Penumbra

by Dan Ackerman

  He looked okay, sometimes even pretty good, but never beautiful.

  Now he looked ungainly. Tan in some places, pallid in others. Thin through his limbs with a new accumulation of fat on his upper thighs, his hips, his stomach. Not enough to really get pinched by his clothes, but they wouldn’t hang off him, they wouldn’t skim so nicely over him now. His ribs, if he stood up straight, still showed a little. He touched his collar bones. Still there but not pronounced.

  He straightened his posture and held his breath. Better.

  Oggie kissed the crook of his neck and folded his arms around him, bearing down so he couldn’t stand up straight enough. “Why do you do that? Anytime you think someone’s looking at you, you suck in like you’ve got anything to suck in.”

  “I do.”

  “So what if you did? You’d still be beautiful.”

  Arden shook his head. “I can’t do this.”

  “One thing.”

  “What?”

  “Look in the mirror,” Oggie said, “And tell yourself you’re beautiful.”

  Arden started to pull away.

  Oggie didn’t let go. “Listen, I’m not saying you have to say it out loud. Think it.”

  Arden stared at his reflection.

  “Cause you really are.”

  Arden finally had to step away. “You’re beautiful.”

  “No. I’m practically flawless. I’m a marvelously lucky roll of the genetic dice. I am as the sun, blinding in my magnificence.”

  Arden raised his eyebrows.

  Oggie gave him a crooked smile. “But you don’t have to look like me to be good-looking. Come on. I’ve been dying for a soak. I think I have dust from that place embedded in my skin.” He skated his fingers from Arden’s shoulder to wrist, then pulled him toward the tub.

  Once they’d both settled in, Oggie kissed Arden’s shoulder and proposed, “Let’s pretend those things didn’t happen.”

  “Which ones?”

  “You dosing yourself with enough Twelve to make you drool and me ignoring you and almost screwing that guy.”

  “You can’t always pretend—”

  “I’m not saying always. I’m saying this time. We had a really good talk, sugar, and I got mad cause I’m scared. I’ve never done this. And you did those shots cause you’re scared too. Let’s go back to our talk and start over from there again.”

  Arden pulled away and turned to face him. “Are you being sensible?”

  “I am capable of it.”

  “So you choose not to be?” Arden asked.

  “Now you’re getting it. What do you say? Our month starts now.”

  “Okay.”

  Oggie kissed his cheek. “Good. Now you’re being sensible, too.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Ripping pissed.”

  “She did look upset.”

  “She’ll get over it,” Oggie said. He stretched and sank up to his shoulders. “She gets mad fast, but it burns out quick. I mean, she gets above her base level of pissed off fast. How’s Rhys?”

  Arden settled against the opposite side of the tube and sank into the water. “I shouldn’t have left like I did.”

  “He survived.”

  “It was thoughtless.”

  Rather coolly, Oggie noted, “That’s you all over, sugar.”

  “You’re going to give me whiplash, I swear.”

  “I can start drinking. That tends to keep my mood more consistent.”

  Arden opened his mouth to protest.

  Oggie winked.

  Arden splashed him.

  Neither of them bathed in any meaningful way. They lounged, legs touching, the water lapping against their chests. They didn’t talk much.

  “So you’re cozy with Rhys’s kid, huh?”

  “What?”

  “You asked about her first thing.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not a bad thing. I didn’t figure you as someone who likes kids.”

  “She’s about the only kid I know. I can safely say I like Darcy. I don’t know about the rest of them.”

  “You were nice to the kids on Terra, too,” Oggie reminded.

  Arden hadn’t considered anything he’d done as particularly nice. “I just asked myself ‘what would Winnie do?’ if I wasn’t sure. He was…He is a great uncle.”

  “He wasn’t a bad neighbor, either.”

  Arden trailed his fingers through the water. “Win was…”

  “Go on.”

  “Win was the first grown-up who believed me.”

  “About what?”

