10. Olly #2
He was worried about embarrassing himself?
I was the one about to come out for the first time—not even Shepard had been trusted with all of my deepest secrets.
Well, some, just not all of them. But for some reason I still couldn’t quite pin down, I wanted to extend that trust to Clark.
Oh, who was I fooling? There was an intense connection between Clark and me, a connection so deep that it even surpassed what I felt for my own lover of a decade and some change.
When we had shaken hands on that first Tuesday together, his walls tumbled in an instant, and I knew him at that moment.
And after these five weeks of watching my belly slowly grow and the season pass, I know him.
Okay, so maybe there were all kinds of pesky details I didn’t know, but in the night, or the wee hours of the morning, I had come to see that I could at least trust him.
Trust, what an odd thing. I had so few people I could say that I really could trust. I trusted Thomas with my mind, Shepard with my body—and my heart, but to a lesser degree.
I felt I could trust Clark with everything, though not all at once.
That would be overwhelming for anyone, I would think.
I swallowed, and looking into the earnest green eyes across from me, I threw away the last of my fears and finally spoke my truth.
“This might take a very long time,” I began, wanting to wrap myself up in Clark’s warmth, which I could feel being subconsciously projected toward me.
Always the protector, that was the vibe I got from him.
“I wanted to start with my gender, because if you can get through that, you might be willing to take it a step further and hear about the weird bits of my life.” Just then, Hilda appeared, with a Lumberjack Special for Clark, and a plate of blueberry pancakes for me.
We each took a moment to look over the food, and I decided to let him enjoy that pile of breakfast before touching on anything too distracting.
“So did Becky spend all night awake with you?” I asked, pouring a more-than-healthy dash of real maple syrup on my pancake stack. Hey, the baby demanded it—who was I to be a Negative Nellie over it?
Clark let out a little chuckle as he salted and peppered his hash browns. “No, the little traitor climbed right into bed with me, curled up into my side, and proceeded to snore the entire night away.”
He and I shared what I could only call a tender look, and it felt that if we didn’t stop holding hands now, I would pick up more thoughts than I was entitled to.
“If we don’t get a move on, these breakfasts will get cold,” I warned.
He let my hand slip from his and watched me while I started to slice up my pancakes.
“Eat!” I said to him, gesturing with my fork to the enormous pile of food amassed in front of him.
He gladly dove into his mountain of bacon, and let out a moan of contentment as the crispiness hit his mouth.
Breakfasts devoured and coffee in hand, I decided it was time to return to our little talk.
We had been discussing our childhoods, his fight with leukemia, then travelling all over the world being pursued by a freaking cult, and my being tossed around to a few foster homes until I got placed with the Parks.
I told him the sanitized version, because how do I explain having psychic disturbances during puberty which scared the hell out of my foster family, when I hadn’t even expressed to him something as tame as my gender identity?
At least being nonbinary was a rather normal thing for some people.
Ringing your neighbours’ bell on a Wednesday morning on your way to school at age six and telling them that if they let their cat outside that afternoon it would get hit by a car, while handing them a grisly drawing of the event?
Not so normal, so I discovered. People didn’t like to see little Mittens’s intestines in bright red on the page.
I’d walked to school in tears, uncertain as to what I’d done wrong, and feeling as though I'd abandoned Mittens to her fate.
And yes, the neighbors did ignore me, and, just like the picture promised, Mittens tragically perished on the asphalt.
Whoa, where had all that come from? I closed my eyes for a moment and felt movement within me, and felt comfort coming from one of the creatures of my inner ocean moving around and swimming up memories to the surface.
I felt my arm very gently shaken, and realized I’d been lost in thought while Clark had waited for me.
I smiled at him and apologized immediately.
“I’m sorry. Just away with the faeries for a moment,” I said, tapping his hand and drinking another sip of my coffee.
I strategically put my cup down to the side and picked up the salt and pepper shakers, as well as a small bottle of hot sauce.
“I do have a lot of important things to tell you, and I’m trying to triage a bit which things should come first. I thought it best to start with my gender because I can practically see those snowflakes from last night looking out at me behind your eyes.
I think we’ll need more time with it, and it’s far more personal.
Perhaps we could talk about the snow second?
” If he wanted to hear about the snowstorm, maybe I needed to adjust my triage schedule.
“I’m sorry, Olly. I do really want to hear what you have to say about salt, pepper, and hot sauce, but damn if I can’t get the snowstorm out of my mind.
Nothing odder has ever happened to me in my life, and that’s really saying a lot considering some of the things I’ve seen.
I’m not trying to be dismissive here, but whatever your gender identity is—male, female, peppermill—I’m going to be able to understand, even if it takes me a bit.
But the localized indoor storm, I have no clue what that means or how it came to be.
Which is why I think we should discuss that someplace more private and where I can process a bit easier, and where you might be more comfortable discussing something so... unique?”
I nodded. “Thanks for understanding. So I’m going to explain to you my understanding of my gender, and see how we go from there. Okay?”
“Take it away, Captain,” he said, his tone encouraging.
“I really don’t want this to sound like a TED Talk, but I want to be very clear, so there’s no room for misunderstanding.
Just to repeat, it’s just how I think about it, and it’s important to know that there are so very many different ways one can express or understand their own gender identity.
” I fiddled with the hot sauce bottle. I moved a few things around on the table until I had a wide-open area to work with, and picked up the salt and pepper, placing each one on a different end of the cleared area of the table.
I clutched the hot sauce like it was a lifeline, and drew in a sharp breath.
“So, picture that this is space, and you have discovered a binary star system. On the left, we have a white star.” Clark grinned that adorable, crooked grin that made me want to kiss him stupid, as I pointed at the saltshaker.
“This star we shall call ‘Woman.’ On the other end, we have a different colour star, which we have labelled ‘Man.’” I ran my left hand through my hair.
“So we’ve got it, a binary system in which each star mirrors the other in a way, yet each has its own characteristics, and expectations on how it will behave.
” Clark was nodding along, so, emboldened, I forged ahead.
“Everything you know about this system is caught up in your assumptions about what a binary system is like, so you don’t spend much time examining it.”
“Just like people?” Clark broke in. “They see, say, a guy in drag and suddenly, they think they know everything about this person, when, in reality, all they know is they can slay in high heels?” Clark actually looked very serious over what might have been a lighthearted topic for some. I was intrigued and filed it for later.
I nod. “As you are about to leave the stars you have named Woman and Man, and yes, I am aware that you’ve studied astrophysics, so this seems terribly simple and grossly inaccurate to you, but bear with me.
All of a sudden, you notice something that you couldn’t see before.
You couldn’t see it because you hadn’t allowed for the possibility that it was there, almost hiding.
Another sphere, we’ll call it a black hole, moving through space between the stars.
” I set the hot sauce on the table, and, starting at the saltshaker, made a pattern of swirls that took it to the pepper, around the pepper, then out of the binary system altogether, weaving its way around the tabletop to finally rest somewhere about in the middle as I’d believed I had demonstrated my point.
Clark reached out and picked up the bottle.
“So you’re telling me that you are a bottle of hot sauce in a universe that expects you to be salt.”
I grasped his free hand. “I’m saying that there is something else out there when it comes to gender, something a lot of people don’t see.
And it is brilliant and beautiful because it defies what we think we know about the system, the one that recognizes a man and woman binary.
It may linger around one end of a spectrum and tip its toe toward the middle now and then.
Or it may gloriously dance all around the stars, picking up bits from here and there, and creating its own reality, one that is harder to define.
Harder to shove into a box. It’s no predictable Woman or Man, and we can only guess what is inside this black hole. It has a type of...magic.”