Awoken

Chapter Three

      He couldn't stop staring at her, pizza neglected on the plate in front of him, jaw slightly open. He must have heard it wrong. He had to. There was no way...with her soft features...how pretty and expressive her eyes could be. Reasoning forced its way through and he convinced himself it was a joke. Zoe St. Clair wasn't born a man. Absolutely not. So Hunter did the one thing he always defaulted to when in an awkward situation and not getting the joke: he laughed. His laugh was a bit too loud and strained, cringing inside at how it came out rushed instead of smooth. If this was a party and she was the girl he had his eye on, things wouldn't go his way. He'd have beer in his face and she'd be walking out the door. But Zoe just sat there with a serious expression and eyes locked on his. Holy shit, she wasn't lying. 

      Hunter leaned forward to look at her features more thoroughly, hoping to find any clue that confirmed what she told him. The way she tossed it out there, a casual fact as if she was describing the color of her car, made it all seem less real. That kind of confession should come with tears and a heartfelt speech. She should be reassuring him now that nothing has changed and that everything was still a beautiful, psychic, salvation story. Instead they had this quick exchange of words in a pizza joint he didn't even get the chance to enjoy. It wasn't like he came to Buffalo all that often or even knew much about Western New York. He was from the Catskills, from a closer knit community, and issues like this were left in bigger cities or TV shows. Now he was front and center. Saved by a transgender woman that was holding out on him. Then again, he asked himself, did it even matter?

      She was still beautiful, despite Hunter knowing without a doubt that he was thoroughly straight. Not a single piece of him had any desire to date a guy. He was attracted to the female form, to the grace and softness of everything they did, to the way they made him feel deep in the pit of his being. He wanted someone he could feel like a man with. Someone he could protect and be every kind of manly stereotype possible with.

      Could he do something like that with someone who was transgender? She looked very much like a woman, he told himself, and she certainly moved like one too. She had an elegance to her posture and the way she crossed her legs at the ankle, back straight, using a fork and knife to eat pizza. Little things like that made him smile. Then there were the bigger things. Did she have the surgery to change everything down below? Did she still have a...male...body? That was the part he wanted to know, the part he was almost obsessed with.

      For her part, Zoe was enjoying Hunter's quiet reaction to her big bombshell. She knew this would cut the cord and free them from whatever bond he felt had grown between them. A "connection" he called it, as he ordered a pizza with sausage and mushrooms...her favorite. It irritated her that his favorite pizza just happened to be hers! As if fate was throwing her yet another reason to stick around. When it came down to it, he belonged in a frat with his buddies and some sorority girl feigning to his every whim. He didn't need someone like Zoe in his life complicating it all. She didn't need someone like him making her question if what she did was good enough. Nothing about them fit and this was the only way to drive the point home.

    "Not hungry anymore?", she asked with a small smirk.

    Hunter swallowed hard, "Just taking everything in."

    "If you have questions, I'm fine with answering them. Usually I refer people to the internet, but I'll make an exception with you", she said.

    He rubbed the back of his neck, "Were you always...like this?"

    "No, I used to be ugly. To some degree, I still am", she shrugged.

    "You're not ugly", he countered, "so let's clear that one up right now. That's what's weird about the whole thing. I saw someone...like you...on campus earlier in the year but he - uh she, I mean - didn't look like you. At all."