ii.

HOLLIS WAS SITTING in the corner during her set. She couldn't help but notice him. She played two cover songs, Cyndi Lauper and Sheryl Crow, and then two originals. Her plan was usually to lure people in with familiar cover songs and then hope they stayed to hear her own songs.

She knew there was an adage to write what you know about, but Fifer liked to write love songs. Sappy, sweet love songs, all about adoration and happiness. She didn't know why. She'd never fallen in love.

She would.

She was not aromantic.

If she could ever find a guy—or girl, frankly; she was cheerfully bisexual, though she thought she liked a male aesthetic perhaps a little more—who would be fine with never having sex with her and probably not even sharing a bed and the fact that she'd be masturbating constantly without them…

Well, that was never going to happen, though.

Fifer had started Aces are Aces!, a group for asexuals on the Shepherd University campus back when she'd been a student at the college. She'd graduated about four years ago, now, but she still ran the group.

She organized Aces Night Out for the group—whenever she was in town and not on some other ill-begotten tour, that was. The rest of the time, she had various gig-type jobs—she delivered Doordash and shopped for Instacart. She sometimes would go and get jobs at a temp agency.

But now that she was certain she hated touring, she was going to have to figure something else out.

She simply wasn't sure what.

Ever since she'd been a little girl, she'd wanted to be a singer and songwriter, and she'd worked hard to figure out a way to make that her job. She thought she wanted that life. After all, she loved to sing and play and she also loved performing.

But she hated touring. And there was no way to be a musician and make enough money to support herself and not tour. Maybe if she lived somewhere else, she supposed. Maybe if she moved to New York City, maybe then she could stay in one place and never go on tour.

But she didn't want to live in a city either.

She liked it here, in Shepherdstown. Touring made her miserable. She never wanted to go on another tour. So, no more dream of being a musician, no more dream of making it as a singer, no more anything at all.

Part of the reason she liked it here was that she'd put a lot of effort into creating a community here. The Aces are Aces! group was active, and there were members of all ages, not just young people who went to the college. This was really important for the asexual members of the group, because one of the real difficulties all asexuals faced was trying to have deep, important relationships with other people.

People tended to require sex in order for a relationship to be considered important.

Otherwise, you were just friends. And you cared about your friends, of course, but you didn't live with them and you didn't assume that you'd bring them with you to your parents' house every other Christmas and their parents' the other years. You didn't automatically assume they'd be your plus-one for a wedding or an office party. You didn't get to be with them in the hospital if they were deathly ill.

Asexuals could get very lonely. It wasn't fair to assume that just because a person didn't want to have sex or even a romantic relationship that they didn't want human connection. Everyone needed human connection.

So, in Aces are Aces! they provided connection for each other.

Once, Fifer had even tried dating a guy in the group. His name was Henry and he was a cyclops. He was older than her, which hadn't been ideal, but she thought that beggars couldn't be choosers. Henry was thirty-four to her then twenty-five. He was asexual, low libido, but he wanted a romantic partner. On paper, it seemed like they would work really well.

But it hadn't.

She didn't find him attractive, that was the problem, she thought. She did find people attractive. She had a sense of it, of what made a person objectively attractive, and then she also had her own tastes. She sometimes did find people she knew in real life attractive, but she never wanted to act on the attraction. It wasn't the kind of thing that made her want to touch that person or kiss them or… eww.

And it wasn't that kissing was gross, not exactly. She liked watching people kiss on TV. She liked the idea of kissing. She'd tried it a few times, though, and it was horrific. She was overwhelmed by the strange smells and sensations and the…wetness. Yuck.

Anyway, she realized that she needed to have some level of attractedness to fall in love with someone, which didn't make sense to her, not really. What did it matter? She didn't want to have sex with Henry, and he didn't want to have sex with her. But she wanted to find him appealing in some way.

Romance was about feeling things for another person, and apparently attraction was part of that for her.

Try as she might, she couldn't summon anything more than friendship for Henry. He felt the same way, it turned out, but it hadn't really bothered him. He sort of conflated friendship and romance. He thought having a romantic partner to do things with was the sum total of the idea of romance. Her commitment to him had made him feel happy, settled, and pleased.

But she had felt as if something was missing.

This had triggered one of her doubt phases. She had them every now and again—less now than when she was a teenager or in her early twenties, admittedly. Was she really asexual? Maybe she wasn't, after all. Or maybe she wasn't aegosexual. Maybe she was a kind of demisexual, and she was just waiting for the right guy, and if she ever met him, she'd finally experience—

Except, no. That didn't make sense, because she did experience sexual attraction. She simply didn't want to act on it.

