heat

zachary holmes spence

GABRIEL’S DOCTOR ASKS WHAT HE WANTS TO DISCUSS, and he says, “I’m bleeding.”

She nods like this is normal for a man on testosterone for eight years, and runs through a list of causes he knows are not the issue: friction from excessive exercise, rough sex, missing doses.

She suggests a blood draw, to check his T levels.

Gabriel hates needles. He can’t look at them, let alone watch them pierce his skin. He has to box breathe while Nathan injects him, which takes all of thirty seconds a week—but blood draws make him feel faint and panicky. How not to imagine the phlebotomist pushing the needle right through his vein? Impossible.

“Gabriel?” the doctor prompts.

“Yes.” He clears his throat. “Okay.”

“If your T is low, we’ll up your dose.”

He nods, and waits, but that’s all she says. He tamps down on his irritation. “I thought injections were supposed to be the best option.” He’s tried topical creams and gels, but they make his sleeves cling to his skin no matter how long he stands around shirtlessly windmilling. He sweats off patches, and doctors won’t prescribe pills anymore.

“You’ve never tried pellets before,” the doctor says, which is an indirect answer, he supposes.

“Do you want me to set you up with a specialist to talk through pellet insertion?”

“Insertion,” Gabriel repeats, imagining a bigger needle.

“Yep. They’re super tiny pellets, about the size of a grain of rice, inserted surgically into a slit in the fatty tissue of your bottom.” She holds her thumb and pointer fingers close to her eye, to demonstrate tininess.

“It’s just one pellet?”

“It depends on your dose—the last patient I referred got six.”

Gabriel’s stomach turns as he pictures a row of bumps under his butt skin. Like some kind of lizard spine he’d absorbed. Like a candy necklace. Like you could squeeze them and they’d go plip plip like bubble wrap. “Prefer not,” he says, nails moving to his wrist, scratching. “Strongly prefer not.”

“Okay,” the doctor says. “What else do you want to discuss today?”

Gabriel almost laughs at the pivot, except he does have something else to talk about. He stops scratching, rolling up his sleeves. “I’ve been getting really hot. Like abnormally hot. It gets slightly warm and suddenly I’m itchy all over. Or I speak in a meeting, and get a little embarrassed or nervous, and then it’s like I’m getting attacked by fire ants.”

“So flushing, itchiness—do you notice any sort of pattern? Is it more common around when you’re spotting?”

“No, it’s literally all the time. I get these hives all over my arms.” He holds out his forearms, which bear faint marks from his scratching, but no hives. The doctor’s office is too cold.

She purses her lips, like Gabriel is a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don’t fit together. “We should check your thyroid levels, too,” she says. “This sounds like it could be hormonal.”

“Because my T is low?” Gabriel’s eyebrows draw in. That doesn’t make sense; he hadn’t had this problem before he went on T in the first place. “Am I bleeding because my T is too low, and breaking out in hives because my T is too high?”

She starts to speak, then stops, then leans back in her desk chair. He wishes she’d just shrug and get it over with. “That’s why we should check as much as we can. After that, I can refer you to an endocrinologist.”

After his appointment, Gabriel heads down to the lab on the first floor. The last time he’d been here, his distraction had been his ex, Vanessa. She’d texted him vampire jokes, and he read the corny ones out loud, avoiding the funny ones in case the phlebotomist laughed and jiggled the needle.

She’d broken up with him six months ago. Told him she couldn’t be with someone so ashamed of his own identity. Gabriel argued that he wasn’t ashamed. Per se. Just, his self-confidence pendulummed. Didn’t hers? Didn’t everyone’s? But the quickest way to fix a problem is to purge it, so like a bad code deploy, Vanessa rolled their relationship back to its previous version. Erasing everything they’d been.

The phlebotomist ties off his bicep, alcohol-swabs the crook of his elbow. The needle slides in. His skin feels hot. 

<><><>

“Why don’t you try subcutaneous injections?” Nathan asks as he rubs Gabriel’s thigh with an alcohol wipe. Gabriel’s already watching the wall. He sits on the edge of his bed in his briefs, waiting for his best friend to stab him in the leg.

Well, jab. Most properly, inject.

“You’ve asked me that before,” Gabriel complains, always prickly when about to be pricked. “I told you: the size of the needle doesn’t matter. I can’t make my hand do the jabbing motion.”

How to overcome billions of years of deeply ingrained instinct that stabbing self = bad? Impossible.