  He lifted his hand. Water dripped from his fingertips. He watched the ripples. He lowered his hand and repeated the process. “Mama loved having a little dress-up doll. Mother planned for a female heir. Winnie…Winnie let me be who I was. He didn’t have an agenda for me, so when I said, ‘I’m a boy’ he could accept it without compromising any of his own hopes or dreams.”

  A soft, quiet sort of affection reached those green eyes. “You never talk about that.”

  All the ripples and drops of water in the world couldn’t distract him. He looked at Oggie, whose face was patient and reassuringly neutral. “I feel like I’m not supposed to.”

  Oggie remained thankfully even. No rush of sympathy, no reassurances that Oggie believed he was a man, no discomfort with the admission.

  “A lot of people don’t like me to talk about it, either. It makes them uncomfortable. Everyone knows. I mean, my transition is a clear part of the public record. But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m supposed to pretend the first eight years of my life…well. Ten, if we talk about how long it took people to believe me. Pretend a decade of my life didn’t happen, pretend I didn’t get treated like a girl.”

  “I’m listening,” was all Oggie said when Arden paused.

  “I didn’t hate it, being treated like that way. There were parts I liked. But…I am a boy. I like being a boy. A boy. I supposed at my age I should be a man, but even Winnie still thinks of me as a child. Being considered a girl didn’t make me miserable but living as I am. As a boy. That made me so happy. It was…This…this wonderful realization. That I could be more than alright, that I could feel ecstatic about who I was instead of trying to figure out why the pieces didn’t quite fit.”

  “Shug.” A gentle smile settled on Oggie’s lips.

  “Everyone thinks that I did all this to make myself less miserable, but I wasn’t miserable. I might have been when I got older or if it had taken too long to get where I needed to be. But I did it to be me, not to be…not miserable. People expect me to have been miserable. To have been ashamed. They don’t understand why I don’t cut my hair short. If I’d always been considered a boy, it wouldn’t make a difference how I did my hair. Or they think that my gender is why I use formulas or why…why I want to be thin so badly. They tie all my problems into something that never bothered me to begin with…Does that make sense?”

  “The most sense you’ve ever made.”

  Arden chuckled. “I guess I think about it a lot.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Not everyone who transitions feels the same way I do but…but it’s how I feel. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re the Autarch. Doesn’t it count the most?” Oggie teased.

  “Oh, stop. I don’t want to be that kind of Autarch.”

  Oggie rested his leg against Arden’s leg. He applied a little pressure, then let up.

  “Thanks for listening,” Arden said.

  “Anytime, sugar. Honestly.”

  “You know I’ll listen to you, too. If you want.”

  Oggie smiled, less gentle, more nervous. “Maybe if I can think of something that isn’t depressing.”

  “I’ll listen to the things that are hard to say, too.”

  “I’ll scare you away.”

  Arden shook his head. “Not likely.”

  His leg pressed against Arden’s again. This time he didn’t let up.
He kept his leg there, lightly holding Arden’s in place against the tub. “I hope not.”

  Arden pushed his leg back, not enough to give resistance, but enough that he hoped it acted as a gesture of comfort.

  After a while, Oggie cleared his throat. “So. This big dinner tonight. What should I expect?”

  As they finished soaking and started getting dressed, Arden provided an extensive rundown of the night’s itinerary complete with his hopes for the event. A simple state function, dinner and drinks. The drinks in moderation, of course. He hadn’t seen alcohol on Terra and didn’t want to get all the Terrans blind drunk their first night among the general populace of Eden. The dinner would serve as a mixer for everyone who called the station home now. He hoped the Terrans would provide lubricant between the workers and peers.

  He voiced that exact sentiment to Oggie who grinned and said, “Might not be the only lubricant you’ll need tonight if you play your cards right.”

  Arden snorted and resumed dressing. He tucked in his shirt, then checked in the mirror. He untucked it, then tucked it back in.

  “Leave it like that.”

