Silent Nights

Aerith Jones had tended bar in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, and by any standard of comparison, Frankie’s was a pretty good place to work. It was a kink bar, and kink wasn’t Aerith’s thing; sometimes, a misguided submissive might mistake Aerith’s five and half feet of boney goth contempt for a Dominant’s, which was awkward. Still, Aerith couldn’t let the occasional misguided assumption ruin the job.

Always and everywhere, Aerith’s life was haunted by assumptions.

There were the constant assumptions about gender--man, woman, that Aerith even had one, even believed in things like that. If they did grasp the concept of being agender, there was often the assumption that being agender must mean being asexual or aromantic. Aerith liked sex, in fact, and as for love -- well, Aerith wasn’t sure it was real, but that was just garden-variety cynicism.

At least at Frankie’s, the tips were good and the flirtation was manageable. The new community manager, April, had recently put spaces for pronouns on the nametags. (Aerith’s were blank.) But no service industry job, no matter how laidback and friendly--no matter how much of a community it is, as April liked to say so very earnestly--is much fun on New Year’s Eve.

“Taking my break, April,” Aerith advised, and the trans woman smiled brightly and nodded and moved to the packed bar. Aerith liked April well enough. She might be earnest and she might be banging the owner’s best friend, but April was the only person Aerith knew who put as much work, as much thought into her Look as Aerith did.

It was just a shame that look was so… colorful.

Behind Frankie’s was a little street where Aerith and the other servers went for breaks, an alley shared with The Body Shop, the gay bar immediately behind. Tonight it held freezing drizzle and drifting mist, rising from the still-hot pavement. It gave the narrow space a little touch of romance, although it couldn’t do anything about the dumpsters. It also held six and half feet of Jeff Bloom, a bartender from The Body Shop. He was dressed in flannel and denim and a plastic top hat that had a corny, infuriating romance all of its own.

He gave Aerith a tight-lipped nod.

Aerith’s life was haunted by assumptions, but Jeffrey Bloom never spoke when he didn’t need to, and he seemed to never, ever make assumptions. It was patently unfair that he added to that a chiseled jaw and shoulders almost as broad as he was tall. The overtly masculine wasn’t even Aerith’s type. Yet Jeff Bloom just stood there, every inch the Minnesota hockey enforcer he had been in another life, and demanded to be climbed like a tree.

I don’t believe in love, Aerith repeated internally. But this crush is fucking killing me.

“You got a smoke?” Aerith asked. “I can’t fit any in these pockets.” The pants were skin-tight black faux leather with a sort of skirt of studded belts slung around the hips, and Jeff gallantly tried not to observe how impossible it would be to fit anything in the pockets.

“Thought we said we were gonna quit,” Jeff said. Aerith shrugged, looking uncomfortable; they had said that, but who took New Year’s Resolutions seriously? Jeff spread his own--empty, cigaretteless--hands. “Well I tossed mine, didn’t I?”

“Well shit. You got a vape or something, at least?” He shook his head, and Aerith arched architecturally-drawn eyebrows. “New Year’s Eve at The Body Shop without nicotine? Is that…”

“Oh it’s hell,” Jeff said mildly.

“Ana’s Mart is open,” Aerith mused.

Things between them had begun with a literal spark, bumming a cigarette off of him during a break, and the tension had built ever since, at least on Aerith’s side. Despite a relationship that was doled out fifteen late-night minutes at a time--always quiet, often silent--Jeff had worked his way steadily to the top of Aerith’s to-do list.

Unfortunately, he seemed to be the kind of queer uncomfortable with anything short of blunt instrument masculinity. If he was uneasy around effeminacy, he must surely be baffled by Aerith’s flaunting of binaries, somewhere under his stoic façade. So Jeff Bloom would stay, sadly, a fantasy.

He shook his head. “I wish I knew how you stand this place,” he said, and the tone of his voice suggested this was more than nicotine withdrawal talking. Aerith stilled and studied his face, his Dudley Do-Right jaw and watered whiskey eyes.

“You okay?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Thinking about going home.”

“Didn’t you just get back from there?” Aerith asked.

Jeff shook his head again, conveying he wasn’t just talking about Christmas break or another vacation, and Aerith said, “Are you… uh… sure about that?” Jeff had only been around since the fall; a cousin in Austin had offered him a spare room after a disastrous coming out back in Minnesota.

“I don’t know that I know how to live as a gay man in Listowal,” he admitted. “It got pretty bad. But I don’t… sometimes I think I don’t know how to live in Austin at all.”