Nathan hums, then murmurs, “Quick pinch,” like he always does, like maybe he says it even when injecting himself. Gabriel grimaces as the needle bites through his skin, but then he relaxes, the hard part over.

When Nathan releases Gabriel’s thigh, the heat of his hand fades slowly.

“Thank you,” Gabriel says. A pinhead of blood forms on his leg. Nathan peels open a bandaid and smooths it over Gabriel’s skin with a practiced grace. “You should be a nurse.”

Nathan snorts, then grins up at Gabriel. “Only because you think I don’t have a real job, Mr. I-have-shares-and-know-what-a-401k-is.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. “You work too much for me to say you don’t have a real job. Out loud, anyway.” Nathan flicks his knee. In college, he’d landed an internship at a tiny non-profit called Trans VisCo, and he’d never left. Now he runs their marketing department. “Did you once again volunteer to single-handedly table at Pride?”

He realizes at once he shouldn’t have asked, because Nathan smiles up at Gabriel, his dark eyes bright, the mouth too big for his face turning him roguish.

“Why?” he asks. “Want to help me this year?”

Nathan has dark stubble running the full length of his jawline, thick black hair, high cheekbones, and a voice low as velvet. Compounding his natural athleticism, testosterone gives him broad shoulders and grabbable chest hair. His daily commute takes him twelve miles by bike, and gives him abs.

Abs.

Gabriel pokes the middle of his forehead. “Turn off the charm, NatNat.” He slides off his bed and fishes a pair of pajama pants from his dresser. “You know the answer’s no.”

For the space of a second, Gabriel thinks maybe Nathan will listen this year. Maybe he’ll let it go without an argument.

Then Nathan sighs. “Gabe, c’mon. I think it would be good for you to hang out with other trans people.”

“I hang out with you.”

“I’m not an entire community.”

At this, Gabriel gives a wry smile. “You mean I should find transes in my own tier.”

Mostly he’s kidding, but he regrets it even before Nathan’s jaw tightens. With quick, whiplike movements, Nathan gathers all his supplies—the box of bandaids, the alcohol wipes, the glass vial of T. He carries all this and the used needle into their bathroom, where they have a sharps kit under the sink, then strides back into Gabriel’s room, the lines of his body rigid. “There aren’t tiers of transness, Gabriel.”

Even his guilt over upsetting Nathan doesn’t stop Gabriel’s huff. “Not that it’s polite to talk about, sure. Last time I went to a Dyke March, a cis woman offered me a pin that said boi on it, with an i.”

“You mean six years ago?” Nathan demands, anger simmering in his voice.

Gabriel drops back down on his bed, rubbing at his thigh. Working in the T that isn’t doing its job, or is doing it too well, or both. “That’s actually my exact point, Nate. I don’t look any different than when I first started on T. It dropped my voice so now I sound like a middle schooler shittily playing the trumpet, and it gave me acne, and the dykes—who are great and all—think I’m one of them, and my colleagues use he/him pronouns for me like they’re in on a joke.”

“Which is why,” Nathan presses, his fingers gripping at his own biceps, “I’m telling you to hang out with trans people, instead of seeking all your affirmations from the cis.”

“Jesus.” Gabriel sighs. Nathan really wants a fight this time, which is making Gabriel’s temperature rise. He rubs his wrist. “I’m not seeking anyone’s affirmation, but I can’t get away from cis people. Believe it or not, I really do want to feel comfortable out in the world, without quarantining myself on the Island of Genderqueers.”

Nathan scowls, but sits down next to him. Gabriel feels the heat radiating off Nathan, and shifts away. “You need to start with figuring out how to be comfortable with yourself. You treat your identity like it’s a secret you don’t want cis people holding over you.”

“And what is it actually?” Gabriel asks, going for droll and dry, maybe just hitting tired.

“A gift.” Gabriel lifts his eyebrows at Nathan, and says nothing for so long that Nathan reddens. “Maybe people know you’re trans even without you telling them. They can take that from you. But they can’t take your trust, Gabriel, or your respect. So yes, when you choose to talk about yourself with someone else, it’s a gift.”

Arms itching, Gabriel reaches for the fan on his bedside table. He turns it on high, and holds out his wrists, letting the air scrape at him. He can feel Nathan watching him, but can’t make himself look.

Then he hears Nathan leave, and he exhales because it’s over, but actually, he doesn’t feel great about it.

“Here.” Gabriel starts, not having heard Nathan come back in over the sound of the fan. He’s holding out an ice cube. Gabriel nods and takes it, running it up one arm, then the other. It melts so fast, like butter on hot corn, drizzling water onto his legs.

