Wits End
short story by Iris
Wits End
Iris
Whitney was restless.
Tidings borne from wicked lies had taught her much of the world. People were lying, and always, for reasons which were easier to see than they would like. Everything was only just beneath the surface for people who loved to lose.
America had become the land of the lost losers.
Cora was a winner. She made everything make sense to Whitney from the moment they first saw her on Tinder. Whitney swiped right, and with emphasis, praying in the moment, pleading to something within. Whitney wanted to serve that woman with her mouth, and all over their body. It was an immediate and insatiable notion when seeing their gorgeous, trans, Puerto Rican body.
Whitney needed nothing more than to be allowed to consume something gorgeous with her tongue and lips—her whole face, in fact. As long as they smelled sweet, and then she would for a very long time. She had decided that. Whomever her face’s fate’s victor was, they would be suffering ecstasy quite completely alongside her.
In the meantime, it was activities—those were how Whitney would bide her time. That, along with rigorous departures into her bedroom for fisticuffs with her little fellow and the rear porthole.
She had been biding her time since registering her L.L.C.
Although nobody had hired her yet, Whitney was a private investigator by trade. Gregariousness had people doubting the efficacy of Whitney’s detective work.
The way people disregarded Whitney, particularly her mother, and especially when they said, “You’re sick and you need help,” felt oddly unconsidered. Especially considering how innately and practically qualified she was.
Her website didn’t seem to be generating much attention either.
Whitney had long since realized things happened in tandems. Mysterious happenings were those often of pairs, entwined and fated notions would hold in patterns. Fours would bore from twos and back into her blankness.
She was a zero. The calculation didn’t quite make sense.
People were triangular, and of boxiness. Everything about them was round. Whitney knew something from her bones, and it seemed too odd to your average fellow. Her only hope was that someone hot and smart might witness her in passing and get obsessed. At least, that someone like Cora might utilize her more base abilities of investigation—that was what Whitney really needed.
Whitney was just good at things. She really liked making people feel happy too. And there was nothing more balancing to gorgeous, infinitely malleable mind than a babe.
She really needed a babe to have her back. Whitney wanted backrubs too. Being a large trans woman who was smarter than everyone else had its challenges, most of all was finding someone to tame her.
Tough cookies were everywhere. They all wanted Whitney to break them, while she just wanted one of them to break her back.
It was the mystery of mysteries — the how — and finding that answer had led Whitney to become something of a psychological savant. She was seeing right through people these days, and for the worse.
Awaiting another exciting response from Cora, who seemed flattered to abide Whitney’s honesty, she was tempering herself and her excitement. Every loose second had been spend thinking of wrapping her mouth around, or putting her tongue inside, whatever they might find beneath Cora’s shorts.
It was a tantalizing mystery. Every solution felt more rewarding than the other in its own plethora of ways. Deepest down, beneath her black, Whitney hoped Cora would be the one to ultimately lead her towards getting rid of the thing. Somebody had to, so Whitney was putting it on everybody.
“Can I get the salami, nine-inch?” Whitney asked the sandwich lady.
As they were plugging the order in with their sandwich fingers, rattling the plastic stand of the ineffective touchpad, Whitney thought that lady seemed sad somehow. It was obvious they were fighting overwhelm.
Whitney stole a lot of extras on the way out.
People didn’t really look at her. They were working the hardest not to, in fact. And there were benefits to her station as the most visible-invisible person. It also helped she was white and kind. Nobody could believe, even as they worked the check stand at their own business, that the thing she had in her hand or cart was not accounted for somehow. In fact, they did not even begin the calculation. For Whitney was one of the few who was immune to all witnessing.
It was how she became such a great detective.
When she was on the street, walking home, enjoying the first half of her newest, freest candy bar, Whitney was thinking about sucking Cora’s little cock, or big one, or whatever. Her salami sandwich could wait if needed. She flipped her phone up in hope for the banner of hope—a message from Cora would have made the plug inside twinge. Yet, what she saw was less than expected.
Whitney had an email, her first at whitneyPI@whitneyPI.com.
It wasn’t anything like what she expected. They were someone like her, but all turned around, and inside-out too, though they seemed unsure about why. She could tell just from their name.
Whitney knew the sort. It was a boy.
They were a female boy, and not one thing was ever shone more immediately, or clearly to Whitney, about any one person, then that fact. A lot of self-important, and self-defined women’s women were boys. Those sorts would often confide the fact to Whitney in private, underhandedly, knowing what they were saying—expecting her to know but not—then blame her for hearing them and respecting that.
It was another Moss. That was a staple-name of the sort. That name choice was the closeted binary-trans-man, halfie-version of Luna.
Whitney whished Luna wasn’t so overused by her trans foresisters.
She would have loved that name.
