by Rachel Gold
We stood around sipping the beer for a few minutes and occasionally yelling a comment to each other.
“Do you dance?” I asked them. Now that Shen and I had a real date, I didn’t mind having Johnny around as much as I had in the past two weeks.
“You can dance in those heels?” Johnny asked.
“Watch me,” I said. I put down my cup and pushed into the dancers with the two of them behind me.
Chapter Sixteen
Tucker
Tucker was a lightweight and she knew it, so after her second beer, when her skin started to tingle and buzz, she went out on the back porch to stand in the cold. The air smelled like ice and pine needles, and maybe snow was on the way. She wouldn’t mind a few cooling flakes on her skin just now.
Ella seemed to be having a great time with Shen. Tucker had danced a few songs with the two of them and Johnny but then wandered away because she wasn’t in a party mood. Watching Ella and Shen flashing little smiles at each other, and finding excuses to touch, made her feel lonely. She didn’t think it had been a mistake to break up with Lindy, but she wanted to have someone with her tonight.
“Tucker?”
She turned and saw Lindy staring at her, light brown eyes burning like candle flames in the dusk. Lindy was dressed as an artist, with a big smock covered in smears of paint. She even had paint on her cheek and she held a full cup of beer in each hand.
“You’re in a skirt,” Lindy said with a shallow smile.
“I borrowed it from Ella so I could dress up like a girl.”
“It looks good on you. Look, I wanted to talk to you more about yesterday.”
Tucker opened her mouth to protest or make some excuse to go back into the party, but Lindy put the beers on the porch railing and held up her hand.
“Please, hear me out. I know you were really upset because you thought I told Vivien you only came out as trans for attention, but that’s not what really happened.”
Tucker waited and Lindy leaned back against the porch railing, looking sideways at her.
“That’s not what I told her,” Lindy said. “I told her I was worried about the kind of attention it was attracting. She must have misheard me. Look, I’m really sorry. It must have been so hard for you to even go talk to her and then to hear that…well, I’m sorry.”
Lindy picked up one of the cups of beer and held it out to her. Tucker took it even though she thought she shouldn’t drink it. She wanted something to hold onto and the cold cup against her palm added to the overall weight of numbness in her body.
“I know you want to split up, and I don’t blame you,” Lindy said. “I’m not going to crowd you if you want to date Ella or whatever.”
“Ella’s interested in Spock,” Tucker told her.
“What?”
“I mean Shen, he’s the one dressed up like Spock.”
“Then I’m sure he’s perfect for her. Anyway, I’m sorry about everything and that we’re not going to work out. I thought we had a really good thing going.”
“Me too,” Tucker said.
“What went wrong?” Lindy asked. She was still turned sideways from Tucker, drinking her beer, deliberately not looking at her. Tucker wondered if Lindy was afraid of what she’d see in her face or if she was trying to give Tucker room.
Tucker took a sip of the beer. It was flat and bitter. She said, “You being so stressed out the last few months is tough with everything else going on.”
“But the last couple of weeks have been good, haven’t they? Other than the Vivien remark, which was just a misunderstanding. And we’re good together in bed.”
Tucker smiled. “Yeah, really good.”
“You know, just for the sake of closure, you could come back to my place tonight. I bet you’ve never had sex wearing a skirt.”
“That’s true,” Tucker said.
“Think about it,” Lindy told her and walked away, into the body of the party.
Tucker drank more of the beer and thought about it. She didn’t trust th e “misunderstanding” line about Vivien, but there was no way to check it.
And she really was done with Lindy, but their sexual chemistry had been one of the best things about their relationship. Would one more night hurt anything?
She felt buoyant inside: her feet numbing with the cold, her head expanding from the alcohol. More than anything right now, she wanted to be warm and to be touched, to be lifted out of her life and carried along on a wave of good feelings. She didn’t want to be alone. She went back into the party.
“All right,” she told Lindy. “Let me tell Ella I’m going.”
Lindy grinned back at her, eyes still bright, almost feverish. “I’ll meet you out front.”
Tucker shoved her way around people until she found Ella and Shen dancing by the fireplace. The heat and sound of the room pressed on her, but inside her head still felt light and cold.
“Hey,” she shouted into Ella’s ear. “I’m going with Lindy.”
“No way,” Ella shouted back.
“Last time.”
“Tucker, don’t.”
“Closure,” Tucker yelled and pushed through the crowd to the front door.
They walked down the sidewalk together, away from the noise, down the six blocks to Lindy’s apartment. Along the way, Lindy took her hand and wrapped it in her strong fingers and Tucker started to feel warm again.
When they got inside, Lindy opened a bottle of wine and poured glasses while Tucker got out of her boots and coat.
“I’ve had enough,” Tucker said.
“You’ll like it. It’s sweet.”
Tucker took a sip. Lindy was right. She determined to drink it slowly. Lindy set out a bowl of rice and seaweed chips and Tucker grabbed a few to get something in her stomach.
“Do you think we could make it work?” Lindy asked.
So that was her agenda: to get Tucker back to her apartment and try to keep them together. The breaking up talk yesterday had lasted all of fifteen minutes, so maybe Lindy thought they still had a chance.
