Sil's only like three inches taller than you Julian and her hips are maybe like an inch wider. Her boxers are NOT that big on you.

So it came down to me either tossing back half a bottle of Nyquil and some big red pills in an effort to sleep the rest of the day away or writing this in hopes it will distract me from the figurative lobotomy currently occupying the right side of my brain. Which is what it feels like when atmospheric pressure fronts change and my sinuses flip the vack out about it. My mom calls me the family barometer. Haha. She also says she grew out of it. I do my best to be only fleetingly hopeful about this possibility. No sense in setting oneself up for disappointment, and my body has for the past seven years run a flawless track record in favour of disappointment.
Sidenote: watching funny videos on Youtube also helps. The Skylander Spyro gameplay trailer should probably count as one of these, considering I laughed(then cried) at one they've done to poor Spyro. He looks like a pug with a sneeze stuck up its nose that just ate a bushel of lemons.
Anyway, I suppose you're expecting me to get on with it. Relax. I'm getting on.
I know this has been long awaited(by one person in the entire world) and I know it's taken me a long time to figure it out. And I think I can tell which stories are most important to me because those are the ones that I have the hardest time figuring out how to begin.


Dollface
Opening pieces
Won't be close to a whole chapter, so don't get excited
Also I just saw Source Code today with a bro and a cousin
It was good
I won't tell you anything about it at all because I want you to go see it
Man I need to put another hat on

I walked around the corner just in time to see my boss kick her store window in.
I kind of didn't want to ask, but I knew I was going to, mainly because I didn't want it coming out of MY paycheck.
"Um?" I said, walking up as fauxglass was still tinkling around her feet. Sil kicked her boots together to knock off the pebbles of dULTRAble hyperplexiplastic. "What are you doing?"
"Fixing it." She glanced at the holoclock across the street. "You're late," she growled. I glanced at the clock myself.
"By like two minutes."
"Late is late."
"Okay, well, that aside...why did you just break our store window?"
"I didn't." Sil turned on me and jabbed a finger right between my eyes. "This did." She held up a brick, which replaced her finger in the space between my eyes. "Buncha kids last night came and vandalized the store. Smashed in the window with this. It was broke when we got here."
"Why are we prepping a lie?"
"Why do you think." Sil took a step back, hefted the brick, and aimed. Then she threw it into the store. It landed with a loud smack on the linoleum, leaving a dent that sprouted spiderline cracks like the roots of a weed.
"Well, you never involve the polies, so I have no idea." Sil just climbed in through the broken window, nothing left of it as fauxglass was built to dissolve completely into pebbles when it was shattered. I swept them aside with my foot before I opened the store door, which Sil had already unlocked from the inside.
"What are we going to tell customers?" I asked.
"Same thing I just told you."
I raised my eyebrows at her.
"Sil, these people know you. They're going to know--"
"They're also going to know not to /push it./" She shot me a pointed look.
"Fine. So should I clean up the glass, or..."
"Leave it. Insurance is gonna need to see evidence. Hence me throwing the brick in here."
"You're calling insurance, but not the polies?"
"Polies can't do anything. Insurance can replace me a window."
"You want me to lie to your insurance company?"
"Just if they ask."
"Sil, of course they're going to ask."
Sil paused as she opened up the register to calibrate it for the day.
"Then yeah, I want you to lie to my insurance company."
"What if they find out--"
"Julian. God." She punched in the password code with all the gentleness of a vengeful nailgun. "Vacking drop it already."
She was using that voice she used when she was seriously threatening to fire me, so I dropped it already. Whatever.
Sil headed back to set up the ink wells and clean the tattoo guns while I finished opening up the register and fed the giant guard spiders. The white one snapped at me like it always did, and I kicked it in the fangs like I always did. It hissed, chittering pissily before attacking its pile of Arachnikibble.
"I hate your spiders," I muttered when Sil poked her head back up front.
"Good. If they were loveable, I'd take them back and trade them in. Let me know when Vitch gets in."
"Is she the one with the blue hair and funny eyes?"
"They're not funny."
"They have eight pupils that move. And at least three of them change colour."
"And you're a guy that wears makeup and miniskirts."
"That's not weird," I snapped defensively after her as she disappeared into the back again.
"It's all in the perspective."

