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  BEHROUZ

  GETS LUCKY

  BEHROUZ

  GETS LUCKY

  A NOVEL

  AVERY CASSELL

  Copyright © 2016 by Avery Cassell.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: Shutterstock

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-170-1

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-171-8

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and not intended to represent real people.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: Of Clits and Cocks

  Chapter One: Lucky

  Chapter Two: Sometimes

  Chapter Three: Tender

  Chapter Four: Owned

  Chapter Five: Stuffed

  Chapter Six: Hitched

  Chapter Seven: Tortured

  Glossary

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  OF CLITS AND COCKS

  Let’s take the time to tell all. Behrouz and Lucky are older queer rascals, our favorite curmudgeonly, tenderhearted gay uncles rolled with a sweet coating of hedonism and snark. When we start off our story, Behrouz is sixty and Lucky is forty-nine years old. Although they both are easily settled into their gender identities, their preferred pronouns and the words they use for their various naughty bits are not apparent to our fine readers. After all, this is just a smutty little love story, so we can safely lay it all out on the line without worrying about asking rude, politically incorrect, or insensitive questions.

  Behrouz identifies as a transgender genderqueer, and Lucky identifies as a butch dyke. Both Behrouz and Lucky were born female, and both often pass as male. Behrouz started taking testosterone late in life, at age fifty-five. Lucky never has taken testosterone and is not tempted to start.

  If we were to ask Behrouz which pronouns they prefer, they would toss one fey wrist into the air and say, “Whatever you’re comfortable with!” That’s a lie. Behrouz prefers they/them or he/him. If we were to ask Lucky which pronouns she prefers, she would say she/her. Unless Lucky was topping and in the mood for honorifics, in which case she would prefer the more masculine “sir,” rather than the more feminine “ma’am.”

  Behrouz and Lucky both call their clitoris their cock, flesh cock, or clit, but usually just their cock. They call the whole package their cunt. They own a ridiculous variety of expensive silicone dildos in many sizes, which they also call their cocks. Lucky has a favorite silicone cock, which is seven inches long, one-point-eight inches in girth, curved, and black. Lucky likes to say that black is classic and goes with everything. We concur with her good taste. Lucky and Behrouz both still have breasts. Behrouz binds to appear flat-chested and so that their shirts fit better. Lucky usually wears a sports bra. They will talk about both their breasts or their chest, and it means the same thing. As we all know, everyone has an asshole and assholes have no gender.

  I wrote this book because I wanted to see more people like myself represented in smut and romance. I wanted to see older genderqueer and butch masculine-masculine couples having hot sex and BDSM shenanigans. I wanted to read about people with full lives, lives that included adult children, grandchildren, parents, books, marvelous food, over-the-top drag, and cuddly cats along with lots and lots of hot fucking. I wanted reality, with heartburn, forgetfulness, and aching joints. I also wanted protagonists that cared about San Francisco and were activists, in their own quirky way. And finally, I spent most of my childhood in Iran and love Iran as my other home. I wanted to include a little bit of that amazing and beauteous country in this tale so that my readers could get the chance to love the country too.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lucky

  I was sixty, and long past the age of hope, young lust, love, and bewilderment. I was sixty, using my senior discount to buy oatmeal, black tea, and ginseng at Rainbow Co-op, and silk neckties at Goodwill. I was a time-traveling, part-Persian expatriate. I had been an outsider all my life, and felt insulated that way. Insulation is protection, but it is also isolation. Even though I lived in San Francisco, that bastion of sexual and gender freedom, I lived outside of the galaxies of the butch, FTM, genderqueer, and leather communities. I’d hitchhiked across the country, been a streetwalker, smoked opium with princes, raised children, been fisted on Twin Peaks, sung in punk bands, grown up in Iran, had threesomes with bikers and members of British Parliament, and followed family tradition to become a librarian. I’d buried one daughter and two lovers, spent decades in the Midwest, kneaded bread, gotten sober, been homeless, pretended to be a boy wanting to be a girl, driven across town in a blizzard at 5:00 a.m. to slap a gigolo who was wearing pleated black silk panties, taught preschool, attended PTA meetings, and tickled grandchildren. It’s-a-long-story was my middle name.

