I woke up with Laura’s uninjured arm wrapped around my shoulders, with my head on her breasts as a convenient pillow. We were in my bed, at my apartment, primarily because mine was further downriver. It was the first time I’d woken up next to her without us having had sex first; there had been a pervasive sense of uncleanliness after we’d gotten back from the riverbank, like a thin film of something horrible had clung to us long after we got back. I didn’t mind it. Just having Laura nearby was enough.

It was a Hexaday, which meant no classes for either of us, and therefore a slow and lazy morning. If Unity hadn’t been sleeping directly across from us, it would have been a fantastic morning for morning sex, but I did not want to get caught. So instead I changed, washed my face and underarms as best as I could, and spent several minutes considering, but not actually making, breakfast.

It was there, in the kitchen, where Laura ambushed me. Her cast bumped against my back without warning.

“Good mo—”

Laura bent down and kissed me on the side of the neck. Well, calling what she did a “kiss” would be underselling it. There was tongue and teeth and suction involved, not quite enough to leave a mark, but enough to make me quiver over my entire body. For a second I was caught off-guard, stuck in the ecstasy, until I remembered where we were.

“Don’t you think we should save that until we’re somewhere private?” I said. My voice shook with every movement of Laura’s mouth.

She moved up to my ear and whispered, very softly, “It’s not like I’m taking your clothes off. Your roommates already know about us.”

Then she nibbled on the outer part of my ear. The bastard knew that that was my weakness, as was proved when I was forced to clap my hand over my mouth to stifle an extremely undignified noise.

I whirled around, slapping Laura’s cast just hard enough to make her wince. “Stop it!”

“Sorry,” she said, smiling absentmindedly. “I’ll hold back. But I’m serious when I say that I don’t think we need to hide anything. They all have to know by now, don’t they?”

I sighed, folding my arms. “Sure, maybe. But that doesn’t mean we can just do whatever in front of everybody. Now, do you want to help make breakfast?”

Laura opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by Anna’s arrival. “Would you two stop necking in front of God and everybody? Do it on your own time, if you please.”

Laura detached from me, stumbling back a step. “Sorry.”

“Also, have a newspaper. I don’t care for it.”

Anna proceeded to hurl the rolled-up paper directly at Laura, who half-turned and caught it out of the air with her free hand. She stormed across the apartment, opening one of the pantries and angrily removing the ingredients, an action that I wasn’t aware could be done angrily.

“Are you… doing alright?” I said.

Anna gave me a look that could turn you into a pillar of salt. “My leg is acting up.”

“I’ve seen you when your leg is acting up,” I said. “And I know your whole philosophy of life is to be the quiet, uncomplaining helper…” I looked to Laura, who had decided to start reading the paper with intense interest, then stepped closer to Anna. Lowering my voice to a whisper, I said, “Is this about…”

“Yes!” Anna hissed. “Er, no, no it isn’t. You don’t need to probe into every emotional turn of my life, you’re not my surgeon.”

I shrugged. “It’s literally the least I can do,” I said. “You’re being paid to more or less be my minder out here, and if I can’t at least take an interest in making you as happy as possible, then I’m no better than the women running the workhouses.”

Anna stayed quiet for a long time, shutting the pantry and clearing out a space on the counter-top. “It’s been difficult. In Amrinval, I always had my family. Here and in Urcos, I always had Unity. Now…”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized. If there’s anything I can—”

Laura proceeded to interrupt our delicate, personal moment by bursting out laughing.

“Do you have something you’d like to add?” I said.

Laura shook her head, instead trying to hand me the newspaper. “Check page four,” she said.

I took it and flipped to that page. At first it just looked like a bunch of random panels of text; but then I noticed a small headline near the bottom. PROTEST OVER ABANDONED FACTORY TURNS VIOLENT, it said.

“Why are you laughing at that?”

“Because, the ghouls tried to beat us down and all they did is put us in the fucking papers! Talk about putting out a fire with oil, right?”

I frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good thing? It means you have eyes on you. That headline does not sound like it’s particularly sympathetic to your cause.”

“Well, yeah, maybe if you only read the headline,” Laura said. “But if you look at the actual article, you’ll see that she runs out of things to talk about respecting the actual protest about halfway through. Then she just goes on to talk about the reason why we were protesting for a stretch!”

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “Even if the article is against the protest, everyone who reads this paper now knows that there’s an abandoned factory leaking toxic chemicals in the middle of the city! Anyone who’s even a little inclined to care about that sort of thing… How many papers are there in this city?”

“Three,” said Laura. “Four if you count the student paper.” She snatched the newspaper back from me, looking it over with a broad grin. “Oh, the afterparty is going to be even bigger than usual…”

“Afterparty?” I said.

