Nico & Tucker

by Rachel Gold

  “I was royally pissed at Summer, but I don’t mean that like an excuse. I was so wrong to say what I did. And I don’t…I’m not saying I understand what it’s like, but I can learn and I’ve been…” She took a huge breath in like it was a monster big deal what she was going to say. “…seeing a therapist.”

  I bit my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh at her adorable discomfort.

  “Is it helping?”

  “I think so. I won’t know until I end up in bed with someone again.”

  “End up?”

  “Don’t distract me,” she said, the faintest smile playing across her lips. “I’m trying to tell you something here.”

  Climbing onto the bed, I settled next to her. I leaned back against the headboard, but sitting far enough away that we weren’t touching.

  She said, “I had to go twice before I could even tell her what had happened. And my third time, a couple of days ago, we talked about it a bunch more. I got to wondering why it had been so hard to talk about.”

  As she spoke, her hands rubbed together, like her fingers really wanted to fiddle with anything but had to content themselves with counting over her calluses.

  She said, “When those guys jumped me on campus and beat me up, it was so easy to say what had happened. I told the cops and the Dean of Students. I told everyone in our queer and trans group. I told my sister Bailey the next time I saw her. I told my mom. Why was it different being raped?”

  “What was it?” The question breathed out of me, curious and worried.

  “It was shame. That’s the feeling that’s haunted me since it happened. I couldn’t name it, only knew that I felt filthy. It was just shame. And I let it shut me down completely. Because I’ve grown up with rape being something that made the victim…disgusting. Nico, I’m afraid I did that to you, shamed you. I never want you to feel that, not for a second.”

  She glanced sideways at me, eyes full of tears. I was almost crying too.

  “That is by far the best apology I’ve ever gotten,” I told her.

  “Second best,” she said with a faint grin. “The best will be when you see my cosplay.”

  I pushed off the bed, grabbed a box of tissues and got back into my spot.

  “When am I seeing that?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe after your surgery, while you’re recovering. You might need some comic relief. If that’s okay?”

  “Uh, it’s perfect.”

  “If I can say one more thing­—”

  I shrug-nodded.

  “I don’t care if you have a clarinet down your pants, I want to go out with you.”

  I chuckled, but had to ask, “How would you know, never having met my clarinet?”

  “Because I can’t imagine anything that would make me change my mind,” she said. “If you’re still single and all.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Kaj.”

  “She’s got a girlfriend.”

  “Oh, thank God. But, you know, even with the therapist, I’m not sure. You might not want to go out with me. I don’t know if I can stand to be touched…” She waved a hand down her body.

  “Genitally?” I offered.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, an echo of how she’d comforted me. “That’s normal for what you went through.”

  I didn’t know a lot of people who’d been raped, but I knew more than enough people who’d had their bodies violated surgically. Trouble with being touched ranked high on the list of outcomes from that. I didn’t have that, but I could understand how a person got there.

  With Tucker, though, I also felt afraid for me. How long would it take her to heal? Would I know what to do to help her? How hard was this process going to be? Would I screw it up? At least I knew how to talk about sex.

  “What did the therapist say about not wanting to be touched?” I asked her.

  “To think about my fear on a one to ten scale and I’m supposed to stop at a five and we’ll work on it. And I’m supposed to breathe and stuff.” She was bent away from me, head and shoulders down.

  I wanted to let her know she wasn’t alone. Give her something to hold onto. Maybe I wanted to give her everything.

  “I learned to dance,” I said.

  She turned back toward me, puzzled. “I know.”

  “When I was four, after my dad took me in for surgery. I was terrified after. I panicked a lot. Mom took me to a somatic specialist for medical trauma in kids and he taught me to dance.”

  “Nico,” she said, the soft sadness heavy in her voice.

  “The interesting thing is that it wasn’t the surgery that was traumatic. I was out for that. It was the way they thought they had to fix me. The way they all treated me. They took away my selfhood. They made me into a non-person.”

  Tucker whispered, “Lindy…yes, that’s how I felt. I wasn’t a person to her anymore. I wasn’t a person at all, anywhere in the world. She wiped me out. Nothing was safe anymore because I wasn’t a person. Because anyone could come in and take my self away from me. Do you still get scared?”

  “Some now with this surgery coming up. I’m super afraid of surgery. I’m afraid I’ll go in and wake up and not be real anymore.”

  She held her hand palm up on her thigh and I put my hand in hers. Her fingers closed hard on mine.

  She said, “You’ll always be real. If you forget, if you feel like that, I’ll remind you. I promise.”

  “Me too, for you.”

  It got super intense in the room. If I didn’t keep talking, I was going to try to kiss her. I said, “What if it’s an oboe, not a clarinet? What’s your stance on oboes?”

  She gave me a half-grin. “What if I don’t know the difference?”

  “Well, you’re obviously not an oboesexual.”

  “Sometimes labels suck. I like you. Whatever you’ve got, oboe, cello, I’ll like it.”

  I wanted wrap her around me and never leave this space. I asked, “Do you want to sleep in here with me?”

  “Will your mom freak out?”

