Chapter 9: Morning One

Jorah opened his eyes and glanced over at the clock. The alarm was going off, and it was morning. His first gaming session was done.

He got out of the chair and stretched, thinking about what he had experienced. He reached behind his ear for the slots that had been implanted, but they weren’t there. He blinked a few times, getting used to feeling his eyes again.

Then he went and took a shower, slowly coming to grips with his old body, the one he’d been living in all his life. It wasn’t the one he wanted, but it worked. It was acceptable.

Some people go ahead and change their outsides to match their insides. It was something that Jorah completely understood, but that wasn’t for him. It wasn’t a lack of commitment or a lack of insurance. The problem went deeper than that.

As he stood in the shower, rubbing soap over his normal body, he thought about the strange position his brain had on gender. He presented male. Very much so. He could get into drag if he wanted, but his body felt male to him. His shoulders were too broad, his body too hairy, his features too masculine. And while there were things that could be done to alter all of that, he had never taken steps to do any of them.

Sometimes, he wondered why that was. Why not shave his legs? Why not use some kind of depilatory, if he hated his body hair so much? But that was the problem; he didn’t hate the body hair. Some of it he liked. The thick hair on his arms felt right, and he liked it where it was. It was very unfeminine, but that was, oddly, part of what he liked about it.

He didn’t want to try to dress like a woman or change his current body to make it look more feminine. With a few exceptions, he actually liked his body. There was a little bit of a belly, but as his trainer said, the organs have to go somewhere. But his arms were muscular and strong, his thighs and calves were well-shaped and powerful. His jaw was very masculine, but he didn’t mind that either.

At the end of the day, Jorah knew that he wasn’t the normal kind of transgender. He wasn’t a woman born in the wrong body. He was something else. And it had taken a very long time for him to come to grips with how his gender identity actually worked.

The problem was that he was nonbinary, sort of. He didn’t feel like he was a man but didn’t feel like he was a woman either. Instead, he felt like he was both. Not an intersection of them, either; he felt firmly attached to both his male body and his female body. That part of him, the part that was a woman, didn’t get to live in her own body. She was forced to share the male body with him. But she didn’t want to get rid of that body either.

It was a hard position to be in. Not as hard as some; going through transition is never easy, and the feeling of absolute wrongness of the body that people who needed transition was almost certainly harder than what he experienced.

Jorah had the experience of both hating the body that he was born in and being perfectly accepting of it. He wasn’t a bad looking man. Despite not caring about such things, he didn’t have a small penis. Sometimes he wished he did but he knew that was a crap shoot. Being well endowed was as much random chance as being poorly endowed.

His body produced a lot of testosterone. He could be what those lunatics referred to as an alpha male. He could grow a thick beard if he wanted to. No one would look at him and call him a sissy. Not unless he asked them to, at least.

But Jorah knew that there was a part of him that was female. A part of him that was every bit as much of a real person as he was. And now he could be Megan every night, while he slept. He could truly live in both bodies, for the first time in his life.

It was a more emotional experience than he’d been expecting.

He got out of the shower and got dressed, then tried to take stock of himself. Was he tired? There’s always the bit of feeling tired that comes when you first wake up from sleep, but the shower had taken care of that. Now he had to see if he had gotten enough good rest during his night of gaming.

He hoped that he had. If he could actually split his life between Jorah and Megan, that would be a dream come true, no pun intended. Never mind what might happen in the game. If he could have an actual life with a female body, that would be amazing.

He had some simple food and sat down to watch the news.

There were a lot of stories that didn’t interest him. The world was always getting worse somehow. Every step forward led to several steps backward. He knew he was being pessimistic, but that’s just the way it all seemed to be. He used to think that the future would work itself out, but he had lost that hope somewhere along the way.

The important thing was that he didn’t see any stories about people having bad reactions to the new gaming experience. There was nothing suggesting that his time in the game would be detrimental to his physical health.

And after the news ended, he took stock and realized that he didn’t feel sleepy. He didn’t feel like he had spent the entire night playing video games. Unlike when he used to do that in his youth, he didn’t actually miss the sleep.

It had worked. His time as Megan had allowed his Jorah body to rest. And now his time as Jorah would do the same for Megan.

Would it be a problem if he became unsure which world was actually real? Would he have that difficulty? Would it matter if he did?