“It’s just too much pressure to have something serious going on right now,” Tucker said.
“I can back off some, make it easier on you.”
“You don’t deserve that. You should find someone who wants the same level of commitment you do.”
“I don’t want someone else,” Lindy said. “I want you.”
She leaned in and kissed Tucker. Lindy was a great kisser and even now it was easy to get lost in the feel of her nimble lips. But another part of Tucker’s brain was knocking on the door of her awareness and waving a sign that said: This is a bad idea!
She pulled away.
“Hang on,” Lindy said. “Let me just slip into the bathroom and get this paint off my face.”
She fairly skipped across the room and into the little bathroom. Tucker stood up and looked around the apartment. Maybe she should leave right now without saying anything, but that felt too abrupt, too rude an end to their relationship.
Her gaze fell on Lindy’s computer. If it was on, maybe she could just lean over it and look at Lindy’s email. Maybe there would be an incriminating message to Vivien and then she’d know for sure that Lindy was lying to her.
But she didn’t need to look for evidence. The fact that she was considering it meant that she didn’t believe Lindy, and she didn’t want to stick around someone she couldn’t trust.
Lindy came out of the bathroom and saw her standing by the couch. She pulled Tucker back down to sitting so they were side by side again. Putting a hand on Tucker’s thigh, she moved it upward.
“I like the feel of these,” she said as she stroked the pantyhose.
“Lindy, I should go.”
“No, you should stay. Just for tonight. One last time.”
She kissed Tucker hard and leaned against her so that Tucker was pinned between her and the couch. It felt good and bad at the same time, but as the kiss lingered the bad outweighed the good. Tucker turned her face away.<
br />
“I don’t want this,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lindy told her. “Just tell me how you want it.”
“I want to go,” Tucker said.
“No you don’t.”
She didn’t know what to say to that and while her brain was trying to crank out a reply, Lindy moved with surprising speed. The weight of her body pressed Tucker into the couch, and her hand pushed up under Tucker’s skirt.
“Stop,” Tucker managed, but if Lindy heard her, she gave no sign. “Lindy, please stop.” The words came out in a near whisper.
“No,” Lindy said. “You need this.”
Tucker’s eyes focused on the barely-consumed glass of wine on the coffee table. She didn’t think there was anything in it other than wine, but her body felt numb and frozen. In the dim light, the wine looked like fake blood, like a movie prop, as if the whole room and everything in it wasn’t real.
She didn’t want to be awake for what happened next, but she was.
* * *
The sky still refused to snow as Tucker walked back to her room, but the air was cold enough that it should have. She held her boots in her hand for the first block and then realized that was stupid and jammed her freezing feet into them. Her fingers shook too hard to get the laces tied, but the fit was close enough to keep them on the rest of the way. She couldn’t remember if she’d had a jacket. She must have, but she had no idea where it went.
Wherever it was, that had to be where her keys were. She got to the front door of the dorm and rang the buzzer for the RA on duty. A sleepy-looking guy came to let her in.
“Too much party?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You have some ID or something so I can let you into your room?”
“Roommate,” she said. “She’ll let me in.”
“Okay.”
She took the elevator two floors up, leaning against the wall as it lifted her. On the third floor, she paused at Ella’s door and then knocked. There was rustling and a mumbled “Sec.” Then Ella opened the door.
Tucker held up a hand and shook her head. She couldn’t talk. Ella stepped back and let her in. She went through the bathroom and into her room.
“I’ll be right here if you need something,” Ella called after her.
She shut the door behind her and locked it. She kicked off her boots and stood looking at the bed but she couldn’t touch it like this. Stripping out of her clothes, she went into the bathroom and started the shower. It took her a long time to get warm and an even longer time to feel clean. Then she crawled into her bed and curled on her side until the sleep she craved finally came over her.
In the morning her head pounded with jackhammers trying to beat their way from the inside out. Any shivering now was purely the effect of fever. When she went to pee, she left the door to the bathroom unlocked and at some point in the morning Ella tapped on it.
“Come in,” Tucker called, but it sounded more like a wounded goose call.
“You sound awful,” Ella told her.
“Feel worse.”
“Flu?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll get you some soup and tea, do you need anything else?”
“NyQuil or something.”
“Are you okay? Last night…”
“Feel like shit,” Tucker said.
“All right, I’ll be back soon with some cold medicine.”
Tucker stared at the ceiling after she was gone and tried not to think about anything. It was easier than she expected.
Chapter Seventeen
Ella
The first two days of Tucker’s flu, I didn’t worry overmuch; I took my vitamins and hoped I didn’t catch it. By the fourth day, I was worried. It wasn’t her stuffy nose or pasty gray complexion that bothered me so much as the fact that she just wasn’t doing anything—not even reading a fun, not-required-for-class novel. I wasn’t sure if she was eating either.
I’d left the door from the bathroom to my room unlocked so when I wasn’t there she could help herself to my microwave and fridge, but whenever I went into the fridge myself, I could see that nothing was gone.
“Go to the health center,” I told her. I’d pulled her desk chair up to the side of the bed figuring that if I was going to catch something from her, I would have already.
