A Prophet In Panties (The Blenders)

I could see the guy who'd knocked on my door through the peephole, bathed in the garish hallway lighting.

Wearing an ill-fitting black suit jacket and striped tie the man looked to be in his fifties or older, a short and squat brown human with a bulky chest and a couple of chins and a hat that looked like it had been crushed in his suitcase while he travelled around the world two or three times.

I wasn't expecting anybody, so I opened the door with the chain still on and peeked out at him through the gap, not letting him see too much of me.

"Yes?"

He looked me in the only eye he could see, with a steely gaze.

"Patrick Wellman?"

I didn't answer. I was too busy scrolling through my memory banks, trying to figure out if I owed anybody money enough for them to have gone to the trouble of sending a bill collector. I came up with a semi-solid 'no'.

"Are you Patrick Wellman?" he asked again.

I let him stew for a few more seconds and then nodded.

"That's my name, yes. What do you want?"

His gaze softened, and he smiled a little.

"You're a hard man to find, Mr. Wellman," he boasted, as if he was congratulating himself on his achievement.

"Am I?"

He nodded.

"You sure are. Can I come in?"

I shook my head.

"No."

His eyes shot open in surprise. He'd already started leaning forward, ready to walk. I got the distinct impression he wasn't used to people denying him entry.

"No?" he blurted out, questioning, mild offense in the tone of his voice.

"Look," I said, "I don't know who you are or what you want, so no, you can't come in."

He looked at me for a few seconds, analyzing things. Maybe me, or maybe the situation.

"I'm going to reach into my pocket and pull out a business card, okay?" he asked, and I nodded, ready to dive out of sight if instead he pulled out a gun or other weapon. It struck me that the odds of that were probably next to nil, but it never hurts to be prepared, a part of my brain once again a little embarrassed for all the many scenarios in life I looked at through the eyes of someone who reads too many thriller novels.

The card, once he handed it to me, was thick and embossed.

Morgan Group Investigations. There were telephone numbers and email addresses for offices in multiple cities and a URL for their website, and at the bottom his name, in capital letters.

Vincent Vasquez.

"Can I come in now?" he asked.

I looked up at him.

"What is this about?"

He looked at me like I was being a pain in his ass.

"It's about something that's best discussed inside your apartment and not out here in the hall, where all your neighbors can hear us."

A whole slew of questions ran through my mind.

"Like what?" I asked, "what are you talking about?"

He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, the way people do when they're trying to stay calm.

"Our client," he tersely began, "hired us to find you, in order to present you with some sort of significant offer. There are financial considerations involved, Mr. Wellman, things that you probably don't want Ms. Busybody across the hall to know about, since she's probably got her ear glued to the inside of her own door listening to us right now."

I wondered if he'd already met mean old Mrs. Glauss or if that was just a standard happening in his line of work.

He stared at me as if he was getting tired of me delaying him.

A few more seconds of letting him stew later I slid the chain off the door and opened it enough to allow him to come in, and he quickly marched like he owned the place straight down the short hall and turned into my living room before I had the chance to ask him to take his shoes off. I guess he didn't care that I was a bit of a neat freak.

When I stepped into the living room he was scanning everything, which I assumed was behavior that came with being an investigator. Not that there was much for him to look at. My natural minimalism when it comes to stuff combined with my life-long financial lack of excess funds meant I didn't own much. A two-seater couch that had seen better days. A wooden rocking chair with a threadbare cushion on the seat. Two little end tables and one little coffee table. A small t. v. stand and a small flat-screen on it. The only thing I had plenty of was books, and they filled up to overflowing three Ikea bookcases along one wall.

Mr. Vasquez was studying the spines of some of my reading materials.

"You said someone hired you to find me?" I asked, hoping I'd get him to explain why he was here quickly so he could then leave quickly.

He turned to look at me, studying me just like he'd studied my books. He looked up and down and back again.

"Like I said, you're a hard man to find. We don't often run into people with absolutely no online public profiles," he said, "so you're very much an anomaly. No Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter, no nothing."

I nodded, because I couldn't think of a thing to say. They're not requirements, after all, or a law.

"You made us have to work harder than we usually do, Patrick," he said, "and real life isn't like what's described in a lot of these books you have. The government doesn't just give out information about people to whoever asks. The Police certainly don't. You don't own anything, like a house or a boat or a car, so we couldn't find you that way. You don't own shares in any public company, as far as we can tell. We couldn't find your name anywhere. Nobody you grew up with that we talked to has heard of you for years, so we knew you'd moved away from your home town. But where? You don't even appear to have a credit rating, for god's sakes. It all makes me want to ask, are you hiding from something?"

I sat down on my couch and looked up at him.

"Why are you here?" I asked, cutting off his line of questioning.

Once again he studied me, his eyes narrowing and his whole demeanour changing.

"Someone who knows you from your past wants to connect with you, and so far they've paid a whole lot of money to us to find you."

"Who?" I asked.

He reached into the right inside breast pocket of his suit jacket and came out with a very thick envelope.

"Someone who has bought you an open-ended first-class return airline ticket and paid for a suite for as long as you want in a five-star hotel in downtown Manhattan, and someone who has also thrown in five thousand dollars spending cash for incidentals, that's who."

Plopping the thick envelope down on my coffee table with a loud whack, he lolled his head from side to side, studying me some more, waiting for my reaction.

"Although I have to confess I have no idea why, so don't ask me."

I looked at the envelope, which was bulging with bills, stunned by the amount of money sitting right in front of me, while I thought of my past and who I'd ever met and who was wealthy, coming up with nobody.

"I don't know why either," I answered, before my innate scepticism flared up and I scoffed at him.

"Look, is this some kind of joke?"

He shook his head, as if I was an annoyance to him.

"No, Patrick," he sighed, "it's not some kind of a joke. See, you don't know me, we've never met, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but I'm pretty much a homebody, if we're telling truths. So I have much better things to do with my time than traipse around the country for weeks on end trying to find someone who lives like he doesn't want to be found. I was ready to write you off a month ago, Patrick. I was going to tell the client you were probably dead, so there was no reason to keep searching. The trouble was we couldn't prove you were dead, because we couldn't find a death certificate being issued by anybody, in any part of the country. But since money apparently is no object with our client, who is as persistent as fuck I might add, I've been doing nothing but traipsing around for the past few months, chasing down dead-end leads. So," he added, trying to look friendly but failing at it, instead coming off as pleasantly harassing, "could you maybe do me a favor and take the tickets and the money and fly to New York? I'd like to sleep in my own bed again before I die."