Aerith waited, quiet, as Jeff unburdened himself of whatever payload of words he was dragging around. It was certainly more than he’d ever said at one time, at least on one of these breaks.

”It’s so loud here. And there’s so many people. So many people all the time. I mean, back home it’s a fight on sight for half the guys I went to high school, and the rest of them make jokes up their sleeve or talk to me about… fuckin’ rectal prolapse… but I know how to fight. I know how to deal with that. And at least I can get away from them any time I want. Go out in the woods and just sit.”

“Is that what you used to do?”

He shrugged again, and a heavy silence settled over the alley as they both thought desperately about cigarettes.

“Maybe this is a stupid question,” Aerith said finally. “But why don’t you just get out of town for a while? The Hill Country is right there. Hell, you can go hike in Zilker, and if you take the right paths, you don’t even know the city is there.”

He looked skeptical. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Aerith said. “Yeah, Austin is getting pretty big these days, but we’re still only twenty minutes from the sticks.”

He looked skeptical. “I think you and me have different definitions of the sticks. I drove here from Dallas and never got out of sight of a city.”

“Nah, you just gotta get off the highway. You’re still in Texas, superchief. I can tell you some of my go-to places for camping.”

“You go camping?” Jeff said, meaning You? And all that?

Aerith gestured at all the gothic finery--the deathhawk and the piercing running from nose to ear, the fingerless mesh gloves and the lavalier of tattoos--and said, “This? All this is for other people. The woods don’t care about any of this shit. They don’t need to put me in any categories, and I don’t have to put on a performance for them. It’s nice. To just get out and let the quiet take care of you for a while. The quiet knows how to mind its business.”

“Huh.” He looked like he was processing.

“Give it some time. Give it… a year. If a year from now you still can’t stand this place, then go home for the holidays and don’t come back. But don’t throw in the towel just because you’re raw-dogging New Year’s Eve and nobody ever told you about the Greenbelt.”

He laughed. And it turned out that the cousin had a cabin in the Hill Country. He’d just needed to be asked. And Jeff did not move back home. The next time they’d talked all he said about it was, a little wondering, “You’re pretty smart.”

That was the kind of thing Aerith put up with from him, the kind of mixture of laconic strength and thoughtless vulnerability that made it impossible not to fall in lo--impossible not to think about him way too much, impossible not to feel the tangled web of cynicism pull a little tighter under the strain. Things like that. Things like Queen Jane.

❄❄❄

One fifteen-minute break at a time through the spring and summer, huddling beneath overhangs from torrential rain and sweating through the broiling night, they learned each other.

He’d wound up tending at The Body Shop, Jeff said, because it was the gay bar he went to himself, and he’d gone there instead of any of the more fashionable spots on Fourth Street because those places scared him. He had come to Austin after a long and torturous adolescence of elaborate excuses to bury his attraction to other men, mainly beating the shit out of people in hockey, and while he was ready to countenance himself as gay there was still a lot to work through.

Aerith, personally, was a long way past Gender 101--quite literally, as a grad student in the UT Gender Studies program--and enrolled in both real and metaphorical advanced coursework of personal design. It left little time or patience for people with a lot to work through, no matter how cute. But as the weeks went by, Jeff had become an unobtrusive but attentive pupil of Aerith’s occasional rants.

“I want people to look at me and know, I don’t belong to any of their bullshit categories. I want them to worry about me. I want to be a problem.”

The pain of expectations and the fakeness of gender; the journey that had brought Aerith to this embodiment and presentation; the tiresome games power played pitting one half of society against the other, and the way that same gambit was replicated again and again even in queer settings. “People say, yeah, I get it, you’re nonbinary, totally, but are you masc-aligned or femme-aligned? What was your assigned gender at birth?

He’d absorbed it and gradually worked through it, and accordingly his view of himself and others began to shift.

“I used to think,” Jeff had admitted one summer night, when the Austin blacktop was doing its best impression of a pizza oven, “that I was one of the ‘regular’ gay guys, you know. Not making it my whole personality. I felt like it was a good thing people were surprised when I told them. But now I see those ‘swishy’ guys and I feel like, damn, that dude’s braver than I could ever be.”

That was all he said about it that night. But when a few days later, he’d mentioned diffidently that The Body Shop had planned a drag night for Pride, Aerith’s antennae perked up.

“You thinking about it?”

“I’d look like a clown,” he said reflexively, and then-- “Not to say... Like, it’s all very well for the people it’s right for, you know. I don’t mean to say… but I’m not exactly the right type. It’d be like making fun.”

