I bought the collar in October. It’s been in the shoebox under the bed ever since. It cost more than the shoes it’s sitting under. I’ve taken it out eleven times to trace the stitching with my thumb, and put it back. Last night I put it on at two in the morning. My husband came in from the garage and found me sitting up against the headboard in it, nipples hard, my throat doing the new thing. His hands haven’t been steady since.
Plain black leather. Nothing written on it. No ring on it either. Not the kind of collar that means anything to anyone who hasn’t been in this exact conversation. I got the size wrong the first time. I didn’t know my own neck. That’s a sentence that means something different now than it meant in October. I emailed a stranger with measurements I took off with a tape measure, and a lot of embarrassment. The collar came in a box with tissue paper. It smells like a shop.
I’m thirty-four. Nineteen months on testosterone, and the changes are still arriving. My voice dropped in the spring. My jaw came in over the summer. There’s a muscle on my chest now that I can feel when I swallow. I catch myself touching it in the supermarket. My breasts are bigger than they were in January. They’re the part I still can’t look at in a mirror without a whole production of self-talk happening first.
Dan knows all of that. I came out to him over burnt toast on a Tuesday.
Two pieces of toast, one of them burnt, on a Tuesday in March four years ago. I said it in the middle of saying something else. He put his toast down. He said “okay.” Then he said, “do you want tea or do you want me to talk.” I said, “I don’t know yet.” He said “okay” again. That was the whole of it. He stayed.
He stayed. He’s still here. Four years of loving a woman who keeps changing in front of him. That’s not a small thing. How much work it is for him, nobody outside us knows. He gets to look at a person he married and see someone else arriving. That’s a third body in our bed. It’s tender. It’s suffocating. I love him too much to shove it off.
Nineteen months of being a woman who is becoming. In all that time, nobody has simply wanted to fuck me. I’ve been a project. I’ve been a miracle that needs handling. I’ve been the best decision anyone made, and also a weather event. I’m not complaining. I’m also extremely tired of it.
The photographs are the worst of it. He has the wedding album on the dresser. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t go through it. Once in a while he does. I’ve caught him doing it. He puts it back and says nothing. That’s the third body. Sometimes it’s a person he married. I can’t compete with her, and I don’t want to. Sometimes it’s a person I was. I don’t want him to grieve me either. I’m not dead. I’m just further along than he is. That’s the sentence I’ve never said to him, and I’ve rehearsed it about four hundred times.
His people are worse than strangers. His mother still calls me by the name from the invitation. I’ve stopped correcting her. The day I correct her is the day he has to pick a side. He’ll pick his mother. He’ll pick his mother correctly, and I’ll lose him over a pronunciation. I go to the house for Thanksgiving. I sit at the table. I’m introduced as his wife. I let it happen. Then I drive home and put my feet up and scream into a pillow. The following week I go back and do it again.
The support group meets Tuesdays at seven, in the back room of a bookstore in this town that’s going to lose its bookstore by Christmas. It smells of dust and spilled coffee and old paper. There are eleven of us and a rotating chair. We do introductions by our names, our pronouns, our deadnames. Every single time someone says my old name at me, it’s a small physical event. Like being handed something fragile in the wrong shape.
Tuesdays are when the girls go. Not my girls. The girls. The ones who are further along. They say the thing I’m not ready to hear yet. You’re not becoming the person you pictured. You’re becoming the person you already are. The waiting is the only thing that’s wrong.
There’s a new one in March. She’s nineteen. She’s been on T for four months. She has her mother’s name and her mother’s jaw. She can’t pass for a girl yet. She comes in with her hood up and sits on the floor, because she doesn’t want the chair. Nobody makes her take the chair. We pass her around the circle the way you pass around a plate. Every single person says their own deadname out loud before saying their name. That’s the rule. You say the deadname so it can be heard, then you say the name so it can be louder.
I’ve never once got used to hearing my own old name in my own mouth.
“Every week you look a bit more,” Priya said to me in March. I didn’t sleep.
Priya is six years further along than me. She has a wife, a house, a job at the university. She’s the one who taught me that a deadname isn’t something you hide. It’s a thing you take out and put on the table, then pick up and put away again. She taught me that in a bookstore back room in about eleven minutes in 2024. She’s never once made me pay her back for it.
She’s also the one who told me, the week I bought the collar, that I wasn’t allowed to feel stupid about it. “You bought a thing you were scared to want,” she said. “Everybody who’s ever wanted anything has bought the thing first and been scared second. Don’t let the order of those two things tell you what it is.”
On the last Tuesday I told Dan about the collar. We were in bed, in the dark. I said, “I bought something.” He said, “what kind of something.” I said, “a collar.” Then I said nothing for about ninety seconds. He didn’t fill the silence. He’s good at that. He’s been good at that for four years.
“What kind of collar,” he said eventually.
“Black leather. A D ring but no ring. It doesn’t go with anything else.”
“Does it have anything written on it.”
“No.”
“Then it’s just a collar.”
“It’s not just a collar,” I said. My voice did the thing it does now, the lower thing. I heard it. He heard it.
“What do you want to do with it.”
“I want to wear it and I want you to see me wearing it. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ve been waiting for that.” He turned over. “I’ve been waiting four years for you to want something and say it out loud.”
