Andy sat on his bed, his mouth open in shock.
“Maybe I should just tell you all about what we talked about in biology today.”
Andy nodded and sat with his hands folded in his lap, listening patiently.
Robby told him about Ms. Eng and AVEN. He explained, “Ms. Eng said she couldn’t speak for anyone else, but she knew she at least so far had no sexual feelings about anyone. She said there were people who sometimes had sexual relationships. It’s not all black and white.” He went on to say that asexuality and celibacy were not the same thing, that celibacy was a choice and asexuality was just who you are.
As Robby talked, he kept a close eye on Andy’s face. He seemed to be listening to it all, occasionally nodding or making a “hmm” sound.
“What do you think?” Robby finally said. He waited, tense.
Andy gestured for him to sit by him on his bed.
“That’s a lot of information,” Andy began. “So you believe you might be asexual. That could change, but it might not. And you want to be in a relationship with me, but we would just kiss and cuddle. Right?”
“I’m not really sure. I might sometimes want to make love to you. In fact, I’m pretty sure I will. But it would be more romantic, loving, than sexy. Would that be enough for you?” Robby asked anxiously.
Andy was sitting on the bed with his legs bent and crossed at the ankles. He leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “Hmm. Let me think.”
Robby waited, tense with anticipation.
Andy finally spoke. “I honestly don’t know. I love you, Robby, very much. The idea of living with you and even marrying you appeals to me strongly. I suppose if I were to get aroused, I could masturbate, right?”
“Well, sure, and me too.”
“And sometimes we might do it together?”
“I don’t see why not,” Robby said, starting to feel hopeful.
“You know I might never get myself a cock, right?”
Robby nodded.
“So I might always have nothing but a vagina. Do you think you would ever want to… well… fuck me?”
Robby shrugged. “Would you want to be fucked?” he asked.
They looked at each other. Robby felt the corner of his mouth start to go up. In no time he was laughing, and Andy was too.
“I love this,” Andy said. “I love how we can talk and laugh together. I don’t think too many people have that, that sort of cuddly buddy stuff.”
Robby reached for Andy and took him in his arms. “I love you. That’s all I know.”
Epilogue
ROBBY AND Andy graduated valedictorian and salutatorian in their class. It doesn’t matter which was which. They were both accepted at the University of Washington. They knew that school had a GLBT center and decided to join it. They wanted to share a dormitory room and reserved one together.
Bradley Dunbar and his cronies were arrested for kidnapping and sexual assault, not to mention trespassing on school grounds with the intention of committing felonies, but Bradley fled the jurisdiction. The last they heard of him was that he was somewhere in South America where he could not be extradited. The other two boys were tried as adults. They got brief sentences in prison, and the girls received community service. The Kahns, with Andy’s reluctant consent, filed restraining orders against them, though the girls made no attempt to violate it. But a civil suit against all the families wound up with a settlement that pretty much paid for Andy’s college. All of the criminals, as they were now known, were expelled from school, denied participation in graduation, had to attend a special bullying program the school arranged, and take their entire senior year again before they were given their diplomas.
Aunt Ivy was like some sort of avenging angel. She fussed over Andy endlessly, to his complete embarrassment. She got involved in an antibullying society herself and dragged Robby along, Andy refusing to go. She was vociferous about all the historical figures she knew of who had been persecuted: the Japanese Americans in World War II, the Stonewall Riots, the Cuban expulsion of all their gay people, lynchings in the South, you name it. “At least Castro admitted he had been wrong when he said gay people were ‘agents of imperialism’!” She punctuated her outrage with a succinct “As if!”
Antiques Roadshow was quite the experience. Besides Aunt Ivy and Robby and Andy, the Khans and Gabe also went to the taping. At first they just stood in line, waiting to get their registration verified. Then they stood in line with Aunt Ivy, cradling the box with the egg in her arms, and waited to talk to an appraiser. The woman who came out to look at the egg held it for a few minutes, then quickly excused herself. They waited some more.
Finally two people, a man in a suit and a woman with a laptop, came and asked Aunt Ivy to come with them. Aunt Ivy insisted Robby and Andy be allowed to come with her. They went into a small room and stood while the man took the box and opened it. He carefully removed the egg and stood gaping at it. He exchanged looks with the woman.
“This might be something quite extraordinary,” he said. “Or it might be a reproduction.”
Ivy nodded and smiled. “We know that.”
