“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.
Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”
Gary shuddered.
“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”
Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.
“No,” he said, “I can’t.”
Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”
His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.
“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”
Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.
“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.
Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.
“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”
This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.
“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”
When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.
Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.
Gary gasped, shaking his head yet unable to deny the river of warmth flowing inside, a glow he could label only as maternity.
“Lana looked for someone like you for a long time. I never saw her any happier than after she met you. Someone open-minded … eager for new experiences … who wanted to break with his past.” Gabriel touched a quieting finger to Gary’s lips when he started to speak. “But let your conscience off the hook. She didn’t kill herself over you. She did it for us.”
Once content to observe, the others now started forward.
“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”
Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.
“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you feel her inside yet?”
He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.
“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She does.”
Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated? What is love? Two souls and one flesh.
Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.
So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.
Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”
Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.
In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town
He stood back, grinning with arms crossed, to watch those hips of hers sway while she threw. Had a wind-up that drove him truly and deliciously insane. This, after she’d kissed the tip of each dart for luck. Oh, she was overflowing with promises of finer things to come later in the night.
Sad about her aim, though. Darts all over the damn place.
“I don’t think this is your game.”
She turned chin over shoulder to stick out her tongue at him. “I got games you never even played.” She danced away to retrieve the darts, came dancing back with all six and handed him his three. Green ones, his lucky color.
“The trick,” he said, “is breath control. You breathe out on the throw, nice smooth exhale. And never, ever, take your eyes off the spot you want to hit. Not even long enough to blink.”
Down and dirty blues thumped from the jukebox while he sank all three darts in a tight cluster. He raised both arms to receive worldwide acclaim.
“Am I the master, or am I the master?”
“Careful you don’t stick yourself with one of those, or that shit you’re so full of is gonna run right out in the floor.”
He pretended to bristle. “Sure is a lot of sass coming from someone hasn’t even hit herself a bull’s-eye yet.”
“Keep making a big deal out of it” — she licked her finger and pretended to clean the zipper of her jeans — “and I know something you won’t be hitting again anytime soon.” A huff. “Anyway, I know what the problem is. I’m distracted.”
“By what, that music? Sweety-pie, the way you’re shaking your moneymaker, I dare say you’re making it work for you.”
“No, no, it’s not the music. It’s that goddamn barmaid! Never have I heard a voice that inspires more natural annoyance in me.”
She had a point. That voice did tend to carry. The gameroom was separate from the main bar, but still, they’d been listening to the barmaid going on nonstop about one thing and then another for the past hour. He sighed with the truth of it all.
“Sugar, go take care of it.” Turning kiddish on him, trying to wrap him around that sweet little finger of hers. “For me? Pleeease?”