by Elliot Wake
“My place,” I said. “There’s someone there you should meet.”
“We’ll leave separately.”
I texted her the address.
“How do you spell ‘Renard?’ ” she said, then, “Never mind.”
She’d input me as BAD BOY.
“Give me a good name,” Tam said, and kissed my cheek, silk on stubble.
My heart got the memo a second late, after she’d gone. Still it shot straight up my throat, a bubble of pure happiness.
My dick had gotten the memo hours ago. When I moved it reminded me it was rock hard.
BAD GIRL, I typed into my phone.
The downside of being a well-built five-foot-seven guy is that you’re still five foot fucking seven in the City of Big Shoulders. I waded through hulking Midwesterners, nodded at friendly faces. Someone called my name. Girls, clasping each other. Two kissed passionately as the others squealed. They wanted my approval, I guessed, as the local prince of queerness. I tried to watch impassively but all I could think of was teenage me, lesbian tomboy, making out with girls like that. How much easier it had been when I thought the worst thing in the world was homophobia. How it always felt slightly off, slightly sad, when a girl touched my face and called me pretty.
“I’m sorry,” one girl said, “but could we get a pic?”
Smile, oblige.
Remember how hard it was growing up, Ren. How much it would’ve meant for someone older, someone seemingly strong and brave, to bestow their blessing.
I glued the smile on as they maneuvered me and jockeyed for position. Phone LEDs flashed, an endless pale dazzle. My vision went fuzzy. Someone grabbed my pec like a tit, squeezing, shrieking with laughter. Then my hands were jerked and shoved against something warm, soft. Flash flash flash. The girls convulsed, breathless. He’s so hot, they said, so strong, so well dressed. So ours.
“Gotta go,” I said, gently removing their hands. “Thanks for your support, ladies.”
One girl, red-faced and giggly, blurted, “I love you, Ren!”
“I’m your biggest fan!” someone else screamed, and, “I love watching you!” and, “Can I have your babies?”
Raucous laughter.
“Thanks. Really, thank you, everyone. Have a great night.”
On the street I leaned against the stone façade, shaking.
Just girls, I told myself. Just young girls. Not predators.
They didn’t respect my physical boundaries because they saw me as safe—assigned female at birth, made of the same base parts. They fetishized gay cis men, too. Anyone who didn’t want to put a penis in them, or didn’t have a flesh-and-blood version. Nonthreatening male eroticism.
They needed that, the freedom to express sexuality without personal risk. In a world that both slut-shamed and objectified them from childhood, there was scant chance to feel normal. I could be that handsome, neutered boy they fawned over. That fetish.
My lot in the world now. Most days I coasted on male privilege. I could stand a little harmless manhandling.
If only I could stop fucking shaking.
I punched the wall and muttered sardonically, “Man the fuck up.”
My hand didn’t start hurting till I looked at it on the train. Skin shredded off the knuckles, exposing red pulp. In the sickly fluorescence it seemed an omen.
On my block, the shadow sitting on my front steps stood.
I slowed. Every nerve screamed: It’s him.
No gun on me. It was back in a locker at Umbra, and I was—
Tamsin moved into a circle of streetlight. “Ren?”
I tried to respond. My vocal cords were a noose.
“You all right?” She closed the gap. “You’re out of breath.”
When I edged around her she grasped my hand.
“You’ve been hurt. What happened?”
“Accident. It’s fine.” I made my voice gruff. “Let’s go inside.”
Dust hung in the dark spaces of the stairwell, spinning stray fibers of moonlight into luminous fabric. The floorboards creaked. At the top landing we turned and saw it simultaneously:
A basket of flowers wrapped in cellophane, sitting on my welcome mat.
We moved in tandem, but while Tam drew her gun I pulled air. I fumbled, found my knife. Only sounds: wood groaning beneath our weight, the skeletal skittering of leaves clawing across sidewalks.
“Is there another way in?” Tam hissed.
I shook my head no.