I had no idea how to respond to him.

No, I didn't really want to go, that was my first reaction. I'm not much of a traveller at the best of times, never having done a whole lot, although that was as much a result of my lack of money as it was my loathing of line-ups and crowds in general.

"Who is this client?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"You're not listening," he said, with exasperation, "I don't know who they are. All I know is that they want to see you, and they've got deep pockets. So are you going to say yes, or what?"

I thought about it for a few seconds.

"So," I began, "let me see if I have this straight," and I paused, wanting to recap things just right, "somebody who is rich and who you won't tell me who it is because you claim you don't know wants to see me again because they somehow knew me in the past and I'm just supposed to take your word for it and use the tickets and the cash in that envelope and fly to New York City?"

He nodded.

"Bingo. You got it in one."

I looked at him with confusion.

"Do you have any idea how ridiculous that all sounds?"

Mr. Vasquez didn't hesitate.

"Patrick," he blurted out, "do you have any idea how much it costs to hire a company like ours, with people and offices all over the country, just to find somebody? We're talking thousands and thousands of billable hours here! Maybe even tens of thousands. Never mind all the travel expenses. And believe me, we ain't cheap. Finding you was damned near impossible, especially when the usual ways of finding someone didn't immediately work. Do you have any appreciation for the fortune our client has already spent and would keep on spending if I hadn't found you? If we were a less-than-professional organization with little or no integrity we could keep this client on a retainer forever and they'd never miss paying a bill. This is a client who is obviously serious, friend, so I'm sorry if it sounds ridiculous to you, but you need to understand that this ain't no fucking joke, is what I'm saying."

We stared at each other for what felt like minutes on end.

"So what's it gonna be?" he finally asked, "yea or nay?"

We stared at each other again, in silence, for way more than a few minutes, while I debated in my head about a decision. Someone from my past? Who could that be? And what's with all the money? What could I possibly say or do for anybody that was worth all that cash? And New York City? Did I really want to go there? With all those millions of people? I hate crowds!

Vasquez just stood there and stared back at me. He looked like he could do it for days if he had to.

"The client is prepared to double the offer of cash," he finally said, perhaps sensing defeat, pulling out a similar-sized envelope from the inner breast pocket of the other side of his coat, "if that will sweeten the offer."

It was more money than I'd seen in quite possibly my whole thirty-eight years of life combined, so I reluctantly said yea.

I called my boss at home and told him I was taking some time off, and while he wasn't super happy about the office going short he couldn't argue that I had weeks of vacation banked, because I hadn't taken one in years. I never could afford to go anywhere in the second place, and I didn't have anybody I wanted to visit with in the first place.

When he asked me how long I'd be gone for, I couldn't give him an answer.

Vasquez arranged for our flight for the following day, and picked me up bright and early the next morning while it was still dark out and drove us to the airport. He noticed right away that all I had was a small suitcase and a tiny carry-on bag. I couldn't tell if he'd somehow figured it out that I don't have big luggage because I don't own a lot of clothes to begin with.

He hadn't lied, either. The seats were in the front of the plane, where I'd never been before, and they were wide and spacious and luxurious, and there was tons of legroom, not that I especially need it at five-seven, and the service was caring and fawning and the flight attendants were gorgeous and always smiled. One of the crew, a young man who I guessed to be in his early twenties, was sporting a serious lump in his tight trousers and a very round rear end, things I usually wouldn't notice about other men but couldn't help seeing. With me sitting in the wide chair the guy's crotch was almost at perfect eye-height for me, and he seemed especially friendly with me for some reason, practically doting, and it embarrassed me, my face turning red multiple times, and I saw Vasquez smile and shake his head from across the aisle.

Once landed at LGA a limo was waiting for us and took us into the city, to a building a block away from a small park, where we checked me into a suite that made my apartment back home look like a closet. The view from up high was spectacular, if you like big cities, which I'm mostly ambivalent about.

I had time to grab a quick shower and change into nicer clothes before Vasquez escorted me to our destination, which was an apartment building on Central Park West, which I'd always heard was the hoity-toity area. Looking like most of the other buildings on the street, we got out of the limo and saw lots of stone and bricks and glass that reflected out rather than exposed anything inside. It made me think that wealthy people didn't want anyone watching them, but they enjoyed spying on the rest of us.

The doorman, wearing a long red tunic and a tall dark shiny hat, opened up the front door for us once Vasquez had talked to him and shown him some sort of documentation, and we walked straight into a shiny elevator full of mirrors and golden trim and travelled in silence up to the Penthouse level. I was more nervous than I could remember ever being, while Vasquez just looked bored.

When the doors opened up, what I saw took my breath away.

We stared at a large living room, one lushly and tastefully decorated. Everything in the room just screamed out the word, 'expensive', which I figured was apt, considering how much money this person had spent simply finding me. Vasquez had said the client had deep pockets, and he wasn't kidding.

The furniture was all white and probably cost more than my annual salary. The walls were white too, as were the floors. On every available surface there was art, statuettes and paintings and sculptures. Hanging in one corner, near the floor-to-ceiling windows, were huge glass ornaments that had to have been created by that one-eyed guy I'd seen documentaries about, who was so world-famous now that anything he made cost several arms and legs.

I was in such awe of what I was looking at that Vasquez had to push me in the back to walk out of the elevator before the doors closed.

We stood on white tile floors, large two-foot by two-foot squares that had to be Italian marble. A hallway ran away from us in both directions, leading to bedrooms on one end and what looked like a mammoth kitchen on the other.

"Have a seat," Vasquez said, pointing to a leather sofa that looked so comfortable that it might just swallow me up.

"Where is this client of yours?" I asked, so nervous about who it might be that I wanted the reveal to finally be over, so I could satisfy the intense nagging curiosity I'd had since Vasquez had knocked on my door.

He pointed again to the sofa, so I sat.

Reaching for his phone he scanned something, a text maybe, and I watched his lips move slightly as he read the words, before he nodded to himself, looking back down at me.

"Okay," he said, moving to the fireplace, where he slid something off the impressive mantle, "my instructions are to get you to put on this blindfold," and he walked toward me, his arms extended, holding something black that looked like oversized sunglasses with an elastic string instead of arms.