Whitney responded to Moss’s single line inquiry, ‘I need to talk about a disappearance,’ and she did it with her usual style of underhanded panache, summoned wholly before its delivery, while unawares what exactly might be coming through her dainty-massive fingertips.
‘I’m here for you.’ Whitney typed first, before ignoring all wording which might emote, scrunching her forehead to find the correct nomanclature of suppliance, catering it all to the type of person who needed to presume themself in control of every interaction with a transgender woman.
She found the perfect finishing note to keep from scaring them way.
Please contact me anytime you would like to set up a consultation.
-Whitney
That had hit the spot, she thought. Whitney didn’t want to frighten Moss by anticipating their needs and making them feel led. Half-hidden boy people with vaginas often hated everything that made them feel in the presence of earnest and heartful intelligence. The only correct answer was to be as much of a lie as they were. For a trans woman to be found carrying that kind of intuitive wit, would focus their resentful ire of projected self-disgust into modern witch burning. All the while it stunk, she could tell they loved her in their bellies, and Whitney could infer she was in a hell of some kind.
She had wanted one of those boys to take a place beside her most of all.
It was just impossible. At least when they were pretending to be women. Especially when they were loving her and hating her for the reflection. ‘Women’ like them only approved of trans women whom they could control with infantilizing gaslighting. If Whitney hadn’t learned to give them what they wanted with an elevated, loving, and consciously humored maliciousness, she might never have gotten a single case.
All her kinds of men were broken out of existence in the world. Most of them, at least.
By the time Whitney got back home, clamoring for keys at her front door, excited more than anything for taking a big bite of her salami sub sandwich, thrumming to pound it down with the overwhelm-donated energy drink and cookies, she felt a pulse from the phone still held in her hand.
Moss had responded bluntly, and clearly wishing to meet as soon as possible, with an urgency below the words which spoke to desires of meeting that very afternoon.
“Do you have any time next week?”
Whitney did, in fact, have that time. She was wide open right through the next week. And so, she responded how the situation demanded.
She linked them to her calendar with a prewritten signature-email.
Whitney didn’t personalize it one bit.
They weren’t talking much on the road. Whitney was trying not to be to nerdy about the way Cora made her feel.
She was just so cool. There was a protective spirit about the woman—to herself—and that made everything better to a person like Whitney who did the same. Standing beside another person, let alone sitting in their car, who knew the struggle and walked it the same was a blessing Whitney rarely got.
In fact, she had never before. Intelligence was rare. To find it with a sister who wanted to be a spicy friend was all she could ever hope to want most.
For them to take the lead was just unexpected.
Cora had let Whitney do the talking until they met. That shut her up.
Whitney liked nothing more than the rarest sort who could make her nervous. Cora had the spark glowing in Whitney’s chest, and that was all she needed to find a peaceful place of rest beside someone.
“What kind of music do you want to listen to?” Cora asked her.
Something in Whitney was warming to the fact she would be able to speak freely in Cora’s presence. So, she did what was always craved for and went straight for Cora’s secrets.
“What’s your favorite album?”
It didn’t take long for Cora to smile. She was the smartest sort of woman. There was a play in their conversation, a simplicity, and layers underneath of literacy to each other which was profound.
Cora didn’t tell Whitney the answer. She just put it on.
Something wicked was bubbling in the belly of Whitney. Her senses were tingling, and everything seemed as if leading to a head. Clarity was brought to the world while seeing Cora squinch her legs together.
Let’s Groove, from Earth, Wind & Fire was a blessing to the ears of a woman so lost in a culture of artlessness.
When finding herself most at peace, in shortest order, at-last beneath the trees, wind flowing in her hair let down, Whitney was still feeling that song’s rhythms. The groove was inside and within Cora, and the effortless they used to claim Whitney’s attention was of gripping absorption. Cora was a most beautiful thing to see in movement.
To lose herself further, deeply within the woods, and feel the speed at which her heart was pulling forward—for that that to be with someone so reflective of the beauty she knew in her own intelligence, was a wholesomeness towards Whitney’s spirit achieved.
Every part of her which had been most concerned of finding a place between Cora’s legs had faded to the blaring of Whitney’s heart.
She felt it beginning there, and clearly, right up until she received the message and made the mistake of looking—when Moss ruined it.
They had scheduled for Monday, as expected. Their newfound impatience was helpful, however. Whitney would be able to catch a ride with her newest friend to follow the lead.
Smiling broadly, knowing Cora would be up for the mystery—something deep within their connection having spoken to Whitney—she let the question slip out, “Can I have you help me with a case?”
Whitney’s blossomed bosom of becoming had bounded when Cora’s nearest eyebrow raised without a glance.
No matter where they looked, Moss’s guidance wasn’t seeming apt at leading towards an actual lead.
After Moss scheduled the intake appointment—a Zoom call they made for pro-bono consultation—they messaged with all the information. Her brother was missing and the reason was shrouded.
