Nico & Tucker

by Rachel Gold

  Tucker’s jaw had relaxed while I was talking and now she laughed. “You are going to tell me the whole story, right?”

  Her blue eyes had copper in them, close around the pupil. Like Tucker herself, bright and metal, solid. I wanted her to keep looking at me so I settled into my side of the booth and tried to pick the right place to start the story.

  “You know I dated Ella for a while, kind of a long while, but we broke up in the middle.”

  “Why?”

  I did not say: because I was a lot more comfortable having a dick than she ever was. I said, “I wanted things to go faster than she did. And we had a fight and…” I circled my hand to indicate complexity.

  She nodded at me, smiling, so I continued.

  “There was this girl at the Noodle, Sian, pretty high up in the general pecking order. She organized a party blending all the vampire, werewolf, and zombie shows. Her invitation line was, ‘Blood, brains, or carnage?’ I picked carnage because I was in a crap mood that day. She told me to dress up as Alcide from True Blood.”

  “He’s the tall, cut one who’s also in that male stripper movie, right?” Tucker asked. “Ella dragged me to that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, this girl…” Tucker prompted.

  “Five and a half feet and curvy—one of those girls who has boobs, a belly and a butt and carries it all like ‘screw you, I’m cute.’ A ton of copper red hair that she put into cool updos. And she had freckles. She seemed way older than me at the time, but she couldn’t have been because she was in high school too.”

  I sipped my water and continued the story, “I put together a pretty solid Alcide. It seemed to me the defining characteristics of the True Blood werewolves were facial hair and a strong desire to take off their shirts. I did fingernail claws and a spirit-gum short beard. Plus two thick, ribbed white tank tops over my binder and one of those red checked flannel plaid shirts. Thick-soled boots and my shoulders got me close enough to tall, hunky guy.”

  “Yeah, that sounds pretty hot,” Tucker said.

  I grinned back at her, because if she thought that was hot, we were so going to be okay.

  “Sian was playing Jessica, the young, red-headed vampire character. She had her hair long and wavy—realistic-looking fangs with a trail of blood running down one side of her mouth. Grey cardigan sweater with a red push-up bra under it so you could see bright red lace framing her cleavage. On the bottom she had a short black skirt and fishnet stockings with garters. She looked amazing. I was completely scared to talk to her.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. She came and found me.”

  “And…?” Tucker asked.

  “We ended up in one of the upstairs studios. The door was locked but Sian had the key ring because she’d done the setup. She said we were going to talk. We did talk for a while, but then she was like ‘Are you going to kiss me?’”

  “You did, right?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Our food arrived and it dawned on me that if I kept this much detail in the story, I was going to end up telling Tucker everything about my anatomy. I ate my burger steadily for a few minutes.

  Tucker asked, “Was she out before that or were you surprised?”

  “Oh, I was surprised. I don’t know what her orientation was, she never said. She liked me, for sure, but I always wondered how much of that was the Alcide costume. She’d seen me before, but she seemed to get really interested after I showed up as a werewolf guy.”

  “Was that weird?”

  “It was fun. I was less self-conscious. She invited me to come over and watch movies. She lived in the basement at her parents’ and I could slip in the side door at night. We hooked up a few more times.”

  “Was it different out of costume?” Tucker asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her eyebrows went way up. “You kept having sex as Alcide?”

  “Yeah, it worked.”

  I hadn’t told this story to anyone start-to-finish like this and hearing myself, it sounded different than it did inside my head. Cool but with a hint of pathetic.

  I said, “I was seventeen. I liked that I didn’t have to have ‘the conversation,’ that I could simply be a hot werewolf guy hooking up with a hotter vampire girl.”

  I’d only had sex with two people and, thinking back, I’d always been in costume.

  In a sense, I was always in costume anyway. Did I know what the real me looked like? Felt like?

  The real me was the person who’d been with Ella in her bedroom. But that person, that me, wasn’t right for Ella. Was I right for anyone?