"What?" I asked, incredulously, "you want me to wear a blindfold?"

In a look I was now familiar with, Vasquez didn't hide his annoyance with me.

"It's not what I want, Patrick," he said, a tinge of scorn in his voice, "it's what the client wants. So just put the fucking thing on, alright?" he ordered, "I can't leave until you wear it, and then you're not going to take it off until the client says so. Those are the rules. Got it?"

The look in his eyes told me he wasn't kidding.

"And just so you know," he added, "no matter how long this goes, I'll be in the lobby, waiting for you. The limo is on the curb, so even if this takes hours you've got a ride back to your hotel. Understood?"

I slowly nodded my approval, before I shook my head in semi-frustration and then slid the blindfold on. It was thick and made of a smooth soft material, so it was cool to the touch and molded itself to the shape of my face, blacking out everything, letting no light in at all, even around the edges.

The sound of Vasquez's feet walking away and into the elevator was followed by a few minutes of total silence.

I thought about taking the blindfold off, and was just about to do so, when I heard clacking noises, one after the other, starting off far away from me but getting closer and louder. Whoever it was had to be wearing shoes that had hard heels.

The sharp reports stopped when the person seemed like they were just a few feet behind me, and I was so nervous my feet were bouncing on their toes, my knees teeter-tottering my thighs up and down.

My inner voice was trying to scream out at whoever it was.

LET'S GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD! SAY SOMETHING!

Finally, I heard an intake of breath.

"Hey, Tap."

My whole body jolted.

Not that anyone could see it, but my eyes opened up about as wide as snow tires behind the blindfold, and I nearly jumped upright. All the conjecture I'd been going through over two days about who the client was disappeared in two syllables.

He'd called me Tap.

There was only one person in the world who'd ever called me Tap. It was one of his idiosyncrasies. He'd sometimes pronounced people's names backwards, just to be different. I was Patrick, or Pat, and therefore I was also Tap.

He was Brendan. Or Nadnerb, as the case may be.

He'd been my best friend in high school. More or less he'd been my only friend in high school. Nadnerb and Tap, like peas in a pod, that was a saying we repeated, often.

We were oddballs then, so much so that one teacher compared us to an old married couple, for finishing each other's sentences. Except that whatever we were finishing was usually not normal, always irreverent and weird. Sometimes it even amazed us how much we thought alike.

I hadn't seen him or talked to him or communicated with him in any way for almost twenty years. It was like he'd disappeared off the face of the planet. One day we were our usual close friends swapping emails back and forth, with him away at College, and the next day he'd gone dark, with total silence since then. I'd not even heard from him when my folks passed away.

"Brendan?" I gasped out loud, with sudden glee in my voice, as I reached for my face to pull the blindfold off.

"NO!" he snapped, "NOT YET! Leave it on for the time being, okay?"

I made a 'why?' kind of noise.

"Please, just trust me," he said, "I need some time to talk to you before you see me."

A sudden shard of worry made itself known in my spine.

"Why? Did something happen to you? Are you disfigured or maimed?"

He laughed a little snort.

"No," he said, "it's nothing like that."

I reached for my second guess.

"Did you get fat?"

Another snort.

"Ha! Nice and politically correct, as always."

I nodded my contrition.

"Okay, sorry," I said, "that didn't come out the right way. I meant to ask if you'd, I don't know, maybe put on weight to the point of being extreme or gross or hideous or something. Is that why you don't want me to see you?"

"No, not at all," he said, and I heard more clacks, following them with just my sense of hearing but knowing he'd moved from standing behind me to standing in front of me.

"I just need to explain a few things first, about what happened to me."

I nodded.

"Okay," I said, anger rising in me, "then what did happen to you? And why did it take you twenty years to tell me? I thought we were friends."

"Yeah," he said, his voice softer, "I'm really sorry about that. But, the thing is..."

"What?" I snapped, "what is the thing? What is this thing that will magically excuse you for just disappearing without a word?"

I heard him gasp a little bit.

"You're mad," he said, and before I could answer with 'you think?' he continued, "and I get it, I understand, you have every right to be pissed, Tap. But, like I said, just let me explain, okay? If at the end of it you're still pissed at me then use the return plane ticket and keep the cash and I'll understand, even if it makes me be sad."

As much as part of me wanted to storm out in protest of how my supposed best friend had treated me back then, I took a deep breath and nodded.

"Okay," I said, tersely, "fine, explain it to me."

He took a few moments to start talking.

"Ultimately, I couldn't cut it," he said, his voice almost a whisper.

"Couldn't cut what?" I demanded.

He sighed.

"I couldn't cut life, the way it was," he answered, and then I heard him plop himself down in a leather chair, opposite me.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, "the last time we talked on the phone you said everything about college was great."

He murmured his agreement.

"Yeah, the thing is, I lied, Tap, and it wasn't just about college. It was everything, and it had been going on for a long time. All through my teens, hell, even before that," he breathed out, "I was a very unhappy human being. I kept that part of me from everybody, my folks, my sister, and worst of all from you, my best friend in the whole world."

I didn't know what to say.

"It was all a lie, Tap. I lived a lie. In front of everybody, I was me. Brendan. The weird one, the crazy one, the flippant guy that everybody expected me to be. I made people laugh, and occasionally offended them too, and that was who they wanted to see. That was who they expected. Even with you, the only person I could ever even come close to being real for, I was weak, and I couldn't ever admit that behind the persona I'd built that there was a huge sea of unhappiness inside of me. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how many times I tried to tell you, thousands probably, because you were always my best friend, and of all the people in the world, I figured you'd be the only one who'd understand, and who'd, I don't know what the right word is, who'd commiserate with me."

I could feel his regret. He was genuinely sad about things.

"So why didn't you tell me?"

He sighed again, heavily.

"I wasn't strong enough, I guess," he whispered, "I always knew you'd understand and be supportive because, well, I just knew it. That's the kind of person you are. But I could never admit that I was, you know, damaged. So," and he took in a big breath of air, "I faked my way through things. I pretended to be confident, and cool. But then I flew off to college, by myself," and his voice got softer, "and that's the harsh part. I was all by myself. No family. And no you. I didn't have my usual support system, you know? So I tried to make new friends, on campus, but I crashed out at that. There was no you, no best friend, no easy-to-talk-to bud."

