Chapter 51

Valerie thought seriously about simply leaving.

Lucca’s outburst had not been, precisely, violence directed at her; but it felt like a threat, or at least a danger. It was, at least, not a strong indicator that she was safe with them. She reflected blackly that it at least helped settle the tension between her concerns about how they had treated her, and her arousal and attraction to them. Despite whatever other ways her mind was twisted and broken, Lucca’s demonstration did not in any way draw her interest.

She ran the scenario in her head- collect her things, at least the few that properly belonged to her. She would leave behind the clothes Lucca had paid for, and their laptop. She was of two minds about the phone- it would be useful, and she imagined that having it in her pocket would be a little bit like a tether to a normal life.

A girl walking thirty miles through the desert with a last-generation smartphone in her pocket felt different in some important, if indefinable, way from the same girl walking with nothing in her pockets but lint.

Still paralyzed by indecision, she was sitting on the bed in Lucca’s spare room when she heard the back door open and close again. Thoughts of departure faded. Walking out in front of them was a message, a provocation, that she did not intend to send.

Slipping out in the middle of the night might still be a possibility, she thought. Until then, she tensely busied herself tidying up the room, which mostly consisted of nudging the pile of boxes into into a more compact stack, and hanging a few stray garments up in the closet.

“How’s your head?”

At the sound of Lucca’s voice from the doorway, Valerie jumped, clothes hangers clattering to the ground. She turned to face them, lifting her hand automatically to the back of her head, which still ached dully. She winced as she touched the tender spot there.

“It’s fine,” she replied back, her tone guarded and calmer than she felt.

“Do you need something for it?”

“No.” The physical pain was, somehow, comforting.

“Ice pack?”

“No.”

Lucca lapsed, awkwardly, into silence. Valerie had the impression they wanted to say something; an apology, perhaps an explanation, or maybe something more critical. An admonish, or a threat. Whatever it was, they seemed to be struggling to decide; to get the words out.

“I wrestled, in high school.”

Valerie blinked rapidly, blindsided by the statement, which fell far afield of what she expected them to say.

“Okay…”

“I was good. Had a scholarship and everything before my shoulder got shredded.” They rubbed their shoulder absent-mindedly, an echoing memory of their pain.

Valerie nodded silently; the awkward flow of the conversation was not doing anything to alleviate her stress.

“That’s not really what I’m getting at, though.”

“Can… I get a glass of water?” There are multiple exits from the kitchen.

“What? Sure.”

They backed out of the door and stepped aside, letting Valerie slip through and into the kitchen. She regretted leaving her shoes off after her earlier shower, but putting them on in that moment felt like a potentially destabilizing choice. The situation already felt charged enough.

Lucca followed her to the kitchen, standing on the far side of the kitchen island and watching while she filled a glass with water.

“I never liked wrestling,” they continued, as Valerie turned back to face them, “sometimes I wonder if I tore up my shoulder on purpose, so I could stop.”

“Why did you do it, then?”

Lucca shrugged. Valerie doubted for a moment that they would answer, but she was unsure how, or if, she wanted to move the conversation forward otherwise.

“My parents,” they answered, after all. “My dad figured it would toughen me up. My coaches. I had the build for it, they said. And I was stubborn, I didn’t want to quit.”

“Was?”

They laughed, and Valerie felt a trace of annoyance that the sound of it took a little bit of an edge off the situation. A part of her wondered whether they she was not being teased back into a false sense of security.

“Yeah, I guess I never left that behind,” Lucca replied, with a shrug. “I wanted to join the chess team, but schedules conflicted, practices and matches, you know.”

“You’re a chess player?” Valerie raised an eyebrow.

Lucca was not stupid by any standard, but they did not strike her as the sort of intellectual that seriously played chess.

“No, but maybe I could’ve been? No. I wasn’t, but Matt was.”

Valerie wondered if people heard the same darkness in her voice when she mentioned Heather as she heard in Lucca’s voice.

“Who was that?”

“Smart, skinny, curly dark hair. Bright blue eyes, like really blue, and when he looked at you, it felt like a blessing. This clever little smile.”

They sounded almost wistful, but unconvincingly, like someone wishing to return to the bliss of ignorance.