Over the next hour, several people came into the room and looked at the music box. The woman went to the computer and looked at several websites with eggs pictured on them. The people left the room, Ivy and the boys waiting for them to come back, and finally the man in the suit asked them to come with him.
They found themselves at a table with a camera and cameraman standing behind it. People kept glancing their way, but the stagehands kept them at bay. Finally the camera lights went on, and Ivy stood with the man in the suit looking at the music box as the man began to speak.
“You say you got this music box in a junk shop?”
Aunt Ivy just nodded but when prompted, she spoke aloud, “Yes, I did. It was really a mess. I had to get it cleaned up and oiled before we could open it and listen to the tune.”
The man nodded impatiently. “You had it cleaned by a jeweler?”
“No, my neighbor who fixes cars did it.”
The look on the man’s face bordered on horror. “I see.”
He picked up the music box and carefully flipped the latch. The spring in the latch made the top of the red enamel egg with the gold accents pop open. The stage director gestured for the cameraman to zoom in on the egg. The little ballerina began to twirl with the bell-like sound of the Onegin waltz starting right at the beginning. Robby realized the stage director must have made sure when the egg opened that the music was at the first bars of the waltz.
The man in the suit started to speak again. “This music box at first appeared to be a Fabergé egg, called Imperial Eggs in the czar’s court. We looked into its history and discovered that the creator, Peter Carl Fabergé, made more than fifty of these eggs. They are all fine jeweler’s art. After the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin had them all collected from the palace, the private houses where they were kept, and also the ones still at the jewelers. In the 1930s Stalin put the collection together and sold them to Armand Hammer, the American industrialist who was a friend of Vladimir Lenin. Several appeared to have been lost, maybe destroyed to sell the gold and jewels for the Politburo.”
“This one was lost for many, many years. It was photographed in the 1890s, having been made in 1889 by Fabergé. It is called the Imperial Czarina Egg and disappeared during the time after the Revolution. We don’t know what happened to it, or how it got into the hands of the owner of the junk shop. But it definitely is one of the original Imperial Eggs.” He gestured to the stage director, who told the cameraman, also in gestures, to put up a still of the egg. Robby and Andy didn’t know this until they saw the episode later.
The man went on to explain that the waltz from the opera Yevgeny or Eugene Onegin was playing on the music box. He told the audience about Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky and the opera written in 1879.
“Now I understand that it used to have a tiny key to wind it up?”
Ivy assured him it had. She explained that no one could find the key, but they had found a way to set the music.
“That is too bad,” said the man in the suit. “If the egg had been complete, it would have been worth more than thirty million dollars.”
Ivy’s jaw dropped. “W-what is it worth without the key?”
The man in the suit asked her, “What do you think it’s worth?”
She looked at him, dazed. “I don’t know, maybe a few hundred thousand?”
He grinned. “At least ten million dollars at auction.”
“Ka-ching!” Robby and Andy chorused, dancing around and hugging each other and Ivy.
“What will you do with it?” the man asked Ivy.
She looked at the egg and laughed and said, “Nothing. I’ll keep it.”
The look on the man’s face showed he thought she might be a lunatic, but he was off camera at the time.
Aunt Ivy did keep the egg. She had a Lucite box made for it and mounted it on a shelf on the wall of her office. She paid to have an electronic security system put in at her house. She constantly let it go unarmed, however. When she died several years later, though, it was still in her possession, and in her will she left it to her nephew Robby and his husband Andy. The two of them donated the egg to the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
THAT FALL after they learned the truth about Aunt Ivy’s egg on Antiques Roadshow, Robby and Andy started school at the University of Washington.
The first night in their shared dorm room, Robby pushed the two beds together. Andy climbed into bed with him. They put their arms around each other, and Robby rested his head on Andy’s shoulder, with a sigh of contentment.
“I love you, Robby,” Andy said.
“I love you, Andy.”
Robby felt complete, with Andy in his arms and sure that he wanted the same things Robby did. The sigh that left his lips said it all.
Author’s Notes
YOU CAN find out more about asexuality at Asexuality Visibility and Awareness Network at http://www.asexuality.org.
