Butterfly Weed

Franklynne, 2025

Nouglas was putting on his shoes.

"Don't forget this," I said, holding out the drawing pad he'd filled while we'd played.

He grinned up at me, shook his head, and said, "you keep that." His smile, his satisfaction—he was glowing, and I knew I would remember this exchange for years to come. "When I'm a big-time famous painter man, that sketchbook will be incredibly valuable."

When was the last time I'd seen him so confident?

I stood in the foyer for a while after he was gone, clutching the pad to my chest. And then I opened it.

I wasn't anywhere to be found.

I had assumed he was drawing me, sketching my body, my pleasure; instead, I found aspens and herons and pampas grass and snow-peaked mountains and water, water he'd somehow made shimmer with nothing but a single 2B pencil—all without looking at the page.

Suddenly I felt very small and lost. I wasn't upset, exactly, but I paled before the creativity he'd found in our dalliance. I needed someone to hold me, to witness my exclusion from the thing I'd helped birth. I needed my partner.

But she wasn't there, so I turned to my tools, and in short order I was back on my bullshit.

I had a spreadsheet open, and I was listing the things we'd done to each other.

In Portia's column, I had:

• might have cornered me into agreement re: sex work?
• cheated (her words)
• iced me out of trans discussion
• cleaned up burnt lemon bars
• ran away
• left a fairly gentle note
• looked way too good in that dress

Was I being vindictive? Was I trying to even the score? Was I trying to win? 

I liked to think not. Building out these tables was somewhere between self-soothing and grounding. It was a tool that helped me keep track of the facts. It was so, so easy to lose track of the facts.

In my column:

• must have done something to make her not want to talk to me
• resented the sex work
• ran away
• slept with nouglas (kind of)

Was the "kind of" splitting hairs? It felt important. 

On the one hand I'm not so naive as to think that you need to stick a penis in a vagina for it to be sex. On the other hand, what we'd done genuinely felt completely unlike anything I'd ever done with Portia. If what Portia and I had been doing all these years was fucking, what I did with Nouglas earlier today had to be a different beast entirely.

With Portia, it had always been about... I don't know, pleasure, sure, and closeness, yes, but it was kind of the structure of the thing, a predictable sexual narrative that fit neatly into both society's stories about romance and the spreadsheet I'd made to track how often we were fucking in a clinical effort to ensure our "spark" didn't "die."

Despite my best efforts, die it did. She basically never initiated, and I, well. I learned to stop reaching.

I think that's what made Portia's initial push to do sex work so baffling to me. Of all the careers she could have chosen, she went for the one thing she couldn't even do with me? The number of times I had sat there waiting for some cake or pie to finish baking, wondering if I should try paying my spouse—

But that wonder had never held up to scrutiny. Anxiety always turned my stomach. Would I even want sex with her, if I were paying? And would she even accept me as a client? I was afraid of the answers.

I hadn't shared these fears with anyone—not even Nouglas, though I think he'd sensed the hidden dimension of my unease, given how often he needled me about "how I was doing" on our late-night calls. I hadn't felt entitled to them.

Until now.

My inaction had borne fruit, my greatest fear made real.

Portia was gone.

I slumped back in my office chair. Spreadsheets might bring me comfort but they wouldn't bring back my wife. Her note sat on the desk in front of my keyboard, wrinkled from a hundred anxious rereads. She hadn't said not to contact her, but she hadn't exactly been ready to talk last I'd seen her. Was I ready to talk? 

I opened my phone, scrolled through my contacts, failed to find her with the other Ps. Of course. I scrolled back up to the Cs, found her, and tapped 'edit contact.'

And then I sat there, for a very, very long time, because she'd been pretty adamant that she didn't feel like "Portia" with me.

I couldn't sleep.

I kept picturing Portia. 

Alone in a cheap motel. Or maybe living it up at the Park Hyatt with Abi?

I didn't like either option, and thus realized a horrible dilemma in my heart. I neither wanted her to be miserable, nor happy. I couldn't bear the thought of my love suffering... but the thought of her gallivanting around Angels, more herself than she would be with me—

At first it pinged as jealousy.

By the time dawn began to creep into my office, I realized it was something else: a deep and bitter disappointment. I had to acknowledge that the only thing in my spreadsheet that mattered was the first item in my own list. I had failed to give Portia the security needed to be herself with me. I'd complained about Portia's disregard of our wedding vows to Nouglas—now I understood that I'd broken them first.

So I texted "Charles" a probably inadvisable wall of text conceived of sleep deprivation and 7 a.m. coffee. I was sorry, I'd fucked up, I would do everything I could to give her what safety I could, we could talk on her terms and on her schedule—a full-scale concession with neither demand nor dignity.