She lowered her weapon. “I’ve been waiting downstairs nearly an hour. This must have—”
Metal and wood screeched. Our heads pivoted toward the apartment door.
Ingrid opened it and gasped, eyes wide.
“Get back inside,” I said.
Inge stared at Tam’s hands. Tam said, “It’s a gun, love.”
“No shit.”
“Ingrid,” I said, “please.”
A minute later we all stood in the kitchen, anxiously peering at the bouquet. Bell sniffed it, then flicked her tail in dismissal and stalked off.
“Why are we treating this like a bomb?” Inge said.
Tamsin had holstered her weapon, but still she scanned the apartment. “Because it’s dangerous.”
“Flowers are dangerous?”
“Black irises are.”
No mistaking it: inside the cellophane was a profusion of dark purple petals, rippling and sensuous.
So Crito had connected the dots: from Black Iris, to me, to Ingrid.
She was the real prize. An unapologetic feminist, a vocal critic of all that was wrong with modern masculinity. Jay and Inge had always loathed each other. Don’t ever let me catch you somewhere alone, he’d told her once, smiling.
Or what, you fucking creep?
Or you’ll see who’s stronger, men or women.
I’d fed her right to him.
Ingrid reached for the wrapper and I caught her hand.
“We don’t know what’s in there,” I said.
“You think some basement trolls have access to anthrax? Get real.” The plastic sang eerily as she tore it. “There’s a card.”
Tam and I traded a look. Maybe it was better Ingrid learned this way: seeing her name, her details, printed on paper. A threat in cold ink.
Inge flipped the card open and read. Then frowned, and read again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant to endanger you, Ingrid. I promise we’ll—”
“It’s not for me.”
As she passed it over, Tamsin moved to my side, too quick for me to hide it.
Men feel everything. We don’t default to silence because we’re emotionless. It’s that the feelings translate to words in a way that would terrify others. It’s not okay for me to scream right now, I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you, hunt you down, tie you up, hurt you every way you’ve hurt me, in every hole you have and every hole I’ll make. It’s not okay to let these words loose, even though my blood pressure is the highest in the room, my muscles the densest, the environment inside me the tightest, tensest, most unstable. So I hit something. Didn’t see what. Didn’t matter because it was only a thing, and it’s better to break things than non-things, than skin and bone.
Violence is a slippery slope. If you break things too often, it grows less satisfying. Then you move on to breaking people.
The girls stepped back as I smashed the glasses on the counter. Simple message. Five words, one name. The name I’d never wanted Tam to know.
I love watching you, Sofie.
———
Ingrid plotted the timeline. It was second nature to her—her mind worked in flowcharts and inescapable chains of logic.
TEN MONTHS AGO
• Adam’s best friend, Jay, begins calling himself “Crito” and trolling women online. Doxxing, RL harassment, etc. Leaves flower bouquet w/cryptic message each time.
FIVE MONTHS AGO
• Adam returns to Chicago.
• Laney orders Tamsin to watch Adam.
Ingrid frowned as she regarded Tam. “Your face is familiar. Have we met before?”
“Doubt it, love.”
“I know I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“Perhaps you’ve confused me for another black girl.”
Inge didn’t reply. Instead she kept writing.
TWO MONTHS AGO
• Black Iris botches mission to intimidate Crito. Crito is wounded, goes silent online.
ONE WEEK AGO
• Ingrid learns Adam is back. Laney refuses to help take down Adam.
TODAY
• Bouquet of black irises is delivered. Deadname in card.
We stared at the whiteboard. Morning had sprung on us without warning, silvery light oozing through the blinds like mercury. My pulse hammered at the inside of my skull, iron on iron. My eyes felt like embers.
“He’s after me,” I said hoarsely.
Ingrid crossed her arms. “Maybe he’s after me, and you just got caught in the cross fire.”
“No. My deadname means it’s personal.”
Tam eyed the board strangely, then darted a querulous look at Inge.
