Furthermore, Dazi hadn’t even answered his question. “Dazi? Did you have anything in mind?”
Dazi shuffled his feet as he walked. “Can we talk? Maybe by the fountain again?”
He wants privacy. I think I know what this is about. “Sure.” Dazi’s shyness seemed to be worse when he had time to think, or at least when Kesi and Kuhma weren’t occupying him. Mateo hoped they could work out whatever tension Dazi felt between them.
Most people were still waiting desperately for a chance at the last autographs of the day, so the balcony was even more abandoned than the evening before. Mateo directed Dazi to a bench where the fountain was between them and the exit doors regardless.
Dazi chewed his lip. “You’ve been doing that a lot,” Mateo remarked.
“Hm?” Dazi paused as his lower lip was tucked into his mouth. It was cute.
“Biting your lip,” Mateo said. “You do it when you’re uncomfortable or thinking about something that upsets you, or so I’ve noticed.”
“Oh.” Dazi licked his lips instead. “Well, there is something I’ve needed to talk to you about, but…I didn’t know how to bring it up…”
“If it’s about this morning, don’t sweat it.” Mateo smiled. “Hell, consider us even.”
Dazi’s shoulders tensed. “So you did feel that.”
Mateo’s smile widened into a grin. “It wasn’t exactly subtle. I may treat my tail like a prop while I’m here, but it does have its own nerves. I didn’t want to say anything at the time because I could smell Kuhma standing there. I haven’t known him long, but I get the feeling he would have made a bigger deal out of that than necessary if he thought I knew what was happening.”
“Yeah…” Dazi rubbed his legs. “I mean, it was morning and I—”
“Hey,” Mateo interrupted, putting his hand on Dazi’s. “I already told you, consider us even if it makes you feel better.” His palm tingled, and he quickly retracted it. “Though, I can and should take responsibility for what I did. You—like you were trying to say, it wasn’t something you had much control of.”
“Not really.” Dazi bit his lip yet again, though this time he seemed to become aware of his action halfway through. “I mean, you’re…attractive, and maybe my mountain lion instincts took over while I was asleep like your jaguar instincts did, but I wouldn’t—It’s not—” Dazi sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
Mateo chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like my powers are reliant on my virginity.”
Dazi looked Mateo directly in the eyes for the first time since they sat down. “You’re a virgin?”
“No,” Mateo said with a laugh. “No, I’m a tried-and-true homosexual. Obviously it wasn’t the most conventional of relationships, but…but that’s a long story.”
Dazi’s lips turned up in an encouraging smile. “I like stories.”
Isn’t this where we started yesterday? “Well, it’s probably not the kind you would like to hear.”
Dazi’s expression dropped quickly. He furrowed his brow in concern. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
Mateo shrugged with a sad smile. “It wasn’t bad, just…a little disappointing.”
That stirred something in Dazi. “Oh?”
Mateo sighed. “I’d known him his whole life. I remember being really little and hearing my mom on the phone when his dad called to say he was born. I trusted him and he was my best friend.”
Dazi frowned. “Who did he tell?”
“No one. He moved to another state years ago and he still hasn’t told anyone. If anything he was the most solemn about keeping my family’s secret. We even made up a code together as kids so we could talk about it around people.”
“What happened, then?”
Mateo scratched his jaw, stalling a moment longer so he could choose the right words. “Even though we grew up together, I was still…different. I could do things he couldn’t, had powers he barely understood. He adored me, but he was also in awe of me. I was like a demi-god to him. He almost literally worshiped me. I was the one who started our relationship, but he’s the one who ended it.” That look haunted him to this day, that look Alejo used to give him when they were together. In retrospect, it was more than the affectionate gaze of a lover, it was the ardent stare of a zealot.
Dazi leaned forward to prop his elbows against his knees. “Why?”