For my troubles, "Charles" left me on read.

For five fucking days.

Somehow I went through the motions of my life.

Well, not somehow. I knew how. I had Nouglas in my ear constantly, reminding me to eat, to shower, to brush my teeth, to sleep. I of course disregarded some of his insistences. I didn't take time off work, and I didn't email my old therapist.

I struggled to sleep, but otherwise did a good impression of being a functioning human. No one at my job was the wiser, and I got through an hour-long phone call with my mom without revealing my troubles.

One thing that surprised me was that things between me and Nouglas didn't feel different. Neither our dalliance nor his new role as my remote caretaker had changed the vibes. Talking to him remained easy, weaving strands of snark and affection in the familiar tapestry that was our friendship.

When he invited himself over on Wednesday to lose to me at Mario Kart, there was no charge, no hint of anything salacious. I didn't ask him about the sketchbook. His lips didn't invite mine. I felt neither alone nor together, and it was nice, in a naive way, until my phone buzzed in the middle of our eighth race.

"Charles" had finally gotten back to me.

"Is it her?" Noug asked.

I didn't respond, which was confirmation enough.

I just kept rereading my spouse's bewildering plea.

"Please don't say these things, Frankie. None of this is your doing. I fucked up and got carried away with my clients' fantasies. I'd like to talk, really talk, husband and wife, about how I can fix things, if you'll let me. I'll do anything. Please."

My heart sank further with each reread, as that one constellation of pixels pierced me again and again, burning into my retinae.

Husband.

At some point Nouglas wrested my phone from my grip, read the text, put an arm around me, and said, "it was never going to be simple."

I knew that.

But it hurt.

Our house felt too challenging, and we'd never been "sit across the table from each other" people, so we met the next day at the university's botanical garden.

There was a faint drizzle when I parked, and I got both umbrellas out of my trunk.

A small part of me resented that Nouglas hadn't asked if I wanted him there—not that I would have said yes. That same part of me wanted one of Portia's clients to come along, sure that she would be more honest in their presence. These were idle thoughts designed to hurt myself, and I did my best to focus on the breath hanging in front of my face, the wet slap of others' footsteps, the flowers and trees heavy with precipitation all too rare in fire-prone Stewardland.

Footsteps softer than most approached, footsteps I would have recognized in any amount of rain on any kind of path, footsteps that told me breakfast is ready and there are flowers on the table and don't worry about the dishes and you're beautiful even disheveled, underslept, fixated on some dumb algorithm for work.

They were my husband's footsteps, and my slowly breaking heart crumbled further with the inevitability of that thought.

"Hey."

I opened my mouth to at least reciprocate the shy greeting. I started crying instead. No, idiot, give her the umbrella, she didn't bring one, like you knew she wouldn't—but the stubbornness of my internal narrative wavered as I took in his damp suit, his tidy five-day beard, his brand-new buzz cut.

Maybe I was wrong.

Maybe this was Charles.

"Frankie, oh, no—" He wanted to hug me, didn't know if he was allowed. I was sobbing. I think both umbrellas were on the ground. "Honey, how, what—"

And then I was on the ground, and he didn't try to ask any more questions. He knelt beside me and put both arms around me. He smelled of cologne. He'd never smelled of cologne. Every noticing deepened my distress, and I clung to him, pulling on the fabric of his costume, thinking of my spreadsheets and failures and wishing more than anything that Abi or Catha or Grace would come take him away from me.

We never even entered the botanical garden. Charles bundled me into my own passenger seat, turned the seat warmer on, and took the wheel. We'd always joked that he was my passenger princess. Everything was wrong. I cried the whole way home, disconsolate and unable to express why.

"Can I come in?" he asked, after escorting me to the front door.

I almost shook my head. I should have. A quick fantasy played out in my head: I could tell her that what I needed, if she was actually ready to do "anything," was for her to come back to me. Being dommed into her true gender was her thing, right?

Instead I shrugged.

We dripped all over the foyer. He put on a kettle. I pulled on his sleeve.

"You did the linens," he commented, mildly, as I took him to bed.

He probably thought it was makeup sex.

But makeup sex would have been me and Portia finding each other across the vast expanse that now lay between us. Makeup sex would have been fingers tangled in hair, smooth skin on skin, halting and unfamiliar and vulnerable and intense. Makeup sex would have been me finding ways to make her feel like I was eating her out; makeup sex would have been her using fingers and lips and maybe toys to teach me all the new ways we could do things.

This wasn't that.

I was pretty sure I heard her crying, after, in the bathroom. But it was hard to tell over the fan and the sound of the shower.