Laura stopped, suddenly looking extremely sheepish. “Oh, erm. Usually after these sorts of big actions, protests and fundraisers and the like, all the girls from the club, we go down to the Crystal Ball and have our run of the place. Helps keep morale up.”

“When’s the afterparty for the protest?”

Laura winced, a pitiful expression like she was a ten-year-old and I was giving her a flu shot. “Tonight.”

“What the hell? Were you not going to tell me about this?”

“I, erm. I thought you weren’t going to be interested in that sort of thing. I’ve never seen you drink before, and I always thought you were more… refined than that.”

“I’ll have you know, I’ve been to my fair share of insane, drunken college parties,” I said, folding my arms. “Plus, you met me at the Crystal Ball!”

Laura’s brow furrowed with concentration. “Oh, fuck. We did, didn’t we? I’d sort of forgotten that.”

“To be fair, you were very drunk when that happened,” I said. “Anyway, I guess I know what I’m doing this evening, which is coming with you to this afterparty.”

“Not like I could stop you,” Laura said with a grin.

Laura wandered off to go do something else, and Anna and I set to work making breakfast. A couple of minutes later, I suddenly remembered what we’d been talking about before Laura so rudely interrupted.

So I leaned over to her and whispered: “Like I was saying, if you need any help, or just to talk to me, I’m here.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “I don’t need your help. I’m sure that I’ll be fine once I’ve had some time to adjust. God will provide.”

…

The Crystal Ball was already busy when Laura and I stepped off the streetcar at the nearest intersection. The sun had only just begun to set, but already you could hear the sounds of celebration from nearly halfway down the block. Laura was grinning madly, the pain of her broken arm gone for a moment. As we pushed through the doors, we were hit by a blast of hot wind that smelled like alcohol and human breath. There was definitely a party going on.

The members of the club had taken up two long tables, and there were other people I recognized scattered around the place, drinking and talking in twos and threes. Laura dragged me to one of the tables, where I recognized Tillie and May, as well as a few others who I’d spoken to but never become all that acquainted with. Handshakes and half-hugs were exchanged all around, and while I made sure to rib on Laura by telling everyone about how she had planned to not bring me, Laura went directly to her primary mission: getting absolutely drunk off her damn tits as quickly as possible.

The beer was alright. You could tell that it wasn’t good beer, or at least not expensive beer, but as not-expensive beer went it at least lacked any kind of flaw. It had a rich sort of taste that I associated with small, local breweries, which in this world was probably all that existed anyway. I drank slowly, not that I needed to in order to avoid getting drunk, but mostly so that I could keep one eye on Laura at all times.

Though her mood had softened in the time I’d gotten to know her, Laura’s attitude toward alcohol had not. She skipped beer entirely for something harder, a pale white drink that may or may not have had an equivalent on Earth. She traded shots with half a dozen of her friends, and in a matter of minutes was so far gone that it was getting hard to understand her.

“Aristos, love, I cannot tell you how much I despise them…” Laura mumbled to nobody in particular, her face about six inches away from colliding with the table. “They’re all around you and you, it’s not even like you can avoid them, that constant attitude of slime and responsibility. Oh I have to do this, I have to do that, it’s nonsense, it’s all nonsense.”

I rubbed her shoulder, not sure of any other way to help her in that state. She’d been going on about the upper classes for a while at that point, rambling back and forth about her hatred for them and their weird quirks.

“You don’t know, is the thing. Until you’ve been with them for long enough, you don’t even know. I hate them more than all of you ever will, because I’ve seen them up close and the ladies of Bluerose are just, blech, horrible.”

I looked to May, across the table. May had also been drinking, but in enough moderation that I could mostly hold a conversation.

“Is she always like this?” I said softly.

    May nodded, causing a lock of hair to fall across her face. “When she’s not flirting outrageously with anything that moves, yes. Her feelings about the aristocracy are well-known; it’s why we invited her to join.”

“I do not flirt outrageously!” Laura said. “I flirt excellently. And with panache.”

“Panache,” I said. Laura’s left hand, the one whose arm wasn’t in a cast, was on my upper thigh, one quick movement away from my crotch. Not that I minded. It felt good, if anything, a little possessive gesture that I’d never gotten when I was on Earth, though it was annoying that Laura was being so attractive while she was in absolutely no state to consent to anything.

“Did you ever tell Emma about your mothers?” May said. “Her mothers are both noble, though she’ll never talk about it in detail.”

“If anyone ever tries to make me a Count,” Laura said, raising her hand in some kind of salute, “I’ll kick their arse between their ears. You can’t make me.”