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

"And the worst part was that I was out in the big world, for the first time, an adult! I figured that everything would change, that I'd finally get to be who I was meant to be. I'd get to do adult-type things, right? Like getting laid, for instance. I mean, I wasn't expecting to be so successful that I'd be wading in pussy every day or fighting them off with a stick, no. But I figured college and parties and alcohol and all, that I'd be meeting women and getting laid regularly, or at least semi-regularly. But that didn't happen. Not once."

I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

"It didn't take long, Tap," he continued, "I was despondent by Thanksgiving. I was spiraling down, man. I was into a serious depression. I was alone and lonely and thinking that no degree in Political Science was worth the misery I was going through, at every turn."

Then his voice got eerily quiet and thin.

"I kept spiraling down and down. And it culminated in me being in a horrible place, in my head and my heart, just before the Christmas break, and I... well, I... see, the thing is, there's no easy way to say it so I'll just say it. I tried to end my life."

I sat bolt upright and felt years of frustration and anger slide away from me, now only deeply concerned for my friend.

"No, Brendan, no."

"But it turns out," he said, some mocking in his tone, "that I failed at that too."

I realized my hands were shaking with worry.

"You can't look at it that way," I said, quickly, "you didn't fail at killing yourself at all," I added, "instead, you succeeded at understanding that life is good and you triumphed at staying alive. Look at it that way."

"Yeah, I do now" he replied, "but not then. Anyway, I took some sleeping pills and drank a bunch of alcohol and ended up in the hospital where they pumped my stomach. And then I wanted to die from shame and embarrassment at what I'd done. But there was a doctor there, a psychiatrist, who started working with me. He was a lifesaver, that man."

I heard him get up and walk around, the clacking of his shoes loud on the Italian tiles.

"Doctor Gillespie. Ian Gillespie. I still remember his name. I'll probably remember it till the day I die. He began my therapy right away, that very day. He made me go through some horrible agony, at first, and I had to learn how to actually look at myself and who I was and where I was psychologically, to be able to be honest with myself about myself. I was a deeply-troubled person, Tap, full of all kinds of emotional problems, and it was fucking brutal, having to recognize and confront my own fears and deal with all my issues."

I could hear the pain in his voice, just from remembering those times, and yet I was curious.

"Fears about what? What issues? It always seemed to me that you were the most stable guy I knew. Hell, I looked up to you for that. You were a weirdo and you were totally comfortable with it. You walked around with a strut, proud as a peacock about it. It gave me strength. It showed me that I could one day be close to the same. Because I was the one who was shy and reserved and uncomfortable around other people and you were the one who accepted me that way and enabled me to come out of my shell and gave me approval. You made me feel like I did actually have something about me that was worthwhile."

He snorted out a hiss.

"Acting, Tap," he said, "it was a lot of acting."

Now I was mad.

"What, so you were acting as my friend? You were making it up? That's somehow supposed to make me feel better that you just fucking abandoned me?"

I heard him take in a deep breath.

"For all that time," he began, quietly, "you were the only thing in my life that kept me from going off the deep end, Tap. You were the only person who I was living for. If it hadn't been for you and your friendship and support I probably would have tried to kill myself a whole lot sooner. So you need to believe me, Tap. I never ACTED as your friend, man. It wasn't acting. I WAS your friend, genuinely, and you were my only support through all those years of growing up."

A heavy silence hung in the air for a couple of minutes.

"I was a failure, Tap, at everything. And then I went off to college and failed at that too. I mean, I did okay grades-wise, at first, but I couldn't succeed at living. I couldn't be him, the guy who everybody back home expected me to be. And worst of all, I couldn't be the guy I expected me to be."

I had to know.

"Which is who? Who did you expect to be?"

"I expected to be a man," he said, emphasizing the word 'man', "the textbook definition, you know? Strong, confident, moderately aggressive, swinging my axe and forging through the wilderness of life, beating my own path, that kind of thing. And instead I was a fraud. I was living a life of sadness, and disappointment at every turn, and full of fears. Some of them debilitating. Fears of failure, fears of not living up to the standards, fears of inadequacy. I was completely unfulfilled, everything around me was meaningless, pointless even, trying to chase the clichéd dream. Trying to be what our society and this culture of ours said was the norm."

I fidgeted on the sofa. The words I was hearing and the meaning behind them were just not what I remembered my friend being all about, or exemplifying.

"Why be normal?" I interjected, "we used to say that all the time."

"Yeah," he said, and then he breathed in and out, "but it's one thing saying it and it's a whole other thing living it."

Once again we sat in silence for seconds on end.

"Let me ask you a question, Tap, and please give me your honest answer, okay?"

I nodded.

"How many genders are there?"

My first reaction was surprise, at the radical change of subject. That was followed by a healthy rise of skepticism, wondering if he was somehow setting me up for a joke or something.

"Well, last time I looked there was two. Why?"

He waited a few moments.

"What if I was to tell you that there are actually three?"

I shook my head, trying to shrug off what I felt was the ridiculousness of his question.

"No, there's just two. Male and female. I may not have much experience with them, but I know there's us and then there's women. That's it."

Brendan walked a bit more, his shoes loudly clacking off the tiled floor.

"Here's what I discovered," he said, "in the years of therapy and self-analysis that I went through, after my stupid attempt at killing myself. Here's what I learned. There are actually three genders, Tap. You're right, sure, that there are men and there are women. But the thing is, there's also the in-betweens."

I scoffed at him.

"The what?"

"The in-betweens," he said again, "I call them the 'blenders'. They're made up of a blend of masculine and feminine qualities, and for the most part they suffer in silence because they don't fit in the standard roles."

"Is that right? Three genders?" I asked, my skepticism now obvious in the tone of my voice.

"Yeah," he whispered out, "it is."

More silence.

"Do you remember..." he said, finally, and then stopped.

"What? Do I remember what?"

He chuckled a little bit.

"Do you remember what we used to call each other?"

I searched my memory for what he might be alluding to, but came up empty.

"Nadnerb and Tap."

He chuckled again.

"No," he said, "I mean, yeah, okay, we called each other that, sure. But do you remember what we occasionally called each other when there was nobody else around? When we were just being silly for silly sake?"

It only took a couple of seconds for me to figure it out, and it was my turn to chuckle.

"Yeah," I admitted, "you would get that phony lisp in your voice and call me Patty, or Patricia, and I called you Brenda."

And then he said the words that changed everything.