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I’ve never had sex in costume.”

  “You should try it.” The words came out automatic, fast, as a defense. Then I realized how that sounded considering she was in a costume right now. Blushed a bunch and went back to my burger.

  Also…Tucker had had sex with Ella and I hadn’t. How unfair was that? I’d been smitten with Ella for years and she wouldn’t have sex with me, but she did with Tucker after knowing her for how many months?

  “What’s that look on your face?” Tucker asked.

  I swallowed the bite of burger that had gone dry in my mouth, gulped some water.

  “Ella and I dated on and off for two years and never had sex,” I said.

  Emotions flashed across Tucker’s face. Eyes widening then narrowing, brow creasing. She shook her head.

  “You get why she had sex with me, though, right?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “She could afford to lose me. She can’t afford to lose you. If you’d hooked up and it got super weird, so weird you couldn’t be friends—you two just can’t do that. She can’t take that loss. With me if it went sideways, at the end of the year she could bail on me.”

  “She’d never do that.”

  “When you love someone, there’s a lot more pressure for the sex part to work out,” she said. Her face closed like a shutter slammed over a window.

  I had a flash of fear that she meant me. But the way her face went empty, she had to be thinking about her ex. Thinking about how messed up ideas of love and sex got when someone took away your right to your own body, your self.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” I told her.

  “Don’t.” She picked up the cloth napkin and wrung it around her finger. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Go back to you and Ella, why did you split up the second time?”

  “On the surface, because I cheated on her, sort of,” I said. “There was this guy I knew from conventions. We made out a few times. I met him when he was dressed as the tenth Doctor and I was Jack Harkness, and we were both about sixteen, and it all made sense. But that was before Ella and I were together, before Sian. I stopped seeing Sian after Ella and I were okay again. We started going on dates, but we never talked about if we were dating officially.”

  I thought about it for a second and added, “No, that’s not fair to Ella. We were going on dates and she wanted this perfect hetero couple date situation. The longer it went on, the less it worked for me. I was so into her and it felt like not having sex was a criticism. Like my body wasn’t right. I ended up in this shitty place in my mind. The next time I was at a con and that guy, the tenth Doctor, asked if I wanted to go up to his room, I did.”

  “I get that,” Tucker said.

  “But that led to a huge fight with Ella and she broke up with me. I think the cheating was the excuse. She was going to get her surgery soon and she wanted to be with a guy. She wanted the dream relationship, the hetero romance movie thing. I’m never going to be that.”

  “It’s never real anyway,” Tucker said. “Dream relationships suck ass.” She plastered a grin on her face, barely covering the sadness. I loved the attempt. I grinned back and stuck a fry up my nose.

  What I didn’t tell Tucker was how bad our fighting had been. Ella and I had started yelling at each other in her driveway. Days later we were still fighting.
In her bedroom, I’d perched tensely on the edge of her bed while she sat rigid in her desk chair.

  “I’m never seeing him again,” I told her. “And I’m really sorry.”

  “I know,” she said in the sad Ella voice that was highly worse than the angry Ella voice. “But we’re never going to work.”

  “Of course we are, we’re perfect. Baby, listen, I can do what you want. I can be that.”

  “Even if we never have sex?” she asked.

  “What, like never?” I got up and bounced on my toes to work out the nervous, angry energy. “Why never?” I paused and stared at her. “Is it me? Are you not okay with…with me?”

  She shook her head and I bounced harder. I knew she hated that she still had “boy parts,” that she wanted to block that out and never think about it. I understood that.

  But what if my body was the real issue? We’d seen each other naked in quick flashes, changing in her room back before we’d started the kissing phase of our relationship. She knew what I looked like. Why had I never thought this through?

  “What, like my dick isn’t good enough for you?” I asked, full on furious. “You need to have a ‘real’ one to prove you’re a ‘real’ girl? It’s not going to be right until you have some hetero cisgender guy’s dick up in you?”

  For the record, that is the worst thing I’ve ever said.

