At the Iron Mask downtown, Qhuinn went over to the bar and parked it on one of the leather-topped stools. All around, the music was pounding, and sweat and sex were already curling into the hot air, making him feel claustrophobic.
Or maybe that was just his headspace.
“Haven’t seen you in a while.” The bartender, a nice-looking female with a rack and a half, slid a napkin in front of him. “Same as usual?”
“Double.”
“You got it.”
As he waited for his Herradura Selección Suprema to arrive, he could feel the eyes of the humans in the club lingering on him.
Come out? Like I’m gay…
You fuck men! What the good goddamn do you think it means!
Shaking his head, he really could have used a break: That happy little exchange had been banging around his head, just underneath the surface of his consciousness, ever since shit had gone down a week ago. On the whole, he’d done an outstanding job of sublimation…unfortunately, that winning streak appeared to be over. As his tequila arrived and he downed one shot glass, and then the other, he knew that there were no other distractions he could bring into play, no more putting the introspection off.
Oddly—or maybe not so oddly—he thought of his brother. He still hadn’t shared anything with Luchas about the young. It all felt too tenuous: Even though the pregnancy was hanging in and continuing to look good, it just seemed like an extra layer of drama the guy didn’t need at this point.
And he most certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about his sex life or Blay. For one thing, his brother was still a virgin—or at least, that had been Qhuinn’s understanding: The glymera were far more restrictive about what females could do before mating, and certainly if Luchas had banged a female casually, it would have been tolerated as long as he didn’t hook up with her long-term. But all of Luchas’s feedings after his transition had been witnessed, so there had been no opportunity there, and the guy’s nights had been heavily scheduled with learning and studying and chaperoned social events. No chance there.
Somehow going into all the shit Qhuinn had done didn’t seem appropriate. It also, in Blay’s words, wasn’t that interesting.
Qhuinn scrubbed his face. “Two more?” he called out.
As the bartender hopped right on that, he thought, damn it, he’d assumed the sex he’d had with Blay had been really interesting. And Blay hadn’t seemed bored when it was happening….
Whatever. Back to Luchas. In all those bedside chats he’d been having with his brother, females hadn’t come up—and males certainly weren’t on the menu. Back before the raids, Luchas had been hetero like their father—which was to say strictly the female you were mated to in the missionary position on your birthday and maybe once a year after a festival.
Males, females, men, women, in various combinations, sometimes in public, rarely in a bed at home? Not something Luchas had any frame of reference for.
When Herraduras three and four were slid in front of him, he nodded a thank-you.
Reaching down deep, even though he hated that expression as well as what it meant, he tried to see if there was anything else in and among his reticence to talk to the remaining member of his family about his life. Any shame. Embarrassment. Hell, maybe a little rebellious gotcha that he didn’t want to inflict on his crippled brother…
Qhuinn squirmed in his own clothes.
Well. What do you know.
If he was brutally honest? Yeah, he was a bit tetchy. But it was on the level of not wanting to be looked at funny for yet another reason…as his conservative, probably-virgin of a brother would no doubt do if he was told about the males and the men.
That was it.
Yup. That was all.
I don’t know how to explain it. I just see myself with a female long-term.
He’d said that to Blay a while ago, and had meant every word—
Some kind of emotion curled up inside his gut, twisting things down there, rearranging his bowel and his liver.
He told himself it was the hooch.
The sudden fear he felt suggested otherwise.
Qhuinn swallowed his third shot in hopes of getting rid of the sensation. And the fourth. And meanwhile, the faces and breasts and sexes of the many females and women he’d fucked flashed through his mind—
“No,” he said out loud. “Nope. No.”
Oh, God…
“No.”
As the guy next to him gave him a weird look, he shut up.
Wiping his face, he was tempted to order more to drink, but held off. Something seismic was trying desperately to break through; he could feel it trembling around the foundation of his psyche.
You don’t know who you are, and that’s always been your problem.
Fuck. If he got more tequila, if he kept swallowing, if he stayed his avoidance course, what Blay had said about him was always going to be true. The trouble was, he didn’t want to know. He just really fucking didn’t want…to…know….
Jesus, not here. Not now. Not…ever.
Cursing under his breath, he felt the geyser of realization start to really bubble, a loud-and-clear from the middle of his chest threatening to break out—and he knew that once it was free, he was never going to get it back underground again.
Damn it. The only person he wanted to talk to about this wasn’t speaking to him.
He guessed he was going to have to man up and deal with it on his own.
On some level, the idea that he was…well, you know, as his mother would have said…shouldn’t have affected him. He was stronger than the glymera’s condescension, and, shit, he lived in an environment where whether you were gay or straight, it didn’t matter: Long as you could handle yourself in the field and you weren’t a total asshole, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V’s sexual history, for fuck’s sake. Black candles used as something other than a light source in the dark? Hell, just being into males was a cakewalk compared to that stuff.
Plus, he did not live in his parents’ house anymore. That was not his life.
That was not his life.
That was not his life.
And yet even as he told himself that over and over again, the past that no longer existed was right behind him, staring over his shoulder…judging and finding him not just wanting, not simply inferior, but utterly and completely unworthy.
It was like phantom limb pain: The gangrene was gone, the infection cut out, the amputation complete…but the horrible sensations remained. Still hurt like a bitch. Still crippled him sure as a limp.
All those women…all those females…what was the true nature of sexuality, he wondered suddenly. What counted as attraction? Because he’d wanted to fuck them, and he had. He’d picked them up in clubs and bars, hell, even that store in the mall where they’d gone to get John Matthew some real clothes after his transition.
He’d chosen the women, singled them from the crowd, applied some kind of data screen that had weeded out some and highlighted others. He’d had them blow him. He’d sucked them off. He’d ridden them from behind, from the side, from in front. He’d grabbed their breasts.
He’d done all of that by choice.
Had it been different with the guys? And even if it had been, did he have to label himself at all?
And if he didn’t slap a definition on himself, did that mean he wasn’t something that his parents, who were goddamn dead and who had hated him anyway, hadn’t approved of?
As the questions fired through his brain, pelting him with precisely the kind of self-analysis he had always stabbed out of his thought processes, he came to an even more shocking realization.
As important as all that shit was, as Christopher Columbus as he was getting, none of it came close to the most critical issue.
Not in the fucking slightest.
The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.
SEVENTY-NINE