Ruby Sutherland Doesn't Break

Chapter Two

          TESS THREW THE hatchet with practiced efficiency and precision, and waited for the satisfying crunch of the blade head burying itself in the trunk of the target tree. Of course, it helped that she was pissed off and freaked out and needing something like this to let herself actually think. It had finally gotten too much.
           Not just one thing. Everything.
           Her whole existence.
           And if she was honest, it had all started the day she had fled from dealing with her best friend—the girl she had once called her soulmate—suddenly looking extremely sexy when she had decided to be a little extra manhate-y in her reaction to the male gaze.
           She and Ruby had both been late bloomers, but damn it all, she had not expected her friend to become what she had assume was a carbon copy of her mother Claire Sutherland-Green as a teen except Ruby had been smaller—more cutely attractive if Tess could be honest now—in the chest. She also had no idea what her sudden attraction had even meant, or she hadn't allowed herself to consider it back then. It was all too clear now though. And it flew in the face of the entire reason she had tried to distinguish herself separately from Ruby only for the girl to just vanish from her life.
           All her life, Tess had strived to be normal. She couldn't have explained why she always felt she wasn't back then. It was just a fact: Tess was not normal by her very nature. Even though she was only now dealing with exactly what that nature was. But she had thought she had to be normal, and she had been pretty sure she knew what that looked like: an allocisheteronormative relationship, possibly kids, college and a comfortably stable paycheque from a simple job. That was what her parents seemed to want from her anyway. What they taught her. Oh, they had nothing against queerness in general, but they were pretty sure she was straight. So Ruby—extremely beautifully powerfully queer Ruby—was a welcome distraction at first. A fellow oddball who wasn't quite sure what their oddness was.
         But then puberty finally started for them late in middle school. Ruby turned gorgeous and started really showing how much of her stepmother's personality and taste she actually had taken in. Puberty for Tess felt like a nightmare. Sure she liked that she became what was considered conventionally attractive, but she felt less like herself.
        Plus there was supposed to be an effect on her libido that initially seemed not to happen. Not until she watched Ruby's perfectly shaped ass in the jeans she'd worn on their first day of high school and heard the girl tear into Steven for staring like Tess had tried very very very hard not to do. It was so decidedly not normal of a reaction. So she had fled from it emotionally and made sure she had a relatively busy high school life.
         But she hadn't meant for the friendship to just... end.
         She had just wanted to make sure she was normal before she subjected herself or Ruby to the potential disaster of her awkwardness. But—the occasional hyper lesbian outburst notwithstanding—at the time Ruby had become... numb. Closed off to nearly everyone after her father died. Not bitchy or standoffish, just... desaturated. Muted. Dimmed. She drifted through life.
        And so Tess had just watched her best friend disappear from her life. Unable to figure out what went wrong or why Ruby hadn't ever reached out. But that was the start of her realising what now was driving her mad.
         She wasn't Cis Het. At all. Not even a little.
        Back then though, she tried really really hard to be both those things. To be normal, or what she had believed to be normal. She ignored her libido entirely. Yes, it kicked in for all manner of really cute girls and especially any glimpses of the even more queer icon growth of her former best friend, but so what? It wasn't the brand of normal Tess Kellar was supposed to be. So she threw herself at boys instead.
         "Fucking Christ."
          She mumbled as she gritted her teeth and flung her hatchet again.
         Crunch.
         She smiled. God, it felt good to finally deal with her shit. To admit it. The truth. Her truth. Their truth.
          That was what had always made her feel off no matter how normal she seemed. It was what made her off because she seemed normal. She was queer. Extremely queer. And not just in her sexuality. It was also her gender identity. She wasn't a Cis woman. She was... femme. It was the only word that stuck, even if it went at odds with the very stereotypical butch vibe of the job she had left college and gone to trade school for. The full explanation was this: she identified as NonBinary, but leaned and presented more as femme. Not a woman. Just lightly feminine in a nonspecifically binaried way. She was still getting used to that fact she had stumbled on thanks to her suddenly epiphany while watching a video essay on YouTube a few hours ago. But even in her infantile state, Tess knew her goddamn pronouns.
          She/Them by order of comfortability/familiarity.
She would be a she for most people, but for those closest to them... well... they were special enough for them. It was so simple, and yet she had run from it all for years. She had run from a lot of things for years, and now she was having to face them. For the most part, it was going smoothly. It was mostly just Tess working it out for herself and planning how she would let others know. But there were going to be some changes that would be difficult. And one specific one that was already pissing her off.
            Jeremy wasn't handling things well. Well... of course he wouldn't, but he was being a particular brand of asshole about it. If she had to be fair, she could understand his reaction. It was just the grander version of every breakup she'd ever had. All of the boys and men she had dated over the years. Or rather, that she made shows of dating in an attempt to turn herself normal by sheer force of heterosexuality. But it was pretty hard to actually do when she was actively ignoring the direction her sexuality was actually taking.