  Ever.

  She started crying and I slammed out of her room and out of her house. I went home and did a lot of crying of my own, but at least she couldn’t see me doing it.

  And then I shut off everything. I shut off boy and I shut off girl and I shut off both. I made myself into neither and nothing for a while. I did school and I cleaned the house so I’d have a reason to get up on weekends. I watched every season of every science fiction show I’d ever liked even a little.

  Ella wrote me a letter and emailed it to me a few days before she went for surgery. It was scary, like she was worried that the surgery could go wrong and she’d never wake up, never get a chance to say this stuff to me. And it was super sad. She said that she was sorry for everything and that there wasn’t a thing wrong with me. She said she’d always love me, but that my body—how I looked when I was naked—reminded her of a part of her life she never wanted to think about again.

  And I got it.

  I felt like such an asshat. I could rock what nature gave me, but I did look similar to Ella’s mid-transition phase. She shouldn’t have to be reminded of that all the time.

  As soon as she was home I went over with flowers and a teddy bear and we were friends again. But that was it, that was all we were ever going to be. I didn’t want to love somebody else like that and get turned inside out ever again.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tucker

  After dinner, Nico led me into the dealer’s room. I imagined poker, but it turned out to be a ballroom filled with tables of people selling books, comic books, action figures, toys, games, props and costume pieces.

  We were hardly the only people in costumes, which made me super relieved. There were so many Klingons—I’d seen enough Star Trek to pick them out. I saw Batman, Superman, Spiderman and a lot of super heroes I didn’t recognize; more Star Trek uniforms; a pack of zombies; and a gaggle of girls about whom Nico simply said, “Manga” as if that explained the pigtails, makeup and schoolgirl uniforms.

  Halfway around the room someone called out, “Excuse me, Starbuck,” and I realized they meant me. Turning around, I spotted a guy with a blond kid about ten.

  “Boomer,” she said excitedly when Nico stepped up next to me.

  “Can my daughter get a picture with you?” the guy asked. “She’s a huge fan.”

  “Of course,” Nico said. Yo turned sideways—I corrected myself mentally because Nico had asked me to use female pronouns while we were in costume—she turned sideways. She stuck her thumbs in the belt of her flight suit, making a tough serious face.

  The girl gave an excited hop and ran to stand between us. I stuck out my chin, jammed one thumb in my belt and put my other hand on the girl’s shoulder. She glanced up and grinned. I tried to muster a tough but approving look. The phone clicked as the dad took photos.

  When he was done, I knelt down level with the girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Joanna,” she said.

  “You want to be a pilot when you grow up?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I want to fly a Viper like you.”

  “That’s right. You get good grades, okay? And you keep in good shape. You’ve got to be top notch to fly in my crew.”

  “Yes sir,” she said and saluted.

  I saluted back and stood up. Her dad pulled her away as she chatted excitedly about Vipers and Raptors and Battlestars.

  Nico’s mouth was half-open, grinning. “Frakkin-A, Starbuck, that was adorable.”

  “Zip it, Lieutenant, I don’t want any lip from you,” I said and managed to hold a straight face for about three seconds. We both burst out laughing.

  Nico threw an arm around my shoulders. “See, you’re good at this.”

  I wasn’t so sure. On my own I’d never do this, but following in Nico’s wake, watching her joke and play with random strangers, made it all easier.

  After circumnavigating the dealer’s room and the art room, we ended up back in the hotel restaurant eating fries while Nico argued playfully with half of the Klingon delegation. It reminded me of going to a convention in Wisconsin with Lindy, but not in a bad way. It made me miss my Minnesota friends, Claire and Emily. I’d met them at that convention—the only other one I’d ever attended. They’d been great friends to me and they were the reason I knew anything at all about trans people.

  They knew I’d been spending time with Nico. Claire got over her disappointment that I wasn’t dating Ella and had started cheering for this pairing. She’d be thrilled when she heard about tonight.

