Excerpt from Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You're getting a lot more candor out of me than I'm used to," her cowboy said, sounding surprised at himself, even as he squeezed Reese's tits. "The power of pussy, I guess."

"You might get my pussy," she responded, enjoying herself and aping his cowboy drawl, "but a good woman'll flay your soul."

"Ain't that the truth," he drawled back. He lifted a big paw to the back of her neck and brought her face close to his. She sighed, went limp.

Her eyes glassily held his.

"Tell you what," he told her, "first I'm going to own your pussy . . ." He paused, and with his hand still on her neck, he slowly, firmly, pushed her face down into a pillow. "Then we'll see about my soul."

Now he slides back into the car, with a little brown bag full of lube and condoms, and a tickling of anticipation slides across Reese's stomach. "Do we really need these tonight?" he asks her, holding up the bag. "You know I'm gonna want to knock you up."

This was why she still put up with him: He got it. With him, she'd discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous. Cis women, she supposed, rubbed against a frisson of danger every time they had sex. The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—­a single f*** to f*** up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn't ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman's life changer. Her cowboy could f*** her and mark her forever. He could f*** her and end her. His cock could obliterate her.

His viral load was undetectable, he said, but she never asked to see any papers. That would kill the sweetness and danger of it. He liked to play close to the edge too, pushing to knock her up, to impregnate her with a viral seed. Make her the mommy, her body host to new life, part of her but not, just as mothers eternal.

"We agreed on condoms always. You said you didn't want it on your conscience," she said.

"Yeah, but that was before you started on your birth control."

She first called her PrEP "birth control" at a Chinese place in Sunset Park where he felt safe that none of his wife's friends would possibly run into him. It popped into her head as a joke, but he looked at her and said, "F***, I just got so hard." He signaled for the check, told her that she wouldn't get to see a movie that night, and drove her right home to put her facedown on her floral bedspread. In the morning, she sexted him one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-­sexual, sexts of her life—­a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-­of-­the-­month clamshell cases. From then on, her "birth control pills" were part of their sex life.

There was another reason, beyond the stigma, taboo, and eroticization, that their particular brand of bugchasing had bite for Reese: She really did want to be a mom. She wanted it worse than anything. She had spent her whole adulthood with the queers, ingesting their radical relationships and polyamory and gender roles, but somehow, she still never displaced from the pinnacle of womanhood those nice white Wisconsin moms who had populated her childhood. She never lost that secret fervor to grow up into one of them. In motherhood she could imagine herself apart from her loneliness and neediness, because as a mother, she believed, you were never truly alone. No matter that her own and her trans friends' actual experiences of unconditional parental love always turned out to be awfully conditional.

Excerpted from Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Copyright © 2021 by Torrey Peters. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.