บททั้งหมดของ Crossdressing For The Emperor : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

I'd heard of Salvage Town before, like you hear about places that are more like stories than real places. People in the village sometimes talked about it with a kind of distant respect, like talking about something beautiful that couldn't possibly be part of your own life. I always put it in the part of my mind for things that were interesting but didn't matter to me.But now, standing in the middle of it the morning after we arrived, I couldn't believe I was actually here.The town looked even better in the daylight than it had the night before. The streets were clean and felt like they knew where they were going. The buildings caught the morning sun, making everything look freshly washed, even the older ones. People moved along the roads with a kind of energy – they had places to be, but they didn't seem unhappy about it. Market stalls had appeared along the main road, already busy with the sounds of people talking and buying things.Lio stood

I never expected to dream. I had been so tired when I finally lay down on my mat that I thought sleep would just take me somewhere blank and quiet, the kind of deep, dreamless rest that belongs to tired bodies and minds without worries. And for a while, that's exactly what happened. I drifted away from being awake quickly, sinking through my thoughts without any effort at all.But then the dream came.It didn't arrive with the confusing feeling of most dreams, where ordinary ones start in the middle of a scene in some almost-familiar place that almost makes sense. This one came in slowly, like curtains being pulled back to show something that was already set up and waiting behind them.I was standing in a room so large that the walls in the distance were hard to see. The light inside was golden and seemed to come from nowhere in particular, like it was coming from everywhere at once, making everything it touched soft. The floor under my feet was

The idea came to me while I was still sitting at the table, turning my empty bowl slowly in my hands and staring at nothing in particular. Carl was quiet next to me, doing that thing he does when he's thinking hard. His jaw would tighten a little, and his eyes would look far away."What if we use the money we have for something small?" I said. "A little business. Something we can run from here."Carl looked at me. "Like what?""I don't know yet. But we have a little saved now, and if we're careful, we can use it to start something instead of waiting for someone to ask us to clear their yard."He was quiet for a moment, and I could see him thinking about it. Carl doesn't dismiss ideas quickly, but he also doesn't jump into things without thinking them through. That's one of the things I like most about him. He takes his time with decisions, like he takes his time with cooking, carefully with focus."It's not a bad idea," he said

Lio was still talking about the park when we got home.Honestly, I expected it. When something gets him excited, he really gets into it, thinking about it from every angle and saying everything there is to say. It’s one of the things that makes him easy to be around. His enthusiasm is real and he’s not ashamed of it. He doesn’t pretend to be interested; he just is.“Every week,” he said, dropping onto his mat and kicking his shoes off. “We’re going every week. No matter what, we’ll make time for it.”“We’ll make time for it,” I said.“You say that now.”“I mean it now. It’s a park, Lio. It’s not going anywhere.”He pointed at me. “Neither are we, and that’s my point. We live here. We should actually live here, not just work, sleep, and eat. The park is part of that.”I couldn’t disagree with his thinking. I didn’t really want to. He was right; we had been sticking to a small area since we arrived – the house, t

I was glad she hadn’t been there.I knew how that sounded. I wasn’t proud of it. But standing at the market, watching Carl look up and down the rows of stalls with that focused, patient look he gets when he’s set on finding something, I felt a tightness in my chest loosen when it became clear she wasn’t coming. That loosening felt like relief, and the relief felt like something I needed to look at honestly, then put in a box and close the lid.So I put it in the box. And I closed the lid.When we got home, I sat in the main room while Carl moved around the kitchen doing pointless things. I thought about how to handle this without embarrassing either of us. I had already tried staying quiet about it, and the quiet wasn’t working. The silence had just given me two days of watching Carl not talk about her, while clearly thinking about her all the time. And now he had made me walk through the whole market twice, looking for a woman we had seen for only about a minute at a vegetable stall.