2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Rosalie flung her phone halfway across the office, where it bounced off the carpet and slid towards the door.

"Woah." Shelby cracked open the door as the phone slid to a stop. "You good?"

Rosalie sighed. She slumped in the chair and looked wearily at her second-in-charge.

"Sorry," she said. "I was reading the news."

"Ah." Shelby nodded. She bent, picked up the phone, and made a show of placing it gingerly on the desk, three feet from Rosalie. "In that case, may I suggest you don't read the news until at least after the next election?"

"Or maybe ever?" She glared glumly at the ceiling. "Is it wrong to wish for another pandemic? One that only targets Republicans?"

"Well, that's dark." Shelby took a seat at her adjacent desk and eyed her, the circle of drained coffee cups and the scrunched up balls of paper that had missed the trash can.

"Why?" Rosalie asked flatly. "They're the ones always calling for us to be exterminated."

"Oh yeah, white, femme, cisgender lesbians, you're their number one target." Shelby's eyebrows rose.

Rosalie blinked.

"Sorry," she said. "That was a little tone deaf."

Shelby rolled her eyes. "I mean I guess we'll let you keep your ally badge today. All things considered."

As a Puerto Rican trans woman, Rosalie's main deputy Shelby was used to dealing with self-centered, oblivious, white, cis people in the community and Rosalie felt genuinely shitty. The Rachel Carlson Center provided care and services for queer and gender diverse youth who were homeless or otherwise vulnerable, and while Rosalie, the director, was in fact queer, it was workers like Shelby who were the real resource of the center, the people that kept kids alive.

Reading the news each day really did leave her with the feeling of being under siege; each news article, each new backwards law launched another cannonball at the Center's walls. Shaking the foundation, the staff, and the kids in the most desperate need of help. Each bill threatened their physical and emotional safety, their rights to self-expression, to education, to appropriate healthcare, to live as themselves, to their very right to live at all . She took a shaky breath.

Shelby was right, though. While there were conservatives working to legislate against the rights of all women and queer people, it was her trans friends and clients who were in desperate need of support and advocacy. Shelby was not the person to vent to, despite their work relationship.

It was possible that she was a little burned out, she reflected, as she reached out and checked her phone for cracks. But then, they all were. They'd survived the Trump administration only to find that at least on a state level - and perhaps an international level - things were only getting worse.

"How are you holding up?" she asked Shelby now, extracting her own head from her ass. Shelby sighed, grey circles under her large dark eyes.

"Oh you know," she said with a shrug. "Sad. Terrified. Angry as fuck. The usual."

"It fucking sucks, Shelby." Rosalie leaned forward and met her eyes. "If you need some time off, like stress leave, or to go on a damn holiday away from all this-"

"There is no away from all this," Shelby's gaze held hers. "Especially when they can't leave." She gestured out to the center, to the kids they had in emergency care, to the kids that were out there in the street. "Honestly, I feel better when I'm here doing something."

"I get that," Rosalie said softly. "If there's anything you need or anything I can do-"

"Just what you're already doing," Shelby gave her a small smile. "Trying not to be an asshole. Actually fucking fighting with us."

It was a Friday night and Rosalie wove her way through the usual throngs of excited revelers crowding the sidewalks before reaching the quieter back streets then her city fringe home. Sometimes she drove to work, but most of the time, like tonight, on a pleasant night in early fall, she enjoyed the walk. Music crooning through her headphones she let her mind decompress, thoughts drifting dreamily as the stress of the day slipped away.

As she unlocked her little house just off the oft-beaten Nashville path, she thought of Shelby's gentle jibe as they both prepared to leave for the day.

"Any exciting plans for the weekend?" Shelby asked, raising her eyebrows, already knowing the answer.

Rosalie had just smiled. "So many."

"Involving a glass of wine and a bath, and watching a show with your cat?" Shelby did not approve of Rosalie's lifestyle and she always made it known.

"All of the above." Rosalie didn't mind her friend's disappointment, she'd been looking forward to the weekend since Monday. Her home was her sanctuary and after a week spent deeply engaged in the lives of others, she craved the solitude and peace of her time alone. "And you?"

"Mariana has the weekend off," Shelby said, her face softening as it always did when she mentioned her wife of fourteen years. "Her sister is babysitting so we can have a date night, then tomorrow we're taking the kids to the water park."