Moss’s email had a picture attached. It was a man who resembled her brother’s best friend to a T, apparently. He was working at a Target, and one of Moss’s friends had shared the image on sight. They had a lot of people working on the grassroots investigation.
Curling into the Target’s parking lot, after having unloaded the scoop at last to Cora. At least, most of it. Whitney expanded on the matter in a final blare.
“I think it’s definitely just this Moss guy being left out. My gut tells me it’s their family. They seem to have almost no information—which means something. I think this is gonna be easy.”
Cora wasn’t laughing at Whitney like other people. She didn’t think it was funny that Whitney believed in herself. There was some feedback loop found there between them. Cora knew that Whitney knew that she knew that they knew; they were already falling for each other.
Whitney didn’t get to talk to people who believed in themselves often.
Cora didn’t get to talk to people who believed in her the right way.
Taking to the parking lot had Whitney excited. That man looked easy to spot. She was going to work him like a doll, and though Whitney expected Cora to stay in the car, she found her new friend kicking her door open as they parked.
Backing him down in an isle—watching him frozen—loving it—Whitney put on her sweetest gait and presentation. She was singing with sweetness of tune as she delivered her kind questioning most tuned to the reality of her station in the situation; he wouldn’t speak to her if she was honest.
Whitney wanted to play it underhandedly, with a layer of uncontrolled manipulative dissonance enforced by a calculative undertone they wouldn’t know how to comprehend or interpret. She was going to freeze him. It felt as if it would come out in subtext he wouldn’t grasp consciously, implying that both he and his proposedly lost friend had been present at her friend’s communal date rape.
It was a long shot that he would have been in a place with trans women. So, she had to play it disembodied, and beyond herself entirely. Whitney knew what she was planning to do as if heard by instruction from herself, then laughed about with whimsy of mercy to her kindest heart, before allowing that all ported back into her conscious intention. Still, the calculation regarding how it was to be spoken, or why that would jar loose the information which Whitney needed was beyond her.
She simply knew when to trust her guiding force of subconscious intelligence. Whitney was secretly quite disabled; a schizophrenic person in America who didn’t need medicine had to keep things quiet when they weren’t protected by a family.
People didn’t know it was a superpower when you wielded it correctly.
Whitney was especially worried about how nobody would fuck her if she said it straight up.
Still, the time had come and gone until she was before the man. He had a scruff, along with something obtuse behind it, which reminded Whitney of who she was so long ago, and that spoke volumes.
“Do you remember Emma?”
That was all she said. It wasn’t what she originally thought of, to come at the man with such a harsh non-sequitur.
“Were you with David at Mark’s place last year?”
Moss’s brother David had no information truly provided about him yet, except an overlong story about his personal connection of drug addiction. Mark just sounded like a nicely fitting name. People were too jammed up in front of Whitney to think anyway.
“What?” Was all Connor said.
He didn’t know how to respond to words which had questions in them he wasn’t expecting. Connor was a robot.
Whitney took a deep breath as she felt the need to dive back in the deep end of communication with the imbecile, “I think you might know David Corinth. I think you and him might have raped my friend.”
Connor stepped back. He was reaching for his walkie when he saw Cora and froze, just enough, some divinity in the delay. It allowed Whitney to get one more thing in as she stepped forward to scare the man into a body shock.
His nostrils flared as Whitney delivered the line, “I’m gonna fuck you two up in the street.”
Threats weren’t taken to kindly by losers. He had to ask her to leave as she already was.
“Yeah, I got you—retard!”
The last bit was uncontrollable for Whitney, and drew a bit hesitance out of Cora as she found her gaze. That glow read on her face, however, once turned, was of the joyous disregard Whitney held post-smote. It was only a specialist-sort who would know it okay to smile along with her.
“Don’t mind me.” Whitney told her as she passed—Cora seeming uniquely stunned, but only just, and for that breath which allowed Whitney’s pride to flare.
Someone finally got her. At least, enough for letting her get away with doing what she had to with the mind-rejects. Even though she hadn’t met Connor, despite the fact that any less aware and expansive person would find her assumptions about the man’s character presumptive—bordering on diagnoses of psychotic—he had been responding affirmatively in body language the whole time, confirming complicity with the very kind of thing she was accusing him of.
He seemed to flinch at David’s name in a way beyond that of the hurt he might carry for a missing friend. The whole thing was suspect, and Connor himself was found as unworthy of Whitney’s respect from that same voice she trusted forward every moment.
Solving the case, proving her merit as a detective in the blind, would teach something fantastic forward to her new favorite person. Someone was finally going to see her. Whitney was going to have a believer and she could feel it.
They just needed to go get a pizza and wait for Connor to get off shift.
She wasn’t wrong—Whitney wasn’t wrong at all. Not one bit. Not one little bit. It was proving that way over again in every way, as it had for some time when she followed her nose. And it was pointing at working that man, Conner, in some unknowable way until her intuition made it happen.
