Here for a Good Time

Kai collects knives they don’t know how to use.

Objectively, they know how they’re supposed to use them. Knives stab. Cut. Saw. It’s easy—just flick it open, then strike. But Kai’s switchblade always gets stuck, catches like a scream in a throat, until they stick their fingers in and pry it out.

If they could open it now, they’d drive it straight through the fucking phone.

“Can you repeat that address?” the counter girl asks boredly through the speaker as she takes the order Kai’s about to deliver. More specifically: the order that’s going to deliver them directly to their breaking point. They know the address already.

That’s exactly the problem.

“Ten cheese pizzas,” the counter girl affirms, and Kai fidgets again with the knife in their pocket. They try to tell themself this job is worth it. That just a little longer, and they’ll be able to pay off their literal mountain of top surgery bills. They try (and fail) to tell themself that every week they’re one shot closer to becoming the kind of man Logan can’t hurt.

They tell themself fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Is something wrong?”

Their breath hitches. Their face haunts the mirror that hangs behind the counter: ghost pale, sweat-slick. The knife catches in their fingers, but anger cuts deep in their chest. There’s no reason, no way, to explain that Logan calling them at work is their last fucking straw.

“Just need a break,” they mutter, because they’re a blade that won’t snap open.

Because they must loooove mood swings, they quit smoking the same month they started taking testosterone. So they don’t light up when they duck around the back of the restaurant. Instead, they squat in the night-dark parking lot behind their dented, pizza-mobile shitwagon, turning the blade over and over in their hands as if the answer might be written on the side of it.

But the answer is the same as it’s always been: run.

Kai’s tried and they can’t.

Bile rising in their throat, they check their phone. The phone is second behind their tits on a list of least favorite appendages. As a pizza delivery driver and, unfortunately, a person, Kai can’t go anywhere without it—which means there’s no way to dodge Logan’s calls. There’s no reason for Logan to call them again, and again, and again.

(Or maybe there’s just no good one.)

It doesn’t matter what Kai wants to be: a tattoo artist, a man, the kind of man who isn’t afraid of every dark road. All that matters is what they are right now: completely fucking helpless.

They climb into their car and shut the door like its slam can keep out the world. But the world ekes in like the October chill.

Slowly, slowly, slowly they unfurl Logan’s note.
Thinking of you.

They shudder, their gaze whipping around the parking lot. But the scariest thing here is still their boss’ conservative bumper stickers…and the memory of tramping across their lawn’s morning frost to find the note lying in wait beneath their windshield wipers.

Kai hasn’t seen Logan since the breakup—but Logan has seen them.

Read Here for a Good Time here.