..|||||||||| 8:23 ||||||||||The sharing ended, the meeting was coming to a close. There was abirthday cake for somebody who had managed to go a year w...thoutfeminizing anybody, and Vicki handed several people little metal tokensfor various other lengths of abstinence from their particular disorder.Nine months, six months, a month. They were even giving out tokens justfor showing up."Go on, Honey" Her boyfriend Mike whispered. But Shelly would have had toget up there and say, "Hi, I'm Shelly. I'm. She grabbed Laurie's hand and placed her fingers on a cold metallic lever. "Pull it," she commanded.She pulled the lever, causing warm water to spay her head and face from all around under the rim of the seat. She heard it draining under the back of his head.After that, she was left alone.Over the next five minutes, Laurie heard people enter the restroom outside her stall. Laurie heard men's voices out in the restroom, but they seemed to go into other stalls. Laurie swallowed in. ’ ‘Oh, no, you can’t do that! I’ll take the chair.’ ‘Of course not… don’t be silly. You take the bed. I’ll be fine. It can’t be any worse than the trenches I slept in during the War.’ The atmosphere between the changed in a heartbeat. One moment they had been talking, and now a sharp awareness slipped between them, stealing his smile away. She looked at him, suddenly larger than life, suffocatingly close. Georgia stared at the way his eyes looked in the evening shadows of the room and could. The truth was that he had suddenly been overwhelmed with loneliness when he saw the man and wife acting as though they were one person, and he had dreamt all night of the sweetheart he had left three hundred forty-nine thousand one hundred twenty-one steps ago across the lake and across the river. But he had agreed to the bargain and would have to begin soon. He took another long drink of the hot beverage Rayna had served with breakfast and began, not quite knowing where he would end.ONCE UPON.