“It’s come up once or twice,” I said to May. It was how she’d gotten an invite to the Society Ball, for one thing. If she weren’t from a rich family, we’d have never met.

May nodded, making a shrill sound of acknowledgement. “Get her drunk, and if she isn’t randy she’ll go on about it for hours. It’s miserable listening, but I suppose she needs to get the catharsis somehow.”

“If you’d know, you’d know,” Laura said. “My mums hated me. Neither of them ever wanted me, though only first mother ever admitted it. Said I’d cost her half her reputation, and she’d had to sell the other half by marrying second mum. Always told me she wanted me to be what she never could.”

Laura stood up, which was a fight with the broken arm and general lack of coordination. “Well, I’ll never do it!” she screamed to the ceiling. “I’ll never do it, you hear me! I’ll never be anything like you, you fucking, you fucking cocksucker!”

I followed Laura up, wrapping my arms around her waist as I nervously glanced around the room. Her eyes were red and it looked like she was about to cry. Also if she got any more drunk, something bad was going to happen, I could just feel it. My eyes caught on to an open space at the far end of the bar, where couples swayed awkwardly to the strains of a trio of musicians.

“Hey, Laura?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go dance,” I said. “You love dancing, right? It’ll make you feel better.”

Laura grinned, or at least that’s what she was aiming for. Her mouth missed the bullseye by a bit. “Sure thing, Shortcake. Just lemme get another drink first. Bar!”

I quickly grabbed Laura’s arm, pulling her after me to the dance floor. “Unless you were about to order a glass of water, that’s going to be a no.”

Laura whined something incoherent, but she didn’t resist me as I took her to the dance floor. We put our arms around each other, the ones that weren’t broken, and started to dance. Though I remembered a few of the steps, I hadn’t gotten any better at it since the ballroom blitz. It didn’t matter, because Laura had been brought down to my level via inebriation. We stumbled and rocked, sometimes spinning fast enough to make me dizzy, other times pulling in tight, other times staying at arm’s length.

“Y’know,” Laura said, “I thought you’d be more drunk by now. I know I saw you partaking, but you’re stone cold sober.”

“Benefits to being immortal,” I said with a shrug. “Or downsides, depending on how I’m feeling at that particular moment.”

Laura’s whole body seemed to sag, and her expression fell into an exaggerated pout. She looked like she was actually going to start crying on me. “Fuck. I’m never going to get you to tell me, am I?”

“Huh? Tell me what?”

Laura didn’t say anything for a few seconds, instead putting her all into the dance, swinging me out wide and pulling me back with a surprising amount of strength for a woman with only one functioning arm. The sense of my own smallness made the pit of my stomach tingle.

And then the moment ended with Laura stumbling, forcing me to catch her. We stepped off the dance floor for a moment while I steadied her.

“Your secret,” Laura moaned, leaning in close. “Whatever it is that you refuse to tell me, the reason why you keep leaving every morning after, the reason why you haven’t said you love me in weeks. Thought if I could get you drunk enough you’d spill. But that was never going to happen, was it?”

Laura was actually sobbing by that point, her face all red and wet and ugly with emotion and alcohol. Fuck, she really wanted to know.

My heart raced, beating so fast that it made me lightheaded, as various impulses warred within me. One was the desire to give her what she wanted. Maybe she was drunk enough that she wouldn’t remember, and if she wasn’t, then it would be as good a time to tell her as any. If it had been tearing her up so badly, not knowing, then why was I still keeping it hidden?

Well, the reason was obvious. I imagined Laura furious, screaming at me for lying to her, disgusted that she’d ever allowed me into her bed. Maybe she’d even get violent, in that state. If I told her the truth about what I was thinking, there was no telling what her reaction would be, whether it might end with her breaking it off for good. No matter what happened, I wanted to avoid that at all cost, because the thought of never being able to fall asleep in Laura’s arms again was a spear being thrown directly through my heart.

And then there was that ugly voice telling me that I shouldn’t have been with her at all. That voice called attention to the heat in my chest, the tingle between my legs, the way I occasionally glanced down at Laura’s breasts when we were standing that close together, and whispered that it was all wrong. I shouldn’t have been doing any of that, I shouldn’t have been having a relationship at all when I wasn’t really myself.

“Emma?”

I’d fallen silent, wrapped up in my own thoughts. My throat seized up.

“You hate me, don’t you? I’m nothing but sharp edges and swagger, and you hate that you’re attracted to me.”

“No! No, please don’t say that about yourself. I…” There was truth to it, was the fucked up thing. Laura could be such a frustrating person to be around, so prickly, willing to turn on the insults at a moment’s notice, and sometimes I actually did hate her. But I couldn’t say that to her, not then.

