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 okay,” 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.