How? That was the question.
Why? That was the money and the validation. It became showing off to Cora and keeping it interesting for a nuance to stretch her intelligence as well.
They got pizza and there was trust involved. Whitney had no way of judging a robot-man’s shift length. He was clearly an, ‘I don’t look at the clock,’ kind of guy. Still, her heart said fun and that involved a quick stop for some weed, and Cora made it sweet by covering the charge.
Whitney worked well wasted, only on the ganja however, and with tobacco most of all. She adored almost nothing more than finding a smoking and kissing buddy.
Cora wasn’t the type for that, and that would be more than okay. Whitney liked being a good girl the very best.
Once they waited the man out, and haphazardly tailed him in their car, quite aware of his aimlessness, it became apparent that whatever Whitney was doing would feel easy.
She didn’t wait long after he went inside his home. Whitney was seeing the signs in the fact he was living in a shared place, and it wasn’t an apartment complex. It was a luckiest happening which allowed for a simple plan to generate.
“I want you to wait here.”
Cora didn’t protest, and Whitney could see the stakes. She didn’t care that she could tell Cora would drive off and leave her if it took too long or got weird. It was only their first date.
Whitney knew it a test she would pass. Somehow, in the pattern, was a victory she was ready for. It felt of multitudes, layered, and too good to be anything but success in all regards at once.
Even with that confidence in tow, while sneaking around the house. Even when finding the blessing of the back door being left as a hanging screen for the pups. Realizing the cars which littered the driveway as no longer matched towards other occupants currently aboding, and hearing the shower upstairs through a cracked window, Whitney just did it. The signs were too clear.
“One step, two steps.” She spoke in plain while entering the kitchen.
She eventually began to just scoot, tip toeing in a dancing half-burst to the other side of the kitchen, before peeking through boldly into the dining room beyond. A word — flanking — came to mind.
Sometimes Whitney resented her childhood the very most.
Regardless, she was also checking her corners and had swept the perimeter on the way in most thoroughly. Glory was a notion finally realized in the entryway, some giant relief of success. An answer was right in front of her.
There was a purse in the hallway.
It made Whitney realize it—this man was about to masturbate vigorously in the shower. Nobody was home. His woman was the kind who went out to work and stayed late. It meant she could do the thing that her body was calling her towards upstairs without too much worry.
She wished there was an awareness of what that really was, or how this would pan out in any way that could show off to Cora and solve her case like the mastermind Whitney was. For most of the way through the yard Whitney was thinking she had been coming for a computer to steal. She couldn’t get into a locked phone, but a computer was less of a proposition.
By the time she reached the top of the staircase she decided—the target was the purse-bearer. Bitches with that kind of boho purse kept journals, and lots of them. Planners were expected, and found immediately upon entering the primary bedroom.
It was clearly not Connors and it was a sign for the best. That was a woman’s space and it led Whitney directly to the side table drawer, which she found empty, then a quick check under the bed for reason’s beyond her.
When rising to think, it was something beneath the bed which spoke of the truth. This woman had yoga mats and a tent. She was clearly not using them. Any journals she had would be old and tucked away—that could be perfect if she knew that clown Connor for a while.
The closet was a goldmine. There was a whole tub of journals. One on top actually proved the woman was still keeping up on her self-work.
Whitney grabbed the whole thing.
It was awkward, and she had to walk right passed the cracked bathroom door steaming ether. It was emanating terrible music and that made her think of Cora.
Nothing made more sense than getting back to their car and getting out of the neighborhood. Something in it was of smell, and sight of blessings untold.
Whitney was practiced at moving just the right amount of stealthily, while efficiently, and maneuvering large things. She took oddest jobs for a largest woman.
Leaving the front door open, nearly bounding when she reached the street and saw Cora’s eyes light up into a full body roar of laughter while popping open the back door to her Corolla over her shoulder in preparation for the evidences delivery, Whitney was feeling conclusions.
She dumped the box, not caring a bit for the results of the missing person case which was surely a sad gay man getting burnt out onto the street somewhere. Knowing she would help Moss track him down, Whitney was just ready to claim her prize.
When she jumped into the passenger seat there wasn’t hesitation as Whitney took a kiss in an extension of her boldness, earned.
Cora took it well by grasping both sides of Whitney’s head, and taking his for her own, then pushing her away with a breathy gasp.
Then Cora took the next one.
Fewest, longest stretched seconds later had Whitney’s hand on Cora’s lap. She begged, “Drive. I want you to drive.”
Cora, perhaps, knew exactly what was beneath Whitney’s words. She sure seemed to. Definitely, she had, as the road turned to the sinking of Whitney from outside view. The windows were tinted, but not enough for her to be brash.
Art by kkingdeo