  “You think?” Arden asked.

  “Or better yet take it off.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I’d like it better on the floor.”

  “Oggie, if you wanted to fuck, you could have said something earlier! We’ve got to go soon.”

  Oggie laughed at him. “I’ve waited this long. Another night won’t kill me.”

  “How long?”

  “I’ve been expecting it since I came here that first night. I’ve been wanting it since you beat me at jumble but that was on a purely physical level.”

  Arden pressed his lips together to stop an unabashed, delighted smile from taking over his face.

  Oggie took his hand and started walking.

  They did have places to be, after all.

  “One more absolute bastard that I’d fuck for whatever abominable reason I end up fucking them for…it’s like…even while I’m doing it I know it’s going to be shitty, but I do it anyway. It’s like I’m…I’m so desperately broken that I’m attracted to people who will treat me badly and fuck me even worse,” Oggie continued as they moved into the hall.

  Other people headed in the same direction, peers all of them and dressed in various states of peacocking.

  Arden frowned at them. He had explicitly called the Welcome Dinner a semi-casual event. Absently, he told Oggie, “You shouldn’t fuck people you don’t want to.”

  “But I do want to. That’s the problem. I want to be treated badly.”

  Arden returned his attention to Oggie. “Do you actually want it or are you accustomed to it? Sometimes we acclimate to things without liking them at all. I ate carrots for six years after Mother passed before I realized I didn’t actually like them.”

  “You don’t like carrots?”

  “That’s not the takeaway I intended.”

  Oggie’s fingers tightened on his. “But it’s the only thing I can address without a lot of introspection.”

  “Oh. Is…”

  “Go on, shug.”

  “Is that the only reason you like me?” Arden asked. He didn’t think so but wanted confirmation.

  “No, no, I gave up on that. I think I’ll have to like you for normal, perhaps even healthy reasons. I might have to fuck you cause you’re usually nice to me and try to do the right thing most of the time.”

  “I think that’s better.”

  Oggie shrugged. He leaned against Arden to confide, “We still have to sort out that thing about how rough you like it.”

  His throat tightened. He had to remind himself to breathe normally and that they’d be in public soon. No sense in getting excited.

  Previous lovers had played at roughness with him for the sake of humoring his preferences. He’d never delved in too deep to those preferences because no one had ever shown an interest in such things. He functioned fine without it but the idea of having someone who wanted to find out with him…His mouth watered.

  “My mother would be ashamed if she knew what I’d done with Eden, but I think that would piss her off most. Letting a worker…”

  “Letting a worker,” Oggie prompted, his breath huffing against Arden’s ear.

  “I don’t know, what are you going to do to me?”

  Oggie nuzzled the side of his face and kissed his cheek. “I don’t know but I can’t wait to find out.”

  “I…”

  “Hmm?”

  “I wish we’d found each other sooner.”

  “How much sooner? Like…when you were twenty-six and I was sixteen sooner? Or when I was twelve and you were twenty-two? Nine and nineteen…” Oggie gestured vaguely to indicate the increasingly terrible trend in their age gap.

  “Og, fuck, do you have to make everything awful! Really!”

  “What’s the youngest you would have had me?”

  “I. That’s…Oggie, that’s a reprehensible question.”

  With a flutter of eyelashes, Oggie reminded, “I am a little young for a man of your age, Your Eminence.”

  “If you keep this up, I’m letting go of your hand,” Arden warned.

  “Ten years isn’t bad at our respective ages. Better than I’ve done with a lot of people anyway…And imagine, when you’re fifty and I’m forty, it will be fine, and when you’re ninety and I’m eighty, it will be like nothing at all.”

  Arden accepted the change in tone, recommitted to his decision to find Oggie a therapist as soon as possible, and made a few quiet decisions about his future. Things could change, of course. Things he’d planned had gone wildly astray before. A year ago he never would have imagined his life being anything like it was now.

  Oggie smoothed a hand over Arden’s sleeve. “Would it be terrible if I got blind drunk tonight?

