by Witt, L. A.
Kim. He’d been coming here forever, and he flirted with all the male bartenders.
Including me.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said with a grin, folding his hands on top of the bar.
I smiled in spite of the queasiness in the pit of my stomach. “Hey, Kim. The usual?”
“The usual.” He winked. “Easy on the vermouth, though. One of your other boys went a little overboard on it the other night.”
“Duly noted.” I avoided his flirty gaze and went about pouring his drink.
“Ooh, good-looking crew tonight.” Kim craned his neck and checked out the other guys behind the bar. “I may have to ask the DJ to put on one of your dancing songs.”
I laughed, injecting more enthusiasm than I felt. “I’m sitting out for a few nights, I’m afraid.”
He frowned. “Oh, but I like watching you dance.”
I shrugged apologetically. “Back’s giving me some grief. Doc says no dancing on the bar for a while.” A little white lie, but less painful than the truth, which was that I just didn’t have the physical or emotional energy to get up on the bar and dance.
“Well, when you’re feeling better, I fully expect you to make up for lost time,” Kim said.
“I’ll do what I can.” I slid his drink across the bar. He handed me a ten.
“Keep the change,” he said with a wink.
I smiled, but my heart wasn’t in it. Not even close. When patrons flirted—and everyone at the Mat flirted with everyone—it was fun. It didn’t put me off. It never bothered me. Some of them knew I had a boyfriend, some didn’t. We all flirted anyway because, hell, why not?
Tonight, I didn’t have it in me. Mixing drinks was the most anyone was getting out of me this evening. Dancing on the bar? No. Flirting? Hell no.
The flirting was the worst part, if I was honest with myself. Because tonight, they were flirting with an apparition. An illusion. Someone who was the polar opposite of me. Every time someone grinned, or winked, or batted their eyes, I wanted to scream, “You’re seeing something that isn’t real!”
Joe’s voice crept into my head. “Can’t believe someone would pass themselves off as a chick, then turn around and be one of those. What the fuck?”
My head spun. I’m not faking what I am. Can’t you see? Can’t anyone here see? I want to be . . . I need to . . . I fucking can’t . . .
“Well, like you said,” Zach had replied. “Package checks, just to be safe.”
“No shit. And God help a bitch if she turns out to be a guy.”
Cold panic flooded my veins. My knees tried to buckle. I grabbed the edge of the bar for support, forcing myself to take slow, deep breaths.
Fuck, I’m losing it.
A hand on my shoulder made me jump.
“You all right?” Colin asked.
“Yeah.” I ran a hand through my hair—short, short, too fucking short—and tried to hide how badly that hand shook.
“Alex, are—”
“I’m fine,” I snapped. As soon as the words were out, I cringed. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
“It’s okay.” He withdrew his hand. “But, seriously, you don’t look so good.”
“I think I’m going to take a break.”
“Good idea.” He raised his eyebrows. “You sure you’re all right?”
No. No, I’m not. I nodded. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, well, if you need to take a longer break, we’ve got it under control out here.” He gestured at the sparse early evening crowd. “Take your time if you need it.”
“Thanks.”
I went back into the tiny room that passed for a break room. My knees stayed under me just long enough to pull one of the plastic chairs out from the table, and I sank into it. Elbows on the table, hands rubbing the back of my neck, I screwed my eyes shut and tried to just breathe. I hadn’t thought it was possible to be so uncomfortable in my own skin at the Mat, but I was this close to losing it. God, I was going to fall to pieces.
Don’t think, don’t freak out, just breathe.
Heavy, high-heeled footsteps approached in the hallway, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted Tabby to come in here or just keep going and leave me alone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone, but hers was a shoulder I could always lean on.
“Hey, kiddo.”
I looked up to see her standing in the doorway, arms folded across her ample chest.
She cocked her head. “Having a rough day?”
The chair squeaked as I sat back in it. “You could say that.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
I shook my head. “Not really, no.”
The slight lift of her eyebrow screamed skepticism. “Sure about that?”
Dropping my gaze, I nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” She paused. “If you need to talk, just say so.”
“Will do.”
She turned to go.
Just before she disappeared around the corner, I said, “How do you deal with it, Tab?”
She stopped and looked at me. “Deal with what?”
“Not being able to . . .” I paused. “Being in a male body when your mind needs to be female?”
She folded her arms again and leaned against the doorframe. “I made my body as female as I can with what’s available to me. Beyond that, until they come up with a safer and more effective gender reassignment surgery, I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“Yeah, but what keeps you getting out of bed in the morning?”
“Hope. That I might be able to afford the surgery someday and change completely. As far as I’m concerned, though, I am a woman. There’s only so much remodeling I can do, but . . .”
“What if that remodeling wasn’t available?” My voice was little more than a whisper, but still too damned male. “If you were . . . stuck?”
She shrugged. “Make do, I guess.”
I sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“That’s because you haven’t had to do it for the last forty-seven years.” Tabby sat in the chair beside mine. “If I’d ever been able to shift, and then suddenly couldn’t, I’d be falling apart, too. You know what they say, sweetie. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
Damon’s face flickered through my mind, and I struggled to keep my emotions in check. “Or until you’re about to lose it, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
I don’t know what’s going to happen with Damon. If I can’t accept me, how can he? I’m just sitting on go, waiting for him to walk out.
I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Nothing.” I leaned forward, rested my elbows on the table again, and resumed rubbing the back of my neck with both hands. “I guess this is just hitting me harder today.”
She squeezed my arm. “You can take the night off, you know.”
“No, I need the money. And I can either dwell about it here or dwell about it at home.” I laughed dryly. “At least I’m not drinking when I’m here.” I moved my hands from my neck to my temples, like I could manually remove all of this from my brain. “I feel like I’m making this bigger than it is.”
“Bigger than it is? Baby, this isn’t a minor thing.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like I have cancer or anything. I mean, assuming the implant doesn’t give me cancer.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could be worse.” She stroked my hair. “There’s always something that could be worse. That doesn’t mean you’re overreacting if you buckle under something like this.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It affects every part of your life, hon. Not everyone understands that, but you know I do, and I don’t think you’re making this into something it’s not.” She rested her hand on my shoulder. “And if you need support, by all means, ask for it.”
“I definitely need it,” I whispered.
“How much do you have?”
I exhaled. “Not much. I’m the subje
ct of gossip at my other job. I’ve got one friend there who’s got my back, but otherwise, I’m a one-man freak show.” My voice shook. “Damon still can’t make heads or tails of the situation, and I don’t know how to discuss it with him.”
“He’s still around, isn’t he?”
“For now.”
“That says a lot, baby. A lot of guys would be long gone by now.”
“I know. I just, I don’t know how much of that is because he wants to stay, or because he feels guilty about leaving.”
“I doubt he’s staying because he feels guilty, sweetie. This is a lot for someone, especially a static, to take in, but he’s standing by you.”
I rubbed my forehead. “I should have told him sooner. It would have been so much easier for both of us to deal with if I’d just gotten it over with early on.”
“Maybe he wasn’t ready to hear it. If you’d told him in the beginning, it might have been too much for him, but maybe now . . .”
“I think it’ll just make it harder for both of us when he ultimately leaves.”
“You never know.” She paused. “Did I ever tell you what happened when I came out to my family?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek and shook my head.
She sat up a little straighter and looked me in the eye. “I was sure my parents would throw me out. One hundred percent sure, no doubt in my mind, I’d be out on my ass if I opened my mouth about it. So I waited until college. Made sure I had all my ducks in a row, and that way, when they cut me off financially, I could finish my degree and still eat.”
“That must have been hard,” I said.
She nodded. “Keeping who you are a secret is always hard. But I had to.”
This revelation surprised me. As long as I’d known her, Tabby had had an enviable—and unusual, for someone who was transgendered—relationship with both of her parents.
“So what happened when you told them?”
“Well, I was home for Christmas during my sophomore year. That visit was agony, Alex. I was there for two weeks, and it wasn’t until the very last night that I got up the nerve to tell them.” Her eyes lost focus. “I’ve never seen my folks that shocked before in my life.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much at the time. My dad was pretty upset, but he didn’t throw me out. They let me stay that last night. When I got up the next morning, my dad was in the kitchen. He said he’d been up all night thinking about the whole situation and, my God, he looked the part. He got real quiet there for a few minutes, but he finally said it was going to take some time, but he’d get used to the idea.”
I blinked. “Really?”
“Really. About knocked me over with that. And it was still a little awkward that day and when they took me to the airport, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. So then I regretted waiting so long. I mean, I’d had that weight on my shoulders for years, and I could have gotten rid of it a long time ago. But”—she held up one emphatic finger—“there’s more, and this is the important part.”
“Okay . . .”
“When I was home on summer break, we sat down and had a good, long talk about it. And you know what he told me?”
I shook my head.
“He said he kind of had a feeling something was different about me. Ever since I was a kid, he knew. And all through my teenage years, he was sure I was going to tell him I was gay, and he was just waiting for me to say it so he could fly off the handle. No son of his was gay. Or a cross-dresser. Anything. No way. But around the time I hit my late teens and headed off to college, he started thinking about it more, and it occurred to him that whatever was different about me hadn’t changed in all that time, so maybe it was more than just a phase. And maybe, just maybe, it was okay.” She put a hand over mine. “So, by the time I told him, he’d already done some soul-searching of his own, and he was ready to hear it. If I’d broached the subject a few years earlier, Daddy and I wouldn’t be nearly as close as we’ve been for the last three decades or so.”
I’d envied her relationship with her parents for a long, long time, and now even more so.
“Maybe Damon wasn’t ready to hear that you were a shifter when he first met you,” she said. “But maybe he’s still around because he is ready to deal with it now.”
“Damon didn’t have a clue, though. Your dad suspected it. Damon . . . he . . .”