"Take the blindfold off, Tap."

You can never be prepared for things that you could never imagine happening.

Apoplectic shock and confusion swept over me, at my first sight of my best friend in almost twenty years.

Standing in front of me was a vision I hadn't expected, and never would have imagined in a millennium of thinking.

He was wearing a dress. That's the only word I could find. I tried to immediately come up with some other word, or excuse for it, as if he was just being fashion-forward or cutting edge, but that was a fool's errand. There was nothing even close to it that I knew of that men actually wore, not even in French fashion shows. It was a dress, plain and simple. Long sleeves, open neckline, buttons up the front, and a pleated skirt.

It clung to his body, and flared at the hips just like dresses do when they're being worn by women. It also bulged in the chest, just like with women, which confused me, because women have boobs and that bulge made sense for them. On Brendan, it looked completely foreign.

And yet at the same time it didn't.

His hair was long and wavy, professionally coiffed, framing his face. And it was his face, no question. But he had eye shadow on, and long thick lashes, and rosy cheeks and wet red lips. He had big hoops hanging from his ears, and he had a shiny diamond on the end of a chain hanging in his cleavage.

He had hips. They were rounded and looked exactly like a woman's hips. The dress itself was long and ended just below his knees, and on his legs he wore hose of some sort, black and gauzy, and his shoes were the same color as the dress, which was more or less a soft light mint green.

His fingernails were the same color.

There were rings of gold and sparkly gems on several of his fingers, and there was a glittering bracelet on one wrist and a thin-strapped golden watch on the other.

"I got mentally healthy and began actually enjoying my life after I accepted that I was a blender. I was in that third gender. The in-betweeners."

I said the first words that came to me.

"Are you a fa... I mean, are you gay?"

Brendan sat back down, directly in front of me.

"I'm a blender, Tap. I was born a male, obviously, but for my whole life I knew I was different. I knew that I had feelings and thoughts and desires that weren't in the normal package of being a male. And I tried, I did. God, I tried, because I didn't want to be anything other than the normal package. I tried harder than anything to be the standard male. Like every other guy growing up, I went through puberty and then did the dating thing. I made out with girls, I followed the rules, I tried to get through all the bases and they always stopped me, although sometimes I got halfway home. Heather, for instance, she let me get to second base a bunch of times."

I sat and stared at him.

Then I wondered if I was supposed to think of him that way, as a him.

"I thought you and Heather started having sex back in grade ten."

He nodded slowly.

"That's what I wanted you to think," he said, regretfully, "that's what I wanted everybody to think. I wanted everybody to look at me and say to themselves, he's a guy, he's a man, he's had sex and still has sex regularly with her. There's no reason to suspect anything odd about him, or dangerous, if you know what I mean. He ain't no fairy, or fudge-packer.

"But the truth was that she wasn't giving it up in the first place, and the further truth was I didn't actually ever really want to go through with it, deep down. It frightened the hell out of me. It just rubbed me the wrong way. It felt, I don't know, antithetical, you know? The whole idea of trying to get my rocks off with a woman just felt like the nails on a chalkboard thing. So I pretended to pressure her, because a normal guy would, and I always acted brilliantly when she denied me, as if I was pissed at her and only stayed because I deep down loved her so much."

I just stared at him.

"I lied to make myself look cool, to everyone," he admitted, "I was a virgin with women then, and, well, here's the thing, Tap. I'm still a virgin with women now."

I just kept staring.

"I'm a blender, Tap. And my particular blend is the truest reflection of my soul, which, as you can see, presents very feminine. I'm only the real me when I'm wearing these kinds of clothes, pretty and sexy. It's like I say in my talks, every blender is different, in terms of the mix of masculine and feminine. There are people, men and women both, who have..."

He stopped talking and looked at me curiously, instantly staring at the hand I had suddenly raised, as if we back in high school, and I was trying to get the attention of a teacher.

"What?" he asked.

I lowered my arm.

"You said 'like you say in your talks'," I questioned, "what does that mean?"

He smiled ruefully and sat back down in the chair opposite me.

"You don't know, of course," he said, perhaps to himself, "I'm getting ahead of myself. So, Tap, why don't you ask me what I do for a living."

I figured he was being rhetorical so I waited for him to answer anyway, but soon enough it became apparent that he wanted me to ask.

"Okay. What do you do for a living?"

He smiled.

"I'm glad you asked," he said, "now, back in our day we would have used the words 'motivational speaker', but nowadays the kids say 'influencer'. So I'm an influencer. But I'm also an author, of two non-fiction books, one of which made it onto the top twenty list last year. I'm also a partner in a video production company."

"What are you talking about, or influencing about? Or writing about?"

He pointed at the glass-topped table between us, which had two magazines tastefully displayed, pages open. One of them was a trade magazine from the financial world I'd never heard of mentioning his rising financial worth, and the other was in the waiting room of most every doctor and dentist in North America every week.

"Look at the bottom third of that page," he suggested, pointing.

The tiny headline read, 'A Prophet in Panties'.

The article itself was wrapped around a somewhat-grainy picture of Brendan, as he is now. Reading quickly, I saw that his book and his talks all over the country were rising in popularity, and the message he conveyed was that many men were like him, most of them unhappy and struggling, in the closet, and that they would only find their joy in life if they gave up the struggle of trying to be the standard 'masculine' and instead accept their own innate femininity, becoming proud sissies, or what Brendan referred to as 'blenders'.

To quote from the article:

Brenda says her primary mission is simple, to reach out to the millions of men in this world who are living unhappy lives pretending to enjoy heterosexual relations with women, and who instead would only find their own spiritual and physical fulfillment in the arms of other men. For millions of men, Brenda claims, women are for making babies, whereas nature for many men demands the connection that only two men can create together. Women know women best, and men know men, that's one of her go-to sayings. And men, Brenda argues, know more about men than women can ever hope to, and for 'blenders' the answer to life-long happiness is the holy union between a masculine man and a feminine one.

I looked up at him.

"How do you think I can afford this place?" he asked, waving his hand back and forth. "How do you think I could afford to pay for the Morgan Group finding you? This is Manhattan, Tap, and real estate ain't cheap here."

"You give speeches?"

He nodded.