  At sixty, and in my considerable dotage, I spent my evenings wearing a quilted, charcoal velvet smoking jacket with a foulard silk cravat, and worn, cuffed flannels while delicately sipping English Breakfast tea with my cat, Francy, strewn across my lap, a pile of tattered paperback Dorothy Sayers mysteries at hand, and vacillating between wanting to manifest a lover and relishing each delicious second alone. Between chapters, and inspired by Lord Peter Whimsey and his paramour Harriet Vane, I imagined a lover, a you. If I could manifest you at 6:00 a.m. when I was lolling between the sheets distractedly having my morning prework come, or on Sunday afternoon when I was settling in for a leisurely fuck session with myself, my two biggest silicone dildos, nipple clamps, my S-curved metal dildo, a metal sound, a stainless steel butt plug, Eartha Kitt wafting from the stereo, a fountain of lube, dim lights, and a cushion of towels and rubberized sheeting to soak up the spillage…I would imagine a you.

  Sometimes I craved you when I came home, tired from a day of advising patrons, giving restroom directions, problem-solving minor computer issues, and searching for copies of the latest bestselling romance. Sometimes I craved that moment of perfect domesticity when I’d open my door to the oregano- and tomato-scented smells of minestrone soup wafting from the kitchen, and you in the rust velvet armchair in the living room. I’d fall to my knees on the rough wool of our Tabrizi carpet, start to crawl across the red and gold fibers, imagining that moment when I could unbutton your fly and fill myself with your cock as an appetizer. Your pipe would be smoldering in the ashtray, filling the air with the sultry sweet aroma of tobacco and cherry. You’d lean back and spread your denim-clad legs, rubbing your cunt as I approached on my knees, the workday rolling off me the closer I got. Reaching your cunt, I’d rest for a minute, my lips caressing the bulge in your crotch, as grateful for your hand on the back of my neck and your packed jeans as I was for salt. I’d growl softly, nipping at the thick blue fabric, damp from my spit and slightly threadbare from past administrations. You would unbutton your fly slowly, each button releasing a soft pop. I’d cover your cock with my mouth until it reached my throat, then ease up and lick the shaft, lost in your smell and your palm firmly pushing my head into your cunt. Your cock would shove the outside world aside, erasing demanding supervisors, aching joints, and crowded MUNI buses until all that was left was y
our cock in my throat.

  I had a shallow, translucent blue glass bowl on the dining room table that I filled with garnet-colored pomegranates, dusty plums, phallic bananas, and tart green apples, and sometimes I longed to see your house keys on the table next to the bowl of fruit. Did I want this complication to interfere with my quiet life? Did I really want someone to know my quirks and fears? To discover that I sometimes ate cheddar cheese, figs, and cookies for dinner, to twist her hand into my silver-haired cunt, to be privy to my mood swings and self-doubt, to be content to live with my need for solitude? I’m Middle Eastern to my part-American core, and as such have a deep belief in fate. At a jaded and indecisive sixty, I decided to leave love and lust to fate.

  How did we meet? How does fate decide to roll her dice? Was it at the park, commiserating over fawn-colored pigeons fighting for brioche crumbs at our feet, while the ginkgo trees shed golden, fan-shaped leaves on the park bench? Was it in an airport while listening to the murky flight update announcements, wondering if we should grab an overpriced stale croissant and latte before our flight, and finally reaching for our lattes at the same time, our fingers touching over scattered copies of USA Today? Maybe it was at work, sighing and rolling our eyes over gum-snapping coworkers, discovering mutual tastes in movies and politics in the lunchroom, meeting outside the office on the sly, and texting filthy thoughts to each other across the table during meetings.

