Thankfully, the next week was fantastically boring. Actual assignments had started to pile on a little bit, and both Rachel and Ran (and, he had to assume, Amelia) spent most of their time either studying in their room or in their small communal space. Not that they didn’t talk, of course, but for the most part, they were both completely preoccupied, and they spent their dinners with their laptops on the table, reviewing notes and work that was almost but not quite yet overdue. 

Considering how strange Ran had been feeling, he didn’t really mind this sort of vague nothing-ness. The absence of real interactions, like his mom would call them. He didn’t go out to hang out with people, he didn’t have meaningful conversations with people, and he most certainly did not laugh until he cried. Not after last time. Amelia was obviously much too dangerous. Whether or not she’d had any idea what she was talking about or what she’d been aiming at, Ran had taken a full day to recover from the anxiety, during which both Amelia and Rachel had both checked up on him in their respective ways. 

Amelia had sent him a picture of a very large ferret looking very offended. He’d given it a little heart-response and had then replied with a picture of a raccoon, which seemed to satisfy her. They’d sent each other rotund animals back and forth for a while and it was only after he’d put his phone down that he realized he’d started smiling. 

A bit later, there had been a knock on his door, and it had opened a few inches. Rachel’s hand had appeared, holding a very small tub of ice-cream and a spoon. It had put both items down, and had then disappeared, pulling the door closed. Amelia had probably told her something was up, and Ran dreaded to think what exactly she’d told his roommate. It couldn’t have been that bad though, if that was her response. He’d eaten the whole tub. 

And then a week had passed without incident, to the point where Ran had started to convince himself he’d just overreacted, and that all of this was going to be a funny memory  some day. In the meantime, classes were… hard. He found it hard to focus. In most classes, he found his attention slipping out of his grasp like an ice-cube on a hot plate, drifting in every direction and hissing and squealing loudly as it did. Comp sci was becoming less and less interesting by the day, and while he knew his parents wouldn’t be mad if he let them know that their initial investment in college might not have been worth it, he knew they’d be disappointed and everyone knows that’s worse. On top of that, every day that passed made the sunk-cost set in a little harder. So he just kept pushing along. At least he could pay attention in Gender Studies. Maybe, he figured, he could sign up for a cooking class at some point? It was something he at least cared about. He could go his whole life without studying any more applied physics for use in java, python or, god forbid, C#, and it would still be too soon. 

He was currently curled up in a nest of blankets and pillows on the sofa, a plate of unfinished food on the table next to him. He’d eat more later. He was working, searching for an errant semicolon that had managed to get lost somewhere in five-thousand lines of code, when Rachel walked into the room looking thoughtful. She was chewing her lip in that way that made him have to look away, and he caught her glancing at him more than once, before she walked past to the kitchen, filled up her glass of water, and went back to her room. She did that dance three more times, hovering around him for a bit but not saying anything, before his curiosity got the better of him. 

“Rachel?” he asked, not looking up from his laptop as he cast a little prayer, hoping for this piece of code to finally compile without errors. 

“Yah?” Rachel asked, turning around on her heel, making her dress flare out in every direction. It stood out, even in the corner of Ran’s eye. That had always looked like such a fun thing to do. Doing it with a winter-coat just wasn’t the same. 

Ran closed his laptop and looked up at her. “What’s up?” Rachel blinked a few times as she looked at him, and bit her lip. He had to look away again. She was simply too… he hated to think of it as ‘cute’, but there was something about the way she looked at him when she did that that made him want to turn inside out. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel obviously lied, and he could tell there was a smile playing around her eyes. “But since you brought it up, I mean…” Ran smirked and put his laptop on the table, crossed his arms, willing to wait her out on this one. Rachel leaned against the back of the couch, and Ran felt a little guilty. She clearly did seem a little bit nervous. “Well… I have something of a request.”

Ran cocked his head. “What’s up, Rachel? Everything okay?” She nodded. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. I just… I have a date with Amelia tomorrow.” Ran was a little surprised. He’d expected something a little more consequential. “It’s our first… daylight date,” Rachel said. She was blushing a little, and Ran did his best to pretend not to notice it, or not to blush himself. He was still uncomfortable with the thought of them, hard as he tried not to be, and he still couldn’t think of any reason other than the one he’d already come up with. “And I… I want to look good, you know?” Ran scoffed, realized how insensitive that sounded, and turned it into a cough. 

“Rachel, you always look… really good,” he said. There were so many words he could have picked there, and every single one of them would have made their conversation a lot more awkward than it would’ve had to be. “I don’t know why you’re stressing out, honestly. Like, the two of you get along really well, don’t you?”

Rachel gave that sideways head bob that was hard to put into words but was best translated to ‘yes and no, kinda sorta,’ but with a little bit of extra nuance. “We do,” she said. “We do. But like… that’s hanging out and sex, you know? And we haven’t seen each other in a couple of days. I want to see if there’s something more there, you know?” Ran nodded. He understood that, much as it felt weird to him, because he couldn’t imagine someone worrying about him in that way. “I was just wondering, and please, let me know if this is, like, crossing a boundary or if it makes you uncomfortable, okay?” 

“Just hit me with it, Rachel,” Ran said, getting more anxious by the minute.

“Well, I was wondering if you could, like,” Rachel said, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, “look at a couple of my outfits and tell me what you think?” Oh, that wasn’t so bad, Ran figured. He could do that no pro- “You know,” Rachel interrupted his line of thinking, “just pretend you’re Amelia or whatever, and give me your thoughts?”