“Gabe.” Nathan kneels in front of Gabriel, his jaw knotting under his dark curls, his gaze steady. “Do this for me.”

The whisper, the eye contact—they’re overwhelming. Gabriel turns the fan down to low, for something to do, but Nathan won’t look away from him.

“Staff a table at Pride, you mean?” Gabriel asks. “Help you with Trans VisCo stuff, since you’re chronically understaffed?”

Nathan crushes his faint hope of lightening the mood, but at least he does it gently. “I mean, go for me. If you can’t go for yourself, then go for me.”

The ice cube has liquified, leaving Gabriel’s arms damp and blotchy. He looks down. “I need another one,” he says.

Nathan’s quiet. Then he rises. “I’ll get you one.” There’s nothing in his tone. While he’s gone, Gabriel tries to brush the water from his thighs, then gives up and changes into cotton shorts.

He’s standing when Nathan comes back, and he hates, more than he’s ever hated anything, Nathan’s resigned expression. So when Nathan hands him the ice cube, Gabriel says, “I’ll go.”

A flash of surprise, and something like joy, light Nathan’s face before ceding to relief. A ragged sigh escapes Nathan’s lips. He drops a quick, firm kiss to the top of Gabriel’s head, and he leaves.

<><><>

Gabriel’s first Pride in many years. Nathan drives his shoddy pickup to the festival grounds at dawn, the truck bed full of cardboard boxes under a flapping blue tarp. Dozens of other volunteers are already there, setting up, everyone too chipper for the hour, and wearing way too much rainbow.

Gabriel’s in denim cut-offs and a white tank top. He’s got 30 ounces of iced coffee sweating in one hand and racoon pouches under his eyes. Meanwhile, Nathan’s in a Trans VisCo tee, a size too small—to accentuate his biceps, he’d told Gabriel, who had rolled his eyes and pinched the soft skin behind Nathan’s elbow, making the other man yelp and laugh at the same time. Nathan has a trans pride bandana hanging from one belt loop, and black glitter dusted through his hair.

Setup goes smoothly, the Trans VisCo booth basic: just a white tent, table, two chairs, and a wall of boxes full of t-shirts and magnets. They fill a cooler with ice, tea, and water from CVS. The last $8 from Nathan’s event budget goes to a family pack of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts. How to pass on rainbow sprinkles? Impossible. They rip the box open and stuff all the foil packets into the cooler, because as everyone knows, Pop-Tarts taste better frozen.

Gabriel watches other volunteers while he and Nathan breakfast on semi-cool Pop-Tarts. A six-foot woman wearing a trans flag as a cape sets up a witchy crafts tent down the alley. Elsewhere, two bearded men wearing t-shirts that read BoochBears heft tanks of kombucha onto a table that bows under their weight. Local credit unions bust out rainbow rubber wristbands and pens. And it’s nice, he supposes.

No, it is nice. Just, he can’t stop glancing at the trans woman in her booth, and he feels guilty about it. At some point, she walks by the Trans VisCo tent, and she smiles at Gabriel, who smiles back. She doesn’t even look at Nathan, maybe because he’s busy brushing Pop-Tart dust off his shirt like it’s the nicest one he owns, but it makes Gabriel wonder.

Strangers mostly assume Nathan is cis. No one’s surprised by his pronouns. No one even asks.

Is that why she didn’t smile at him? Her bonhomie is just for Gabriel, someone clearly in her community.

Maybe that’s why Nathan likes working for Trans VisCo. It gives him a way to be part of a community that otherwise might not recognize him. Gabriel feels weird, suddenly, to think that people passing their booth today might look at the two of them and assume Nathan is Gabriel’s cis colleague. Weird to feel there might be some way Gabriel is closer to the community he mostly ignores, closer than Nathan who lives it and breathes it and loves it.

Nathan looks up suddenly, and both of them startle at the eye contact. Then Nathan smiles, eyes shimmering. 

By 2:00, all Gabriel’s feelings of camaraderie, contentment, and community melt into the pavement.

Hot, Hot, Hot blares from a boombox somewhere. The kombucha bears hock their wares by shouting about how it’s 97°. Shirts come off, pasties come out.

Gabriel pours an entire bottle of water over his head, and it barely helps. His whole body feels like a volcano, his clothes clingy and chafing. Their tent has gone from a shady refuge to a muggy, airless cage. He’s scratched the hell out of his arms and his neck, and passersby keep demanding, repeatedly, whether he’s okay.