There is a great deal online about being transgender. Gender Odyssey, http://www.genderodyssey.org, is a great resource. Any search on the terms transgender, trans woman, trans man, FTM, and MTF, as well as genderqueer, should lead you to a great many resources and groups. Also for those who are trans men, there is the fabulous site called Hudson’s FTM Resource Guide at http://www.ftmguide.org/, a sort of step by step, “one stop shopping” site about everything from surgery to clothing to “packers.” Finally you can’t go wrong by taking a look at Transgress Press at http://www.transgresspress.com, with books on all sorts of aspects of being transgender.
There is also information about asexuality at the Matthew Shepard Foundation at http://www.matthewshepard.org/asexuality, a site with information on hate crimes against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people too. Learn all you can about how teenagers and adults can fight the senseless violence against people who just don’t match the mainstream. Also see the book Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls, and Controversies by Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld http://www.amazon.com/Hate-Crimes-Causes-Controls-Controversies-ebook/dp/00LXFGBBS/.
I had quite a time finding a name for the scholastic competition that I finally called “Quiz Kids”. There is a games company called WizKids, but at least that isn’t a competition. The earlier choices I tried, Mathletics, turned out to be something quite different, and both Academia and Academica were in use. I based the competition on High School Bowl which was based on GE College Bowl which ran on CBS and NBC for many years. There are High School Bowl competitions in local high school television markets even now.
Could Ivy have found a Faberge egg? An article at CNN.com from March 20, 2014, concerned a Midwestern man who owned a small Faberge egg that he hoped to have melted down and get $500 for the gold. As it happened, he discovered an article by looking for “egg” and the name on the egg, “Vacheron Constantin,” online. His search brought up a 2011 article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper describing a “frantic search” for the object: the Third Imperial Easter Egg, made by Fabergé for the Russian royal family and estimated to be worth 20 million pounds ($33 million).
However, the Imperial Czarina Egg is my invention, created to allow for the fantasy we all have to find a priceless objet d’art.
The author welcomes any questions about any of this and will discuss the book if you write to him, Christopher Hawthorne Moss, at [email protected]. You can find out about his books at his web site, http://www.authorchristophermoss.blogspot.com and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/kitmoss2012.
More from Christopher Hawthorne Moss
At the time of the earliest Crusades, young noblewoman Elisabeth longs to be the person she’s always known is hidden inside. When her twin brother perishes from a fever, Elisabeth takes his identity to live as a man, a knight. As Elias, he travels to the Holy Land, to adventure, passion, death, and a lesson that honor is sometimes found in unexpected places.
Elias must pass among knights and soldiers, survive furious battle, deadly privations, moral uncertainty, and treachery if he’ll have any chance of returning to his newfound love in the magnificent city of Constantinople.
Readers love Beloved Pilgrim by Christopher Hawthorne Moss
2014 Rainbow Award as Best Transgender Fiction
“Moss gives young trans readers the benefit of a trans hero they can identify with…”
—Lambda Literary
“Christopher Moss’s Beloved Pilgrim is a wonder. Every now and then you stumble across a story that not only had to be told, but managed to get itself told by an accomplished author. Beloved Pilgrim is such a story.”
—Elisa’s Reviews and Ramblings
“…a perfect novel if there ever is. I would highly recommend this novel to everyone that wants to read a strong novel that shows a sense of care and the courage one needs to keep going when times get bad.”
—MM Good Book Reviews
“A definite addition to my to be read again shelf… a well written historical tale…”
—Gay List Book Reviews
CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE MOSS has dedicated his writing and Internet resource development career to fostering a history and a heritage for GLBTQ people everywhere. As he is fond of saying, “We were here, and we were queer!” As a transgender man, he is also gay and therefore has a particular interest in helping gender-variant people feel included in a culture of positivity. His belief is that plausible stories of GLBTQ people will do more good for inclusion than any other effort.
Kit lives with his husband and their two doted-upon cats in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. He has the glorious distinction of being one of three siblings, all of whom are gender variant.
He writes for both Dreamspinner Press and Harmony Ink Press.
Website: www.writerchristophermoss.com
E-mail: [email protected]
By Christopher Hawthorne Moss
Beloved Pilgrim
A Fine Bromance
Published by HARMONY INK PRESS
www.harmonyinkpress.com
Published by
HARMONY INK PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
[email protected] • harmonyinkpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Fine Bromance
© 2016 Christopher Hawthorne Moss.
Cover Art
© 2016 AngstyG.
www.angstyg.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of
international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-63477-001-9
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63477-002-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901425
Published August 2016
v. 1.0
Printed in the United States of America
A Fine Bromance Page 14