“Damon knows you.” Tabby squeezed my hand. “That, and the night he found out, did he act like you repulsed him?”
In my mind, I replayed as much of that night as I could, what pieces weren’t blurred by blinding pain and nausea. He’d been surprised, of that there was no doubt. Hostile at first, and I couldn’t blame him for that, since his immediate thought was that I was his girlfriend’s lover. But after he knew the truth, he’d stayed. Even after I was discharged from the hospital and had practically shoved him out my door, he’d come back. And he kept coming back.
“No,” I said quietly. “He’s never acted that way.”
“Then have some faith in him and quit beating yourself up for not telling him. You both have two years invested in this relationship. Don’t let a week or two of indecision make or break it.”
“Good point.”
She put her arm around me and let me rest my head on her shoulder as she stroked my hair. “Listen to me, sweetheart. You’ll make it through this. You’re a strong, strong person, and even though it’s tough, you’ll get through it.”
“And what if I can’t get this thing out?”
“Then you find a way to live with it.”
“God, I hope that doesn’t happen.”
“Me, too. But if it does, you’ll be okay.” Still stroking my hair, she whispered, “Think about those times when you were a teenager and you didn’t think you could live another day.”
I shivered. She was one of the few outside my family who knew how many times I’d considered killing myself. One of even fewer who knew how many times I’d tried to kill myself. Even Damon didn’t know about any of that.
“You thought you couldn’t make it, but you did,” Tabby said. “And things got better. They’ve been bad and worse, but you’ve had a lot of good times since then, haven’t you?”
I nodded.
“And right now is one of those really shitty times. Most people would have crumbled under it by now.” She squeezed my shoulder. “You haven’t crumbled, and you know from experience that even the worst of times do, eventually, get better.”
“I’m just not sure how this one will.” I raised my head and looked at her. “Unless I win the lottery and find someone who can get the implants out without killing or crippling me in the process.”
“Well, if you’re stuck with the implants—”
“Assuming they don’t kill me.”
“Right,” she said. “And you’ll have bad days as a static, but you’ll make it through them, and there will be good times again, too.” She went quiet for a moment, then went on. “I mean, look at it this way. Your parents have made you miserable over this whole thing. They’ve driven you to almost killing yourself a few times, and now they’ve forced you to be static. Haven’t they had enough control over your life without making you miserable every waking moment for the rest of it?”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“And I’m not saying that’s easy by any means, baby.” She put a gentle hand between my shoulder blades. “There are going to be days when you just do not want to get out of bed in the morning. Believe me, I know. But you have to look at yourself in the mirror, even when you hate what you see, and tell yourself you’re going to get through the day.”
That prospect made me shudder.
“You’ve heard all the crap I’ve been through,” she went on. “Statics don’t understand transgendered people any more than they understand shifters. Sometimes, when it’s really bad, I think the only reason I make it from one end of the day to the other is because it’s a ‘fuck you’ to a
ll the people who wish I was dead.”
“Seriously?”
She smiled. “Hey, whatever works, right?”
I grinned. “Okay, true.”
“So, moral to the story is, if you can’t get through the day for yourself, get through it because you know it pisses other people the fuck off.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said with a quiet laugh. “Damn it, why couldn’t I have had a mom like you instead of the one I got?”
She snorted. “Oh, honey, I’d be a horrifying parent.”
“I don’t know. You do a pretty good job of filling in where mine fucked up.”
“Alex, darling, Cinderella’s stepbitch was a better mother than your mom.”
Chuckling, I said, “Okay, you’re right. But you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.” She hugged me again.
I closed my eyes and held onto her. “Thank you, Tab.”
“Anytime.”
She let me go, and we both stood. Before we left to return to the front of the club, Tabby took my hand. Clasping it between both of hers, she looked me in the eye. “There’s one more thing I want you to keep in mind.”
I inclined my head.
“Everyone here, both the employees and the customers, adore you,” she said. “We’ve all got your back, and even when your brain and body don’t match, you’re still Alex to us. I know that doesn’t fix everything, or even scratch the surface, but I wanted you to know.”
I smiled, biting back a flood of emotion. “Thanks.”
“Anytime, hon.” She nodded toward the front of the club. “Think you can make it through the rest of the night?”
“Yeah. I think I’ll be okay.”
“Good. Now get out there and make me some money.”
The trial was brief, wrapping up in less than a week, but it was hell for Alex. The defense attorney tried to win the jury’s sympathy by portraying Alex as an unstable alcoholic who’d resisted therapy for severe depression. His father’s suicide, as well as Alex’s own attempts as a teenager, were paraded in front of God and everyone. One side pointed to the self-destructive behavior pattern as a manifestation of the emotional toll of trying to function as a shifter in a society designed for and accepting of statics alone. The other side used it as another example of mental instability, both in shifters and in Alex himself. His parents had acted illegally, and they acknowledged that, but their attorney insisted they’d acted with Alex’s spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being in mind.