deep breath. "I'll make an appointment with my GP."

"Good. Do you know what for?"

"Y-yeah. I need to ask for a referral."

"A referral for what, Meer?"

I am surrounded by closing walls—my needs, Beau's patience, the spiked facade of Meer. I try to say something but I choke on the words.

"You're going to need to know how to say it to your doctor."

"I'm... uh... a transwoman—"

"Fucking hell, Meer, did you just omit the space?"

"What?"

"Trans. Woman. Meer. Two words."

I don't think Dr. Normin will nitpick my verbal orthography, but: "Trans." I gulp painfully, wait an extra beat. "Woman."

"That's right," Beau says. "You can do it when you try! Now remember, dysphoria isn't medically required anymore, but it doesn't hurt to lay it on a bit thick. Really convince them you need help."

"I'm not a very good liar."

"Then convince yourself first."

My heart is racing, my mind going a mile a minute. I've seen how much Beau changed on T, his voice lowering, his hair beginning to thin. I've heard our parents yelling at him about irreversible damage, costly mistakes, the death of their daughter, how he'll never give them grandkids. Is that my future? There's only the two of us. Am I really going to sever our family line just because I like when Beau tells me what to do?

"I'm a trans woman." Repeating it doesn't make it true.

"Yes!" Beau says. "My girlfriends will finally stop concern trolling me about my trap brother."

My throat aches. I never wanted to be a trap. But what did I want? It's been particularly murky since Beau transitioned, but my identity has never been separate from my twin's. I thought I wanted to be her, but then I wanted to be him, and now I just want whatever will keep us together.

I think about the cost—pain I can't imagine, hair removal and multiple surgeries—and I think about Ted Parker's bruises. He didn't set out to become an activist. Maybe I can learn to love becoming a woman.

"Hey," Beau says, voice suddenly soft, as though responding to my unspoken vulnerability. "Still there, sis?"

"Yeah."

"This really can all be over when you want it to be, you know?"

There is no provocation in his words, and that just makes me sadder. This would all be so much easier if Beau were a sadistic psycho bent on forcefemming me. His sadism is learned, practiced, affected: a tool he has studied in order to grant me release.

"I'm sorry I'm a shitty brocon failgirl," I say.

"It's okay, Meer. We can fail at being girls together."

I lean back on the bench, allow my eyes to drift up with the woodpeckers in the redwoods. It feels good to stretch the front of my neck, but what I really want—what I'll never have—is Beau's lips kissing it better. "Thanks."

"Really hot pics by the way. Ol' Teddy Parkinson is one helluva cameraman."

"Don't make it weird."

"Can't," he laughs. "It started out weird."

"And whose fault is that?"

"The chancellor's, I believe?"

"Pff, reports of the chancellor's involvement in campus police brutality are greatly exaggerated," I say, and then Beau and I mock in perfect sync, "he was busy golfing with oligarchs!"

He chuckles, and I breathe a little easier.

"I'm making chicken noodle soup," he says, a hair before I'm about to say goodbye. "Good for the throat."

"Thanks bro."

It is only after hanging up, after finding a bathroom, after making it most of the way home, that I remember what Ted Parker said as I left. 

"See you Tuesday."