Sleep never came.
Brett lay on the mattress that sagged in the middle and watched the red numbers on his thrift-store clock turn. 11:47. 12:19. 1:03. 2:36.
Lance's words were still in the room with him. One million dollars. Become a girl.
He turned onto his stomach and pressed his face into the pillow that smelled like cheap detergent. His body felt too heavy and too loud. One hundred and seventy-five pounds. Five foot eight of muscle he'd built doing warehouse shifts and pushups on this exact floor because he couldn't afford a gym. He'd liked being solid. He'd liked that when he walked into an interview, he looked like someone who could lift things, carry things, survive things.
One hundred and twenty pounds. The number echoed. Lance had said it so casually, like ordering off a menu. That was fifty-five pounds gone. That was his shoulders narrowing, his thighs shrinking, his stomach caving in under a corset until his ribs learned a new shape.
He sat up, sweat on his neck despite the cold. He went to the bathroom and turned on the bare bulb and stared at himself in the cracked mirror.
Big blue eyes. His mom's eyes. Full lips that girls in high school used to tease him about. A nose a little smaller than average that made his face soft when he wasn't trying to look hard. Short blonde hair that stuck up in the back.
He'd been told he looked like his mom his whole life. She was beautiful in that tired, Montana-winter way. She'd worked double shifts at the diner to keep him fed after his dad left. She still lived in the same trailer with the leaky roof.
A million dollars would buy her a house. Not a trailer. A real house with a porch and a furnace that didn't scream.
He leaned closer to the mirror and tried to imagine it. Longer hair. Extensions brushing his shoulders. Skin tanned instead of pale from too many indoor months. Veneers making his smile perfect and white. Makeup softening the angle of his jaw. He touched his throat. Hormones, Lance had said. Possibly implants.
His stomach flipped, not with disgust, exactly. With terror. With something else he didn't have a name for.
You can keep your man parts, Lance had said, like he was doing him a favor. When this is over you can totally change back.
Could he? Could you starve yourself down, learn to walk in heels, let a needle change the chemistry of your blood, let people call you 'she' and 'Mrs. Caldwell' at galas, and then just... change back? Would his body remember how to be Brett? Would his mind?
He thought about the girls Lance dated. Models with sharp cheekbones who laughed at his jokes and then asked about the yacht. Actresses who kissed him for the cameras outside his father's charity events. None of them stayed. None of them saw Lance the way Brett did — the kid who cried when his dog died at fourteen and pretended it was allergies, the guy who still sent Brett twenty bucks for gas without making it weird, the man who was trying so desperately to be good on his own and was being strangled by a last name.
You're the only person I've ever had who didn't use me for money.
That was the sentence that kept replaying. Not the million. Not the heels. That.
Lance trusted him. Lance needed him. And for the first time in years, someone was looking at Brett not like a strong back to hire, but like a solution. Like something precious.
Brett walked back to the bed and opened his phone. His bank app showed $47.13. An email from the warehouse: Thank you for your interest, we have moved forward with other candidates.
He laughed, a short broken sound. He imagined telling Lance yes. Imagined the first appointment. The corset laced tight until he couldn't take a full breath. The first time in makeup, his blue eyes lined dark, his full lips painted. The first time Lance saw him and didn't see his broke best friend, but saw... her.
The thought made his skin prickle hot and cold at once. Shame, excitement, fear, all tangled.
He thought about his father leaving. About his mother saying, "You're so handsome, just like me when I was young." About how he'd always hidden the softer parts of his face under a scowl.
What if he didn't have to hide them? What if, for once, being pretty was the job?
At 4:17 he stood up and did pushups until his arms gave out, as if he could punish the idea out of his body. At 5:02 he was at his tiny kitchen table with a notebook, writing numbers.
Rent past due: $800
Mom's roof: $12,000 estimate
Dentist he'd been avoiding: $2,400
A year of not being scared: priceless
He wrote ONE MILLION and underlined it three times until the paper tore.
At 6:30 the sun came up grey over Kalispell and Brett hadn't slept a minute. His eyes were rimmed red, his blonde hair a mess, his big blue eyes glassy. He looked at his phone. One missed call from Lance at 3:14 am. No voicemail. Just the missed call, like Lance hadn't slept either.
Brett picked up the phone and held his thumb over the call button. His heart hammered against his ribs like it wanted out.
He didn't call. Not yet. He just sat there in the cold light, a well-built twenty-one-year-old boy on the edge of becoming something else entirely, and whispered to the empty room,
"What the hell would I even look like as a girl?"
The question hung there, unanswered, until his phone buzzed again...