by Rachel Gold
If I went back to bed with Quin, would I freak out again? How would that make her feel? And if I backed away now, what did it mean about me? Could I never have sex again?
“Fucking get it together,” I mouthed to my reflection. The wide eyes hardened as I watched. We glared at each other.
Tonight should be a banner night.
It was going to be a fucking banner night. Screw Lindy. She was nothing. I’d show her how fucking nothing she was.
I threw the towel into the corner and pushed through the bathroom door to see Quin putting on her pants.
“Hey, don’t,” I said.
She reached for her shirt.
“I mean, you don’t have to,” I told her.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“It’s not you—” I started and realized how bad that sounded. “It’s been a while and, you know, it got kind of fast there and I…shit, I got scared, okay?”
Not saying why or about what. Not thinking about it. I kept my eyes on Quin’s face, on her body, filling my brain with her, holding onto her like a lifeline.
The edge of her mouth turned up in a half smile. “You don’t seem like a girl who gets scared.”
“Yeah, usually I’m not.”
I didn’t know what else to say and I needed to be closer to her now. So close that she was all I saw. I kissed her. Her lips started out tense and careful. I kept kissing until she relaxed.
I pushed her back onto the bed, determined, and she let me take the lead in getting her pants off again. Her hands roamed over my back and shoulders, but when she tried to touch lower, I pulled off her panties and moved down her body.
I kissed my way down her belly. She laughed.
“Tickles,” she said.
I turned my face up, raised my eyebrows at her and kissed lower. “How about here?”
“Oh, no. I mean, doesn’t tickle, but yes, yes.”
She said yes a lot more after that and I worried that Ella could hear us through the walls, but it wasn’t enough to stop me. I needed to stay in this world filled with Quin’s body. I needed to not think.
In the morning I woke curled along Quin’s back and snuck out of bed to use the bathroom. When I stepped into my room, she was awake, lying on her back with her arms folded behind her head. I crawled over her and snuggled in beside her.
“You want anything?” she asked, gesturing in a general way down my body.
I shook my head. “I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
I was deeply not sure. Pretty convinced I was so far from okay I couldn’t even see the signposts pointing back toward okay, but that wasn’t what she’d been asking.
“Yeah, I had fun, I’m good.”
“The offer stands.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She kissed me but when it started to heat up, she pulled away. “I’ve got to head out. Give me your cell if you want my number.”
The fact that I’d had sex with a girl whose number wasn’t even in my phone made me feel worse than almost anything else about the night. I fished in my coat pockets for my cell while she put her clothes on. No call or text from Nico. That sucked. And the feeling that I’d been stupid was back.
Quin typed herself into my contacts.
“I’ll text you, so you’ve got mine,” I said.
I didn’t know if I was supposed to kiss her goodbye or what, but she hugged me and gave me a quick kiss before breezing out the door. I sat down on the side of my bed, still in my boxers, feeling the chill of the room, and studied the phone in my hands.
Now I knew my panic had nothing to do with Nico. If nothing else, I owed it to Nico to tell yo that.
I texted Nico: Call me?
And then: I’m sorry, I can explain, please call me.
Chapter Fourteen
Nico
The night before the appointment to go over the biopsy results with Dr. Peace, I had a hard time getting to sleep. When I finally did, I had terrible nightmares. People in white coats dragged me down a long institutional hallway as I screamed and fought. When they got me into the surgical suite, they were going to carve up my dick like a garnish flower made from a carrot. Make it pretty and useless and numb.
I woke myself up yelling, curled in a ball with my hands between my legs. The door to my room flew open and Hazey threw herself into my bed. She wrapped her skinny arms around me. I hugged her close.
Mom came in too. She got into the other side of my bed and put an arm around both of us.
“I’ll be with you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be with you for all of it.”
I leaned into her. “I know. Thanks. Would you tell me a story?”
“Fable or science?” she asked.
“You have a good science story?”
“I think it’s good, but you can tell me.” She leaned around me and touched the tip of Hazey’s nose. “Did you know that our galaxy is still making stars?”
“Cool,” Hazey said.
“And the places that make stars are inside of nebulas. They’re called stellar nurseries. Some people have been studying these stellar nurseries in the Snake Nebula. They’re looking at cosmic seeds: glowing areas in the nebula where stars are created.”
Hazey made a drowsy “mmhm” sound. Curled into my pillow, tucked under my arm, she was half-asleep. I grinned at Mom.
Mom said, “We used to think that high-mass stars formed from extremely massive cores. You’d have a very big core and it would collect the star material around itself.” She held up one fist and circled it with a finger. “But now we’re learning that stars don’t form alone. Stars are born in groups. One of the study’s authors called them villages or families.”
“Big stars are made in families?” Hazey asked blearily. “Like us.”
“Yes, like us. Eventually the Snake Nebula will have all these clusters of stars that formed in these families. The stars will all grow up together.”
“That’s good,” Hazey said.
I kissed the top of Hazey’s head. “Go to bed,” I told her. “I’m okay.”
