Chapter 1
one
. . .
Akilah is four seconds and one dirty look away from burning her club to the ground.
She glares as the last people stumble out into the rain from the hen party, and she finally releases her breath until she feels lightheaded.
This morning has been a lot. Nothing major happened.
It was simply bigger than she wanted it to be.
Usually, Akilah can compartmentalise the horror of loud noises, too many people, and owning a strip club. She takes shelter in her office like a raccoon in a dumpster, freezing the moment someone finds her with her hands wrapped around a pastry.
This morning, one of her servers called out sick, so she’s been serving drinks for an overly enthusiastic hen party for hours.
People have thrown unsolicited advice at her with no regard for whether it would offend her.
Akilah should smile more, let them get on the poles half-drunk, and wear purple mascara to bring out her eyes. (Akilah noted the latter).
There had been at least thirty conversations happening around her that lasted more than three seconds, and she managed not to say a single word. It’s one of her many talents.
A gust of wind blows in the open door, and Akilah tenses for the inevitable slam.
She jolts even though she knew it was coming, and all of a sudden, she is left to figure out how to get over three uninterrupted hours of noise.
There’s no chance her mind will settle simply because nothing is loud anymore.
It is waiting, like a terrified toddler in a thunderstorm, for someone to be in her peripheral vision.
In her thirty-two years, Akilah has learned to function while her body doesn’t feel like her own. There’s a routine. So, she rids the tables of glasses. She throws leftover feather boas away. She repeats the same Emily Dickinson poem in her mind.
She does well, even as her fingers tremble and her shoulders refuse to settle. She does it all so she can go home and lie on her back with her eyes wide open and her hands tapping the bedsheets, until her alarm goes off at six and she’s right back under the fluorescent lights.
Once the ringing in her ears calms down, she’s going to be fine. It takes a while, but she trusts it will calm. It has done every time before. Soon, her body will be kind to her again.
But God often gives her the hardest battles and will continue to do so if her mother has any say in it. Including, but not limited to: clearing up after a hen party she didn’t want, answering the phone, and placing her in the wrong body at birth.
There’s never going to be a day she answers the phone with glee.
However, she has managed to fix at least one of them (even if the boobs she was desperate for, try and slip out of this bra she knew was too pretty to be useful).
A second on the horizon if the water hose would cooperate and let her rinse the bar mats. It snags, because of course, it snags.
Another day, Akilah would take a breath so deep she felt it in her toes and try again.
Now, it’s only two in the afternoon, there’s a pulse behind her eye, the phone numbers of three of the women that she declined a handful of times, in her pocket, and even as she repeats trees in her head, she wants to self-soothe physically.
Akilah will not be beaten by her own mind. Her hands stay tensed by her side, and she tugs at the hose instead.
Akilah is smart. She knows that. People have spent her whole life telling her in passive-aggressive ways.
Classmates would glare at her when her hand shot up in class, but they were suddenly friendly when it was a group project.
She’s book smart, as in she got a master’s in historical archives management because she was offered a scholarship and promptly disappointed her parents by opening a strip club, instead of becoming a scholar, smart.
She’s not always practically smart. Not when it matters. Not when her brain can’t deal with more than hearing noise twenty minutes ago.
The knowledge that she could flood the bar is obvious now as the water rushes around the soles of her vintage boots.
Akilah leans her head back, wills her wrists to stay pinned to her sides as she tries not to be embarrassed that the bar floods often enough, that even with her inability to pick up on most social cues, she should have figured this out.
If she called her mother, she’d tell her it was a sign. Everything is biblical to her. She’d think Akilah was the new Noah, and she’d be shoved in a stuffy confessional by sunset with the priest telling her it’s not too late to train as a surgeon.
Instead of religious trauma, she has Damon—her favourite member of staff, and the only one who speaks to her. The two things aren’t related; if anything, she’d like him more if he ignored her, too.
At first, she thought having everyone scared of her was a good thing. Everything would be done on time, and she wouldn’t have to pick between boss and friend. She never had a choice, of course, not really.
So, her hope of having a successful bar with a handful of friends is just lonely. She’s never fired someone; she’s never even shouted at someone. Yet, the company Christmas parties go ahead without her. She’s used to it now. Having someone around still trying to pity invite her is awkward.
Damon dashes over, his wide shoulders throwing the lighting off behind her closed eyelids. She opens them to catch him flipping something off, and the water stops running. Well, Akilah could have done that.
“Boss, what the fuck happened?” His voice is too soft to be mad.
She takes a deep breath, tapping her toes lightly. The water hasn’t breached her thrice-re-soled boots.
“The hose has a vendetta against me.” It clips back into place easily now that Damon has turned off the water.
He leans against the bar, his eyebrow raised, and she pointedly ignores him.
“And it’s nothing to do with the entire bar needing an overhaul?”
Akilah’s jaw clenches. There’s that. The council's letter that stains her desk upstairs. It’s not their fault the building isn’t up to the regs. It is her fault she’s waited so long to fix it.
“No.”
Damon rolls his eyes, grabbing the mop from the side of the bar. It’s not supposed to live there, but this isn’t the first biblical event they’ve had. She taps the bar in hopes it stops them from getting a plague of locusts next.
“Is getting water on your favourite boots enough to get you to revisit the interior designer?”
“I don’t have favourite boots.” They are. They’re so much her favourite that she feels the back of her throat burn with the idea that she’s ruining them because she’s in a mood.
“Tell that to the scar on my forehead.”
Akilah looks to the side. “I didn’t throw anything at you.”
Damon looks up, and Akilah avoids his gaze.