If there was a combination of words that were set up, possibly by some divine being with a wicked sense of humour, to turn Ran’s train of thought into a runaway mine-cart going downhill at top speed, it was that one. “I… what?” Ran said. Rachel’s face fell. 

“I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” she said, and got up to go back to her room. Ran reached out and softly touched her arm. His heart was in his throat, but he couldn’t stand to let her down like that. 

“No, no,” he said, “I can… I can do that. It’s no problem. I promise.” He wasn’t sure he shouldn’t have promised that there, but, well, it was Rachel. Even if he was going to have to pretend to be Amelia. That was something he could do, right? He’d always prided himself on his willingness to put himself in the shoes of others. He wasn’t that interesting of a person, so taking up a persona or a temporary mask wasn’t all that difficult. “I just wasn’t sure you were comfortable around me like that, I guess.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rachel said, and her expression of relief warmed Ran’s aggressively beating heart. She shot him a smile, and it almost killed him on the spot. “I just… I’ll be honest, I was apprehensive when we first started renting here, but I just don’t get the same kind of discomfort around you like I do around other guys.” Ran tried not to show her how happy hearing that made him, just nodding along as she spoke. “I don’t know, it’s a bit like you’re just one of the girls sometimes. Anyway!” She hopped up and ran to her room, leaving Ran to sit there like she hadn’t just hit him over the head with another one of those statements that made his brain all static-y. After a minute, Rachel came back out of her room wearing a beautiful blue summer dress, with a matching blue ribbon to hold her hair up, and Ran’s mind was, if not on track, then at least evening out a little bit. “What do you think?”

“You’re… it’s beautiful,” Ran said, and then he realized what he was supposed to be doing. This wasn’t just about what he thought. He had to put himself in Amelia’s place. What would it be like to be Amelia, to be a lesbian trans woman? It’s something he’d never considered. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. It’s not something he’d ever allowed himself to consider. The thought of being a lesbian appealed to him, just because it was the concept of loving girls in a way that didn’t involve someone as eminently disappointing as him. But then he felt gross at the thought of fetishing lesbians, and that was a rabbit hole of frustration and self-esteem (and lack thereof) he didn’t let himself go down all too often. But for Rachel, he was willing to at least humour the idea. “So,” he said, really trying to see Rachel as if he was Amelia. Well, he couldn’t just be Amelia, that would be weird. He didn’t have the kind of experiences with Rachel that the trans girl had. And if this was a first date, it was better to try and see her with fresh eyes. “Give me a second,” Ran mumbled, “I’m just trying to get into character.”

“I… okay!” Rachel said, and she did a little spin. The dress flared again, and this time, instead of just looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, he tried to see her like a trans woman would. Would there need to be a name? If he had to pick a name… He’d heard the name ‘Lily’ before, and that had always struck him as cute, so he just went with that. So, hypothetically, if he was a trans girl named Lily, what would he think of that outfit? Well, Rachel was obviously beautiful, but she was always beautiful. 

“I like the way the dress flows and spins,” he said. “But I don’t know if blue is your colour.” Rachel nodded and flattened out the skirt part. Bottom part? What were those called, anyway? Ran would have to look that up later. Obviously, Lily would already know about all this stuff. Or maybe not? 

“I know,” she said, “I haven’t worn it in a while, but I wanted to have a look at it first. Maybe you’d see something I didn’t.” She hurried into her room while Ran looked up dresses on his phone, learning the differences between different kinds of dresses and skirts. When Rachel came back in, she was wearing a black blazer over a white tank top and tight black jeans. “What do you think?” Rachel asked. “Too… lesbian?”

“I… no,” Ran said, and let Lily take over for a moment. “I think it works really well. You look a little bit intimidating, but I don’t think Amelia minds. Besides…” he imagined himself in Amelia’s place, closely in front of Rachel, and his heart went from beating to hammering again and his brain went from useful to less so. “You look really, uh…” The girl he imagined being, a recently out trans woman, would look at Rachel and realize that there was a sense of envy there. After all, if he (well, she, really) wore clothes like that, they’d just look masculine. Blazers on a woman were gorgeous. On a guy like him, they were just men’s clothing. “I think I’d be jealous,” he said, “but I think that would be mitigated by the fact that I would be the one who gets to date you, and then that would just become, like, pride.”

Rachel cocked her head. “Jealous?”

“Well, you know, you look feminine even wearing a blazer, and that’s something I could never do, you know?” he said, feeling like he was backing himself into a corner without a visible opponent. “Like, if I was a trans woman, I would think like, ‘god, I wish that was me’. Because I’m trying to think the way Amelia thinks and she would get- she’d be kissing you later anyway, so that’s fine, right?”

“That… that helps, I think,” Rachel said. “Are you okay?” Ran frowned. Why would she ask that? He was okay, right? He was stressed out, sure, and it was getting a little hard to hear her because of the thumping of his heart in his ears, but that was normal, right? Was this just his envy of her relationship with Amelia that was making him feel like his face was on fire? “Ran?” Rachel asked. “Are you- Why are you crying?”

“I… I think I need to… I have to go…” he said, practically launching himself out of the couch. He grabbed his coat on the way out, and only barely failed to stop himself from hyperventilating as the door shut behind him. 

Elamimax

This poor sweetheart!

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