“Because I’m not human.” Mateo wrung his hands, his head bowed in something like guilt. “It was too much for him. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be overjoyed if their god picked them as a mate for life. That’s what I thought we would be. We had already spent the beginning of our lives together, why not the rest of it?” He shook his head. “Alejo said he couldn’t take the pressure. He felt he would never be good enough for me.”
“I might as well be a sparrow nesting with an eagle.” That’s how Alejo had put it. “You deserve something greater than I am. Someday you’ll realize that, and I don’t think my heart could take it if you abandoned me. It’s best if I find someone ordinary that I know I can keep happy in the limited ways I have.”
“But you do make me happy, Alejo,” Mateo had said. The sting of his own desperation still ached in his heart. “I don’t care that we’re different. I don’t care if you’re a nagual or a human. We belong together. That’s what we’ve always said, right?”
Alejo had simply shaken his head. “We were young. We lived in the moment. I’m looking to the future and I can’t see you keeping me as a burden. I don’t want you to. This is for the best.”
Mateo blinked away a tear. “And…sometimes I thought about ending it, but only because I was afraid I would hurt him.” His stomach squirmed with lingering discomfort. “Yesterday, when I…let the jaguar go too far with you, that…happened before. Worse, it happened during my first time with Alejo. I started off human, but as I got more into it, I began to change. Let me tell you, it’s bad enough when your teeth suddenly become strong enough to tear out your lover’s throat, but when your cock can rip holes in more than the condom…”
Dazi wrinkled his nose and recoiled in horror. “Oh, wow, yeah, I can imagine.”
“I never topped after that. It was another thing that made Alejo feel guilty. He thought it was wrong for a being like me to submit to a mere human. Even so, we kept it going for two years. Some days we were more affectionate than intimate because it was easier for the both of us.” Mateo slumped his shoulders. “But Alejo didn’t want to hold me back. He basically gave me the it’s not you, it’s me speech, and I’ve been single ever since.”
“Wow.” Dazi sat and processed that for a moment while Mateo tried to put away his memories before he could think about the months of dejection and melancholy that had followed their break-up. “How long ago was that?”
“Six and a half, maybe seven years.”
Dazi was quiet again, then nodded. “Right, I keep forgetting you’re older than you look.” He stared down at his hands. “I’ve only ever had one relationship, too, but compared to yours, mine…makes me look bad.”
That gave Mateo pause. Dazi didn’t come off as a jerk or abusive or anything like that. He was a bit naïve, stuck in the perspective his paranoid tribe had painted, but if Dazi trusted someone enough to date them, Mateo couldn’t think of a reason Dazi would treat them poorly. Then again, I don’t actually know him that well. “What did you do?” Mateo asked.
“I dumped him because I was too much for him and it frustrated me.” Dazi scratched at his nose, eyes staring into the past. “I guess it’s similar to yours, but the opposite. I knew him all my life, too. Hard not to in my tribe. I didn’t pay any attention to him until my dad became his mentor.”
“Aha,” Mateo said. He had noticed Dazi’s cockiness. Not many people would identify another shapeshifter and follow them into a bathroom without determining if they were friendly or not. Is that cockiness or blind arrogance? There was more to the story, obviously, and Mateo wanted to hear it.
; Dazi opened his mouth, then rubbed it with the back of his fingers. “Kuhma will be pissed at me for telling you more about our tribe, but fuck it, I’ve already gotten in trouble for that. A little more won’t make that hole much deeper.” He took a deep breath, looked around, and explained quietly, “A lot of the time, one or both of your parents will have the same skin as you, or one similar enough that they can teach you how to use yours. My mother has a bobcat skin, so even though I was much bigger, she could teach me how to stalk and pounce and do other cat things.
“However, if you choose a skin different from your parents’ or other family members’, then you get a mentor. My father has a raccoon skin, and no one in Nawogan’s family did, so after he received his skin, he trained with my father for four years. For the first year, I didn’t pay much attention to him because I was a few years older. By the second year, I thought of him as a cute younger brother. Puberty hit him hard, though, and suddenly he was gorgeous, so I started flirting with him. He flirted back almost immediately.