She stares at his thick moustache instead.
It’s a little ginger in the middle. He hates it, but she thinks it suits him.
Not that she’ll tell him that. She’s tired enough that he might be able to coax an apology out of her, even though she’s spent the last six years pretending she didn’t lob a coaster at him when he stood on one of her shoes.
In her defence, they were new (well, to her, not the charity shop she found them in), and he usually catches things.
“I didn’t know you were a master at levitation,” he replies, scrubbing the floor around her.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” Her fingers tense with the need to arrange something. Maybe trace a repeating pattern in the condensation on the fridge, then clean it free of smears.
Damon snorts. “You hoard sweets in your office, you don’t look at anyone, and you’re going to be grumpy when I tell you I’ve got a new contact coming in thirty minutes.”
Akilah frowns, her eyes opening only to show Damon that she’s closing them again in annoyance. These are things everyone knows about her. Things she gives away easily, to stop people asking for anything important. Though she’s not sure she needed to bother. No one asks her anything.
“Your contacts don’t have any taste.”
People would say Akilah has no taste, too, but that’s because they can’t appreciate the intricacies of the colour black.
It’s because people don’t understand the history of a second-hand jumper.
It’s because she was forced into boy clothes growing up and never figured out how to wear the colour pink without looking like a My Little Pony fever dream.
Or because she shops once every five years.
Every designer she’s interviewed has come into her club downtown and hasn’t even looked at it.
They’ve seen Akilah’s brief, which is a complete redesign (she means it needs new floors, paint, chairs, and a bar area, not that she wants to wood-panel every surface), and tried to make the most expensive, soul-destroying sketch they can.
“I don’t want something that looks like an office building,” she says.
To the interior designers’ limited defence, Akilah has no idea how to tell people what she wants.
She’s not good at human interaction, full stop.
People think she’s rude the moment they meet her, and she’s never had much success changing that.
Akilah lets people off when they have a bad interaction.
She lets it go because they could have a headache or something at home that might have explained why they were short with her.
No one gives her that grace, and she’s not one to shout I have Asperger’s, I’m not trying to be rude, in someone’s face.
“I think the chicks on poles throw that off.” Damon squeezes the water into the bucket. Akilah wants him to repeat the sound. “Seeing boobs nightly doesn’t feel like work.”
“You’re gay.”
“Oh, so I can’t appreciate a pair of tits?
I used to have great ones.” Damon loves to tell people he’s trans.
He says it gets ahead of any awkwardness, though she thinks he likes the jokes.
She’s known him since he started working here, and he listed his transition on his application form.
Still, he tells her at least four times a week.
Akilah is envious of the ease with which he talks about it.
She started her physical transition in her teenage years, but she was living as a girl for years before that.
Still, if someone looks at her for too long, she assumes they’re going to bring it up.
She wants it to be forgotten. There’s no shame in it; she doesn’t like the prying.
The overfriendly people who are looking for gossip and to know what’s in her trousers, who get offended when she tells them to fuck off.
As if she must be polite and give them her life story to make up for it.
She flicks at her fingers, self-soothes in the most subtle way she can.
A way she hates because she is in her thirties and should be able to control her mind now.
Usually, she moves when someone else moves, then they don’t realise.
Now, Damon has been looking at her for at least thirty seconds and shows no sign of stopping.
It doesn’t mean this is a hostile environment, and yet, her brain wants her to run for cover.
“Who is it?” Akilah asks as she sits on the bar. It’s the same as helping. It’s a natural movement anyone might make. Besides, Damon would force her to sit down if she dared try to help anyway. He loves a gender role, and she’ll succumb to it when it feels like there’s sand in her eyes.
“Mum knows her.” Neither helpful nor comforting. “Her portfolio is new.”
“How new?” Akilah hasn’t got any right to judge. Once, she painted her front room orange and had to go to the shop right away because it wasn’t the right tone, and it gave her a headache. She still wants it to be orange, but she hasn’t figured out what shade.
Damon finally puts the mop down. “She’s graduating in the summer.”
“You want some teenage chick with a skip to her step and a dream to come and turn this place around?”
Damon cocks his eyebrow. “What did we say about being judgmental?”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m gay, it is my birthright,” he replies as quickly. “She gets her hair done at Mum’s place. She’s someone’s sister twice removed, or something.”
Akilah wants to rub at her brow. “She’s what?”
“Mum says she’s beautiful.” God, he’s started with the last-ditch attempts. Akilah likes beautiful women (and around two men a decade) because she’s got eyes. No one knows she only likes looking at them.
Somehow, people realise she can’t look at someone for longer than three seconds, and they think she’s void of personality, yet still manages to go home with a different person each week.
No one bothers to read between the lines, see that things don’t add up.
Akilah doesn’t mind the rumour, so she’s never told them she hasn’t had sex since she was twenty-two.
“Your mother emails me photographs of clearly AI animals,” Akilah says, instead of dwelling on the idea that no one cares enough about her to figure her out.
Damon fixes her with a look. She waits for him to say stop being rude to the woman who brings banana bread.
Instead, he tells her, “Don’t be mean. She got your three anti AI articles, and you didn’t get the one of the cows on a trampoline after I told her how to delete in a lengthy phone call.”
Akilah sighs, and she picks the mop back up when Damon heads back into the kitchen.
The methodological sweeping works for her until she hears the slap of shoes on her flooded floor.
Looks over to see someone all but skipping towards her with dark brown hair that flicks in all different directions at her collarbones.
A briefcase, tweed blazer and skirt that are giving Akilah sensory overload from across the room. And the widest smile she’s ever seen.
She’s too tired for this.