Simon/Joy: That Thing Is Heavier Than It Looks!

My man has good timing.  Or maybe just phenomenal retention of details over time.  It will have to remain a mystery, because I'm not going to dredge up the thing that would answer the question one way or another with him.

It's been roughly a year since one of his visits to California lined up with me being at a low point, as the man living my life dropped a "Save The Date" on me to say he was going to stay as Simon for, presumably, life.  That date was last weekend, but instead of moping around some dismal wedding venue in Cleveland, feeling conflicted about what message bringing my rich boyfriend sends to the man who stole my life, I was lying on the beach in Jamaica, letting a charming Scottish man fetch me vodka martinis, pondering getting a Honey Ryder bikini for selfie purposes, even if I don't quite have the same sort of curves Ursula Andress did.

Indeed, by Sunday night I was relaxed and content by the campfire, showing Iain how to make s'mores, which are apparently not a big thing in Scotland.  I was thinking of it as just a vacation, not connected with that other thing, so I was genuinely surprised when, as we were about to dose the fire, he got down on one knee, pulled a jewelry box from somewhere, and asked me to marry him.

I stopped beating for a moment.  I don't know what goes through a real girl's mind then but I had so many thoughts all at once.  I had never imagined seeing this scene from this perspective, looking down at at a man on one knee with the ring extended toward me like the really cheesy bit in a 3D movie, and there's an amazing feeling when it hits you that someone likes you enough to make this offer.

And also, I did it!  I've played the part of a woman so successfully that there was nothing in the back of his mind that made proposing feel wrong.  I'd made him like the parts of me that were different from the original Joy, maybe even more, because he hadn't asked her.  And, yes, I'd landed myself a rich husband, one who would give me peace and security no matter what else being Joy threw at me.  It was the biggest sales job I've ever done, with the biggest commission.

You may say that sounds mercenary and awful, but I didn't feel any guilt as I said "yes" with genuine delighted surprise and let him slide the ring onto my finger.  I'm not the first pretty girl to use my good looks to lock in a comfortable life, and I won't be the last - and most of the others grew up learning how to navigate the world as a woman.

And I do love him.  It's probably not the same way a regular woman lives a man, but I feel good when I'm around him and warmer as he held me and kissed me.  I feel a bit of envy where most girls probably just feel desire, and I probably measure him against what I'd do in a similar situation more than his other girlfriends have, but he scores well, so what of it?

All of that did make it feel different when we had sex as soon as getting back to the hotel room.  We'd liked each other before; now we belonged to each other, and we were both a bit more aggressive and careful with what we were holding.  I think I may have enjoyed it bit more, too - it was almost like back when I first discovered my clit and was learning new ways to stimulate it with each new guy.  No pressure, just fun.

Still, when I got into the shower afterward, taking off my earrings and necklace and other jewelry, I looked at the ring and had a brief moment where I didn't know whether to take it off or not, thinking that girls who had planned to get married since they were kids knew but I didn't because I'm a fake.  I decided not to take it off, but it took a second, and Iain noticed the hesitation.  He thought it was funny when I said that I'd just realized I'd never be totally naked again.

I had a quick moment of panic when we got to the airport because of it.  I think that most of us guys the Inn turned into girls tend to go light on jewelry, and I always take it off before going through airport security, but obviously this wasn't coming off.  It was a silly thing to worry about - did I think every engaged woman or married couple took these things off and risked losing them in the x-ray machine? - but I didn't think about it until that moment.

Then we got home and it was time to show off the ring, and that was kind of weird.  Not at first - Sir Robert was the first person we told and showed, and he was just as sweet as can be.  Weathers and some of the other help may not have been completely pleased - I get the feeling some of them see Iain marrying an American who isn't rich as beneath him and somehow them by extension - but to hell with them.  I may be able to fire them if they give me crap by this time next year.