“Then…well, we took it beyond flirting. We kept it secret, added a sense of taboo and intrigue to it to make things more fun, but that wore off eventually. He was still younger, not as strong as I was, had the libido of a jackrabbit but he wanted to be more playful in bed whereas I wanted to be more…uh…”
“Intense?” Mateo suggested.
“Yeah, you could say that.” Dazi sighed through his nose. “We lasted about eight months before I got fed up with him. He was nice and cute and very, very eager to please, but we never truly fit as a couple. When his training finished a year later, I basically ignored him. These days we’re friends, in a sense, but I don’t spend time with him.” He slumped his shoulders. “Makes me feel petty and shallow, being his first like that and then tossing him aside because he wasn’t good enough for me.”
“How old were you?”
Dazi wrung his hands and looked away. “I was twenty.”
“Oh.” He wasn’t a teenager anymore, and if I’m remembering Native American rites of passage correctly…oh. That might have counted as statutory rape if the other guy wasn’t eighteen yet, depending on what his tribe’s laws are. No wonder he feels so bad about it.
“I never hurt him,” Dazi added hastily. “If he said slow down, I slowed down. He said stop, I stopped. I was…a good partner, I suppose, up until I got sick of going at his pace and told him I wasn’t happy. Poor kid, he really liked me, but for me, it was…or rather it wasn’t a big deal. It was my first time, too, but I wasn’t in love with him. He was growing attached and I couldn’t handle it, so…I ran.” He covered his eyes. “Told you it made me look bad.”
“Well…” Mateo cracked his knuckles, for lack of something better to do. “True, you do come off as the jerk in this story, but you weren’t abusing his trust or forcing him to do anything, right?”
Dazi nodded. “I only ever did things I knew he would be comfortable with.”
“Then you’re not the absolute worst. And at least you understand that you were a jerk. Some people go their whole lives being total assholes without realizing it and getting confused when people hate them.” Mateo wondered if Kuhma was that type or if it was only how he acted around strangers he didn’t trust.
“Then you don’t hate me?”
Mateo smiled. “Of course not. You have a lot of good qualities. You’ve been handling yourself well today, and I’m glad you’re keeping an open mind. Now if you could get the rest of your tribe to follow suit, they would see the furries aren’t a threat, and maybe they would all calm down.”
Dazi smiled weakly. “It’s kinda difficult to change that many people’s minds all at once, especially when it’s something they’ve held onto for decades. Might as well try to rewrite all our laws.”
“Laws should evolve with the times,” Mateo said. “Look at the USA’s laws. The country has changed immensely since it was founded. People come from Africa as tourists, not slaves. Women can vote. Information can bounce between continents in the blink of an eye. Do you think they could have foreseen all of that when they wrote the Bill of Rights? No, but now that it’s the reality, people shouldn’t hold onto outdated rules. I’m not saying your tribe should come out and tell the world what you can do, but if you’ve survived this long, don’t you think you guys can relax even a little?”
Dazi thought about it for a long time. Mateo let him. He considered his own family’s history. Technically they were secretive as ever, only trusting people who were capable of understanding their powers right away, but they were no longer nomadic or constantly trying to fade into the jungles so no one could find them. Mateo had even attended public school for a couple years, though he was often teased for the baggy pants he had to wear to hide his tail. Still, at least he was allowed to mingle. He didn’t know how closed off the Mukua’poan had made themselves, but he would find out when he went to visit.
“It’ll take more than my voice to make them listen,” Dazi said. He looked into Mateo’s eyes. “You’ll tell them, won’t you? If—If they ask you, as in, if they interrogate you about the furries, since you’ve spent so much time with them, you’d talk to them, right? Tell them about yourself and them and why…why things aren’t as bad as they’ll think it is?”
Mateo nodded emphatically. “Absolutely I would.”
Dazi smiled, though there was a sadness in his eyes that Mateo couldn’t understand. He wanted to help Dazi get rid of it, in any way he could. If that means standing trial for fraternizing with furries, I’ll do it.
