Natasha could rock until cock’s crow, but she possessed a particular sensitivity toward music: namely whether it was boring. It was to her great benefit that she liked it hard, and loud, and aggressive. She fronted a band like that. The Porn Categories didn’t like getting boxed to a genre but if asked by an interviewer she supposed she would describe it as borrowing from post-hardcore, industrial and chiptune.

A similar band was the local opener in support of a visiting tour, which is why Natasha was here. She didn’t consider the other trans bands in the scene rivals. More like sisters. You support your sisters. Plus she got to indulge her rare transgendered blessing of shortness. Little corset, blunt black bangs, false lashes, fake nails. She enjoyed being the girl at a show. She never stayed in the pit long, but when she did join, the contrast entertained her. The high goth is for looking without touching. This time though she’d put in extra moshing, to rev up the audience. The crowd stayed unmoving, cross-armed even. That had been one set ago. Lavinia, her butch, sat out the pit two rows away as usual, and welcomed her in her arms with a remark on her sweatiness.

Lavinia had over a head of height on Natasha before the boots. The strength of her arms always soothed Natasha, even when she didn’t know she needed soothing. Which she did now: she was more than a little embarrassed at her half-hour of dancing alone. The next band was no distraction either. They were hard, loud, aggressive, but somehow monotone, a blur of snare drum and illegibly low guitar. Natasha did not understand why the pit filled up now. The music was undanceable, yet the invariant speed whipped a baker’s dozen metalheads into circumambulation. Pushes and elbows spilled through the crowd, and Lavinia hugged her tighter. She melted into her warmth, unique even in the swell of bodies, for the second it lingered.

Where did she go? Natasha peeked through a small opening where her lover had stood. She processed at once that Lavinia had spent the last fifteen minutes bobbing her head, bouncing a leg with uncharacteristic energy. Now she was in the one place she never ventured: the moshpit.

Lavinia windmilled her arms with verve, hard boots clomping toes. For once she wasn’t shrinking from herself. Half-pints reeled punch-drunk, men with long hair shoved her out the way. Natasha squinted. That wasn’t a man. Well, she’d made the wrong call before, but no man would crop a top that short and certainly no man danced with such loose command. Where the stranger moved, the floor followed. A plate carrier’s weight in jacket patches fluttered breezily about her. The stranger offered Lavinia a hand. Lavinia took both. Together they pinballed the crowd. By the time Natasha plucked her ass off the floor the set was over, Lavinia grinned like she was on molly, and the stranger traded high-fives with her constituency.

It was rare that The Porn Categories halted rehearsal. They’d been in lockstep for so many years that even new material coalesced into basic playability within a few tries. Stopping twice, now, was inordinate.

Natasha looked to the dragging drummer. Lavinia was hangdog. Most the time she took mistakes on the stiff upper lip.

“What’s wrong, Lav?”

Lavinia, steel-icy redwood-tough Lavinia, smiled like a schoolgirl on a first date, only she hadn’t smiled like that on their first date. “Just tired,” which was true, if rare. Lavinia had been between jobs for about a month, which is why she’d accepted an invitation from the moshpit to an afterparty.

The stranger’s name was Reina. She had hair down to her ass and illegible band patches describing violence in verb or noun form: all Rebuk-ed or Sterilizat-ion. Friends all over the scene apparently, no scene Natasha had ever been in but her group only grew as stragglers filed out of the bathrooms and merch booths. Her eyes never opened all the way, suspended in a lazy smile. Heightwise she stood between Natasha and her girlfriend, and strengthwise there was no compare: Lavinia if peer-pressured could bench a motorcycle but outside the gym clammed up with anxiety, while Reina’s tigrine poise filled the venue. And her shoulders. At any moment she could have bride-hoisted Natasha, with a twirl, a wink and a curtsy. All together she was kind of entrancing. But, work in the morning.

Natasha didn’t notice when her girlfriend got home. As she left for work, Lavinia was even sounder asleep than usual.

Bright, eager Lavinia: “I was in the pit.”

“No way,” said their guitarist, then the bassist: “You don’t dance.”

“Apparently I do.” The beginning of a blush crept up on Lavinia. What the hell was going on. “Wanna see the bruises?”

“Do I wanna see your tits? Do I want ice cream and a million dollars?” Locker room banter long supplanted earnest desire to bed Lavinia and-or Natasha. Not because foursomes would never happen: they were all transgender, and polyamorous besides. The quality of the sex, though, had turned out not worth the effort. Over time Natasha and Lavinia’s togetherness became a preconceived notion, and the band stayed the kinds of friends who verbally slap each other’s ass. Only this time there was a keenness. Novelty, maybe.