It took nineteen months. I’m not going to skip it with a pretty line. Nineteen months of watching my own body arrive. Nineteen months of learning to want things in the specific way I want them. Nineteen months of learning that the wanting has to be spoken out loud in a room where another adult is present, or it doesn’t count. I learned that in a Tuesday group in the back of a shop, not from anybody who loves me.
I didn’t know that. I thought wanting was private. I was carrying it around like the collar in a shoebox, which is exactly how it turned out.
Then he said: “It’s been in the shoebox.”
“What?”
“It’s been in the shoebox. Under the bed. I found it in September when I was looking for the other shoebox. I put it back. I’ve been waiting for you to say something about it.”
I didn’t sleep that night either.
So last night I put it on at two in the morning, in the dark. The clasp was cold against the back of my neck. My hands weren’t quite doing it. I sat up against the headboard with the sheet around my waist, my nipples hard, my throat doing the new thing. I waited for him to come in.
He came in from the garage smelling of cold. He saw me and stopped in the doorway, his hand still on the handle.
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he came over and put one finger under the leather at the front of my throat. He lifted it a half inch and let it drop. He said, “it fits.”
“It fits.”
“You’ve been wearing it in the dark.”
“For four hours.”
“You’ve been wearing it in the dark for four hours waiting for me to come to bed.” He laughed. It broke something. “Kira, you could have knocked on the door of the room.”
“I’ve been wearing it in the dark for four months,” I said. “Tonight I just didn’t take it off.”
Then he got on the bed. He put his hand on my hip. His fingers trembled against my skin. I felt it go through me. I said, “you don’t have to be careful with me.” He said, “I know, that’s the problem. I’ve been careful with you for four years. My hands haven’t done that once.”
He got the clasp at the back of my neck. He didn’t take it off. He undid it. Then he did it back up. Twice. Every time, my breath went out of me like I’d been hit. Then he said “keep it.” I said “keep it.” He put his mouth on my throat, right where the pulse is, and started to work on it. I was wet before he got to my hips.
He’s not careful with me when he’s not careful with me. He got my legs open. His hand went between them. His fingers were slick already. They always are with me. They get like that the second I say anything about wanting him. He pushed in, and my whole body went up off the mattress. I made a noise I’ve never made in front of another human being.
He fucked me slowly and all the way in. The whole length of him. One long push. Then he didn’t move for a second and just held it. My throat closed around the sound. The leather rode up against my Adam’s apple when I swallowed.
“Say it again,” he said. I said it again. The second time, I put my hand on the leather at my own throat, so he could feel my fingers on it. He made a sound I’ve never heard out of him either. He pulled almost all the way out and pushed in again, hard. His hand came up and gripped my throat under the collar. My cock was so hard against my stomach that I could feel it slapping back with every thrust.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Dan—”
“Say what you said you wanted.”
“I want you to see me—”
“No,” he said. He stopped moving. He waited. It’s the only time in four years he’s ever made me wait for anything. It was the only way I could’ve got it.
“I want you to see me wearing it,” I said, “and I want you to f— I want you inside me while you look at it.”
“Good girl,” he said. I’ve never liked those two words. I’ve never once been as undone by them.
He fucked me with his eyes on the leather the whole time. Both hands on my hips, his thumbs on his hipbones. The collar on my throat. His mouth coming up to my mouth and then away again. Every time he pushed in, I felt the leather ride up against my Adam’s apple. At some point I put my hands over his on my hips and held them there. That’s when I felt it: his hands shaking against my skin.
“You feel that?” I said.
“I feel that.”
“My whole life I’ve wanted somebody’s hands to be unsteady on me.”
“Kira—”
“Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He got his hand under my jaw and turned my face and made me look at him. He said it low, in the voice he uses when he’s trying not to come:
“Look at you. You are so gorgeous. Every week you bloom more, and getting to worship you like this is my favorite part of life.”
I came so hard I could hear myself. I felt him shudder and break inside me at the same time. I held his hands on my hips the entire time, because I wanted to be the reason they were shaking.
Afterwards he undid the clasp. I took it off. He put his hand out for it, which I didn’t expect. I said “no.” I put it back in the shoebox under the bed. I got back into bed. He said, “so tomorrow.” I said, “some nights I wear it to sleep.” He said, “all the nights.” I said, “all the nights.” He turned the light off.
In the morning the shoebox was under the bed where it’s been since October, and the collar was in it. My throat was raw where the leather sat. There was a bruise on my hip in the shape of his thumb. My breasts ached from his mouth. I lay there for a while and let all of it be evidence.
And I haven’t yet told him. Some mornings I take it out, put it round my neck, and wear it to the bookstore with my coat on. Nobody knows. It’s the most private thing I own.
Nobody has asked me why I bought a collar I wasn’t going to wear.
Tuesdays at seven, in the back room, in the dust and the coffee. Eleven of us and a rotating chair. I’m not the girl in the photographs from four years ago. I’m not the girl I’m going to be either. I’m not going to be a before and an after. I’m going to be a woman in a bookstore back room who says that’s my name now and means it. Everybody there knows everybody’s deadnames. Nobody there uses mine.
The collar is in the box. The box is under the bed. Some nights I wear it to sleep alone. Some nights I wear it to be seen. Tonight, for the first time, it was both. My husband’s hands are still not steady. I’m going to spend a very long time making sure that never happens again.