"I've given thousands. When I first started out, after I learned my place in this world and realized I could help other men find theirs, it was for tiny crowds, sometimes just a few people, oftentimes in little community centers or basement meeting rooms, and for peanuts in terms of money. And in those days I did it for the satisfaction of delivering my message, the money was unimportant. But," he said, and leaned forward to make a point, "the more I travelled and talked, the more a lot of men listened, and the bigger the crowds got, and then everything grew pretty quickly from there. Next thing I knew I had a booking agent and a literary agent and I was published and doing book signings. Now," he added, sitting back with a huge smile, "now I get thirty grand a talk and expenses, plus a percentage of the gate. And those book sales have been steady and entirely profitable. So a few years ago I got me a money manager and now I'm richer than stink."

I had to know.

"What do you mean, you learned your place in this world? What exactly happened?"

A slow smile crept onto his face.

"My apocalypse, that's what happened."

I'm sure my mouth opened a little in surprise.

"You had an apocalypse?" I asked, somewhat derisively.

"It means 'awakening', Tap, not 'the end of the world' the way some idiots use it. It's not about judgement day or any of those other religious interpretations. It just means 'awakening', and it took me a while and a lot of therapy, but I got there, eventually. I awakened."

I waited for him to say more.

"I learned to understand what nature intended for me. I woke up from the foggy dream of enforced morality. You see," he said, leaning forward again, "it's like this. Too many men follow a destructive path for their own soul. They waste all their energies and break their own hearts pursuing relations with women, when they're just simply not cut out for it. There's plenty of men who are totally straight, of course, and good for them. But the blenders, a lot of them, they just don't realize that they're blenders, that they're neither one of the two main genders. They're a mixture. So they spoil their time and they try and they try, they keep banging their heads against the wall, and for what? A little pussy now and then? Even if they get it, which, based upon most women I know means hardly ever, they're not meeting another soul head on, they're not connecting on the most basic and intrinsic of levels. They can't possibly expect to join hearts and minds when women and men are so completely different. I say that the evidence is right there in front of our eyes, and contrary to what we've all been taught. Happily ever after can't possibly happen when you're mixing apples and oranges. Or oil and water. Mars and Venus. However you want to phrase it.

"The perfect coupling for men like me is with a masculine and dominant male, an Alpha, if you want to use that word. That doesn't make him better than me, or stronger than me, or somehow more important than me. Because it takes two to tango, and what I learned is that two benders, one masculine and one feminine, they create the most ideal bond, the deepest connection, you can't have one without the other. Equal in every way, except one is masculine and one is feminine.

"And I learned it the hard way. Like too many other men, all around the world, I wasted my time in the pursuit of women, thinking that would bring me the happiness I deserve. And the main reason I didn't want to actually have to have sex with Heather is because it just felt wrong, it felt misguided. It felt to me like the idea of sticking my erection into her was the saddest thing ever. Somehow I just knew, deep in my soul, that releasing my seed into that particular kind of hole was anathema to my happiness. Even today I shudder just thinking about it. I mean, not only could I make someone pregnant, which I do not want, but even conjuring up the image of going into a vagina just turns me off.

"So, once I actually gave up the pretense of being attracted to women, to being straight the way society expected of me," he continued, "and once I finally let myself dress and appear the way I actually felt inside, pretty and sexy, well, then everything changed. It happened! Kapow! Just like that! And finally! I got laid the first night I went out dressed! It was that easy! And it wasn't just a, oh I got laid kind of night either. No. It was everything. It was transformational. It was cataclysmic. It literally changed my world, because it demonstrated that I'd been right all along. The truest joy for a blender like me was with other men.

"And, more importantly, I found my community that night too. I found my brethren. I found where I belonged."

I nodded my understanding of his words.

"So you're gay," I said, "you got laid by a guy?"

He nodded, and beamed a smile.

"Yeah," he answered, "but I didn't just get laid, like, it wasn't a run-of-the-mill event, is what I'm saying. It was my awakening. My apocalypse.

"And that first guy," he said, "wasn't just a guy. He was more than just a good fuck, although, make no mistake," and he grinned like a Cheshire Cat, "he was a GREAT fuck. He made me cum more than I'd ever done before, more than I ever thought possible. I saw stars. I cried like a baby. He opened up the floodgates, when he opened up my legs."

My brain instantly created an internal video for me to watch, of Brendan, dressed like he was now, all feminine-looking, in bed with some anonymous guy, the guy going bananas on top of him, screwing him over and over and over again, the two of them bouncing and rutting like wild animals.

I found the idea of it shocking and it startled me, especially when I realized that I was more than half-erect in my pants.

"Have you ever been fucked, Tap?" Brendan asked, and I watched him smile deliciously at my discomfort at answering.

"Uh... well... um... not with men, no."

I was just about to say the line from Seinfeld about how there's not anything wrong with that when he held up his hand and said, "don't."

Like I said, we could finish each other's sentences because we knew how the other thought.

"Mr. Vasquez tells me you live alone," he continued, "but I take it you've been in relationships with women?"

I nodded, trying to appear completely proud of the normalcy of that.

"I was married, actually," I responded, "for a few years, until we kind of drifted apart."

He nodded.

"I'm sorry it didn't work out for you," he said, "I am. And if you don't mind, let me ask. What caused the break-up?"

I looked at him like if it was anybody else who asked such a personal question I'd say something, or just haul off and belt him. But we had a relationship built on honesty, back then, or at least our version of it, knowing now that he wasn't always truthful with me.

"We were just two different people. We didn't sync much, at all" I answered, truthfully adding, "in or out of bed."

He smiled, perhaps a little smugly.

"What I offer men in my talks is a kind of spiritual guidance. I try to point them in a direction that they'd never considered before, or maybe had thought about but denied themselves, like I had done for years. I promise them, because I know, that their ultimate pleasure, and their ultimate release for that matter, will only happen with other men. And it doesn't matter if I'm talking in front of a hundred people or thousands of them. If I can reach one poor misguided man to redirect his energies to letting his feminine side out, then I've done my job. And, if I can convince one masculine blender who's always wanted to top a bottom blender but denied himself his ultimate pleasure, then again, I've succeeded."

I looked at him and admired his confidence and his self-assuredness.

"People really pay you money to tell them to be gay?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"No," he said, forcefully, "people pay me money to tell them that it's completely natural for a lot of men, men who've always failed at being successful with women, to tell them and show them that the reason why they fail is because they're likely blenders, and to tell them to free themselves from the restrictions of the standards we've all had force-fed down our throats our whole lives."