Hours later, while he slept next to me and I wondered whether I would ever sleep again, I realized I didn't know how to tell Nouglas what had happened. A dark chuckle escaped me, then another, and then I was laughing. I should have been worrying about how to tell my wife that I'd fucked my best friend, but here I was, afraid my best friend would judge me for fucking my husband!

"You okay?" Charles asked, half-asleep.

"Yeah," I lied, still laughing.

He turned over and mumbled something incoherent.

I went downstairs and laughed, then cried, then eventually, mercifully, lost consciousness on the living room sectional.

I woke to footsteps, then rummaging in the kitchen, then the whistle of the kettle and a whispered "shit" as the person I'd vowed to protect tried to make me a silent breakfast.

Checking the time on my phone I saw that I was very late to work. I also had a number of texts from Noug I couldn't imagine answering if I didn't change my current trajectory.

I pulled myself to my feet, shivered, pulled a couch blanket around me, and stumbled toward the decision I knew I needed to make.

"Portia."

I think I left most of myself on that couch—my tears, my guilt, my cowardice.

She opened her mouth, and maybe even spoke. It was probably an objection, but the sliver of me confronting her was undeterred. 

"This can't work," I heard myself say.

Fingers brushed her cheek, felt the beard I'd always known she hated. Beyond that her ear, and then the wretched absence of her long blonde locks. Had I really never known? Had I really never made a secret spreadsheet weighing evidence for and against her being trans?

"I hope someday you'll give me a chance to show you that I see you."

No more objections, just the smell of overdone bacon.

I took her hand, uncurled her fingers, and put my wedding band in her palm.

"Franklynne," I heard, and maybe, "wait."

But I didn't wait.

The naivety I'd left in the living room wanted to talk things through, to hear and be heard, to fight for us. It dreamt of couples therapy, of pathetic admissions and healing tears, of a ceremony renewing our vows. And it was all fucking useless, because Portia's approach to reconciliation had been to take every corner of herself and bend each until it broke, to solve herself as if she were a problem, as if I wanted my husband returned to me with all his quiet despair and secretive Reddit browsing.

My head shook as I backed away from him.

"Call me," I said, as I put on my sandals and reached for my purse, "when you're yourself."

The whole way to Noug's house I wondered if I'd seen her nod.

I took time off work.

I emailed my old therapist.

I fucked Nouglas, then sat for him as he painted seagulls circling over the incline. He explained to me that I was in the sketchbook he'd gifted me. "It's figurative," he said. "Well, not figurative in the artistic sense, I guess, it's kinda the opposite,  but..." I laughed and called him a dork, but I saw more and more of myself in his art with each week I spent in therapy.

I talked to Noug's husband Dwayne about antique bicycles. He walked me through some of his restoration techniques. I thought a lot about the Ship of Theseus. How many pieces of a bike could you replace before it was a different bike? How many pieces of a marriage?

Time passed.

Charles didn't call me.

We were still married. He was living in my house. I was living with Noug, ghosting the rest of our mutual friends.

Portia came out on Facebook in the spring. She looked so happy in her new profile picture. Sad, too, or was I projecting? I tried not to spend too much time staring. I updated her name in my phone's contacts, just in case she'd ever call.

Noug told me to either contact her myself or start dating.

I flirted briefly with a woman at my work, bought a bi pride sticker to put on my water bottle, and signed up for a grief class.

I knew I wouldn't be able to move on unless I kicked Portia out and divorced her. But I didn't want to. The interminable loss stretched out and I stretched with it. I bore it willingly as penance, no matter how often Nouglas told me I was inventing reasons for my misery.

It was Dwayne who broke my inertia.

We were sitting in the garage one evening. I had a cushion and a book, he had the spokes of a bike wheel to clean. We'd taken to this kind of quiet parallel play over the year or so I'd been imposing on him and Noug, only occasionally pausing our respective activities to share a passage or insight.

"I just can't imagine," he said, wiping his hands on a cloth, "what Portia thinks she's doing."

It took me a second to realize he meant my Portia. In all our time together, he'd never broached the subject of my zombified marriage. "What do you mean?"

"I mean." He frowned. "She's living in your house. Using your last name. You're not talking. I get your whole deal, but... what the hell does she think is happening?"

I had no good answer. I wondered, not for the first time, if I was being taken advantage of.

"Do you think I'm an idiot?" I asked.

Dwayne looked up at me, for the first time that evening. "I think you're patient."

"It's the least she deserves," I said, too quickly.

I expected him to argue, but he nodded. "Yeah. Just..." He stood up and stretched, slowly, then plodded over to the utility sink in the corner of the garage and washed his hands. He took his time drying them. My attention never left him. "Remember that waiting isn't the only thing that can be done patiently."

The next day, I began drafting a letter.