The fact that Laney had known Adam was in town before any of us—and set Tam to watch him—turned over and over in my head.
My instincts were right.
I’d seen him. I knew I’d seen him. That face in the crowd, watching me.
“They know,” I said. “Both of them. They recognized me, somehow.”
Tam frowned. “You wore a mask that night with Crito. And Adam never saw you after you—after you transitioned, right?”
In that pause, she’d pictured me as a girl. It made me a little sick.
I’d cut all contact with Adam before starting T. Ingrid and I moved to a new place. Corgan was a big campus—I wore hoodies, took night classes. My YouTube channel didn’t break a thousand subs till a year in. By then, people I’d known freshman year didn’t recognize me anymore.
I’d made her disappear in plain sight.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they found me. They know who I am, where I live. What I’m a part of.”
Ingrid plucked an iris from the basket and tore its petals off, one by one.
Tam’s gaze bounced between us. “What’s Crito’s motive to hurt you, Ren?”
“Aside from me existing? And breaking into his apartment, and letting you shoot him? He’s Adam’s best friend. In the past, Jay . . . encouraged Adam. Egged him on. To do things he didn’t—” I raked my hair, wishing I could claw the spiderwebs out of my brain. I was this close to defending Adam as a victim of Jay’s manipulation. “They’re fucking bros. You hurt one, you hurt the other. For all I know Adam’s told him some fucked-up version of our history, and now Crito wants my blood.”
I grimaced, hearing myself articulate exactly what Laney had been trying to tell me: if I went after Adam, it would tip off Jay. And she wanted Crito to pay for his sins fully. I couldn’t touch either of them till her whole plan came to fruition.
Whatever the fuck it was.
What was she waiting for, anyway? What more did we need to take him out? Tam could’ve killed him that first night, and the world would’ve instantly become a better place.
Ingrid crushed the nude stem in her fist. “How do we know these came from Jay?”
“It’s his signature move,” I said.
“Right. So if someone wanted to make you think he was after you . . .”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying there’s only one person who knows your old name, and that you’re part of Black Iris, and that you have a history with Adam and Jay, and who’s gone behind your back to do God knows what with them.”
The Little Wolf.
“No,” I said automatically. “That’s nuts. Laney wouldn’t screw me over.”
She couldn’t. I had collateral.
“She already did. She fucked you over when you asked for her help.”
“But now I think I know why. She’s got some long-term plan. Something she hasn’t told me yet.”
“So? Couldn’t she at least tell you that she found Adam, that you weren’t crazy, instead of letting you doubt yourself? That’s basically gaslighting.”
The term made me stiffen. “That’s a comforting way to look at it.”
“I’m not trying to comfort you, asshole. Don’t be stupid—consider all possibilities.”
“He’s just had a terrible fright,” Tam snapped. “You might be kinder.”
Inge unveiled her trademark frosty glare. Then she said, “I’ll go for a coffee run. Be kind to each other while I’m gone.”
The door slammed. I rubbed my hands over my face.
“I think she likes me,” Tamsin said wryly.
“Inge hates every woman in my life. It’s nothing personal.”
“Ah, the jealous ex.”
I turned the kitchen tap on. “What makes you think she’s my ex?”
“The way she looks at you.” Tam hopped onto the counter beside me. “Odd, though. Thought you said she was a lesbian.”
“She is. It’s—” Water spilled over my cupped hands.
“Complicated?”
I doused my face. “God, what isn’t. I’d kill for some fucking simplicity.”
“Here’s something simple: Ingrid is lying to you.”
Tap off. Pause. “About?”
“Adam, among other things. How does she know he’s back?”
The night was a whirlwind of factoids and details, a jumbled dossier. “Some friend of hers saw him. Took a pic. She showed me.”
“Saw him where?”
“Cubs game.”
“Right. Now, I’m no American, thank God, but according to the Internet”—Tam scrolled her phone—“baseball season ended in September. More than a month ago.”