  “Hey, can we get a picture of us?” I asked Nico. She asked one of the Klingons to take photos with her phone. She texted me the best one and I forwarded it on to Claire with a note to also show Emily.

  While the Klingon debate wrapped up, I studied the photo on my phone. I couldn’t get over how girly Nico looked.

  “How you holding up?” she asked when we were alone again.

  “This fake leather is hot as hell,” I said. “And those Klingons smelled like wet cat, but otherwise I’m great.”

  “You want to hit the parties? There’s also a costume competition, but no way we beat some of the ensembles I’ve seen, so I was going to skip it.”

  “Works for me.”

  Fliers advertising room parties covered the hotel walls next to the elevators. Nico picked one. When we got to the second floor, I realized all the parties were clumped together so it didn’t matter where we started. Each room had its door propped open and you could peek in and see the themes from the halls.

  We went into the Doctor Who party first. The door was made up like the entryway to the Tardis. That one wasn’t very active yet, so we wandered across the hall to the Hogwarts party. They had a ton of snacks and huge bowls of jelly beans. We got plates and nibbled.

  Back in the hall, as we considered the next set of doors, someone shouted at us, “Hey, Toaster!”

  It was an insult from inside the Battlestar Galactica world.

  Nico spun around. “Frak you.”

  I turned too. There were three guys in space cowboy outfits, like Firefly but with tacked on random Star Wars bits. The one who’d said the insult was a badger-faced white guy.

  “Which one are you, Boomer or Athena?” he asked Nico.

  “Athena, I always liked her better,” she said.

  “Then what are you doing with Starbuck? Those two would never hang out together.”

  “They do all the time in the Starbuck/Athena slash fic,” Nico said. She spun around, grabbed my lapels and kissed me.

  Or was it Athena kissing Starbuck? And what the heck was slash fic? I tried to remember the show but my brain was s
crambled. Either way I figured this should be a good kiss. I put my hands on Nico’s hips and kissed back. Someone cheered and another person took a photo. Nico pulled away, laughing and flipped her hair over her shoulder.

  “Come on,” she said and pulled me away from the now speechless space cowboy. She drew us into the women’s bathroom and leaned against the sink. “Was that okay?”

  “Uh, more than. But what was that even about?”

  “I think he was trying to hit on us. Badly. Challenging my cosplay, indeed.” Nico leaned in toward the mirror, checking her makeup.

  “Seriously?”

  “Guys don’t try to hit on you much, do they?” Nico asked.

  “Pretty much never. It’s the Mohawk. And the boots.”

  It was driving me crazy watching her redo her mascara. It was hot in a way my brain didn’t have categories for. And I still worried that I was more attracted to her as a girl than as plain Nico. If there was a plain Nico. Was there?

  Was it the Nico who met me in the parking lot of the Chocolate Cafe and cried into my shoulder? If so, I really really liked that Nico too. But was I as attracted? Or was this not fair because Nico was crying then and now she’d kissed me?

  Frak, my brain was going to explode.

  Out in the hall again, Nico led me down to the end where the Klingons had set up in a big suite. The whole two rooms were covered on every wall with fake stone, like being in a cave, and the AC was cranked up to freezing. I didn’t know if the Klingon home world was full of ice caves or if this was from some movie I’d missed. I didn’t care because at last my flight suit was the right temperature.

  Spacey techno beats pulsed through the room and most of the Klingons were dancing, despite their heavy, armor-plated costumes. Someone came by with a tray of glowing blue drinks in plastic glasses. I took one.

  “Be careful with that,” Nico said. “I hear Klingon drinks are strong.”

  I sipped it and tried not to cough. It had twice as much alcohol as I expected.

  “You want to dance?” Nico asked.

  “No, I kind of suck,” I said.

  “All right, I’ll dance, you stay here.” From anyone else that might have sounded pouty, but Nico said it with a smile. She moved into the dance area amid the partying Klingons like she belonged. And then I was glad I hadn’t said yes because I would have looked even worse than usual next to Nico.