"Sounds nice," Rosalie had said. It did sound nice. For Shelby.

Now as she walked into her quiet home, the polished floorboards gleaming softly as she switched on the light and Lemonade rushed to curl around her legs and complain about her absence, Rosalie felt nothing but content.

For years she'd assumed one day her life would also include a wife, or at least someone wife-shaped. Never children though, Rosalie knew too well how brutal the world was to ever consider that. But despite Shelby's disapproval, at the age of thirty-seven Rosalie had come to understand that domestic life was not for her. She'd tried it on a number of occasions but the truth was that she had limited energy for relationship battles and only intermittent interest in cohabitating.

Sure, it was nice to have someone to come home to when things were great - conversation, sex, someone to snuggle up to on the couch - but things didn't stay great forever. Coming home to someone also included arguments about who did more housework and who never instigated sex anymore or wasn't emotionally available or backed away when they felt like they were cornered (Rosalie, Rosalie, Rosalie and Rosalie again.)

So it felt all-round pretty nice to be self-sufficient. No one walked around the place looking disappointed in her all the time and she didn't have to walk on eggshells. She could put on a record at seven o'clock in the morning and dance alone in her kitchen while she made her first coffee of the day. She could lie in the bath for an hour to decompress, eat toast for dinner or cook an elaborate feast. She could stretch out wide and sleep in her big comfortable bed like a starfish, or have long one-sided conversations with Lemonade about the state of the world.

"I know," she said to him now, as she slipped out of her shoes and tossed her keys on the bench, "I'm a bad, selfish person. I should be going to Cassidy's gig tonight; I promised Savannah. But I literally can't think of anything worse right now than being packed in with sweaty strangers at a loud bar full of drunks. And I'm pretty sure Savannah already knew I'd bail on her before she even invited me."

Savannah was the one person she felt comfortable letting down. They owed each other so much that they both knew the debt could never be repaid; the small things didn't even register between them.

"Cassidy will hardly notice," she consoled herself against the slight tinge of guilt as she refilled the cat's kibble bowl. She straightened up to peer into her fridge, pulling out a bottle of wine and thought of the last time she'd seen Savannah's younger sister, about a month ago. The whole family had come over to Rosalie's for dinner. Since Savannah and Brynn's daughter Emmeline had been born, just over three months ago, they'd struggled to return to any kind of normal, though Savannah had thankfully lost the haunted look in her eyes as she'd come out the other side of a hard bout of postnatal depression.

For someone of Savannah's level of fame to head out to a restaurant also meant more fuss and exposure than anyone wanted to deal with, so Rosalie had suggested a low-key meal at her place. When it was on her own terms, Rosalie loved to entertain and she'd spent a joyous afternoon cooking up a storm before their arrival. She could have served up Lemonade's kibble for all Cassidy noticed though.

She and Lane could barely drag their burning eyes off each other, always low-key touching like being even a foot apart would be agony. Long after they'd left, the ghost of new lust seemed to flutter about Rosalie's living room, making her smile as she remembered feeling that same restless energy in her own veins.

Even though she knew it was wrong to have favorites, Lane was still, hands down, her favorite of all the kids who'd come through the center. She'd watched them grow from a traumatized fourteen-year-old, through to a thriving, if socially anxious older teen, always with a blunt irreverent sense of humor and frequently lacking a filter. At twenty-two she'd paired them with Savannah - her friend in need of a nanny and her ex-client in need of guidance - and over the next few years had seen them blossom under her care, from a cute lavender-haired punk kid, through to accessing hormones and top surgery and blooming into the classically handsome heartbreaker they'd become.

More than just Cassidy had swooned in their wake, but in all the years of counseling Lane she'd never seen them anything more than slightly diverted by a pretty face. Secretly, Rosalie had related. Despite one or two notable exceptions, she too had worked hard at keeping her sexual and romantic entanglements light. It had unnerved her to see Lane so twisted up in knots over another human being, but she found herself utterly delighted to see it happen. Rosalie loved her own life; she found though, that she didn't want it for Lane.

That night as she lay in the bath, gazing at her own toes, even Lemonade done with her company, she found herself thinking of her younger self. It was the only thing that ever gave her any kind of pause about her quiet, peaceful life. Teenage Rosalie would be pissed at her.