  In reality, we met prosaically. Lacking a noisy yet accurate village matchmaker, we filled out our profiles on OKCupid, rolled our mutual eyes at the idiocy of naming the five things one could never do without, and updated our profiles earnestly and regularly. I worried about whether I sounded too shallow, and you fretted about sounding too serious. I mentioned that I had an Isherwood haircut, lank thinning brown hair, hazel eyes, a husky build, and a pale DAR complexion. We both were annoyed at OKCupid’s lack of queer identity choices. I changed my sex from male to female and back again monthly, while she identified as bisexual so as not to leave out possible FTM matches. I mentioned that I was a daddy in the streets and a strumpet in the sheets. Although I took testosterone, I was not a man or even FTM. She put up an out-of-focus picture of her repotting plants, said she spoke French, ironed and starched her sheets, had olive skin, dimples, and a graying pompadour. She didn’t mention her sexual proclivities at all. I mentioned flagging red, gray, black, and navy right in the first paragraph, said that I cooked Persian food and collected bird skulls, put up a photo of myself half-dressed and playing an accordion, and said that only butch dykes need apply. She was eleven years younger than I, a rough-hewn-looking butch who gave me five stars, which made my heart flutter and my cunt get wet in anticipation. I rated her five stars back, and nervously sent her a short, overly edited but carefully flirtatious email suggesting that we meet for tea and conversation. Then I heard nothing for five months. In the interlude I went on a series of fruitless first dates, but I had not forgotten her. In spring she finally wrote back, suggesting that we meet for coffee. Her name was not Amber or Dixie or Tyler, but Lucky. And I wrote to Lucky, signing my name Behrouz, which means lucky in Farsi.

  We met at Café Flore, the classic rendezvous for queer blind dating in the Castro. Public transportation was two steps away, so it was easy to flee from the date if it was awful. Café Flore was loud, and gay as fuck, with mediocre food and sweet servers. We were both on time. I wore pleated gray flannel pants, a white shirt with a Campbell clan wool necktie, my tattered gray Brooks Brothers jacket, purple silk socks with striped garters, horn-rims, my hair slicked to one side, and my favorite butterscotch-colored brogues. Lucky wore a stately pompadour, a red-ribbed wool sweater with frayed cuffs over a white oxford shirt, black 501 button-fly jeans, three gold rings on her right hand, and harness boots. She was stocky and muscular, a little shorter than my five-eight, had deep-brown hair threaded with gray, small breasts, olive skin, a chipped front tooth, hazel eyes, a large aristocratic nose with tiny nostrils, black-framed glasses, and a beguiling swagger. She drank black coffee, and I sipped sticky-sweet soy chai latte.

  I was immediately turned on by Lucky, trying not to look too eager as I glanced at her rough gardener’s hands, evaluating them for size and dexterity. I was nervous and unsure if she liked me back. I was never good at reading signs, and knew that my reserve was often read as disinterest. I wanted to feel her hand in my cunt. We started slowly. We talked about our cats, the general state of classism and disrepair in San Francisco, our jobs, food, and our upbringings. Lucky’s tuxedo cat, Elmer, had died two months ago, after living a long and productive life of catching mice, napping in her oval, vintage, pink porcelain bathroom sink, and skulking on bookshelves. My ginger cat, Francy, had one bronze eye, a puffed-out tail that was longer than her body, and liked to pee with me when I came home from work. I told her about my love of books, organization, and social service, which led to the good fortune of a job at the San Francisco Public Library. After studying biology, Lucky had fallen into gardening, and spent her days planning gardens and fondling manure and plants. We agreed that the recent invasion of stealthy, gleaming-white Google buses with blacktinted windows that transported entitled tech workers from their cubicle penthouses in San Francisco to their jobs in Mountain View were shark like, and wondered why they hadn’t been violently defaced yet. We mourned the loss of Plant It Earth, Osento bathhouse, Faerie Queene Chocolates, the dimly lit Mediterranean place on Valencia with Fat Chance belly dancers swiveling sensuously around the tables, The Red Vic Movie House, and Marlene’s drag bar on Hayes Street, and then we sighed like curmudgeonly old farts wondering where the past had disappeared.