           Since realising that she was hyper attracted to Ruby, she had sought out all the boys who would clearly be the sort she should be attracted to. Aaron and Philip and Scott and even Steven had been burned through within her first year of high school. They were the nightmares, all grabby and pushy and clearly only thought with their dicks. All of which was why she had quickly dumped each one. Steven specifically she had publicly kneed in the groin when he tried to fondle her—or more specifically, when she stopped him and he made a dig at her saying that he thought she might have been easier to fuck than her bitch of a girlfriend Ruby. She still didn't know if she had done it because he was a vulgar asshole, out of outrage for being called easy even though she had still been a virgin then, or because he had called out that she had been in love with Ruby the whole time.
           After that, she made a point to at least fake interest in possibly having sex but being nervous because of the first time effect as she called it. It had worked pretty well until her junior year in which she had finally run out of good excuses for why she didn't sleep with any of her boyfriends—or checked out girls more than any guy—yet was apparently straight. So she had finally relented with Caleb, and then promptly got them both so drunk she barely remembered the experience other than that she didn't enjoy it and he clearly did. At least that first time. The second time had been sober and was followed promptly by him leaving when she hesitated to actually follow through. It did something horrible in her mind and heart.
Made her desperate to be convincing.
And so for the rest of junior year she forced herself to get at least good at getting her boyfriends off, even if she never did enjoy even the thought of it. Guys never did interest her. If she had wanted to sell her interest she was forced to think of the way Ruby had looked in a bikini when she had seen her at the pool over the summer. And yet she still denied the undeniable. All for something she was expected to want.
And then they graduated. That had been the last time she had seen Ruby, who went to college in California on an art scholarship. Meanwhile Tess had gone north to UW for a year. That was when her desire to be normal had finally started to snap. She had dropped out of UW and broke up with Wesley before doing what she actually wanted: trade school in carpentry.
Then she had come home and taken over her dad's hardware business, and eventually she became sort of the go to handyperson in town. But Ruby had still been gone—was still gone even now—and Claire and Delilah had mentioned that Ruby seemed to be getting along with a girl in college. So Tess just did what she always did. She went out and found a man to at least cling to the image of normal she was already questioning. And Jeremy wasn't a complete bastard, but he was still pretty dickish. He was... well, he was a typical Cis Het white man who had been an athlete and so thought highly of himself. Entitled. Owed. He didn't force her on things, but he did push and try to coerce. He also tended to ignore when she said something he didn't want to consider.
Like he had before she had come out to the woods to throw her hatchet at the tree. Her tree. The one she had scarred up the day after first sleeping with Caleb to let out her natural disgust and self hatred. Now it was her venting station when dealing with all the shit she had imposed on herself.
"Come on, Babydoll. No girl that good in the sack could be a dyke. You might be bi, but we both know you love di—"
She let out a feral scream as she thought about the smug way he had laughed at what she was finally admitting to the world. She had nearly hit him. Nearly buried her hatchet in the hood of his Subaru instead of the tree. And she still had to face him and finish this. But she wanted nothing more than to be done. To finally flip off normal and find out what it was like to just be her. To hook up with some woman and find out what she really liked. Then maybe reach out to Ruby for advice on dating.
Or maybe it would be better to just reach out to the self titled Bright Falls Queer Coven, the three couple friend group of sapphic women who were Ruby's family. Literally. Her moms—Claire Sutherland-Green and Delilah Green—were two of the six, along with Delilah's stepsister Astrid Parker and her girlfriend Jordan Everwood and their close friend Iris Kelly and her partner Stevie Scott. Even when Ruby's dad was alive, those six—Claire, Astrid, and Iris when Ruby was little, with Delilah coming in around the start of middle school followed quickly by Jordan and then Stevie—had raised Ruby. And it showed.
When Tess had last seen Ruby, the girl had her mother's curves in spades despite never having developed breasts beyond—in Tess's humble estimation—a stuffed double B cup. Out of love for her stepmom, she had already started her own tattoo collection with a couple of oracle cards flanking her stomach under her belly button: a praying mantis and an apple. Even now Tess remembered that Ruby had said they represented her moms because of how silly they got over those two cards and hinted at which belonged to who. Ruby took after Delilah in a little more than just her punky aesthetic and love of art. She had been confident in her sexuality and her game. Like both Delilah and Iris, she had a snarky and biting sense of humour when she let it loose. But she could be the sweetest at times like Claire. And as far as Tess had been able to tell, she could switch into the absolutely devastating ice queen bitch just like her Aunt Astrid. The rest was harder to see. Because after her dad had died, Ruby had started holding back her vulnerable traits.
"Stop! She's not here anymore. You ran, then she left, and now you need to move on from that pain. You need to actually get laid for once. And you need to stop putting up with all this Cis Het bullshit."
As she spoke the thought out loud, she eyed the tree that she periodically butchered. If she was going to be done—really done—with all her old allocisheteronormativity shit, then she knew what she needed to do. The grand gesture to symbolise the turn in her life. The end of the foolish little girl who ran from love and happiness because it wasn't normal even if it was completely her dream. She turned and stalked over to her ATV. She needed something bigger than her hatchet if she was going to take down this fucking tree.