Lavinia stood. A hematoma around the forearm bone. Two smaller ones behind her armpit, and, as her shirt came free, a fresh-purpled constellation everywhere from her underarms to her lower back. Some of the higher ones up the neckline were sized not unlike a mouth.

The band cooed. Natasha felt an unbidden urge to shut them up. The sight of her girlfriend agitated a possessiveness right outside of her thighs, where Lavinia liked to grab her. God. They’d been too long without fucking. And Lavinia just kept turning, unveiling new shades. Natasha had never been a sadist but the wolf-grins on her bandmates stirred something. Maybe she’d propose getting spicy, but she should offer some standard sex first, see what Lav wanted. In her reverie Natasha barely noticed the shirt coming back on. She tucked her thoughts away as the Porn Categories lurched towards the end of rehearsal.

Natasha and Lavinia set aside a half hour before bedtime. Natasha had been pent up for so long it had become an ignorable background fixture. The release was welcome anyway. Lavinia was in no such straits: Natasha didn’t ask, but masturbation was likely just another pastime for the unemployed. She’d always had trouble cumming anyway. Thankfully not so getting hard. Natasha fucked herself out on Lavinia’s cock, and, after accepting a bevy of reassurances that no reciprocation was necessary, both nestled into their respective spoons.

“I want to try something spicy,” Natasha said, into the silence of Lavinia’s arms.

“Hm?” Lavinia’s focus had not improved much after practice ended. She was elsewhere even during the foreplay. Likely the job hunt was getting to her.

“Spicy. Like…” Her afterglowing mind grasped for examples. “Like spanking? You know.”

Lavinia nuzzled into Natasha’s hair. “Is that what the hickey was about?”

Natasha made a small noise. Lavinia had taken the pressure of teeth on neck with granite resolve, but for sure she got that extra bit harder. “Maybe I just like people knowing we fucked.”

Their downstairs neighbor was having a party. Mediocre psytrance lightly bumped the floor.

Lavinia: “I’m going out tomorrow morning.”

“Job interview?”

“Hanging with Reina. You remember Reina? I should be back before you’re home.” She offered that last figment in a conciliatory tone, as though she had something to apologize for by going out, and the return time was an olive branch. The job hunt. Who wouldn’t feel guilty at not contributing? Natasha tried to answer: the overtime wasn’t so bad, she’d be bored anyway with too much freedom. Her reassurances half-formed into a warm mumble, and went to sleep.

Lavinia was not home before Natasha.

Natasha tossed off her work laptop and slumped dead on her phone for fifteen minutes. No band practice, and she wasn’t hungry enough to stir up a meal, knowing it wouldn’t be as good as Lavinia’s.

Where was the hanging out at three in the afternoon? She pulled up socials. According to posts, Reina existed only on weekends, fronting her own band at capacity-packed bars. Natasha’s stomach queased. These bands she’d never heard of, this girl she met not a week ago, had thrice her audience. It couldn’t be the singing: she shrieked curses like a crow, incomprehensible and broken. No singer at all. Was it her looks? She certainly had an energy, though the particularities of stage presence slipped her phone speakers.

Whatever. Some bands are popular because they’re good and some bands are popular because they’re popular. Natasha had just resolved to fix herself whatever was in the fridge when Lavinia came through the door in a new shirt.

“Babe.” Lavinia bent over to kiss Natasha’s forehead. She smelled of light summer exertion. Up close the logo on her shirt read PURGATORIUM. Reina’s band.

“Hi Laviii,” Natasha answered in her customary singsong. “Where’d you get that shirt? Purgatorium? There’s like a million bands named that.”

“It’s Reina’s. Leftover from a tour. Her band’s dope.”

Dope? Wait, tour? “Eh, they all sound the same.”

Lavinia gave her an odd look. “Were you looking them up?” And then, in belated defense: “I don’t think that’s true.”

“They all, you know, they just play like…” Natasha bapped her thighs.

“It’s called a blast beat.”

So that’s where the hanging out was. They’d been fucking.

Which was okay. It was! Polyamory part-parcel. Natasha was often away and sex was an activity like any other. A hobby, if you please. What did she expect, Lavinia as an obedient stay-home housewife? It was boon enough that such a fine piece of butchwork could cook.

“Sorry, babe.” Natasha wasn’t quite sure what she was apologizing for. “I think I’m just hungry. Do you think you could, you know.”

“Honestly, I’m kind of tired. Maybe we could order something?”