Eventually Gabriel retires to the back of the tent, creating a private nook with a wall of boxes. Nathan stays up front, chatting up the crowd that shuffles past, explaining Trans VisCo to people as excitedly as if his 500th time is the first:

“We run trainings and workshops on trans inclusivity for schools, companies, and small businesses.”

The shirts have the company name on the back and we are everywhere on the front, stylized in different fonts, most of them campy. Gabriel marvels at how many they sell, given the we pronoun. The magnets sell even faster.

“Gabe, I need more mediums up here,” Nathan calls. Gabriel wipes his face with his t-shirt, giving up on trying to achieve zen detachment from his body and its blistering itch.

“Got it.” Gabriel looks around his makeshift den, his heart dropping when he spots the mediums beneath three other sizes. By the time he unearths the right box, the waistband of his shorts feel like a lasso of fire around his hips. A million high-heeled spiders dance across his skin.

He crab-walks the mediums to the front, and hears Nathan say “Thank—” before he drops it, rips open the cooler, and thrusts his hive-riddled arms into the mostly-melted ice. Gabriel groans loudly, submerging himself up past his elbows.

Across the tent table, he hears someone giggle and someone else say, “Omigod, are you okay? Hey, are you alright?”

“He’s fine,” Nathan says. “Sensitive to heat.”

“Kill me,” Gabriel says.

“Do you, like, need anything?” the worried voice asks. Gabriel peers beneath the table and sees a few legs, rainbow platform shoes, and the tip of a cane wrapped with a boa.

“A swift death,” he suggests.

Nathan shifts, his shadow covering Gabriel, though maybe he only wants to hide his corpse from view. “Did y’all want magnets, too?”

Gabriel blocks out the rest of Nathan’s salesmanship. He splashes his face with the melted ice water, which restores him enough to drag the whole cooler into the back of the tent as if he’s hunted it and plans to eat it in his lair.

Once safely behind his box wall, he peels off his shirt and unbuttons his denim shorts before thinking, Fuck it, because no one can see him, and anyway, even in his briefs he’s still only in, like, the 70th percentile of nakedness at this festival. He shucks his shorts, then pours a second bottle of water over his head and bites back another moan. It feels good—for a minute. Then the water goes tepid and he just feels damp and warm.

He needs air conditioning, but the nearest store still requires a thirty-second walk in the sun, which at this point would feel like pressing his bare body to the hood of a car left baking on the street. He’d roast like a marshmallow over a campfire. All his skin would char and slough off.

“Fuck—”

Gabriel’s eyes snap open at Nathan’s voice so near. He finds his best friend in front of him, cradling a ten pound bag of ice, wide-eyed.

“Sorry,” Gabriel says, sure he’d blush if he weren’t already red everywhere. “I’m—my doctor’s referring me to an endocrinologist.” He doesn’t know why he blurts this out, but he knows Nathan will get it. “Maybe my dose is too high.”

Nathan swallows, his eyes casting far to one side before circling back to the cooler. “You also said you think your dose is too low.”

In a desperate hope that Nathan had also experienced spotting while on T, Gabriel had told him about it a few weeks back. But of course T had never given Nathan any trouble at all. Not even acne.

“Yeah, well,” says Gabriel. “T sucks.”

Nathan rips open the bag of ice and dumps it into the cooler, splashing water at their feet. “Those people who bought the mediums got this for you.” He straightens, tossing the empty plastic bag onto a stack of broken down boxes. “You should get a hysto and quit T.”

“A trans guy who isn’t on T?” Gabriel grins. He can’t imagine it. Top surgery, a hysterectomy, and yet no T? Who did that?

But Nathan shakes his head. “What’s it doing for you?”

Gabriel winces. “Fuck off, Nate—”

“I’m not making fun of you, Gabriel.” Nathan frowns. Sweat mats a coil of dark hair to the side of his face. His cheeks gleam; black glitter’s in his eyebrows now. At some point, someone painted the trans and pan flags onto his arms. “You complain you’ve been on T forever and you still look ‘like this,’ which, for the record, I think is perfect, but you say it’s doing nothing anymore, so what’s the point? You hate injections, nothing else keeps the sharks away, and now they’re not even doing that. You planning to get jabbed every week for the rest of your life just because you think your trans card will get revoked if you don’t?”