“Your first… crush?”

“Yeah. Crush. First everything, really. First kiss, outside the locker room after I won a big match. State semi-finals. Sneaky like. I’ll never forget the way his hands felt on me. First lay… well, anyway.”

“What does this have to do with… anything?”

“You wanted me to explain. I’m explaining.”

Valerie briefly raised both her hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Before that first kiss, I didn’t really understand that I was into men. I just thought he was cool, sophisticated… just knew I wanted to be around him.”

Valerie nodded. She could not relate, as far as men were concerned, but she definitely knew what it was like to be drawn to someone like a pair of magnets. She knew what it was like to confuse attraction and envy.

“We started dating. His parents didn’t care that he was gay, which was a surprise. Oil money, attended republican fund-raising dinners. But I guess they saw having a gay son as some kind of… cultural one-up on their wine and cheese party friends.”

Growing up, Valerie had seen the kind of big-fish-in-a-little-pond people that Lucca was describing, though she had never known them so closely.

“They had this great big house on a couple acres right in the middle of a suburb, eight foot tall stone wall around the whole thing… Never mind. That was sophomore year, we dated all the way through senior year.”

“Then what?”

A number of years before, in Texas.

“I can’t do this anymore, Matt. Even if I believe you,” Lucca started, before interrupting themselves. “Sorry, I mean, I believe you, of course I do, but I see how people whisper and laugh at me behind my back in the hallways…”

Lucca still presented as masculine, in those days, and used he and him pronouns. They were tall, with the strength and bulk of an all-state wrestler. Matt had gone from skinny to lean over those few years, and gained a few inches in height, but he still had to crane his neck up to kiss Lucca.

“Don’t worry about them, they’re just jealous little people. Do you know why I brought you here?” Matt asked, running a finger teasingly along the outside of Lucca’s thigh.

Their relationship had been rocky recently. Matt flirted and fooled around a lot with other men; Lucca was so head over heels that they refused to believe the stories, until they came first-hand from someone they considered a close friend.

“You want to apologize? Tell me your parents are inviting us on another trip to Miami, or maybe Mexico this time?” Lucca suggested, humorlessly.

They were sitting on the hood of Lucca’s car, parked in a asphalt-paved turnout next to a city park. A small creek trickled idyllically past. Trees shielded the turnout from the main road, shrouding them in a false sense of privacy. Earlier in their relationship, when it was still a furtive, guilty little secret, they had come to that spot often to make out, or more.

“No, silly,” Matt played off the comment like it was a joke, despite the venom in Lucca’s voice. “This is the first place we kissed. I brought you here because I want to ask you to marry me.”

“No it’s n-… what? Marry?”

“I want to prove to you how much I love you.”

They had fought about Matt’s dalliances the previous weekend, which they were supposed to have spent away, camping together out on some ranch land Matt’s family owned out in the hills. Lucca had brought up the story they had heard, as carefully as they could, and Matt had lashed out, telling them the friend was a liar, was jealous, and that Lucca should feel bad for believing it; that they should feel guilty for accusing him of being unfaithful.

Matt had stormed off in Lucca’s car, leaving them alone on an empty piece of land fifteen miles from the nearest payphone. They had slept there, and then carried all of the camping gear for fifteen miles the following morning.

And now Matt was apologizing, as he always did, with grander and grander gestures. The diamond promise ring he had turned up with a few months before still dangled from a chain around Lucca’s neck. Somehow, Matt always managed to apologize without admitting any fault in himself.

“Matt, it ain’t even legal here…”

“My parents will fly us out to California, we’ll have a whole destination wedding.”

“I…” Lucca did not know what to say, but as a flicker of annoyance crossed Matt’s face, they hurried to reply, “Of course, I want to. You know I do.”

“It’s settled, then.” Matt turned his thousand-watt smile on Lucca, who melted in front of it like they always did. “My parents are gonna make us sign a prenup, though, you know how they are.”

“Prenup?”

“A contract? You know, protect the family money. Don’t worry about it. It only matters if we get divorced, which isn’t going to happen.”

“I’m guessing you got divorced?” Valerie asked, seated on the counter top, engrossed, despite herself, in Lucca’s story.

“No, and that’s really the crux of it.”