Natasha tried not to frown. Their finances weren’t tight yet, but they’d get there if they started ordering in. Nevertheless Lavinia cooked daily, and better than Natasha. Maybe a break was in order. “Sure, babe,” she said with a tight smile.

That weekend, The Porn Categories played first of six bands. Three songs in, the crowd still wasn’t dancing: the longer they stared unmoving, the more Natasha knew herself judged. She thought she’d handled her fear of being appraised by being appraised, live music as exposure therapy, but by show’s end she had little more in her than perfunctory performance. Thank god that, at her worst, she was still competent. We’re The Porn Categories, thank you, we’re a local band, give it up for the next.

“Everyone has bad shows,” the guitarist offered.

Natasha answered: “There’s always something to improve.”

“I love you babe. You did great.” Lavinia had one hand on Natasha’s shoulder, her phone in her other. She’d worn the Purgatorium shirt. It was a good fit with the boot-butch look. Dressed down by stage standards, but it gave her this ominous all-black finish. Plus she was supporting local trans bands. If it made Natasha feel bilious, imagining Reina on stage not wearing a Porn Categories shirt, that was on her and she had to get over it.

“Hey, is everything okay?”, Natasha asked.

“Huh?”

“I felt like you were distracted back there.” She was distracted right now, stealing glances at her phone.

“I don’t…” Lavinia composed herself, spoke slow. “I thought I performed to standard.”

Lavinia’s phone buzzed.

Natasha, with a sigh: “Look. You have that new crush energy. If you have to go work that out...”

She she couldn’t get another word in before the band started ribbing about the new crush: jealous much? But Lavinia remained unamused. Just opened her hands, fumbled, and again careful with words, political even: “I don’t want you to have a problem with her.”

“I don’t!”

“Okay. Thank you. I am going to go hang with her. Is that okay?”

“You don’t need my permission.”

“Well. Thanks.” Lavinia lingered for a second, as though she might have more to say. Natasha might, too, but then her girlfriend was gone.

When Lavinia next announced intent to go out, Natasha offered to come along. She expected to meet resistance and instead found confusion. Well, if this was rare of her, it should comfort Lavinia that she had no intent to disturb the nascent polycule’s V-shape. If it could even be called that. Reina had no interest in formalities: this, Lavinia explained through the door as she hogged uncharacteristic amounts of bathroom time. Natasha had only just managed to muss out her false lashes when the knock came.

Reina was fashionably late in a tank top improvised out of a bulk-identical black tee. The slogan on her sweatpant leg, DEATH TO FALSE GRIND whatever that means, went up between Lavinia’s knees, DEATH thigh nuzzling crotch. Her shoulder striations flexed as she controlled the kiss. Only after seconds of staring did Natasha find it in herself to squeak out a hey.

“Heyyy,” Reina hummed without guile. Her mouth had found its way to Lavinia’s neck, where the pit-bruises once blossomed. She met Natasha’s gaze out of the corner of her own, and it didn’t mean anything, it was the only way to make polite eye contact in this position but Natasha swore she saw a twinkle.

Some trick of Reina’s tongue: Lavinia melted backwards onto the couch armrest. Novel crimson hickeyed her collarbone. Her eyes were glass until Reina slid in next to her, then they were bright awake, raking over her new crush. Sunny skin, spread legs, the hollow between the muscles of her back and triceps.

“Hey, um!”, Natasha breathed. “So! Are you excited for this restaurant? I’m still not sure where we’re going.”

“I’m not raring. Starting to think we could just order in.” Reina took up residence in Natasha’s home as easily as she did the bar. Even at this distance, she diffused a body warmth that might’ve been overwhelming, if not because it carried a scent, subtle but defined, of sun-dried linen. And if Natasha found it pleasant Lavinia took to it like catnip. They both ran cold, and Lavinia joked, not without reason, that no amount of cuddling warmed them.

Lavinia: “I’d love to cook for you, baby.”

Reina ignored Lavinia, or acknowledged her with some quirk of her smile, as she reached back to leaf through their CD collection. A vinyl Natasha unwisely picked up at an old favorite’s concert: they didn’t have a player.

“Do you like them?”, Natasha said, with a hope in her own voice she didn’t recognize.

“No.”

“Oh.” Lightning tingled out of Natasha’s chest to her fingertips. All at once it hit her she’d been standing for minutes. She looked around for somewhere to sit, like she didn’t already know it was the couch or bust. “Why not?”

“Mm.” Reina’s eyes shifted back to Natasha. God, what a smile. “Did you catch last week’s show at the Bull?”

“I don’t, um…” She let Reina’s poise swallow her anxiety. Of course her dismissal stung, with such easy warmth waiting on the other side.