The doubt phase predictably kicked her into a depression phase. It wasn't fair that she was so weird . Why couldn't she simply be normal like all the other sexual people in the world? Why couldn't she just put on her big girl panties—or take them off, she supposed—and get fucking laid. Just do it. Everyone else did.

In the immortal words of George Michael, sex was natural, sex was good. Not everybody did it, but everybody should.

She should.

Just… fuck someone. Anyone. Anyone at all .

This usually triggered her making some kind of dating profile on an app, getting messages, setting up a date, and then chickening out of all of it at the last moment and ghosting all the nice guys who'd shown interest in her.

Her thing with Henry had been two years ago. She was twenty-seven now. She hadn't even attempted anything resembling something romantic since then. She found the entire idea daunting.

No, she'd just keep up with Aces are Aces! And the group would grow with her, and—as long as she had the group—she'd always have people. There would be people to call when her car broke down and she needed someone to help her get to work in the morning. There would be people to call when she wanted to go out to the movies. There would be outings and trivia groups and potlucks and all the things she organized for the group. It would be something, even if it wasn't quite enough.

No one ever really felt like they had enough, anyway, not even people with romantic lifelong partners and children and grandchildren. Fifer understood that it was pretty common for people to still feel some sort of niggling worry, deep down, as if something was missing. Maybe that was just being a person, in the end. Maybe it was best to ignore that feeling and focus on feeling grateful.

She'd try that.

She played four songs in her set, and she tried not to keep looking at Hollis while she was playing, but she did. Maybe it was because he was sitting in the corner, all alone, gazing at her solemnly. Maybe it was because his skeletal face stood out. Maybe it was because she kept thinking ridiculous thoughts like, If he's a skeleton, how is he filling out that hoodie? It looked like he had broad shoulders and a broad chest under there. Was that an illusion? Magical somehow?

When she finished, everyone clapped, and there were lots of whoops and yells from the room. That was gratifying and she couldn't help it. She did have fans in town. When she played, people would come in from the garden in the back of the bar and from the room in front where the bar was, and they'd sit down and listen. Fifer knew that not everyone playing open mic attracted an audience like that.

It was good, and she liked it. It made her feel good, worthwhile, as though she had something to give to other people that they valued. It helped that it was something that she also really enjoyed doing. It was a sort of perfect symbiosis, and she wouldn't trade it for the world.

"Thanks everyone," she said into the microphone. She turned down her guitar and unplugged it. Lucy, who ran the open mic, a kelpie, came over to help Fifer get disconnected from everything.

Lucy told the gathered crowd to put their hands together for Hollis.

There was some scattered clapping, but about two-thirds of the crowd got up and left, talking amongst themselves. Fifer heard things like, "noise" and "just can't handle that" and "too much."

Fifer put her guitar away in the other room and came out and plopped herself right down in front of the area where the microphone was set up.

Hollis was kneeling down, plugging in an array of foot pedals. His instrument was not a ukulele at all. It was a violin. A sleek, futuristic-looking electric violin with half of the body cut out. It was bright blue. He stood back up, plugged in his violin and checked a few of the pedals. He spoke into the microphone, "I'm about to radically change the vibe in here."

Fifer blinked, waiting.

She had to admit, open mic tended to attract a certain kind of musician. You usually didn't get a whole band to show up to play open mic, for instance—what was the point in setting up all that for four songs? You didn't tend to get someone who just played the flute or the saxophone or the drums. Sometimes, you might get a guy or girl who played keyboards.

But a keyboard player or a guitar player would almost always be of the same variety—someone who'd sing and play together, accompanying their voice with an instrument. The style of music might vary, but it was typically folky or poppy or melodic, something pleasant that people liked to listen to.

Fifer had never seen someone bring distortion pedals to open mic before.

Hollis looked out at the people who were sitting in front, and then made an experimental stroke with his bow on the violin, which was fitted right under his skull's chin. The sound that came out of it was strange—a sort of mix between a violin and an electric guitar, with that characteristic violin twang, but somehow deeper and grittier with the distortion. He played a few licks, then went into a bit of "Greensleeves" before stopping and nodding. The sound was loud, oppressively loud, but it was fantastic.

Fifer loved it. She let out a delighted laugh, even as two or three of the other people sitting around to listen got up to go elsewhere.

