Summer Amusement 01

From my teen years through college, I spent most of my summers working at Beachworld. I'm not surprised you've never heard of it, it's one of those little spots that barely feel permanent and definitely don't feel up to code that you probably drive by on the way to your real vacation spot and say "hey maybe if there's time on the way home," before never thinking about it again. But for the locals in the area, or tourists already piling into the big hotels in the area for the summer season, it's a fun enough thing to do for a night. Ride a shaky rollercoaster, win a teddy bear for the kids, Or more often than not, a place for parents to drop their kids off so they can go out to one of the nicer restaurants or sneak off to have sex somewhere since they're paying so much for this vacation.

Anyway, if you were young and not rich and lived in the area, chances were you worked at Beachworld at least one summer as a kid, and some of us just found it easier to go back during school rather than try to hunt something better down. It was an easy enough gig, management didn't care enough to try to make us be super into the magic of the park like some bigger name places, and it was a fun way to goof off with friends after being away the rest of the year. I probably worked every possible job at the park, from picking up trash, to running midway games, to yelling at kids for trying to double up on the waterslides.

Things changed a lot by the time of my last summer. The bungee slingshot ride got taken out because of an accident with one at another park. They tried putting part of the roller coaster in the dark to make it scarier, and some of the food stalls upped their game over time to compete with nearby trucks outside the park. But I changed a lot too. All through high school, I'd seemingly been an awkward, shy boy afraid of his own shadow. But by the end of college, after coming out as trans as a sophomore and with a couple of years of HRT under my belt, I had bloomed as the confident, intrepid young woman that I'd always been bursting to be under the surface.

It's not that I wasn't scared shitless half the time, it's just that I decided that I had spent enough time in my life inside myself and so I was going to be as out there as I wanted to be, and that maybe by faking some confidence now and then, I'd start always feeling it for real. So, that was the summer I decided would be the "hot girl summer" I'd never had the whole time I'd been working there. It was the summer to bust out my one piece bathing suit tops, my cutest, shortest denim skirts and daisy dukes, and live it up. And shockingly everyone was pretty cool about it. I'm not gonna lie and act like I looked so hot now that no one even knew I was trans. They're hormones, they're not magic, but I still looked good and the place was laid back enough that everyone just sort of went along with it. There were the occasional dumb jokes from guests but they were easy enough to ignore, and I started to master my deadpan stare which would throw them off enough to drop it.

Anyway that's enough about me, let me tell you about Danny. Danny was one of those things that never changed. He was like the fryer oil in the corn dog stand or the way the rim was bent on the midway basketball game so it was almost impossible to score a point. Danny and I had started working at the Beach (as we called it) the same year, and we got partnered up a lot on different assignments because we were able to get along with each other enough to not be a hassle for the bosses when drama flared up. I liked Danny, we'd gone to different schools so we hadn't been incredibly close when we were teens but we always talked about movies and video games and stuff like that, typical stuff, and there were worse people to pass a summer with. Danny had also been pretty cool when I'd given him the heads up the first summer that I was coming to the Beach to work as Lexi, and never even called me by my deadname even once. He treated me like it had always been Lexi working with him, which was nice cause then it felt like it had.

Danny was probably a lifer, he'd never really talked much about plans for what he'd do after graduation, and over the last couple of years his role had become more and more administrative at the park, so I had a feeling he'd just get into that as an ongoing thing. I figured he'd probably stay in town and eventually get married and have kids and just settle in. But that was something else that had never changed about Danny, I was pretty sure that even as we hit our early twenties, he was still a virgin.

It wasn't that I didn't think Danny liked girls, I could tell he did. He'd steal glances at some of the hotter women who walked by or talk about actresses or comic book characters he liked, so I knew he had an interest. He was just so shy, as shy as I'd been before I transitioned, and so he'd clam up whenever a woman gave him any bit of flirty attention back. Which would definitely happen because the guy was cute as heck, he just didn't realize it. That was maybe the only thing that changed between Danny and I. The more femme I got over the last few summers and especially that last year when I was just going for it, the more shy and awkward he got around me, especially since flirting had become a second language for me.

I wasn't really into boys that much myself. After coming out I'd mostly dated women and femme non-binary folks, I'd had a fling with a trans guy junior year and friends with benefits thing with another girl like me, but I'd never done or really been all that interested in any cis men. But Danny was really fun to flirt with. And it became like a regular part of my daily rapport with him, it was fun to do stuff to make him blush, like run my fingers through his hair or make sure I got nice and close to him so he'd stare at my chest, when we were squeezing by each other. Sometimes it was pretty brazen, but I paid really close attention to him and he never seemed put off by it or disturbed by it, and sometimes I could swear he was kind of into it, so I just kept doing it.