  Lucky was raised Jewish in Columbus, Ohio, a hotbed of Republican ideology and Christian intolerance, graduated a year early from Bexley School for Girls, then fled to UC Berkeley for sexual and intellectual freedom. Her dad was an insurance adjuster and her mom worked part-time in the ladies’ undergarments section of Lazarus department store. Her father worked late hours and fancied himself a suave businessman, leaving the house each morning awash in citrusy Spanish cologne and cigarette smoke, and sporting a flashy gold Rolex wristwatch won while playing cards. Her mom was bitter around the corners and sentimental in the middle. She was a brunette in turquoise double-knit pants suits and the sweetly floral scent of Chanel No 22. Lucky told me about coming home to find her mom drinking endless goblets of chardonnay while listening half-cocked for the metallic sound of her father’s key in the front door, and the sneaky shuffle that announced his belated presence home. Lucky was an only child, but lived in the same Tudor-style home in the same quiet middle-class neighborhood her entire childhood, with the oak-lined streets, and her aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends with their families protecting and loving her even when Lucky’s folks were distracted.

  Since our family had moved every two years from state to state, country to country, and continent to continent, I found Lucky’s childhood geographic stability both exotic and enviable. At age seven, Lucky decided she wanted to be a boy. Each night she’d stare dreamily out her bedroom window while stroking the faint down on her upper lip to wish a mustache into existence. Wryly, Lucky told me that it didn’t work, but now she was content with her hard-earned butchness. As a child, Lucky escaped into books, and spent hours in the Bexley Public Library, scouring the shelves for anything related to sexuality and gender, which wasn’t much in the 1960s. Lucky’s curiosity and scholastic diligence paid off with a full university scholarship and an early release from Ohio. I’d also grown up immersed in books, hiding in odd corners at home with a stack of books and a pocket full of raisins. I related to the escapism that they provided to desperate kids like us, junior outsiders and renegades.

  After three hours of exchanging stories and too much coffee and chai, we started to talk about sex and desire. Our drinks cooled as the temperature heated. We both lived in San Francisco, home to sexual freedom and excess, with everything from International Ms. Leather, to the Eagle, Mr. S, the 15 Association, th
e Exiles, regular play parties for every identity and orientation, BDSM coffee houses, and more. One-time hookups, public play, and casual sex were easily obtainable, but I was embarrassed to admit to Lucky that in my mid-fifties I’d grown out of the ability to do casual play and sex. It didn’t work for me anymore, and although I missed the immediacy and physical relief of instant sex, I needed lovers, continuity, and intimacy. Lucky commiserated, and said that she’d felt the same ever since turning forty-three. Even though we agreed that we both wanted love and deeper intimacy, everything felt dangerous and forbidding—as if we were getting ready to foolishly leap off an emotional cliff, our hearts potentially shattered on the shoals below.

  I flushed as our eyes met. We both stopped breathing for a second, unsure if we wanted to continue. Finally, Lucky inhaled, leaned forward, pierced me in my eye with the future, and murmured, “Tell me. What do you want? What do you need?”

  I blushed, my eyes widening and quickly looking down, and my cunt tingling. I admitted to wearing my hankies on the right, and a proclivity for getting fisted, giving head, ass-fucking, bondage, and getting beaten. Lucky reached across the table and held my hand, my palm facing up and her calloused hand beneath mine, leaving me feeling exposed, trapped, and cradled all at once. I swooned a little at her touch. Lucky smiled a lopsided, sweetly sly smirk, and I imagined one pointed incisor sharply peeking through her lips, her teeth hard against my neck and biting my flesh. She told me she was a top and a sadist, and had been that way since she was a baby dyke in plaid flannel shirts, Frye boots, and Carhartts. I blushed again, and felt my nipples harden painfully in the tight confines of my binder, as I whispered through dry lips that although there was no accounting for chemistry, thus far we seemed to have chemistry just fine. I told Lucky that I had simple tastes really, all I wanted was to suck her off, then be beaten, and fisted until we were swimming in a pool of come.