“Yes,” he said firmly. “I want to make him cupcakes.”
“Okay, so that’s half the night figured out,” Harper said.
“What’s the other half?”
“What are you going towear, Wy?”
Wyatt’s heart sank. “I…I don’t know.”
“How about that green button-up shirt you got last Christmas?” Harper asked. “That looks really good on you.”
Wyatt hummed noncommittally.
“What?”
“I kind of…” He swallowed. “I kind of woke up this morning not being a boy.”
“Oh,” said Harper. “Oh.”
Wyatt was glad they were on a phone call and she couldn’t see him wince.
“Okay, so you know you’re welcome to raid my closet, right?” Harper asked.
“I…” He swallowed again.
“Only if you want,” Harper said. “But you’re welcome to.”
Wyatt thought back to what Izzy had said about how smoking hot Harper had looked when he’d met her. “What were you wearing when you met him?”
“My yellow sundress,” Harper said. “Actually, I think I left it there because I figured the weather here turns on a dime and jeans are usually a better option.” She didn’t push him. Didn’t tell him to do it. She only said, her voice softening, “It would suit you, I think.”
His voice shook. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But whatever you’re comfortable in.”
Wyatt squeezed his eyes shut.
“Now,” Harper said, her voice rich and warm. “You’re baking bread too, right? Because I don’t care how everyone hates carbs these days. Warm home-baked bread is a fuckingdelight.”
Wyatt laughed, the tension bleeding out of him. “Yeah, of course I’m baking bread. That goes without saying.”
“Glad to hear it,” Harper said, and distracted him from his lingering nerves by telling him all about her weird new neighbor, the kitten she’d ‘accidentally’ spotted on her local shelter’s website, and the hot guy in Hugo Boss suits she kept running into in the elevator at work.
* * * *
Izzy was working until the afternoon, so Wyatt had most of the day to prepare and to…to freak out. He found the yellow sun dress hanging in Harper’s closet and held it up against his body. It was pretty. Definitely pretty. Maybe smoking hot too—but would Wyatt be either of those things if he wore the dress? He figured there was only one way to find out.
He shucked his clothes off in the middle of Harper’s bedroom and tugged the sun dress over his head. He’d expected it to be tight across the bodice, but he guessed his lack of boobs made up for the additional width of his shoulders. And it’s not as though he was much broader than Harper anyway. He’d always been skinny. One of the thin spaghetti straps slid down his shoulder, and Wyatt tugged it back into position and stared at himself in Harper’s mirror.
He couldn’t tell if he looked like a girl, or if he just looked like a boy in a dress.
He unfastened his hair. Ruffled it to give it some body, andoh—there she was. The pretty girl staring back at him, eyes as big as an owl’s because she didn’t quite know how to process what she was seeing either.
And it was all cosmetic, Wyatt knew. The dress and the hair didn’t make him a girl—it was something far deeper below the surface that did that—but this was how the girl wanted to look. This was how she saw herself.
Wyatt smiled slightly, and the girl’s lips curled up in the reflection in the mirror.
For years Wyatt had been trying to deny her, and now here she was. And she was pretty, and she was smiling, and she had a date tonight with a gorgeous guy who loved her.