“Kiss me.”

She did, though she had to bend around her cast to do it. Her mouth tasted awful, bitter and dry, but I still kissed her with all the passion I had in me. When we parted, Laura didn’t look quite so miserable.

“Does that tell you anything?”

Laura nodded. “Oh, Emma, you little thing. You confuse me, sometimes.”

I chuckled. “I confuse myself. Now let’s go, I don’t think you’re up for any more dancing.”

We found another corner, a place with as much privacy as you could get in a crowded bar, which is to say that there was an empty seat next to me and another empty seat next to her. There were a few other people nearby, ones I sort of recognized from the club, so I felt vaguely comfortable. I ordered a drink for myself, and made sure that Laura got something with no alcohol in it.

For a minute we didn’t even speak to each other, just soaked in each other’s presence. Laura must have been thinking about something, because her face, while still red and tear-streaked, put on this odd, distant look. This must have been the tenth time I’d looked at her face and thought I’d seen it before somewhere.

I was thinking too, trying to work up the courage to tell her the truth. It was obvious that my refusal was destroying her, even if most of the time she was capable of keeping it together. I could stay quiet out of fear for myself; but staying quiet when it was actively hurting her? Never. So when our drinks arrived, I swallowed nearly half the glass in one go, then set it down on the counter with a heavy clack before finally speaking up.

“I guess I should tell you,” I said. “So, you remember everything I told you about Earth?”

Laura nodded. “Wild place. Flying machines that can cross the world in hours, analytical engines that can fit in your pocket. If anyone else told me about it, I’d think it was all a fantasy.”

“Well I’m glad you trust me,” I said. “But there’s one thing about Earth that I didn’t tell you. I guess I was too afraid to tell you.”

Laura frowned. “But you want to tell me now?”

I nodded. Even with the intention out in the world, it took me a solid few seconds to work up the courage. “So, on Earth, there’s actually… two kinds of people. It’s… sort of like the differences in…”

I made a vague gesture between my lap and Laura’s. A few seconds later, a huge grin broke out on her face. “You can say ‘cock’, you know,” she said loudly. “We’re in a bar, not a church.”

“Yeah, well, um, on Earth there’s more to it than just cocks.” I paused for a moment, thinking about how to phrase it in Blueroser, eventually deciding to just use the English words directly. “So there’s this thing called ‘gender’, where most of the population is divided into two groups called ‘men’ and ‘women’. And the ‘women’, they look more or less like people on Selene do, except they’re usually a bit shorter I think. But the ‘men’, they’re totally different. Taller, different overall shape usually, the body hair is usually more thick and dark, they have full-length hair on their faces called a ‘beard’, it’s a whole thing.”

“Sounds fucked up,” Laura said with a nod. “I mean, what’s even the point of having a whole extra… Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“I assure you, it’s perfectly normal where I come from. Like our whole culture is tied up in it, and there’s the ‘patriarchy’ and all of that, and ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ and all of these other things. But I’m not going to try to explain the ‘gender binary’ to you while you’re drunk. It’s beside the point.”

“So what the fuck is the point, then?” Laura said with a frown. “That’s, I mean, it’s interesting, I think, but it doesn’t… You get what I mean?”

I sighed. “You are so drunk.”

Laura shrugged.

“The point is, when I was on Earth, I didn’t… I didn’t look like I do now. In fact I had a totally different body.” Laura’s blank, slightly confused expression was boring through me like a power drill in my skull. I had to look away for a second, take a drink from my cup. “I was a ‘man’, on Earth.”

I winced preemptively, waiting for the look of disgust, the accusation. But it never came. Instead, Laura’s frown intensified, and her brow furrowed as she looked me up and down with a keen eye.

“Huh,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”

…

Have you ever had a moment where it all hits you at once? Where it feels like your whole world is a sheet of glass and someone just threw a baseball through it? One of those moments where the camera does that thing from Jaws and everything falls away, a moment where you forget to breathe because your entire soul is ringing out like a musical note? A single instant where you have to stop and process, because something just made all of the pieces fall into place at once, and now you’re left sitting in the ruins, staring.

Yeah.

SaffronDragon

I get the feeling that a lot of people have been waiting a very, very long time for this to happen. Well, guess what? This next chapter is The Big Gender chapter, where you get as much gender as you want.

And if you want to read that next chapter without having to wait two whole entire weeks, click the link below to see my patreon. I have the next two chapters of Selene as well as the next four chapters of The Chained Flame available right now for only $3 a month, as well as various other benefits including a Patron-only discord server. If you can't, that's fine; I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter XXII: The Night When Everything Happened.