“You think people who look like you don’t transition?” Aerith asked mildly, but relented at his uncomfortable expression. It was a sidetrack anyway. “Look, we’re not talking about transition. We’re talking about drag. The performance and the exaggeration and the juxtaposition is the whole point.”

“I’d look ridiculous.”

“I think you’d look fucking hot,” Aerith snapped back, and a long, weird silence hung between them, broken finally by the rattle of Jeff vaping. He looked away, and Aerith studied the thick-soled jangly boots that were the only goth signifiers not yet conceded to the heat, other than the tattoos and piercings.

“We can try,” Jeff had finally said, quietly. So, Queen Jane was born.

Aerith borrowed the clothes from April, who was almost as tall as Jeff, although ten years of estrogen had wrought some serious differences. And in those clothes, he had been fucking hot. Aerith could still maintain the fiction that it was just a crush… but it was a good thing Queen Jane only came out on special occasions.

❄❄❄

Time wore on through another busy year, until the holidays rolled around once more; sneaking cigarettes and catching each other, trying disgusting vape flavors and then finally, excruciatingly, quitting for good. They both had dated off and on over the months. Jeff had more than one boyfriend fail the camping test, unable to shut up and let the quiet be; Aerith had more than one lover fail the Jeff test.

If a date compares unfavorably to idling in a dark alley with a hockey goon, Aerith reasoned, then why bother?

It was the weekend before Christmas. The lot of a goth in Texas was a tough one, and winter was at last Aerith’s season; tonight, the bartender was in fine form in a blood red corset over long-sleeved mesh, with a long black velvet cloak that had been a Christmas gift from April before she left on her honeymoon.

Aerith stepped into the alley, the noise and cheer of Frankie’s cutting off with a thump as the door shut behind. The space was again full of chilly rain and Jeff Bloom, this time in a Santa hat.

His eyes moved over Aerith, observing and appreciating all the little touches as he always did. He was a noticing man, and he kept track of details. “How’re you doing?” he asked, which meant that despite Aerith’s care, something showed of the wearing week in academia just gone by.

“I’m all right,” Aerith said. Grad school was always punishing this time of year, between TA work and annual deadlines and presentations to committees. Aerith reached absently for cigarettes, flinched at the tell, and then flinched at the flinch. Damn it. “It’s rough,” the goth admitted. “If I knew I was going to have to find a new advisor this late in the game, I might not have… pissed off quite so many people.”

Aerith’s advisor had been a wonderful advocate and champion, not afraid to burn bridges to support her protégé in shaking up the Gender Studies program at UT. Until all the bridges were burnt, and it turned out she had a back-up plan and Aerith… didn’t.

Jeff’s expression was wry and full of both affection and doubt. “You’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah.” Aerith exhaled slowly, then burst out, angrily: “I just can’t believe she would do this. We were supposed to be in this together. You and me against the world, kid, doesn’t really work when you jump ship for fucking Northwestern. I could almost forgive UCLA, but… Illinois?”

There was a long beat, and Aerith winced again.

“Sorry. I know you’re… from there. Loosely speaking.”

Jeff shrugged. “I knew you were city folk before tonight,” he said dryly. “Besides, it could be I’m not feeling all that charitable about the Midwest tonight, either.”

Aerith gave him a sidelong, kohl-ringed look. “So you’re not moving back, huh?”

He chuckled grimly at that. “Over Thanksgiving I heard my dad and my sister talking about when I’m going to get tired of rebelling against God.”

“Family’s hard,” Aerith whispered, and he nodded.

“I was thinking,” Jeff said. “I’ve still got the key to my cousin’s cabin. Won’t be getting any use while I’m back there for Christmas. You ought to take some time up there. Revise, think, just whatever. Let the quiet take care of you for a little while.”

He extended his hand, the key a dim brass flash in his huge mitt, and some last strand of cynicism in Aerith’s heart went twinge and snapped.

Aerith stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders and the back of his neck, pulling down his close-cropped head to a more sensible level, kissing him long and hard in the cold spattering rain. For the first terrible moment he didn’t react at all, taken completely flat-footed. Then his hands tightened in the laces of the corset and dragged Aerith closer, his mouth opening against cupid’s bow lips, painted black and tugged out of true by piercings.

Silence, perfect and timeless, fell.

“Come with me,” Aerith said, stepping back for breath “Don’t go back there. Not for good, not at all. They don’t understand you. Just come with me. We’ll spend the whole break in the cabin and we won’t say a fucking word.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and reached again for Aerith.