Sil's pet deinonychus, Dewey, started scratching and hissing at her pet flap in the shop's door. Apparently Sil had forgotten to unlock it. The living fossil's vivid gold-orange eyes glowered up at me as I let her in. She slunk back behind the counter, threatening one of the spiders out of her spot in the corner with a flash of vicious teeth.
Vitch came in while I was touching up my mascara.
"What happened here?" she asked, jerking a thumb at the shattered window. I shrugged.
"Ask Sil." If I was going to lie convincingly to someone I had to look them in the eye, and I couldn't look at Vitch's eyes. "She's in the back," I added when Vitch still hadn't moved. She grunted and brushed past me.
I always itched to know what went on back there, what they were talking about. If I thought I could get away with it, I'd try to eavesdrop, but I knew the second I did something would go horribly wrong. Because that was how my life worked.
My life worked in a lot of interesting ways. For instance, this was the first time I'd ever gotten a job by running into my not-yet-employer in an underground masc/fem club, entirely shitfaced, vomited on her, outright invited her to vack in the filthy bathroom, fired back six shots and then promptly passed out in front of her.
She says she caught me, though I'm entirely certain she didn't, because I woke up with an additional throbbing that wasn't part of the hangover and stuck around long after the pounding alcohol-induced migraine had faded. I wasn't bleeding from anywhere on my head, but I'm sure I felt a bump. Sil says I was imagining things. I don't see why she gets to brush off the possibility of me having a concussion just because I regularly do six different kinds of drugs and consistently have mild hallucinations. Mild ones. I'm not, like, crazy or anything. I'm almost completely positive that they're probably most likely caused pretty much by my drug use.
Probably.
Anyway, Sil says she caught me(despite also being kind of drunk herself, at least I'm pretty sure she was, why else would she be in a club if not to get drunk)and when I wouldn't wake up, she didn't want to leave me there alone. People don't like to think about fems getting taken advantage of--let's call it what it is. Raped. People don't like to think about the possibility of a guy like me getting raped by a woman like Sil. Because women don't rape men, right?
Well obviously not a woman like Sil, since for whatever reason she had a mild lapse of sanity(that's Sil's term for when she feels kindness towards fellow human beings)and actually took me back to her apartment. You know like took me back with her and didn't violate me in sixteen different ways before dumping me in the alleyway outside with a ratty bath towel barely covering the unmentionables.
I had my ID on me and everything but Sil doesn't have a car and the slums I live in with my mom are so epicly shitty cabs have been programmed to not go into them.
Waking up in Sil's apartment was another first because it was the first time I'd woken up in a strange place after hard shitfacing and not been either bruised, sore in the tender place, wobbly and weak from drug use, tasting several things I couldn't identify, or all of the above together.
I felt a hangover and that additional headache that Sil denies existed and some confusion about where I was. I checked myself over and realized I was dressed in entirely strange clothes, right down to the vacking underwear, which would have disturbed me more if my brain hadn't been trying to pinball its way out of my skull at the time.
"The...what?" I muttered, plucking at the baggy shirt and shorts, then pulling the hem away from my hips and staring down at a pair of boxers two sizes too big. "...What?" I repeated.
I meant shit at the time but the thing with my brain trying to pinball and all was making it hard to say words, much less think of them.
I looked around myself and slowly pushed myself to my feet, gritting my teeth against the nailguns pounding in my head.
"...What."
It was nicer than most places I woke up in. It wasn't, you know, tidy, in the way that a bachelor's home isn't tidy when they aren't expecting to bring anyone home. There were random clothes like shirts and socks tossed over the arm of a sofa and piled in the corner, a few empty pizza boxes were stacked on the coffee table next to a half-empty mug, and what probably used to be a very nice duvet before whatever animal had gotten to it had gotten to it was piled in an armchair...under the animal that had gotten it. A deinonychus, standard size, lay with its head propped up on an arm rest, large hindlegs gathered under it, the massive scythe claws trimmed down to regulation length, the long, rigid tail resting on the other arm rest. It was a dark red with a lighter mottled red along its spine, with some white patches on its legs.
Velociraptors weren't rich people pets, but you had to have good money to afford one--and by good money I mean you can afford to pay more than five bronze monthly rent and have more than two pieces of furniture in your dinky two-room apartment. I was definitely not in the sort of place I usually woke up in.