Hollis wasn't paying any attention to the audience at this point, though. Instead, he launched into "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC. The first bit built as his fingers danced over the strings. Then she realized he was using loop pedals to play with himself. He set up the background lick, the one that went up and down the scale, and looped it on one of his pedals so that it played as he played over it. He laid down two more layers, changing the sound so that different elements had different layers of distortion. Then he played the main melody over top of that.

He didn't look at the audience. He didn't look at anything except his fingers moving on the violin. He stood up there, hunched around the instrument, his skeletal fingers dragging the bow string over the the strings of the violin. His bony skull peaked out from behind his hoodie, gleaming white. He was something to behold, and the music was this intense and overwhelming wall of pure sound.

He played it perfectly.

She loved it.

It was very, very loud.

No one played AC/DC at open mic night.

She was electrified and overjoyed and excited. She couldn't stop grinning. She sat there, transfixed, watching this happen.

Two more people watching got up and left, eyes wide, clearly affected by the intensity of it.

But Jack was still there, grinning at her, raising the metal sign above his head. When Hollis launched into the chorus, Jack whooped. And there were two or three other people watching, all of whom were clearly enjoying this as much as she was.

Hollis finished the song, and then he played "Master of Puppets" and then something very distorted and very loud that she thought might have been Van Halen, but she couldn't place it. Then he shuffled back over to the microphone and said, "Thanks for listening."

And that was it.

He tore everything down and took away all his equipment, and the next player came up (because two more people had signed up later, and Hollis hadn't actually been last) to play covers of Neil Young and Rick Springfield and Billy Joel.

She went into the back room—it was where the dartboard was, but it was where people usually left their guitars for open mic night—while he packed up his equipment.

She leaned against the wall, toying with a lock of her hair, feeling a strange feeling in her belly that she didn't know if she'd ever really quite felt before. "Wow, you're really good."

He glanced up at her, letting out a little laugh of disbelief. " You're really good."

She laughed, too. "We're on, like, totally different wavelengths with our music."

He nodded. "Uh, true."

She grinned at him. "I just… I never heard anyone do something like that. You have balls ." Except, well, she guessed he literally didn't.

He laughed again, gazing at her. "It's nothing. I get bored is all. So, sometimes, I get on these kicks where I go out and, uh, it's easier if I have something to accomplish while I'm out. Otherwise, what's the point, I guess? I don't think very many people like it that I'm playing. But… fuck ‘em." He shrugged.

"Fuck ‘em, exactly," she said. "They're idiots. That was the coolest thing I've ever heard."

"Coolest thing?" He shrugged at her. "That's high praise."

"How long have you been playing violin?"

"I don't know. Forever," he said.

"Yeah?" she said. "That's so cool."

"I mean… I play other instruments too."

"Oh, yeah. Like, guitar, right? Because everyone plays guitar."

"I have," he said. "We could play together sometime, if you were into that."

"Seriously?"

"No, I'm lying to you." He was deadpan again.

She snorted. "Okay, you're fucking with me like Jack. Guess I walked into it."

"You did." But there was amusement in his tone. He went back to putting the violin away.

"So, you usually come to open mic?"

"Yeah, I have been. Past few weeks," he said.

"I think I'm going to as well," she said. "Because I'm not going to have a chance to play for people otherwise, and this seems like a nice chance to play out regularly. I like performing, you know. I just don't like touring."

"Fifer with an ‘F,' right?" he said.

"Don't look me up."

"You have music online? Can I buy it?"

She shrugged. "I mean, doesn't everyone?"

"No, not everyone is selling music online." He buckled the violin away and stood up. "You're a very interesting person, Fifer Ione."

"So are you, Hollis Mac," she said.

He laughed. "Well, thank you. I think that's a compliment."

"Yeah, same to you." She pushed off the wall and gave him a playful shove on the shoulder. Wow, that really felt like muscle under there. She furrowed her brow. It would be really rude to ask him questions like that, so she didn't. "I like interesting people."

"Do you?" He picked up his violin case. "Well, see you next week, maybe."

"You're just leaving? You play and then you leave?"

"Usually, yeah," he said. "You want me to stay?"

"I mean… you could," she said. "Not that I'm pressuring you or anything. If you want to leave, you should, um, I mean… I'm obviously not…" Flirting with you. Clearly not doing that. I don't know how to flirt with someone, and… and…

It was only that a guy who literally had no equipment to have sex? Might be sort of perfect for her, wouldn't he?

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to make you nervous or flustered."

"I'm not flustered!"

"Okay," he said. "Really, I am sorry." He started toward the door, towing his violin case. "See you next week."

"Right, um, goodbye," she said.