I haven't made a while lot of female friends of my own here yet - we travel, split time between the manor and London, and lots of Iain's friends are couples anyway - so that's kind of weird.  I see them with him, and my first instinct is to kind of be causal, but he wants to tell them, and I get it.  It's a big deal, and a really nice ring, after all, and I've certainly liked it when a girl showed off a gift I gave her in my old life, but it kind of starts to feel one-sided at a certain point.  He's not wearing a ring showing that he's claimed and off the market, and I've got to relate the whole story of him getting down on one knee like I was surprised and flattered and not like this is something I've been working toward, even though I'm pretty sure some of these women were just as mercenary as me.

Joy's parents are thrilled, but I'm already wondering what the next year's going to be like.  The bride's family isn't people who can be minimized when wedding planning, but I've been living my own life.  They probably know a lot more about Joy's dream wedding than I do, and I'm guessing it might be useful.  I don't have a dream wedding, after all, and living her dream is probably better than just going through the motions.

After which I'll be Joy McKinnon.  I suppose I should be a little sad about that, but it's not like "Kershaw" means that much to me.

Still, there's a lot coming up, because I've got this ring on my finger, even if most of my life is staying the same.

-Simon/Joy

Simon/Joy: Professional Girlfriend

The title of this post sounds kind of disreputable, but it's kind of what I feel like some of the time.  I don't have a job, and a fair amount of what I've been up to this spring and summer has been traveling with Iain, or just going out with him for events where you're kind of expected to bring a plus-one.  There's enough of this stuff to do that we're out a couple times a week and not always nearby - that condo in London is not just a place he has because it's annoying to rent a hotel room, although given how few neighbors we see when we're there, it is for some other people in the building.  We've been there, and to Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen besides.  The travel and event schedule is just enough that even if I had the right sort of visa to get a job here, I'd be a terrible employee for all the scheduling leeway I'd be asking for because this can be the only way to see Iain for longer than it takes him to get up and go to work.

Which isn't too suggest he's keeping me around because I look nice in a dress, have excellent small-talk skills that he can't know have been honed over a couple of decades in sales, and know what a man likes in bed on top of that.  No, more and more I feel like he genuinely likes me and doesn't think much about how "Joy" is different than she was a few years back.  We have fun going out together even if it's not a work thing.

Not that some people don't occasionally notice.  We were having a sort of low-key night out on Saturday with some of his old school friends, who had apparently met her but not me, and someone made a remark that I hadn't been a whiskey girl in the past.  I shrugged and said I'd developed a taste for it, but this woman was weirdly insistent and annoyed all evening.  I asked Iain what was up with that, and he said that even if she were not a professional party planner, she had sort of been groomed as a hostess from a very early age, and apparently knowing the favorite drinks of your guests was a big deal, both for looking like you cared about them personally and making sure you had the proper amounts of spirits on hand.  Eminently reasonable - I still remember what a lot of clients favored - but it kind of rubbed me the wrong way that night (maybe it wouldn't have if I'd been drinking white wine).

"Is that my future if we stick together a few more years?  A mental file of how to properly flatter everybody you do business with and everyone else in the UK besides?"

"Nah, I figure that'll be my job while you sell the horses."

He said it as a joke, but I am kind of getting better at all the horse stuff.  I'm not really good at riding yet, but I'm finding that I really like it.  I've never really thought about how much girls liked horses, but they really can hit this sweet spot of being pretty, powerful, and (hopefully) not threatening.  Iain's family are breeders, so it's not like the horses in the stables were ever wild, but when you sit atop one, you don't feel small and weak and like prey.  Maybe that's not such a big deal to born women, but I definitely notice it.

I haven't quite reached the point where I ask Sir Robert if I can shadow him doing business; it would be really presumptuous with my not actually being part of the family, and as much as I'm okay with having that as a goal - women like Joy have been guaranteeing their futures like that forever and I would be a realist even if I didn't actually like Iain - it's not the sort of thing you can be too plain about.

Is that too "professional"?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Joy didn't really like this sort of thing based on her diaries, but those also make it seem like Iain wasn't too thrilled with them either, and maybe he's either learned to enjoy them more with a date who doesn't complain or he just grew up and realized this is how the world works, and maybe Joy would have too.  Or maybe she wouldn't have, but it doesn't matter, because I'm Joy now.