“Check out the next. Visiting from Europe. Might not be your usual thing, but they’re melodic enough, and their songwriting is superb. The drummer’s something to behold.”

Reina was animated now, brilliant in her half-lid assurance, like a solar eclipse. The calm education of her attentions smothered Natasha’s anxiety. She found herself grateful. Wishing she understood more about the things that interested Reina, so that she could share in earnest.

In tandem, the more Reina grew at length, the more of her skin Lavinia nuzzled. Her nose snagged on the bra band visible through her armholes, ran up her underarm, breathed in her collarbone. She got greedy, fumbling crossbody for Reina’s hips: Reina just mussed her hair. The keen this elicited popped Natasha’s bubble. Something not unlike terror tickled her mons pubis from within.

Reina, reading her fretfulness: “I thought you guys were poly?”

Natasha grasped for an answer that would make sense, even to herself. With a heaving effort of linguistic intelligence, she managed: “We are.”

Worship slurred over Lavinia’s semiconscious tongue. She was drunk on Reina in a way Natasha thought actresses invented for porn. Reina just pet her. Regarded her with lax, waxing-gibbous eyes. Smiled like the Buddha.

Natasha, betraying her politics, exclaimed: “For god’s sake, Lav, she’s in sweatpants.”

“Yeahh’n they smell like her.” Lavinia oozed down the couch until her face was crotch-height to Reina, and nuzzled inside her thigh. She hadn’t even the decency to sound guilty, just grateful at the reminder of Reina’s particularities.

Natasha balked. The guilty one should be herself. Whatever Lavinia was getting out of this, it was clear she needed. Or even just wanted. Who was she to ask, much less judge? She braced her sudden dizziness against the living room wall.

“Are you not gonna join us,” Reina submitted to Natasha, and the noise Lavinia made upon hearing it was heartbreaking. Natasha could do nothing but nod, then realize that did not function as a response, then realize it had been interpreted anyway and Reina had begun to unbutton Lav’s jeans, which is probably what Natasha wanted. She was cold all over. Was she having a panic attack? With nary the strength to stand she found herself crawling on the tile, towards Reina’s heat.

“Do you need a moment?”, Reina asked. At some point Lavinia’s pants had come free. Her ass was soft, strong, helpless as putty under Reina’s grip. Natasha had taken plenty nudes and could but compare: Reina’s hands on her lover’s body possessed an artistry that no amount of her full-body posing could buy.

“I’m good. I figured I wouldn’t eat much.” A girlish blush crept up on Lavinia’s face. She tilted away, bashful. “I’m already prepped for you.”

Natasha was going to die.

Lavinia, with a small, broken, new squeak, a steadying of arms around Reina’s neck, positioned herself to reveal the umerciful sight of her new lover’s cock. Reina’s heft was tremendous, and what it did to Lavinia: a stroke of lightning splitting a mountain, peak to base. Natasha choked on the sight. Her cheeks tinged with secondhand humiliation. A perfect specimen of butchness, broken by… it was not right to call Reina in her rough-cut tank and unmade curls femme, but neither did she flag butch. Had they invented a type of woman that didn’t have to try? Because that’s what she was. An hour of makeup gave Natasha’s totality a fragment of the appeal of Reina’s thighs alone, clung as they were with perspiration to her sweatpants. Lavinia was one-point-five times Reina’s weight and it bothered her not at all, delighted her even, she cooed Lav to stop bouncing and melt, down to the base of her cock, spread like so much honey. Fucksake, she had abs. In any case Natasha was the only embarrassed one. Lavinia’s self-concept, crushed in the recesses of pleasure, died by the second under a neverending orgasm. Which was fine. Lavinia had needs unmet and it would be irresponsible of her partner to deny them.

In a flash Lavinia was on her stomach. Natasha jumped. Whatever body trick Reina performed to reverse positions had been too quick or clever to follow. That same power now had her girlfriend biting the couch arm, and if Lavinia was overpleasured before by her own locomotion, being at Reina’s mercy drew from her something inhuman. The sheer length of her rapture was becoming fearsome.

Reina looked over, remembering Natasha’s existence. Sweat poured down her face, the animal redolence that Natasha had caught on her band’s shirt, in another lifetime, or the beginning of this one. Still she smiled, and again read Natasha’s mind: “You don’t know trans women can have multiple orgasms?”

Earnestly she did not.