She grumbled, a sound I’m sure she learned from Yai, and went back to her room. I bunched up my pillow and put my head on it. Mom brushed her fingertips across my temple and stayed until I fell asleep.
* * *
Ella texted every day, a bunch. She was onto me. I told her I was doing family stuff and I’d talk to her after the weekend. I said enough about Dad being in town and fighting with him at the steak place to get her to give me some space. I figured I’d call her when the biopsy results came back and I could tell her it wasn’t serious.
But the results came back and it was serious. Not malignant, not quite cancer, but pre-cancerous. Dr. Peace wanted both the ovotestis and the ovary out. As soon as I was back home, alone in my room, I called Ella.
When she answered, I couldn’t talk.
“Nico, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay,” I managed around the lump in my throat. I hopped up from my desk chair and circled the middle of the room to loosen my words.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked. “Tucker says she’s called you a bunch and texted you and you’re ignoring her. What happened?”
I pulled my phone away from my ear and stared at it.
I hadn’t gotten any calls or texts from Tucker.
Then I remembered and my gut dropped with horror: after I’d blocked Summer, I had also blocked Tucker. That’s what I’d forgotten.
I’d meant to unblock her right away, a day or two at most, give me a little space not to be angry, not to react. But with my dad in town, the lawsuit and then the evil peanut…
That had been weeks ago. She’d been blocked all this time. She’d been calling and texting while I thought she was ignoring me.
“Are you mad at her?” Ella asked while I worked to uncurdle my brain.
Matt’s favorite non-swear words, like “numbskull” and “nincompoop,” circled in my head. Tucker must think—I had no idea wha
t she thought.
That I was an ass?
That I wasn’t into her? Oh hell, what if she thought I didn’t want her? What if she thought I was punishing her for panicking? That would be beyond awful.
I’d avoided calling her because I thought she wasn’t calling me. Tried to give her space.
“Why would I be mad at Tucker?” I asked as my fingers flew through the steps of unblocking her number.
“I don’t know, neither of you are telling me anything. What IS going on with you?”
“Ella,” I drew out her name to buy myself another few seconds. “Babydoll.”
Steel came into her words. “Tell me.”
I flopped back onto my bed, put a hand behind my head, tried to sound light. “I’ve got to get some surgery.”
“What?” Her voice dropped into the quiet-mad-worried range.
“The radiologist found a…something like an evil peanut.”
“What!”
“There’s a mass in my ovotestis, they have to take it out,” I said, staring at the blankness of the ceiling and trying not to cry.
“Nico!”
“And the ovary too,” I said. “They have to take it all.”
Her voice was high, tight with worry, “No! Are you okay? How are you doing?”
“So-so.”
“Will that change your hormones?”
“I’ll have to go with shots and pills,” I said.
“The pills aren’t bad.”
She would say that. It was how she got her hormones. But I was glad to hear it.
I told her, “I have to decide what hormones I want and, um, while they’re in there they could change some other stuff. Make my junk more generically picture perfect. And my dad’s pushing for that. He’s still on his ‘be a man’ thing.”
“Oh, Nico.”
“Dr. Peace says female would be easier, but I don’t know. You knew me as a girl for a bit, what do you think?”
“I can’t,” she said. “You have to decide that. I can come down this weekend and we could talk about it.”
I wanted that. Wanted to see her and hang out and talk it all through. But it would be tough on her, the parts about me freezing eggs so I could have kids someday when she never had that option.
Plus she’d always been so sure about herself, she didn’t seem like the right person for a conversation about picking a gender. She’d say things like ‘you just know’ and other unhelpfulness.
I asked, “Aren’t you and Shen going camping for spring break?”
“I’ll cancel it.”
“Don’t. Come down for the surgery but go have your trip with him. He’s going to be gone all summer, right? Back to China to hang with his family? You should get your romance on. Besides I cannot wait to hear the Princess Ella Goes Camping stories. Shen does not know what he’s in for.”
“Nico…”
“There’s time.”
“Can I tell Tucker?” she asked. “I mean that you’ve got a surgical thing going on, not the part about ovotestis.”
I grinned thinking about Ella talking to Tucker about my ovotestis.
“Is that like the initiation for advanced trans and intersex conversations—the graduate level course? You have to have a detailed and polite conversation with friend B about friend A’s junk?”
She was laughing, but softly with this edge of worry in her voice. “You talk about your own junk, but I know she’d want to know that something’s up with you. She’s been asking about you. A lot.”
My heart thumped its approval of that. Asking was good. Not giving up on me because I was the dolt who’d blocked her and forgotten, very good.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
After a pause she said, “Nico, I love you.”
“Love you too, baby.”
We hung up and I immediately listened to all the messages Tucker had left and read all the texts. The first were close together. Then they trailed off like she was trying to give me space and not bug me.
Yeah, I’d been pissed off, but way more about Summer than about Tucker. With Tucker it had been that old echo of shame, like she ran away from me because of me. Summer’s words “you’re afraid of what I’ll find” had hit so deep in me, so close to my fears about Tucker’s reaction, that it all got mashed up together. I’d wanted to block out the fear, not Tucker herself.