Standing in his underwear, red as a rusty barn, surrounded by screaming cis queers—this is not the place Gabriel wants to have this conversation. He opens his mouth to say, Forget it, to say, Can we do this later? to say, I’m going home, to say, What the hell do you know about feeling like you’re not enough for other trans people and too much for cis people? But his brain stutters on this last thought, because, actually, he’s realizing today that maybe Nathan does know what that’s like, and so what slips out is,

“Did you call me perfect?”

Nathan blows out a sigh. He stoops, pushing both hands down into the cooler and coming back up with two pieces of ice. He pops one into his mouth and rolls it around while his eyes search Gabriel’s face.

Then he leans in, and kisses him.

Nathan’s lips and tongue are cold; he tastes like strawberries and sugar, like ice cream, like winter. He cups Gabriel’s neck with icy fingers, making him shiver. When Nathan’s other hand finds his waist, Gabriel gasps at the shock of the ice cube against his skin. Nathan’s throat rumbles with a predatory sound; he presses his palm against Gabriel’s back, runs the ice cube slowly up his spine, over his shoulders, up and down each arm.

Once it melts, Nathan pulls away and grabs more ice. Gabriel tugs him right back to his mouth, wrapping his arms around Nathan’s broad shoulders. God, of course he’d gotten it wrong with Nathan, the timeless queer trans guy question, “Am I attracted to this man or do I just want to be him?”

Nathan’s facial hair prickles against Gabriel’s chin, the sensation bursting bright like a string of Christmas lights inside him. Gabriel, who never really mourned his lack of facial hair, realizes now that it wasn’t envy he felt every time he caught Nathan trimming his beard, shirtless, at the bathroom sink.

With the new chunk of ice, Nathan’s hand courses up Gabriel’s stomach. He scrawls something across Gabriel’s chest.

“What’s that?” Gabriel breathes against Nathan’s mouth.

“My name,” Nathan says, and Gabriel loves that answer, so he tangles his hands back into Nathan’s hair and pulls him in for more kissing. Nathan’s hand descends to the waistband of Gabriel’s briefs—

Gabriel jerks back. “Nate,” he says, voice catching.

But Nathan merely hovers, the ice cube suspended just beneath Gabriel’s naval. “May I?” he whispers.

“Here?” He means the tent, the Pride Festival, but Nathan raises one glittered eyebrow and asks,

“Can you think of a hotter place on your body?”

Breathing heavily, Gabriel stops trying to process. He shuts his eyes, and he parts his lips, and Nathan very gently comes back to kissing him, his teeth tugging lightly at his bottom lip, his fingers slipping beneath his waistband, running the ice cube between his legs with a quick, cold stroke. Nathan swallows the noise Gabriel makes. Gabriel clings to him, shifts his feet apart as Nathan’s fingers cradle him, as the ice melts quicker than anywhere else it had been before. The cold numbs his skin but he still feels the pressure of Nathan’s fingertips rolling in circles, drawing panting gasps from Gabriel, shivers and tremors that shake his body, that make him sink his nails into Nathan’s back.

When he comes, he grips Nathan hard, and Nathan’s hand stills but stays put, like his mouth, like his lips on Gabriel’s—firm, sure, unflinching. 

<><><>

What they did makes him sweat, literally. Once they clean themselves up—that’ll be one shirt missing from the inventory—Gabriel realizes he’s no longer an inferno because he’s finally sweating.

He sits at the tent table with Nathan, and they take turns explaining Trans VisCo’s mission and selling shirts. They share more Pop-Tarts. Gabriel sends Nathan to the BoochBears tent with $10 and blinks when he comes back with one cup of kombucha.

“Pride, man,” Nathan shrugs.

Gabriel sighs, but takes a sip, feeling the fizz over his tongue and thinking about Nathan’s mouth on his.

After the last of their small t-shirts sells, Nathan hops up to scrounge for adjacent sizes in their box mountain. He comes back, not with shirts, but a magnet.

“Hey.” His smile, when he looks at Gabriel, has a shy tilt to it. “Why don’t you keep this one?”

Gabriel takes the magnet, turning it around in his palm. It has Trans VisCo’s slogan, we are everywhere, in black Times New Roman instead of a fun rainbow font.

Kombucha-fizzy all over, Gabriel thinks about putting it on his marker board at work.

<><><>

When his blood test comes back, Gabriel’s T levels fall perfectly within the expected range. He considers this the worst possible result for its inexplicability. Perhaps his body is converting excess testosterone into estrogen, his doctor suggests, and she sends him for another blood test.

