Recovery

They helped me find a place, a room in a shared house with some girls who were at the city college. And that's what happened, more or less. I found an intramural soccer team, volunteered at an animal shelter, got jobs as a YMCA lifeguard and in a bookstore. I took some online classes, some of which I really liked. Max visited a lot. I made friends, both in the city and some of Max's friends from the college. I settled into life as Chloe, and it was good.

I applied to colleges, and got into some. Better ones than I had as Casey. But not the one that Max went to. It took some soul-searching, but in the end I decided to go to the best school that I got into. It was on the west coast. We said we'd make it work.

We went back to the cabin for a few weeks the end of the next summer, and then I went off to college. It was amazing: everything I'd dreamed. I joined a sorority, walked on to the soccer team, and tentatively declared a math major. That was something I never would have dreamed of as Casey.

Eventually, Max and I broke up. It wasn't nasty or anything, but we were just too far away. It was hard, but I got over it. He let me keep the necklace.

I dated some men over the next few years, and a few women. Some of them were great, some were jerks. My submissive tendencies in bed were a problem: some of my boyfriends weren't as assertive as I wanted, and the only one who really was ended up using it to become mildly abusive to me in the rest of our relationship too. That was a shitty two months until I finally wised up and dumped him.

After I graduated, I ended up starting a math doctorate in New York. Life in the big city was different: super fun, but also kind of lonely in the midst of so many people.

One Saturday night in my second year, I was out at a little rock club a friend had dragged me to. I was enjoying it fine, dancing a bit, though as usual I couldn't see anything but the back of the people right in front of me. Someone put a hand on my waist, not an accidental bump but clearly grabbing me, and I spun around, ready to confront whatever asshole thought he could cop a feel when I saw Max's face grinning down at me. I hadn't seen him in years: he looked great, basically the same as before but a little more mature, and with a light beard that totally worked on him.

"Thank God that was you," he smiled. "I was terrified I'd be groping some random woman."

I answered him by getting up on my tip-toes for a kiss.

Three months later, we moved in together.

* * * * * * *

Max was in publishing now, for one of the big scifi/fantasy publishers that he had adored as a kid. It was his dream job, but it didn't pay much, and neither did being a grad student. So we moved into a tiny studio, but it had good light, it was cozy, and it was ours. We got a little gray cat, put posters on the walls, found furniture on the side of the street and prayed it didn't have bedbugs.

The next year, I had a paper at a conference in the Caribbean, just a few islands away from the one where Richard had become Sasha. Max came down after the conference was over, and we went to that island for a vacation afterwards. The hotel that Richard had worked at had shut down, but we stayed at one nearby, and we lazed on the beach and learned to scuba dive. One day, we went on a hike through the little patch of rain forest on the top of the hilly island. When we emerged into a view of the sparkling Caribbean sea spread out below us, Max was on one knee. Of course I said yes.

* * * * * * *

We got married the next June, at Max's family cabin on the lake. Only us and our parents knew how special the location was, but that was okay.

Neither Max nor I had any close relatives outside of our parents. In a sense, that was lucky, since I'd probably have had to tell them about the necklace, and we thought the fewer people who knew, probably the better. But all of our good friends were there, including even one of my original housemates who'd been my first close friend as Chloe. My dad walked me down the aisle that we'd set up in the yard, everyone danced, we had cake, most everyone drank too much.

I, though, didn't drink at all. Because I had someone in my belly whose tolerance wasn't so high yet.

* * * * * * *

I tried to time my thesis defense to be well before the birth, but thesis committees are notoriously hard to wrangle. Max was at my defense partially for moral support, but partially to be ready to rush me to the hospital in case the baby decided to come a little early.

Little Jeri, named after Uncle Gerald, was born just a week after I submitted the final version of my thesis, dedicated to her and Max. I had been lucky enough to get an assistant professorship lined up for right after my degree, but deferred it for a semester to take some maternity leave first. We'd have to move to Chicago, but Max was able to find a great job there as well.

Jeri was an angel, and Max was a great dad. The other thing he was surprisingly amazing at was keeping our sex lively: even with my boobs sore from breastfeeding and both of us running on laughably small amounts of sleep, he was still able to throw me over a counter and bring me to more than one gasping orgasm. Gasping, instead of screaming, because I couldn't wake the baby.

It was good, too. Because we still needed a boy to leave the necklace to.