Free You Are the Reason by Renae Kaye

could finally believe it was all true. The person in front of me was a man. “What do you do with it?”
    Lee frowned, looking confused. “Do with what?”
    “Your dick. What do you do with it when you put a dress on?”
    Lee burst out laughing, and a slight redness came to his face. He really did have a complexion that couldn’t hide any blushes. “I’m not sure about your dick, Dave, but my dick’s not really detachable. When I put a dress on, it just has to stay there.”
    I chuckled. “No, you idiot. I mean how do you make sure it doesn’t show?”
    The blush climbed higher. “Oh. Well. Remember the black and white dress from the first night? That one has an underskirt, so I don’t have to do anything special. The cut of the dress hides all the bulges. But the dress I wore last night…?” He trailed off as he looked at the ground in embarrassment. “The bulge would’ve shown in the front on that dress, so I tuck.”
    I tried out this new word. “Tuck? As in push it all back between your legs? How does it stay?”
    I think Lee was trying not to laugh at me. He was pressing one hand against his mouth and giggling. “Oh, God. It’s not usually the thing I need to explain to people. Most have already googled it a thousand times on the Internet.” He choked again and then managed to say, “You, uhh, push your, uhh, testicles back up inside your body, then tape your empty scrotum and penis back.”
    I think my eyes bugged out of my head. I was like one of those cartoon characters with their hair flying off and eyeballs about a meter from their face. “You what?”
    Yes, Lee was definitely laughing at me. He wasn’t allowed to. Wasn’t I the one who was angry at him?
    “If you ask me nicely, I’ll show you one day,” he promised with a cheeky smile.
    “Inside your body? How?”
    “Give us four walls and a roof, and I’ll demonstrate.”
    I let that go in order to query the next bit. “Tape?” I stared in horror. “Doesn’t that pull the skin off? And what about the hairs?”
    “I use medical tape, so it doesn’t rip your skin off. But there’s no trouble about the hairs. I’m completely shaven.”
    I blinked. He was…?
    I nearly swallowed my tongue and ended up coughing like an idiot.
    “Dave?” Lee took a couple of steps toward me, and I held out my hand to ward him off.
    “No,” I said, still choking.
    I saw his face fall as he stepped back again. It felt like I was kicking that puppy. There was a pained feeling, deep inside me, as if my intestines had decided to try the triple-twist somersault with a reverse tuck. Tuck? Oh, shit. There was that word again.
    I swallowed hard and repeated, “No.” Then I glared straight into the cute pixie face that lied to me. “Davo.”
    “What?” A look of confusion crossed his face.
    “Davo,” I said. “You don’t have permission to call me ‘Dave.’ That’s only for the ladies. And I believe you’ve just finished telling me that no longer applies to you?”
    I finished the sentence with a question, leaving it open for him to change his mind. Anything was possible at this point in my life.
    The side of his mouth quirked up. “It never applied to me,” he admitted with a chuckle. “I did it to support Bobby. I wanted to show him that gender is not set. He’s one of the people I counsel at the youth center. He’s mixed up and hurting, like most of the people we get through the door. I do what I can to ease them into knowing I understand a bit of what they’re going through. The cross-dressing? It’s not really something I do too often in public.”
    “No?”
    “No. A couple of parties where my friends know me, sometimes a quick shopping trip out in my finery. It’s not a big thing in my life.”
    “But you’re so pretty,” I blurted out, then flushed a deep red as I realized what I had said.
    Lee’s answering smile lit up his face. “Yeah?”
    I rolled my eyes. “As if you didn’t know.”
    “A guy likes to be told these