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I let a genuine smile break free. “That’s what I’m here for.”
The rest of my hour with Steven switches to lighter topics. He seems a bit more at ease by the time our sessionwinds down and I stand to shake his hand and escort him toward the door.
One customer down. Two rounds to go. I resolve to be less distracted next time. It would be humiliating for a customer to catch me distracted when they’re all college students paying good money for this experience.
I reheat my tea in the microwave that we hide from customers (at least a few of them would be scandalized by this tea faux pas) and then pace the basement before the next round starts. Cameron raises his eyebrow at me, but his nearly permanent scowl doesn’t change in any meaningful way. Julian jumps up to join me, calling it a fun game, and that deepens Cameron’s scowl to a look of actual disgust. But before they can start bickering again, it’s time for us to line up and greet our next round of customers.
“Welcome to the Boyfriend Café. We look forward to serving you.”
My next table is a girl looking to go into early childhood education after she graduates. Anna loves working with kids; it’s the adults who are getting her down.
“Kids are just so honest, you know?” she says. “It’s adults who are always speaking with some double meaning. Like the other day, we had this class of kids we were working with, and one walked right up to someone in my class and asked them what non-binary means. All the adults in the room were so awkward, but the kid was justasking a question. He didn’t think anything of it.”
A familiar bolt of dread shoots through me. I don’t make any secret of my gender here at school, but it rarely comes up as a topic of conversation, especially in a setting like this. My customers don’t have any reason to talk about it, except I suspect Anna brought this up deliberately. She’s fishing for my opinion on the matter, or perhaps for my approval. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted me to pat them on the head for not being a bigot, but how is that my damn job?
“What did your classmate say?” I ask mildly. I’d prefer for her to talk about this instead of me.
Anna jerks her shoulders in a shrug. “They said some people aren’t boys or girls. They didn’t want to talk too much about it.”
I understand the feeling. I don’t really want to talk about it either, but I’m at work with a customer, and she isn’t doing anything wrong by bringing up the subject.
“What would you say?” she prompts.
Ugh. What would I say? I don’t know. The same things I’ve had to say over and over since coming out, probably. The same things I’ll be repeating to everyone I meet for my entire life. It gets easier, but it never really becomes fun trying to explain your existence to another person.
“It sounds like your classmate had a good answer,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, the kid didn’t ask any more after that. He seemed to accept it.”
Kids often do, I’ve found. The feeling of being nebulous, neither,different, isn’t as strange to them. They’re often less poisoned by expectations, so hearing that someone isn’t really a boy or a girl doesn’t rock their world. If only everyone could take it in stride and go back to playing with their LEGOs.
Anna has apparently gotten the approval she was seeking from me. She moves on to complaining about having too much homework, and I relax and encourage her along. Once she leaves, I take my last table of the night, a pair of friends both going for photography degrees. They’re the best table of the night since they’re mostly there to gossip rather than complain or throw awkward questions at me, and I lose track of time chatting with them.
I’m still grateful when their time is up and I get to escort them out. It’s been a draining night, especially with Diego consuming a good fifty percent of my brain power. Even when I’m not thinking about it, I’m kind of always thinking about it. Any time I have a free second, the memory of our dancing floods back in, bringing with it every sense and sensation from that night.
He never asked me about my gender. I corrected him one time and that’s been the whole discussion on the matter. If a guy who has spent his life mostly in the middle of nowhere, a guy who’s encountering this stuff for the first time, can take it in stride that easily, what is everyone else’s damn excuse?
Granted, Diego is studying gender and sexuality. So he might not have met someone like me before now, but his entire academic career prepared him for that meeting. Still, I don’t think people need a freaking degree to just chill the hell out. Is it really that hard?
I’m so distracted by these thoughts that I go through the motions of cleaning up the café on auto-pilot. I’m surprised when I realize we’re done and I should lock up the basement and head outside with the rest of the staff.
I walk them all around the house and bid them goodnight. They leave in a cluster, Cameron and Julian already well on their way to arguing. Poor Henry. He has to walk home every café night with that. It’s a wonder the guy stays so relentlessly cheerful, but he’s never complained in the slightest.
When I head inside, our manager, Mia, is lounging on the couch in the living room, as I knew she would be. I flop down beside her and start unbuttoning my vest and loosening the laces on my shoes. I dress like all the others for café nights. It’s very masculine, but it’s become the café’s uniform, in a way, and I don’t really mind it. If I wanted to show up in a dress or skirt one night, no one would care.
“How was it?” Mia says as I sprawl beside her. She lifts her feet to make space for me, then plops them in my lap.
“Fine,” I say.
“You look exhausted. Even compared to usual.” Sheshuts the laptop perched on her thighs and sets it on the coffee table. “I finished the scheduling for the next month and updated the waitlist. I also made sure we have some social media posts ready for special events. Oh, and I paid Montridge Munchies, so we’re good for another month with them.”
I nod, too worn out to care. Mia has been on top of everything I could ask her for and more.
“Hey, seriously, are you okay? You look like you’re going to pass out sitting up,” she says.
“I feel like I’m going to pass out sitting up,” I reply.
“What happened? Did you have a bad customer?”