-Simon/Joy

Simon/Joy: Highland Girl

I actually did it.  Everything that the original Joy ever owned is gone.  A lot of it went to thrift stores, some of it went to Treena, and the rest is in her parents' basement, but by the time I left San Diego, there was nothing in my bags that I had inherited from her.  This may seem like a silly thing to do, but once it was done, I wondered why more people who wound up in a new life long-term without the original person planning to return because of the Inn don't do it. 

Admittedly, it's not exactly financially great; purges don't bring back enough cash to replace what was gone; it maybe only really works when you're going to be traveling light and moving in with your rich boyfriend.  Still, there's a bunch of really silly stuff that goes with wearing someone else's clothes and sleeping in her bed and maybe having pictures of the girl with type current face doing things you never did on the fridge.  Like, what am I supposed to do when Treena smirks and says I'm wearing Joy's lucky panties?  And the time I've spent fiddling with her devices because she had some screwy preference that returned every time her phone rebooted.  It just feels good to have all that be mine now.

But wait, you may say, weren't you focusing on traveling light so that you can move in with Joy's ex-boyfriend?  And, yeah, I see where that come off as hypocritical.  But it's not like he ever mentions stuff he and she did very often, and I feel like the fact that he's been visiting me for the past year, so that it's mostly me choosing where we go and what we do, I feel like I've been making him my boyfriend rather than hers.

I don't mean I've been deliberately trying to change him or anything, just kind of bringing out the parts of his personality that are more in line with mine.  Some of it's guy-inside stuff, like being a little more reluctant to give head, or maybe spending an afternoon at a game rather than a nature walk or whatever, and some is just me not being girl-next-door-y in the same way.  Like, I'm not going to resist when he wants to take me to a nice restaurant or spend a couple hundred bucks on a bottle of wine, or anything like that.  I'm not gold-digging or dropping hints or anything, just not saying no or being embarrassed when life offers me nice things, and maybe she would have felt the same if she'd returned to this life after spending the better part of a year as someone else.  That she didn't is all the reminder I need that life isn't always generous and you should take what it gives you.

Although even I must admit, the castle is a bit much.

Iain's family doesn't live in an actual castle - it's not made of stone with turrets to shoot arrows at invaders or anything - but it's a pretty sizable mansion, with an enclosed courtyard, a dining hall that can accommodate a lot of people, a ballroom, and stables that I'll get to layer.  I showed some nice places to guys that had money to spend in California, but even the really nice, old ones, I'd be giving some sort of spiel about what the servants' quarters had been converted into, whereas this one still had servants living there!

Maybe more staff than family, at times.  Iain has an older half-sister, who herself is married with three kids of her own, but they live in Ireland and mainly visit around the holidays, and a younger brother who is attending school in Boston, and a few cousins who have rooms in the house to call their own - a few of them are around at any given time - but most of the time it's him and his father, plus the butler, cook, stable-master, and now a nurse.

One of the benefits of not really being Joy is that I don't remember Sir Robert Mackinnon as he was before the stroke, and as such I apparently didn't come off patronizing or pitying the way that a lot of old acquaintances do when they see the wheelchair or hear him slur his speech a little.  He's still sharp, especially when you get him talking about his horses or something else where he can get excited.  I think we've even started to bond a bit, since I'm around the major a little bit more than I'd originally expected. 

As much as being the live-in girlfriend of a rich young man sounds, it gets kind of boring at times, but getting a job in a foreign country is a kind of chicken-and-egg thing.  You can't get a job without the proper visa, and they won't issue you the visa without a job lined up.  It may go a little smoother because Joy's parents are English, but that doesn't make me a citizen.

So I kind of hang around, the staff kind of resents me because they're not running a hotel, and I try and figure out what to do next.  I would occasionally wander by the stables, and one day last week Sir Robert was there, arguing with a trainer.  The horses, you see, are the foundation of the McKinnon family fortune; they've been breeding them for decades if not centuries, but it's not something Iain and his siblings have particular interest in, and Sir Robert is apparently a canny enough businessman to recognize that diversifying the family's holdings is a smart idea.  It makes him a bit sad, though, so he seemed to be heartened by my interest, asking if I'd ever ridden.  I don't know what Joy would have said, but it's not exactly something I could fake.