  “I don’t think the Terrans have ever drank before. I’d appreciate it if you could be a good role model.”

  “For once.”

  “Please.”

  The most dramatic, wistful sigh escaped him. “I could try. Five?”

  “Three.”

  “Four, then,” Oggie decided, his nose in the air. He peeked at Arden. “Right?”

  “Of course.”

  They entered the Big Room together. Arden thought about changing the name. He’d have to at this point.

  The Terrans stood together in a tight cluster off to one side of the Big Room. In the center, he saw the children trying to peek around their mothers. The members of the Transition Committee stood with them. They looked more like guards or captors than liaisons.

  Arden approached.

  A dozen voices greeted him with questions.

  He held up a hand, which did nothing to quiet them.

  Oggie sniggered.

  “Please, really, I can’t answer if you’re all talking at once.”

  They kept talking.

  Finally, he crossed his arms and gave a sour look.

  They quieted down after that.

  “How do you like it so far?”

  “Everyone is staring at us,” one said.

  “Of course, they are. We’ve spent our whole lives never meeting anyone new.”

  Holly pushed her way through. “How can you never meet anyone new? There’s hundreds of you.”

  “Thousands, actually,” Arden corrected.

  “And he just means the peers, there are less of them and they’re very much in each other’s business,” Oggie added.

  “Go mingle,” Arden suggested.

  “I don’t want to,” Holly said.

  Arden offered her his arm.

  She squinted at him.

  Oggie took hold of Arden’s other arm. “Like this.”

  Holly placed her hand on Arden’s arm.

  “Come meet my friend Cathie. You’ll really like her,” Arden said.

  “You said that a dozen times already.”

  “Well, I happen to think you’ll like her!” Arden escort
ed Oggie and Holly through the room, his eyes peeled for his friends.

  Cathie found him first. She wrapped him up and lifted him off his feet. “Ardi! Oh, I was so worried about you.”

  “Oh, Cath, I’m fine. I’m always fine.”

  “Like a roach,” Holly provided.

  Cathie set Arden down but kept her arms around him.

  “Cath, this is Holly, she’s, uh,” he began.

  “From Terra One!” Cathie supplied. She let go of Arden and turned to take in Holly.

  “Holly was a great help to me on Terra.”

  Holly elbowed him in the side. “Ah, I showed him around a little, that’s all. Taught him how to find onion shoots, too.”

  Cathie made a face. She looked over Arden. “Sounds just like you…”

  Arden blushed.

  “Picking onions. What else?” Cathie asked.

  Arden shrugged. “Whatever needed to get done, I guess.”

  “You wouldn’t help pluck those birds we caught,” Holly reminded.

  “Oh, I couldn’t! I almost threw up just watching. Oh, their poor little feathers…”

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  Arden scanned the crowd for the others he wanted Holly to meet. He spotted Rhys and almost immediately forgot about introducing Holly to anyone. He left behind the other three and approached Rhys. “The baby!”

  Darcy kicked her legs and grinned at Arden. She leaned out of Rhys’s grip.

  Rhys tightened his arms. “Darcy, you’re gonna fall.”

  “She just wants to see me!” He hadn’t anticipated how happy her chubby little face would make him.

  Rhys handed over the baby.

  Arden immediately hoisted her up into the air. “Hi, booger.”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “Little booger baby,” Arden continued. He feigned dropping her.

  Darcy giggled.

  Arden settled her on his hip. “I’m gonna keep this for now,” he told Rhys.

  Rhys glanced around the Big Room.

  “What?”

  “Gertie doesn’t like you.”

  “Still?”

  Rhys shrugged. “She thinks you’re a bad influence.”

  “It was one swear.”

  “No, it’s more the extensive formula use, capitalist ideologies, and authoritarian power structure.”

  Arden shifted the baby, then glanced around to see if Gertie lurked somewhere nearby. “Who would teach that to a baby?”