And so it was that I decided that I was going to do Danny a favor. He was always such a sad sack when it came to his attempts to pick up women or flirt back and I sort of felt like every time he self sabotaged, he'd retreat a little in confidence and make it that much harder on himself to try again the next time. It was this vicious cycle and it got worse each summer. So I decided what he needed was a combo breaker. As the summer wound down and my time working at Beachworld was coming to a permanent end, I decided that before it was all said and done, if he was up for it, I was going to have sex with Danny. I was going to rock his world.

I started out slowly enough, gauging his interest. I'd brush against him as I walked past when we were working a booth together, I'd compliment his looks more. And I did the silly stuff you see in movies, like making sure he'd see me reapplying lip gloss or sneaking a glance in the mirror of my compact to see if he was checking me out. I could tell he seemed at least receptive to it, he started subconsciously reciprocating as well, flirting back.

Finally, I decided to make my move. It was a Thursday night in late August, getting pretty close to the end of the season, and the park closed down at midnight. We were working the beer garden so we'd actually made last call at ten so the guests wouldn't be still getting hammered into the night and getting sick on the rides or starting fights in the funhouse. After we'd wiped everything down and closed the flaps on the outside of the booth, I poured us each a cup of the Beach Blonde Ale and toasted to the end of another shift. I sat down on the ground, my back against the wall of the booth as Danny joined me.

"Another one in the books," he said.

"Yep, winding down," I smiled. "You get any numbers?

"What? No, of course not," he said, blushing. "You?"

"Not tonight," I said. Lies, I'd gotten two from some tourist gals that I'd pocketed for another evening, since I already had someone in mind for the night.

"Oh bullshit," he said laughing, "I literally saw that blonde chick slip it to you."

"Her?" I said, "She doesn't count. Tourist."

"Aren't they all tourists?"

"Oh, not that kind of tourists, I mean queer tourists. I know her type closeted "straight" girl," I said, making the air quotes, "who really wanna dally in a night with another woman and see a trans girl like myself as some sort of in-between, safety wheels type of option. Good for a roll in the hay, I guess, but they usually vanish right after."

"Doesn't that make you feel shitty?" He asked.

"Does what?"

"Well, you're a woman, right, flat out, not a woman with an asterisk, so having someone who acts like you're a special training version seems sucky." He had no idea how true his words would start to feel over the years, but at the time I hadn't been hurt by it as much.

"I mean, yeah, but I just think of it as a game, you know? Like spin the bottle. Remember, it wasn't as much about emotions and feelings when you played, it was just fun, kids experimenting with kissing and touching each other, making out to learn how to do it better for when you got with someone you really liked. Except of course those times when the bottle landed on someone you really liked and it felt like the universe tossing you a solid."

"I wouldn't know," he said, and I could see him start doing that clam up thing he did.

"Never got that solid?"

"Never got to play spin the bottle, didn't get invited to those kinds of parties."

"What?" I asked. "That's some bullshit." I paused for a moment and then looked over at the recycling bin where we tossed the empty glass bottles of beer that we'd pour into plastic cups so guests wouldn't break glass all over the park. I crept over to it and fished a bottle off the top of it, bringing it back to where we'd been sitting and I sat criss-cross-legged in front of Danny, setting the bottle between us.

"What are you doing?"

"Spin the bottle, Danny," I said to him with a smirk.

"What? Come on, cut it out."

"Everyone should get to play spin the bottle at least once, It's like a rite of passage. Unless you're like ace or something, if you're ace I won't make you."

"I'm not ace. I just, come on this is silly it's just the two of us."

"Danny if you don't spin that bottle then you'll lose your turn and then I'm gonna spin it and you'll miss out."

He raised an eyebrow at me a then let out a laugh at the ridiculousness of it and then, making direct eye contact with me as if to accept the challenge, he leaned forward and gave the bottle a spin. He made the rookie mistake of spinning a little too hard so it twirled and twirled for a bit too long before finally coming to a stop, with the neck of the bottle pointing right at me. He looked up at me and opened his mouth to say something but before he could I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his. Because his mouth was open I ended up closing my lips against his bottom lip before opening them up again to continue the kiss. I felt him tense up for a second so I paused and pulled back to check in with him. We made brief eye contact and he look terrified. Suddenly I was afraid I'd misread his seeming interest in my flirts.

"Danny, I--"

He interrupted me by placing his thumb on my chin and leaning in to kiss me back. I felt myself melt as I opened my mouth to let him slip his tongue in. Then I pushed forward as he leaned back against the wall, moving myself from where I was sitting to straddle him a bit as we continued to kiss. I started to wonder if he was inexperienced as he claimed to be because he seemed to know what he was doing, or maybe I was just good at leading him to do what I wanted him to. All I know is his lips felt damn, damn good.

We made out for several minutes, and I could feel him getting more and more into it as we went. Finally, we reached a point where I knew if we got too much busier in our little booth we'd make enough noise to draw the attention of someone who could fire us, so I pulled back from him and wiped some of the shared spit off of my lips.

"We should probably move elsewhere if we don't want to stop," I said with a smirk.

"Do you want to come back to my place?" Danny asked.

Absolutely.