He was a bit disappointed by that, but got a little happier when I started to show interest in the business.  In certain crude ways, it's a lot like what I was doing before the Inn, if you consider breeding akin to a custom manufacturing process and horses a short of durable good that certain clients might need, whether they be in the racing business, farmers, or even a couple of police departments.  Sales and contracts are...  Well, it's interesting, though he doesn't necessarily seem to think a young American girl like Joy would be interested in anything but the pretty horsies.

He seems keen to foster that interest, if only because maybe me being interested would get him interested, but didn't think much of it until I got back from doing a little shopping and had the butler, Weathers, intercept me and say there was a parcel for me from "the Master", which means Sir Robert (Weathers trends to call Iain "Mister McKinnon").  Curious, I went upstairs to find a garment bag with a riding outfit in it - boots, jacket, little cap, the whole deal.

Of course I tried it on, posing a little in the mirror.  As much as I've grown used to being Joy by now, sometimes I surprise myself, and seeing Equestrian Barbie made me giggle a little, both in delight and kind of ironically.  It wasn't hard to imagine where this could go, me as lady of the house, riding on the weekend, going to events with Iain, looking modest when he says that I'm not just a pretty face but actually run the family business.  Ridiculous, I guess, but what did I come here for if I wasn't looking at that as a possibility?

Gotta learn how to ride first, though.  First lesson with Iain tomorrow, weather permitting.

-Simon/Joy

Simon/Joy: Save the Date

I guess the way a couple of things have been going, where I find myself today was kind of inevitable, but it still catches me kind of flat-footed.  It shouldn't - I didn't just have it dropped on me without warning - but I've kind of been in denial.

As you see, I haven't been back to the Inn this summer; Brian has been getting treatment as me back home, and though he lost one testicle, and has subjected the other to who knows what, he's been making progress since, and was declared cancer-free in October.

Obviously, you don't get there alone, and he told me about all the doctors and nurses and such, and, yeah, I did notice that one nurse came up a lot.  I even caught that they were getting kind of close, but didn't much worry; he figured it would drop off after he was well.  Brian's been doing a good enough job of keeping me in the loop that he'd tell me if this seemed to be getting serious.

Except he apparently didn't realize.  They were having dinner to celebrate a good check-up and he just blurts out "we should get married".  No having this thought earlier and checking with me, or realizing that he should back off, but just this instant, casual proposal that she accepts and that he easily talks himself into.

He calls me after, saying it just sort of happened, but now that it has, it feels right to him.  My first instinct is obviously to tell him no, try and sell him on the benefits of giving me my real life back, but I think - do I really want to go back to that life, my career stalled out and missing a testicle?  Maybe I don't want to be Joy forever, but getting life back to being my life sounds like something even worse than just spinning my wheels, and that's not me.  So I wish him well, shave my legs, put on a miniskirt, and go have some fun with my girlfriends - my happiness isn't tied to that old identity!

Of course, I can't be sure it's tied to my current one, either.  I had Thanksgiving with Joy's parents, and they're reminiscing about their first few, with a pre-school Joy irate that they didn't have a proper Thanksgiving dinner like her friends.  it was the first time, they said, that they truly realized that they were raising an American child as opposed to raising a child in America.  It was a cute story which would have been even cuter if I was responding about not remembering it because it happened when I was four rather than because the person involved was dead and I was pretending to be her.

That's not usually a huge deal for me, hanging around with Joy's friends or talking to her family in Facebook or whatever - it's a challenge to make sure they don't think there's something weird about me and keeps me sharp.  In a house where there a bunch of photographs of her and where I'm supposed to be relaxing, it gets under my skin a bit more.  Still, I felt like I'd shaken it off by the time I got back home to San Diego.  Got back into my life connecting people with apartments, finding a nice beach-side bar at the end of the day, letting myself be chatted up but not meeting anyone I wanted to see for the evening that week.  The usual.  Then I got home on Friday, and there it was in the mail.