My brain could not process numbers. “So?”
“So her timeline doesn’t match up. She only told you last week.”
“There could be a million reasons. Maybe she didn’t know till then. Maybe it slipped her—”
Tamsin pushed off the counter, crossed swiftly to the whiteboard. Rapped it hard with a fist. The noise startled Bell out of the room.
“Does this look like the work of a careless mind?”
“Tam, you don’t know her.”
“That’s why I can see her clearly. Your eyes are clouded by history.”
“Believe me, they’re not. There’s a reason we’re exes.”
“Look at the board. Read it to me.”
“Tamsin—”
“Read it.”
I moved toward her, our shadows thrown long in the colorless dawn. Ingrid’s scalpel-sharp handwriting slashed impeccably across the whiteboard. I recited the words.
“And what didn’t she write once,” Tam said softly, “in this massive plot against Renard Grant?”
My name.
“Tam, it’s complicated.”
“So you say. But I think it’s rather simple, really.”
“Let’s not do this. The clichéd love triangle, the emotional tug-of-war. I trust both of you.”
“How bloody presumptuous.”
“Should I not trust you?”
“Trust the person who sees you as you are, not as you were. And don’t presume to know my emotions.”
I leaned closer. “Am I wrong? Am I the only one who feels this?”
Our breath mingled, tinged with the beer we’d drunk. The wash of metallic light darkened, and a whiff of wet stone and copper filtered through an open window. Rain coming.
Her reply was unexpected.
“Sorry I saw the name. The old one. It’s not right, using it against you.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I know a bit about being stigmatized by your past.”
“That sounds like a story.” My hand rose, and I traced her chin with my thumb. “Tell me someday?”
Her mouth opened at the same time as the front door.
We stepped apart.
/>
“Breakfast,” Ingrid called.
In the kitchen she parceled out coffee and bagels with a weird, seemingly genuine cheer. Few things put my misanthropist BFF into a good mood like other people’s misery.
When she pressed a paper cup into my palm, she said, “Hot, black, and bitter. That’s what you like now, right?”
I sputtered.
But Tamsin merely smiled and said, “His taste is improving.”
———
None of us had a car, and I needed time to think. So I rode with Tam on the bus back to her hotel. But even the caffeine couldn’t kick my mind out of zombie mode. You, I thought. You didn’t hurt me enough, did you? You came back for more.
Whatever those bastards wanted with me, they’d find more than they bargained for.
Sofie was long gone. Ren was here now, and he broke men for fun.
Tamsin and I sat side by side, staring at the city, the gunmetal lake sliding beneath a steel sky. The warmth between us knit our bodies together and I thought of how good it would feel to put my arm around her, how dangerous that desire. At her stop she didn’t move. Her head lay against the window, skylight starring her sooty lashes like bits of diamond forming in coal. I let her rest. Clouds swept in, then rain, clear buckshot bombarding the glass. Tam stirred and looked at me and neither of us spoke, but in her half sleep she touched my cheek, rubbed the stubble where she’d put her lips. Something in the center of my chest went soft.
“Tell me your story, Ms. Baylor.”
Drowsy smile. “You’ll think poorly of me, Mr. Grant.”
“Let’s make a deal. For every bad thing you’ve done, I’ll tell you something bad I’ve done.”
“You’ll get the better end of that deal.”
“I’m no angel.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
For the first time, she made me blush. “You must be very tired. That’s grade-F pickup artistry, Tam.”
“Why don’t we stop this senseless flirting,” she said, tipping her head toward mine, “and get to the bloody kissing.”
The gravity between our bodies pulled us closer. My skin felt magnetized, drawn. Craving connection. Touch, pressure, heat. I wanted my mouth on those thick, luscious lips. I wanted to start this thing and not be able to stop it.
Instead I leaned away. “I want to know who you are first.”
“Fear of intimacy.”
“Really? That’s like, item number one on my psych profile. You can dig deeper than that.”