I don't know why, but I couldn't help notice that her nipples were as hard as rocks.

"I tell them that the greatest sexual experience they will ever have, bar none, without question, no bullshit, the absolutely fucking greatest sex they'll ever have is with other men. And I ought to know, because once I let go of trying to be the 'man' and finally had a cock inside me, it started me on this journey of love, and I've had thousands of men since then."

I stared at him, open-mouthed.

"Thousands?" I asked, skeptically.

Brendan nodded, and grinned.

"Thousands," he answered, and then his eyes narrowed and he stared at me, in his serious mode, "so tell me, even if you'd stayed married to this woman of yours," and he paused, "would you have had sex most every day? Seriously. Almost every day?"

The answer was obvious, of course, and written all over my face.

He nodded.

"I'll take that as a no," he said, "whereas I do have sex almost every day, and, well, there's no point in sugar-coating it, but not only am I rich but I get laid more than you can even dream of."

We stared at each other again, for long quiet moments.

"Why are you telling me all this?" I finally asked, "why did you spend all that money trying to find me?"

He thought for a bit.

"Have you ever done any public speaking, Tap?"

I shook my head.

"There's two clichés you hear about from people regarding public speaking, and how to avoid the nerves," he explained, "whether you're talking in front of ten people, or ten thousand. To alleviate the nerves you're going to be feeling, the first cliché says you should look at the audience and imagine them in their underwear, to help you calm down, right?"

I'd heard that particular saying before, and I nodded.

"I've never really done that one," he admitted, "I mean, I tried at first, but it just didn't work for me. But," he added, "the second cliché is that you should pick one person, just one, and give your talk to them. Speak directly to them, even while you're looking at all the audience, back and forth, so they don't feel left out."

I'd heard that saying too, and nodded again.

"You're that person for me, Tap," he said, slowly, earnestly, "every talk I've ever given, whether it was just a handful of people or whether it was standing-room-only theaters and arenas, I've always spoken to just one person."

He waited to say it.

"You. You're my person."

His eyes got teary, welling up with liquid.

"This journey I've been on, this awakening I've lived, it's always been for you."

I felt my eyes get wet.

"Me? What are you talking about?"

Brendan sat forward, as tears ran down both of her cheeks.

"You and me, we were always operating on the same wavelength, right?" and he kept on crying and talking, "Nadnerb and Tap, two peas in a pod, remember?"

I felt a tear run down my cheek.

"Yeah," I said, my voice cracking, "I remember, but..."

He shook his head.

"But nothing, Tap," he interrupted, "it was the truth then and I've spent twenty years believing it's still the truth. I had to go to the worst place a human being can go to, wanting to kill myself, before I could have my apocalypse, my awakening. And I've spent twenty years preaching and teaching other men that they can do the same, that their salvation lies in accepting that they're blenders, and that their only path in this world is to give up the stupid pretense of relationships with women and instead stick to their own. Because I learned it, Tap, first-hand. I found God, if you want to call it that, and it's in the company of other men. You haven't lived until you give up all the pretense and let go of the moral bullshit that society spews at us and just go for it, because it'll amaze you and stun you and leave you in awe."

He sniffled and wiped his cheeks with the sleeves of his dress.

"Trust me!" he practically shouted, "one night with the right kind of man and you will cum harder and longer and more often than you ever thought possible and you will finally understand that your life, right down to the genetic level, is enhanced by accepting a man's seed into your body! It feeds you, it nourishes you, it combines with your own cells and makes you stronger. And you will never feel as much passion and true romance as you will with other men. For men like you and me, the in-betweeners, the blenders, women are for making babies and that's it! Don't get me wrong. I love the softness and beauty of women, and I choose to pursue those qualities in how I present myself to the world. But I will never, and I mean NEVER lie with one, for the purpose of love-making. Men like us should always be with other men. That's the message that I've been talking to you and only you about, for twenty years. You were just never there in person."

More tears ran down my cheeks.

"Is that why you went to all this trouble to find me? You paid all that money just to bring me here so you could try to convince me to be gay?"

Like a rocket he stood up and gazed down at me.

"NO!" he loudly said, "I don't have to convince you of anything like that. I know you! I know how you feel, I know how you think! Two peas in a pod, remember? I know it, more than I know anything, that deep down you just need a gentle steer in the right direction. I don't need to convince you of anything, you'll convince yourself."

"I'm not gay, Brendan!" I shouted back, "I only have sex with women!"

His head tilted to one side.

"Oh yeah?" he asked, "and how's that working out for you?"

It hit me like a freight train.

I hadn't had any luck in that regard in years, and as soon as that realization entered my brain my tears doubled up and ran down my face.

"That's what I thought," he said, my silence answer enough for him.

Looking up at him, even through my tears, I couldn't help but see his chest, and the roundness of what looked like breasts, and it once again struck me as odd.

"Are those real?" I asked, my voice choking, pointing at his tits, and he looked down and then back to me.

"Yes, they are," he said, "because I always loved tits and I decided when I could afford them that I wanted tits of my own. And you know what? It hurt like fuck, to be honest, for weeks afterwards, but between the implants and some organic supplements to help them grow I've never been happier. And believe me, my lovers adore them too."

Then I looked down, at his groin.

"Yes," he answered without me asking, once again proving that in many ways we were two peas in a pod, "I still have all my boy parts. I would never, and I mean NEVER get rid of those. Especially now that I have almost nothing but prostate orgasms."

Then he looked at me again, studying me.

"You ever had one of those, Tap?"

Once again, the answer was obvious to him, written on my face.

"Just like I say in my talks, man," he said, sitting back down, "you have no concept of how good a prostate orgasm is, how much better than any sex with a woman can be. You haven't fully lived, I promise you, until you've taken a cock into your ass and had that cock rub up against your prostate. It will literally make you realize that every other kind of orgasm was tiny, and weak. Puny. Nothing to even think about. One cock and I guarantee you you'll never want to stick yourself in a hairy smelly va-jay-jay ever again."

We stared at each other again, like we always had, seeing into each other's soul.

I felt his words and their meaning start to weigh on my brain. Was he right? Was I that much like him? Were we really two peas in that particularly unusual pod?

"You're wondering now, aren't you?" he asked, quietly.

Letting him wait for an answer for a few seconds, I finally relented a bit.

"Maybe."

Brenda smiled, from ear to ear.