  “A little, but I can handle it. Come get in bed. And take off your pants, you’re not sleeping next to me in jeans. Unless you’re commando, in which case you can borrow my shorts.”

  “I’m good,” she said and stripped down to boxers and T-shirt. She deftly worked her way out of her bra without taking off her shirt. Under the covers, I took her hand and rolled away from her, pulling her toward me. She put her arm around my stomach and spooned behind me.

  I told her, “My dad and brother want me to be a boy. I was trying it this week, being a boy all the time. I thought I had it, but tonight in the mirror I looked so wrong to me.”

  “Yeah. That’s happened to me the few times I’ve put on a dress. Sorry, that’s probably not the same.”

  “I think it’s close. I might be able to do girl. It’s less restrictive than boy in a lot of ways, but you get treated shittier.”

  “Why do you have to pick?”

  Her breath was tickling the side of my ear. I turned my head a fraction away so I wouldn’t laugh, but pressed back against her more. Her arm tightened around me. We fit together really well, at least with her behind me. I loved her warm weight along my back.

  I told her, “When I was a kid, they thought I’d pick at three years old or thirteen or whatever. And I still don’t want to, but I’m so sick of everything, the questions and the pressure and the quiet, sinking disapproval like needles all through me.”

  “You don’t have to pick with me,” she said.

  “Don’t you want a girlfriend?”

  “I think I need a person who’s at least somewhat a girl, but that doesn’t have to be exclusive. Girl plus boy plus whatever else works for me. I’m not completely inflexible. You’ll see when I show you the cosplay.”

  I reached behind me and ruffled her short, darker hair. “Are you a boy?”

  “Yep.”

  “I for sure want to see that.”

  “You will.”
>
  She didn’t say any more, but her breathing was too fast for sleep. Did she regret her bold words or was something else keeping her up? I couldn’t ask, too much to think about already. Neither of us fell asleep for a while.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nico

  We ducked out of my house fast so we wouldn’t get the third degree from Mom and Yai. Stopped for breakfast on the way up to Freytag. Talked about the cabaret. Tucker rested her hand on my leg as I drove, which made me crazy but in a great way.

  When we got to campus, Tucker asked me back to her room. I was dying to make out with her, but I wasn’t going to push it. Her room was a more make-outable space than any other on campus. But when we got there, she sat in the desk chair. I perched on the edge of the bed all by myself.

  “About this dating thing?” I asked.

  “Do you want to? I mean, I’m asking you out. I want to go out with you, oboe or no. If you want me to prove that…I don’t know how to.”

  I was running on five hours of sleep and a residual high from the performance the night before. I felt light-headed and filled with wanting to be closer to Tucker, pressed against her.

  Some small voice in the back of my head was telling me to be careful, but my mouth said, “Why don’t we both take off our pants and get it over with. See if it’s a deal-breaker.”

  “What?”

  I’d never seen her eyebrows go quite that high before.

  I said, “If you’re going to have issues, questions, whatever, I’d prefer that you have them across the room from me, not, like, on top of me. So let’s both take off our pants right now and see where we’re at.”

  “You’re not kidding?”

  “You have a better idea?” I asked.

  “Honestly, no.”

  If it turned out that me having a dick was a deal-breaker, I could at least crawl next door to Ella’s room and cry in her bed until she got sick of me. I loved Tucker’s brave talk of the night before, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she could live up to it.

  Tucker stood and glanced at both doors, locked and locked. She unbuckled her belt, unzipped and dropped her trousers, kicking them to one side. She pulled off her boxers and stood by her desk.

  “Hey, at least I can do this without messing up the anxiety scale,” she said.

  “Where are we at?”

  “About a three. I’ll have to let Bridget know standing around with no pants works.”

  As she talked, she unbuttoned her dress shirt and pulled it off so the shirt tails weren’t covering her. She was in a white undershirt, bunched up at her waist. I could see her bare hips and legs and everything.

  “Undershirt too?” she asked.

  “Uh,” was all the reply I could manage, watching Tucker, tough and vulnerable, with most of her clothes in a pile on the floor.

  She said, “You don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to. I mean, I deeply do not. But, you know, if it helps I’ll stand around with the wind blowing on my ass as long as you need.”

  I laughed. “There’s no wind.”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I’d been in similar enough situations in doctors’ offices throughout my life. I knew how exposed it felt. I loved that she was willing to go first. Too many people thought they should know about me, get access to me, without being willing to be vulnerable themselves.

  Tucker sat backwards in the desk chair. Her legs were open around the chair’s narrow spine. I could see all sorts of intimate landscape. My brain was a city grid losing power—lights winking out block by block the longer I looked at her. If I kept standing there, I wasn’t going to have a shred of power left for higher thinking.

  I turned away and undid my pants fast. Might as well muscle through this while I had the brain power to get myself out of the room if she freaked out. I pushed pants and boxer briefs down to where I could yank them back up fast and turned toward her.

  Her mouth was half-open, eyes intense, looking and looking before flicking up to my face.

  “Nico,” she said. “Will you please go out with me now?”

  “Um?” Lights blinking out in my brain.