The "Save the Date" card.  Because people getting married are so fucking excited that they can't just ask you once.  They've got to call you, stake out a date on your calendar, and then send you a formal invitation.  Now, I don't think I get particularly volatile or anything when I've had a couple cocktails, even with the low body weight, but somehow seeing that just destroyed what (safe to drive home) buzz I had left, and I needed it back and went for the vodka.

A lot of it.  It's been a while since I was as hungover as I was when my phone buzzed to wake me up the next morning so I could pick Iain up at the airport.  I kind of looked like shit, but I figured a shower would get me pretty close to human and telling him to take an Uber would have led to him asking questions I didn't feel like answering.

Truth be told, it kind of just put off the inevitable.  We spent that Saturday having a ton of fun, but then he mentioned some pre-me thing about Joy, and I held it together for a while but must have seemed kind of withdrawn afterward.  Fortunately for me not wanting to explain things, Iain is still basically a dude and presumed that my lousy mood was due to this being his last visit to California for a while.  Which, admittedly, does kind of suck, but maybe not as much as he thought.  I said, no, I was just going through some other stuff, that there was a lot of people who didn't want me for me, and then there was this stupid wedding save-the-date, which I shouldn't even care about but why is something just coming together for him?

He was sweet, of course, and probably figured that some other guy had gotten handsy because that was the last time something had really had me shaken.  That hasn't happened more than usual lately, but I didn't say anything; it was getting late, and I didn't want him feeling nervous about touching me if this was the last sex we were going to have.

But that did come up the next evening, as I was giving him a lift back, and some sort of estrogen surge had me tack "what are we even doing" onto "so, what comes next?"  Like, some stupid part of my female brain had to know whether he liked this version of Joy or if he was just having a nostalgic lay every few weeks.  Probably really wanted to hear something like "oh no, you're so much more confident and capable than ye were when I first knew ye, and it makes ye even sexier!", but I had to settle for "I really like ye, and these jaunts have been the highlight of my trips to the West Coast."

Which, hey, is still pretty good, although it still sounds like we're probably more or less done as a regular thing.  At least, for almost a minute.  Then he says "why don't we move in together?  The family estate is bloody enormous, and it doesn't really make sense with just me and Dad there.  And you know he's been eager to meet you."

"I don't know...  That's such a big--"  I had to hit the brakes, which dumped the purse I'd set on my lap after paying the last toll onto the floor, and after an obligatory "oh shit!", I started shaking my head.  There on the floor were five sets of keys, my birth control prescription, tampons, a bottle of red hair dye that I had been planning to surprise him with before I drank myself to sleep, and all sorts of ridiculous crap.

"What I saying?  I'm Joy Fucking Kershaw.  I do things I would never have thought of doing all the time!  It's my entire goddamn life, and now when a guy offers me a chance to leave all the garbage in my life behind to live in a fancy manor house because he likes me, I'm going to say no?  That's not me!"

Iain looked shocked that I said that, but as soon as we were stopped at a light he leaned over, turned my head to the side and kissed me.  I let him and returned the favor, long enough for us to get honked at when the light turned.  I giggled, dropped him off, and received another long kiss before he made his way to the gate.

When I got back home, what I had just agreed to hit me all over again, but I caught a look at myself in the mirror.  I looked cute, as usual, but there was a bit more to it; my hair was a mess, my wide-necked t-shirt was exposing a shoulder, and I took myself aback.  I didn't look like I was trying to be anyone else for once - not Simon, not the original Joy, not even the sort of person I thought I'd be if I'd been born this girl.

This, I thought, is what Joy should be:  Pretty.  Wanted.  Always on new adventures.  And easily able to find a man who will look out for her.

I guess it's not that feminist, but so what?  I'd always known that girls were naturally looking for what I'd just been offered, and they couldn't even see it as commendation for what is had taken away.

So, yeah, I'm moving to Scotland in the new year.  Big yard sale at the end of January - save the date!

-New Joy