"What have you got going back there, wherever you live now, Tap? Anything? A lover of any kind? I think we covered that, right, and that's a hard no. And based on the report Vasquez filed last night, I can only assume the little hovel of an apartment you rent means that whatever job you have doesn't pay a whole lot. Correct?"

I nodded.

He leaned forward.

"So the odds of you affording a woman in your life are also pretty close to nil, let's be honest. They're expensive, we both know that. So instead," he said, loudly, "stay here, with me, Tap. Let's be two peas in a pod again! I have more than enough money to give us both a great rich lifestyle for the rest of time, man!"

A question was nagging at my brain.

"Are you suggesting... I mean... do you think that I should, like, be your boyfriend or something? Is that what you're getting at?"

He laughed.

"Hell no," he said, grinning, "you're not a top, if that's what you're thinking that I'm thinking. No! Of course not! I'm not inviting you here so you can be the man who fucks me, no. Don't you get it? I'm inviting you here because you're just like me, Tap. You are sweet and gentle and soft and you've got a romantic soul, and you would absolutely adore letting your femininity come out. You have no idea how much everyday life is better just by wearing women's clothes. They take your own natural womanly qualities and amplify them like the biggest fucking speakers in the world!"

I looked at him, from top to bottom, from his makeup and jewelry and his dress and his breasts and his legs looking sensual in hose and the killer high heels he had on, which I admit were sexy as hell.

"Really?" I asked, tentatively, curiosity evident in my tone.

He nodded.

"Really," he answered, "I could show you right now, Tap. We're probably close to the same size, and I've got closets fucking jammed full of every kind of outfit you could ever imagine, and I guarantee you that your internal erotic meter will go right off the fucking charts the first second you slide panties up your legs. You'll probably cum, without even touching yourself. That's how good it feels."

Once again we sat in silence, while I considered his words, and found myself wondering if I could go through with what he was suggesting.

"The plane ticket is open-ended," he reminded me, "so if I'm wrong, and you don't like getting dressed in sexy clothes, you could always just say 'thanks but no thanks' and go back home. But I'm one hundred percent confident, Patricia, that you'll love it, more than everything you've ever done in your whole life. And then you'll want to know if I'm right about sex, that laying down on your back and spreading your legs for a horny man is the best hobby a man like us can have. You won't be able to think of anything else, so much so that you'll be begging me to set you up with a date. And I'll double all the money Vasquez gave you if I'm wrong, but I can absolutely fucking guarantee that one night in bed getting your virgin ass cherry broken will convince you, just like my promise has convinced thousands of other men, that men like us were meant to be with other men.

"We're blenders, Tap, you and I. We not only need it, we DESERVE it! We deserve to live our fullest lives, and that can only happen when we're slutting ourselves out with horny men, drinking their cum and then taking their cum inside of our asses."

I stared at him, and I know my mouth was open in shock.

Shock at his frank words, for sure.

But also, shock at realizing that I was considering his offer.

Shock at giving it all credence.

Serious credence.

"Or taking their cum all over us," he added, with a big grin, "on our face. It's called getting painted, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's a WHOLE lot of fun! Especially when there's more than one painter in the room!"

I watched her nipples get huge, poking out from her chest, through the material of her bra and her dress.

Brenda noticed where I was staring.

"And you could get breasts of your own, Patty, if you wanted. I've got more than enough money for that too."

I looked back up into her eyes.

"It's not a requirement," she added, "but a lot of men really like them, and I can tell you for a fact that I adore having them. There's something about all that weight on my chest that just reinforces the feminine feelings racing through me, like the big amplifier thing. And, on those rare nights when there's no big strong man to play with them while he fucks me, playing with my own tits is a pretty good replacement."

I thought about how much I liked breasts, and how in my own inept and awkward ways I'd tried my whole life to feel as many of them as I could, rueing that women didn't often give me that green light. So, having a pair of my own, I realized, could satisfy that particular urge on a full-time basis, couldn't it?

Then I thought about where I was in life. Almost forty years old, my parents both deceased, no brothers or sisters, doing inventory control for a small manufacturing company for less-than-ideal amounts of money.

And what did I have at home that was worth fighting for? The only thing I'd truly miss were my books, but those could get boxed up and shipped to New York pretty easily.

I looked at Brenda again, and we stared. Into each other's souls, like always.

"What do you say, Patty? Wanna move to the Big Apple and be girlfriends together? We could double-date every night!"

I thought of Vasquez, waiting for me in the lobby, and the limo sitting on the curb, idling away and costing my best friend money. I thought about how lonely I was, in general, and how my life had never felt completely correct without my best friend, without him around. Or her, as the case may be. And how it could be, now.

I thought about the old expression. You only live once. YOLO, as some people said. And then I remembered carpe diem, or seize the day. They both meant the same thing, if followed literally. Reach out and grab the things that are worth grabbing, because life is short and the opportunity might never arise again.

I thought about clothes that I'd seen in my life, things that various women had worn at one time or another, and which ones really made my blood rush and my libido race. Dresses, skirts, blouses, heels, all sorts of different designs and styles, as fashion trends went in and out of favor, and every color in the rainbow. And I kept thinking, if they made me so excited when other people were wearing them, how much better might it be to actually feel them against my own skin?

I thought about the plane ride, and that flight attendant with the big lump in his pants and the round rear end, and how I'd actually enjoyed thinking about his penis, even when I was blushing red and embarrassed. Denying it was absurd. And I realized that I'd been thinking about his penis even in the limo rides, and even when I was at my hotel suite, taking a shower. I remember washing my own groin and thinking that he'd been bigger than me soft than I was erect.

I thought about prostate orgasms. I'd never had one, and yet now that I knew about them a huge portion of my soul wanted to find out if they were as good as advertised.

Brenda sat and let me think, because she knew me better than anyone and she just needed to wait me out.

I thought about how I'd never been attracted to big cities, and yet now was itching to experience living in one, where I would be free to live no matter how I wanted to live, one drop in a sea of humanity, and therefore safe to pursue anything.

More tears came out of my eyes, as I looked back into her eyes, with all of my concentration.

"You've decided, haven't you?" she asked, and when I nodded slowly she leaned forward as more tears came out of her eyes.

"So what's it going to be, Patty? Are you going to go back home? Or will you stay and be my best friend again?"

I cried more, and then steadied myself, and gave her my answer.

THE END