When his estrogen levels come back “unusually high for someone on testosterone,” his doctor refers him to a hepatologist, because his bilirubin levels are also elevated, whatever those are. One liver ultrasound and a third blood test later, the hepatologist pronounces his liver satisfactory.

“The liver processes out excess hormones,” she explains, her Rs all Boston-strangled. “So, this was worth checking, but your liver is fine.”

Her best guesses: 1) that he has Gilbert’s Syndrome, which is harmless, and definitely not causing his hives, 2) that he’s androgen insensitive, but then again, probably not, since that occurs in people with XY chromosomes, and 3) that he should see an endocrinologist.

Maybe his body just doesn’t give a shit about T, Gabriel self-diagnoses as he escapes the hospital into the suffocating July afternoon. The sun wraps heat around his limbs. His skin tightens. Some of the ultrasound goo absorbed into the waistband of his jeans, and now it chafes against his stomach, sticky and inescapable. He heads for the Green Line stop, two blocks away, over a narrow river that he hopes will give off a cooling breeze.

It does not.

Scraping his arm against his shirt for friction, Gabriel pulls out his phone to distract himself.

nothing, he texts Nathan. suggested an endo

another dead end in the hunt for non-domesticated waterfowl, Nathan responds a second later.

Gabriel rolls his eyes even as his phone buzzes with another quip: the feral anserine trail goes cold.

That morning, Gabriel had snapped at Nathan to stop calling all his appointments a “wild goose chase.” At least Nathan joking about it means he’s forgiven him.

you’re a riot, he texts back, by which he means, I forgive you, too.

This time when his phone buzzes, it keeps going, and Gabriel nearly fumbles the thing trying to swipe his screen to answer.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” Nathan’s voice always sounds deeper on the phone, like the connection cuts away his alto notes, leaving him bassy and smooth. “Cajun shrimp tonight?”

“Sounds hot.” Gabriel stops in a patch of shade, blowing a quick breath down his free arm.

“I’ll turn the fan on for you.”

This pulls a laugh from Gabriel. They can’t have sex without the fan on, and so it’s become flirtatious code. Whenever Gabriel gets home from work, hivey and dizzy and distressed, he turns the fan on full-blast and stand in front of it with his shirt up and box breathes, and inevitably Nathan catches him and raises an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” says Gabriel. “Sounds good.”

The station is empty, just a flat stretch of concrete with recessed tracks and signs indicating inbound or outbound. He finds a bench in the shade and plucks at his shirt.

“Gabe,” Nathan says. In the background, Gabriel can hear people singing snatches of Hamilton songs, badly. Trans VisCo barely qualifies as a workplace. “What are you going to do if the endocrinologist doesn’t find anything, either?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” Gabriel answers. He has, though. Maybe he’ll change his mind, but at the moment, he’s thinking he’ll just let it go.

If the endocrinologist comes up empty-handed, doesn’t that answer Gabriel’s question? Why am I bleeding? he’d demanded, of his doctor, of medical science, of his body. And now he thinks, maybe, his body is answering. Because you are. Because you just do.

Now that the question has changed—okay, I bleed, even on T; how do I stop it?—he has new options. Good old fashioned birth control pills, for one, skipping all the placebos. An IUD, or whatever they call the kind they implant in your arm. Quarterly birth control shots.

“You could still go the hysto route, you know.”

“Yes, NatNat, I know.” Gabriel leans back on the bench, and even the wood feels hot, pressing like fire pokers into his shoulder blades. “If a hysto’s so great, why haven’t you gotten one?”

“I don’t need one.”

“Why not?”

“Because—T works for me.”

“Well, why don’t you get one anyway?”

“Why—” Nathan clucks his tongue. “Because it’s super invasive and painful and expensive, so I’d rather avoid it if I can.”

“And you don’t think I feel the same way?”

A moment of silence, aside from the distant butchering of Say No to This. “Yeah,” says Nathan at last, his tone contrite. “I’m—being pushy, huh? Sorry, bud.”

Bud. It’s a weird term of endearment. Too Bostonian to like. But it only started after the Pride Festival, and Nathan only ever says it in that soft tone. They haven’t put a label on what they are now. Friends, roommates, partners—maybe they’re everything. Gabriel’s thought about it, and he wouldn’t mind. Being everything. Maybe it’s weird, to expect to be just one thing.

“It’s okay,” says Gabriel. He spots a drink machine down the platform, but how to survive that shamble across the sun-bleached concrete? Maybe he’ll start carrying frozen water bottles with him. “I’ll be home soon. Turn the fan on for me.”