She sat propped up on pillows, the area around her littered with crumpled tissues and books that I had yet to see her open. Each time I visited her, there was another book on her bed, and yet she didn’t seem to be reading any of them. A blue Freytag U mug steamed on the table next to her. At least she was using my electric kettle.
“It’s just the flu,” she said. “I feel a little better today. I can probably go to class in a day or two.”
“Are you working on the new paper for Gender Studies?” I asked. “I can read it over for you if you want.”
Tucker shrugged. “I’m thinking about dropping the class. Maybe I’ll do another major, something useful like Communications.”
“You’re still running a fever, aren’t you?” I asked because that didn’t sound like her at all.
“I’m sick of all the shit with Vivien,” she said. She didn’t add “and Lindy” but I heard it in the silent pause before she went on. “I just want to get my degree and move on.”
Her rounded shoulders and the darkness in the skin under her eyes signaled defeat. Until this week, Tucker had always seemed larger than life to me—so outgoing with her opinions and her affections, and now I was looking at a shadow of her.
I had no idea how to respond, so I said, “Shen’s coming over to watch a movie on the laptop. You’re welcome to join us.”
She shook her head. “I’m going back to sleep.”
Either this was one hell of a flu or something else was going on. I wanted to push the issue, but I knew what it was like to have to give out information before you were ready, so I went back to my room.
Shen showed up with a brown carryout bag that smelled of garlic and peanuts. “There is no good Chinese food here, so I got Thai. It’s not good Thai either, but at least I’m not personally offended by it.”
I laughed. “That’s important.”
We settled onto my bed, sitting against the wall at the head of the bed with my laptop on his shins and our takeout boxes in our laps. I rested my shoulder against his and he leaned over to kiss the side of my face high up on my cheek. I grinned and opened the white cardboard carton in my lap. It was pad thai with tofu.
“Not spicy,” he said. His palate could take a lot more heat than mine and Johnny beat both of us, though I think some of that was bravado and not personal preference.
Shen reached into my lap and picked up my right hand, pulling the chopsticks I was holding forward until my hand was up near the base of them. I wasn’t bad at chopsticks, Mom taught me as a kid, but I’d asked him for help weeks ago because it was a good excuse to touch and now I was in the habit of holding them wrong to get his attention. I snapped the sticks at him and he laughed.
“You’re almost ready to compete in chopstick relay,” he said.
“Is that a real thing?”
“If by ‘real’ you mean a party game Johnny invented to pick up girls, then yes, very real.”
“Does it work?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Have you ever used it to pick up girls?”
His smile was confident and reticent at the same time. “I never needed to,” he said.
“How many girlfriends have you had?”
He paused and looked up at the ceiling, counting under his breath, “…eighteen, nineteen, twenty-two…” Then he chuckled and looked at me. “Four, counting you.”
“Who were they?”
“When I was nine, Meirong brought me a flower and asked if she could tell the older boys that I was her boyfriend. She was very forward. I didn’t disagree so I was her boyfriend for the rest of the year, but I don’t think that meant anything. Then in high
school I was with Yanmei for the last two years but we both knew we would go far away from each other for college. And last year I went around with Laura for the second semester, but we weren’t well suited.”
“What happened?”
“She found another boy, less thoughtful.”
“I like that you’re thoughtful,” I said.
He smiled and didn’t say anything, but I knew he was curious and too polite to ask the same question of me.
“I dated Nico for a while,” I told him. “Off and on for over a year. And I kissed some boys. And…um…I kind of hooked up with Tucker over fall break, but then she was with Lindy again.”
The phrase “hooked up” wasn’t at all fair to describe what had happened between me and Tucker, but I thought it was a safe place to start to see if Shen was going to have objections.
“Would you rather date her?” he asked.
Sometimes I thought that if there could be two of me, like me and a clone, then one of me could be with Tucker and the other with Shen. But right now I’d still want to be the one who was with Shen. I felt a lot for Tucker, but some of it was so complicated I didn’t even know where to start thinking about it.
“No,” I snuggled closer into his shoulder, “I really like spending time with you.”
“Good,” he said.
“But I’m worried about Tucker. She’s a really good friend and something’s bothering her and I don’t know how to get her to talk about it. I don’t want to blaze in there with questions because sometimes it’s important to have secrets.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I will never tell you that I’m secretly drawn to Japanese flower arranging. Oh, rats.”
After a moment of silence where we both ate a little, he added, “If she is going to tell anyone, it will be you. And you’ll be the right person for her to tell.”
“Thanks.”
We didn’t say anything more on the topic of Tucker or other people we’d dated, but I felt better. Being around Shen had a calming effect, whether we were watching a movie or studying or playing games.
We’d only kissed a few times, and already I wanted it to go further—but I didn’t want to come across like a tease. It wasn’t like he was pressuring me, it was the opposite, but my mind couldn’t help racing into the future. What would it be like when we’d been together three months or six? The only threats to the relationship that I saw came from my end. First, that part of me was also interested in Tucker, and second, that I was probably the most virgin kind of virgin ever when it came to guys.