I decided to wait a few minutes so Ella could go over and talk to Tucker first, and then I’d call her.
Chapter Fifteen
Tucker
Ella pounded on my door. She never pounded but maybe this was how we were now. I threw it open, half mad in case she was going to lecture me about Quin. After the sex of last weekend, I’d been out to dinner with Quin twice more but hadn’t invited her back to my room. Did she think we were dating or just rebounding? I was afraid to ask.
I glared at Ella through the open doorway. I didn’t need her giving me grief about Quin on top of the dump truck of guilt I felt.
“What?” I clipped out the word and stared at her.
Ella was not a girl you could stare down. Her cool green eyes were thunderstorm dark. She cocked her head and waited. I took a step back, letting her into my room, because I got that I was being a jerk.
“Nico hasn’t called you because yo had a medical situation and is scheduled to have surgery in a few months,” she said.
“Oh, hell. What for?”
“There’s a mass; it’s complicated. Nico says it’s not a big deal, but I know yo’s scared.”
“No shit.”
I paced across the room and back a few times. I was the world’s biggest jerk. I’d hooked up with Quin, all the while thinking Nico was blowing me off. Lately, I’d been pissed at Nico for not calling. But this turned it all around.
“Should I call?” I asked. “I should call, right? I mean, we’re friends and Nico was…when I needed…I should call.”
“Yes,” Ella said and almost managed not rolling her eyes at me. “Nico said I could tell you, so yo expects you’ll call.”
“What do I say?”
“Maybe listen?” Ella tipped her head to the left, gazing up at me like she was trying to puzzle out how big of a dope I was. She added, “I offered to drive down for spring break but Nico told me to go ahead with the camping trip. I think yo’s going to need someone to talk to.”
“I don’t get it. Is it like cancer or a tumor? What does it mean to find a mass? How does that even happen?”
Ella’s eyes focused on me and then clouded over. She shook her head. “It’s not for me to say.”
I’d paced to the far side of the room and spun fast to face her. “What the hell?”
She fired the words at me, crisp and hard-edged, “It is not. For me. To say.” She had to be as scared as I was, maybe more. She’d known Nico so much longer.
“All right, all right I’ll call,” I said.
“Finally,” Ella huffed and went back into her room.
I got out my phone but the first call I made wasn’t to Nico. It was to my sister Bailey.
“Bay, what are you doing?”
“Laundry,” she said with a snort. “You need another ride?”
“I want to borrow your car.”
A barking laugh, loud and harsh, followed by, “Forget it.”
“Twenty bucks in cash and I bring it back full tomorrow.”
“Jess, what are you doing?” she asked.
“A friend of mine got some seriously scary medical news. I want to drive down to Columbus and, you know, be a good surprise.”
“Well shit, yank on my heartstrings. Give me the twenty up front.”
“Of course,” I told her. “Pick me up in fifteen?”
“Deal.”
I’d borrowed Bailey’s car a few times my senior year of high school but hadn’t had a reason to while at college. Our hometown was so small you could walk across it in less than twenty minutes, outskirts included. She lived maybe ten minutes walk from the salon. She could live without a
car for a day.
I was throwing things into my bag, trying to think of what to say to Nico, when yo called.
“Hey,” yo said. “I’m sorry about not calling you sooner. I would’ve. I wanted to.”
I pressed the phone hard to my ear, wishing I was so much closer to Nico. “Ella told me. Medical stuff. It’s okay about not calling. I’m sorry about…a lot of stuff.”
“You don’t have that much to be sorry for. I’m sorry too.” Nico sounded like yo was going to say more, but the words trailed into silence.
Oh yeah I do, I thought. Hooking up with someone else while you’re scared and dealing with surgery shit.
“Feels like it,” I said. “Do you want to talk about what’s going on with you?”
“We’re about to sit down to dinner. But I wanted to just call and hear your voice. Can I call you in a bit?”
“Give me about two hours?” I asked. “I have to do a thing. But I want to talk.”
“Sure. Call me when you’re done.”
“Perfect.”
I had a few minutes before heading down to meet Bailey. I searched for coffee houses in Columbus. I knew where Ella’s house was. I figured Nico had to live within a few neighborhoods of her since they went to the same high school. And Nico’s mom was a professor at OSU, like Ella’s, so I went halfway between Ella’s house and the campus. When I saw the place named Chocolate Cafe it was no contest.
My hometown was twenty minutes southwest of Freytag, nearly on the way to Columbus. When I dropped Bailey back at her place, the GPS on my phone said it was an hour and forty minutes to the cafe. I made it in an hour thirty-five because I was determined but not stupid.
I called Nico from the parking lot.
“Hey, you get your stuff done?” Nico asked.
“Sure did,” I said. “You want to come meet me for coffee and maybe chocolate fondue?”
Nico chuckled. “It’s pretty late to drive up.”
“How far do you live from Chocolate Cafe on Northwest Boulevard?”
“Tucker, where are you?”
“I’m in the parking lot.”