They went for a short walk around the convention center until Kesi texted to say they were out of their panel. Mateo had the layout of the buildings memorized, and the four of them met up within a few minutes. Mateo noticed right away that the tone of Kuhma’s stoicism had changed. There was a melancholy to his expression and a slump in his shoulders.
“What happened?” Mateo asked.
“Someone cried,” Kesi said. “It was this poor woman who said she felt like an otter who had been carried off by the tides and didn’t know where she was or how to get back to her family. What got her crying was that she felt she couldn’t talk to her human friends about it without sounding crazy, and it’s not like she could actually live with otters when she has a human body. It was really weird because she had this happy otter mask and she took it off to dry her eyes and she was so sad underneath.”
“I told you,” Mateo said. “Some of these fake-skins are just trying to feel normal here. The other furries understand in a way most people don’t.”
“She tried to kill herself once.” The meekness in Kuhma’s voice took Mateo by surprise. His eyes were distant. “She said she would rather end this life and hope she could rejoin her otter family in the next one. Everyone supported her and told her it was going to be okay. She said the only thing that gets her through the year is the furry community. If not for them, she…” Kuhma clenched his jaw.
Mateo nodded. “Sometimes dysmorphia does that to a person.”
“Dys-what?”
“Dysmorphia, the obsession over the idea that something about your body is shaped wrong. For most people they worry about their ears being too big or having too much body hair, but you can bet that therians who seek psychological help get diagnosed with it too, or dysphoria, probably put on medication for both and told that yes, they are crazy, but if they try hard enough maybe they can come to terms with their humanity.” Mateo sighed. “Poor kids. The whole world is telling them they’re wrong about themselves, like with trans people or homosexuals. We’re normal, damn it. Just because others don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Dazi looked at Mateo like he had something to say. He bit his lips again. That small tick was starting to depress Mateo every time Dazi did it. Dazi had never fully explained it, but it carried a sort of despair with it that Mateo could feel. He wanted them both to take on their big cat forms so he could groom Dazi comfortingly. This was neither the time nor the place, though, and even back at the
hotel Kesi and Kuhma would be there, and Mateo wasn’t sure what Kuhma would do when face-to-face with his jaguar form. Dazi turned his gaze away, and Mateo’s heart sank with a low mournful moan.
The whole mood of the group had changed. Right when Mateo had thought perhaps he and Dazi were connecting on a deeper level, that Dazi was opening up to him in a way he hadn’t since their first meeting, he was withdrawing again. Kuhma was still staring at the floor with blank eyes. Even Kesi sat down on a nearby bench and pulled her knees to her chest.
“This…changes things,” Kuhma said. “I’m not saying I trust the fake—the furries near our reservation. If anything this proves some of them would die to gain our powers, but I can see that’s not why they’re here. I think I do understand, a little.” He took a long breath, his shoulders slumping again as he exhaled, but not as deeply as before. “When we give our report back home, I’ll tell them our tribe should stay far away from these people. We don’t need to defend ourselves yet, but we don’t need to go on the offensive either. We should just…leave them to themselves.”
“D-Does that mean you’re leaving early?” Mateo asked.
Kuhma shook his head. “We paid for the whole weekend, we’ll stay for the whole weekend. You have to come with us anyway, and I guess you would want to stick around.”
Mateo didn’t remember telling Kuhma he had accepted the invitation to visit their tribe, but he supposed it went without saying. “Well, I want you guys to do what you want. We don’t have to go to the dance, if you guys aren’t feeling up for it. We could go to the karaoke event instead, maybe grab pizza afterward.” There wasn’t much change on their faces. “Or…or we could skip straight to the pizza, now, if you’re hungry enough.”
“Pizza sounds good,” Dazi said, his eyes barely moving in Mateo’s direction. “What do you guys think?”
Kesi shrugged. “I could go for some peppers and onions on mine.”
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