  She got up, knocking the chair flat on its back. Took a step, stopped, “Can I?”

  “What? Touch it?”

  “Kiss you?”

  “Oh, yeah—”

  The attempted kiss turned into a wrestling-style smackdown. I stepped toward her, forgetting my pants were around my knees, and fell forward. She grabbed for me and tried to lurch us onto the bed, but it wasn’t wide enough. I ended up half across the bed with Tucker on the floor.

  I thought she was laughing, but when I bent over the side of the mattress I saw that she was crying more than laughing.

  “You hurt?” I asked.

  “Why can’t I make anything work?” Her words came out muffled because she had her knees up, arms folded over them, face tucked into her arms.

  “Dtao, why don’t you put your boxers on and come get in bed?”

  “Probably work better if you call me Starbuck,” she grumbled.

  “Starbuck, put on your boxers and come here.”

  She crawled across the floor to snag her boxers and jackknife into them, asking, “Does that make you Athena?”

  “Did you want Athena?”

  “She’s hot, but I like you better.”

  “I could have the surgery to go that way, to make me more traditionally a girl.” The words fell out. Now that we’d gotten through the worst part, I was babbling with relief. “That’s the deal with this surgery, they can change things, you know, remove the clarinet and all that.”

  “You don’t have to say clarinet,” she said. “I’m not going to run screaming if you say ‘dick.’ What do you say?”

  She’d scooted back to sit against the side of the bed with me belly-down on the mattress, our faces close and level. Looking into her sea-blue eyes, I said “Dick, usually, or clit or junk or cletis.”

  “Cletis,” she grinned. “I like that. I was afraid you were going to say ‘Little Jack Harkness.’”

  “Huh, I’m going to have to think about that.”

  “I don’t know my way around dicks,” Tucker said. “Is it okay that you’ll have to tell me?”

  “It’s better that way. Mine’s not the most average. And the undercarriage isn’t guy-standard. There’s labia and a vagina.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen some of those,” she said with a smirk. “Not that yours aren’t special.”

  “Hah, thanks. You want to come up on the bed?”

  “Not yet. It’s easier like this, to talk. I’m kind of fucked up.”

  “Trauma and fucked up are not the same thing,” I told her.

  “What if we can’t have sex? What if I can’t do what you like and you don’t want me to—”

  “I do,” I said. “Me and Little Jack are in complete agreement about that.”

  “Oh wow, no.”

  I was laughing because she was right, that sounded awful. I said, “Sorry. Can I come down to the floor with you?”

  “Sure, it’s posh down here.”

  I pulled up my boxer briefs, kicked off my shoes and jeans. Then I slid down to the floor and rested my shoulder against Tucker’s.

  I asked her, “Now that we’re going out, do we swap varsity rings or letter jackets?”

  She turned and kissed me. The last illuminated city block of my brain winked out into the soft darkness of my closed eyes and Tucker’s lips.

  The kissing went past breathless into panting and horizontal. I only got conscious thought back when my shoulder, jammed against the bed leg, became painful.

  “Can you move over?” I asked.

  “Let’s try the bed,” she suggested and climbed onto the mattress.

  Back to kissing, but awkwardly because every time I started to roll onto her, I backed off again. Reflex from the night of Cal’s party when she panicked and left.

  “I think I’m oka
y,” Tucker said.

  “Let’s not rush it.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Oh, I want to, but…you asked me out and everything, maybe we should have a date.”

  Confusion crossed her face, a hint of frustration, a wash of relief.

  “Like movies and holding hands?” she asked. “To make up for the part where we stood around with our pants off?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “There’s a theater a few blocks away. Can you stay over? Do you want to?”

  “Yeah, I’ll text Mom.”

  So we went to a movie. Got dinner. Somehow managed to be back in Tucker’s room with most of our clothes off, in the bed, not making out.

  She curled into me and I wrapped an arm around her and prayed that this was going to work.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Tucker

  I had a late morning class that Monday, which I offered to skip. Nico said to go, that yo had homework to do anyway. We went to Mill’s for breakfast. Then I gave Nico the key to my room and went to class. All I could think about was Nico in my room and how I wanted to get back there.

  When finally I did, Nico was cross-legged on the bed reading from yos tablet.

  “What do you usually do Monday afternoons?” Nico asked.

  “Study or go work out.”

  “Let’s work out. Can I get into your gym?”

  “I can swipe you in. Let me change.”

  I got on my running clothes and loaned Nico an extra pair of sweats and T-shirt. The gym was nearly empty. Nico found an open dance studio room and sent me to run. I did two miles but that was all I was in the mood for. I wanted to get back to Nico.

  I went down to the studio and looked through the glass door. Just stood there for a long time watching Nico move.

  Nico saw me and opened the door. “What are you doing? It wasn’t locked.”

  “I could watch you all day.”

  Nico laughed. “Boring.”

  “Let’s go shower?” I suggested.

  Nico followed me out of the gym and we walked across the quad together. “You know I’m showering alone, right?” yo asked.

  I’d been thinking about how awesome it would be to be together under the hot spray with the soap and all that, but then I realized how exposed that could make Nico feel.