Lavinia’s life poured out of her half-erection. Her inability to stay hard seemed not only to not trouble her but unshackle a base euphoria. As though her nights with Natasha were mere responsibility, and what Reina did was sex. Reina crowned Lavinia’s apex with her own. Even now she was perfect in control, pulling her lover’s thighs back with force enough to collapse her under slow, liquid strokes. Moonlit pleasure gleamed out of the slivers of her eyes. When young Natasha’s aunt had taken her on her only hunting trip: the buck survived the first shot, and her aunt put it down with one tap behind the ear. In the moment Natasha just screamed. But not a month passed since that she didn’t visit the memory.

“Hey. Are you crying?”

Natasha looked up from the floor. Her vision was blurry and it didn’t help: the sight of Reina’s afterglow demanded focus. Perspiration beaded in her iliac furrows. She had Lavinia kitten-docile on her lap, and looked at Natasha like the aunt of memory had at the deer. Not without compassion, but neither kind.

How much time had passed? Oh god, she was wet all over. Sweat. Tears? She scrabbled up off the floor and to the bathroom mirror, had to get away from that pervasive mingling of Reina and Lavinia’s scent. Her makeup was unrecognizable in streaks. She was over-hot, burning from core to thighs, and sticky too. In a rush she took off her panties: wet enough to drip. Across the thin door, the sound of bedsprings started anew.

Natasha woke with little memory of going to sleep. Her knees hurt from the tile, and her skin was brittle and forlorn, like a dry sponge. She’d spent too long in the shower scrubbing. It made sense to be turned on by the sight of her girlfriend’s pleasure, yes, but she didn’t want it agglutinating on her. Just in case she took another shower: she could still smell summer love.

A different scent, coffee and spices, drew her afterwards to the kitchen. Only after stepping in did she realize she should’ve been dreading it. Reina was at the table, in the same clothes she’d brought, legs spread as though she owned the place and she might as well have, what with Lavinia cooking her breakfast.

She grasped for something to say. Reina was after all a guest, Lavinia a good host, and neither of them had noticed her yet. But she was going to have to disrupt their quiet eventually. Just as she prepared to take another step Reina began to sing.

It started low in her chest, a volcano depth bubbling over. Half-slouched she had a dark, rich baritone, and every inch she straightened granted her another peak of range, casually beyond the grasp of Natasha’s full effort. Natasha gripped the wall. Her stride had suspended in midair, and she set it down by the tiptoe, gripped by utter terror at making noise.

Lavinia set down the coffee she was pouring, and hand-drummed along.

$30 was the cheapest denim jackets went for. Natasha’d just gotten done sewing its first and thus far only patch when Lavinia came into the kitchen.

“Hey, babe.” Lavinia’s phone wasn’t in her hand this time but she still had that intractable absentmindedness about her. She’d been in afterglow for weeks. Even the affection with which she carded through Natasha’s hair was foreign.

“Hi!”, Natasha beamed, curling her body over the jacket as she pushed it away.

Lavinia spared it a confused glance, then pulled back a chair. “Can we talk?” She settled in with plodding seriousness. Oh, no.

“Um. Sure!”

After a lapse, as if fishing for the fullness of Natasha’s consent: “I’m thinking of joining Reina’s band.”

Natasha’s pelvis knotted taut. It was an instantly familiar sensation even though she’d only experienced it once. Maybe because she’d never stopped feeling it in earnest. The bathroom mirror, Lavinia’s shirts, the askew bookshelf: summer was coming round, and even the scent of outdoors was a reminder.

“I don’t see what’s so we-need-to-talk about it,” she answered. “You don’t need my permission.”

“I feel like I do?”

“I’m not the leader just because I’m the singer.”

“Okay. But the rest don’t get jealous. I don’t know. Maybe I’m insane. But I almost feel like you want to give me permission?” Grimacing: “Or withhold it.”

Something behind Natasha’s eye splintered like glass. She wasn’t a rockstar to keep her band on a leash. Reina wasn’t a better singer, just different, that’s what makes art fertile.

“And if I do withhold it?”, she found herself asking.

The inexpressive non-change in Lavinia’s face hurt worse than any shouting. Like she expected this. “Then I guess I won’t.”

“Okay.”

They fell into the silence that follows a couples quarrel: they did not even fall hand in hand.

“What’s that?” Lavinia motioned with her eyes at the jacket.

Natasha tried to summon up faith in the project. “I’m making a jacket.” She held it up by the patch she’d picked up for $15 at the community market, felis domesticus colored in even halves of lesbian and trans flags. Underneath, the label CHAOTIC LESBIAN.

Lavinia tried hard to not show pity. Worse, the low edges of her stare reflected a mild dismissal. Reina at the record collection.

Natasha’s chairlegs moaned against the tile. She stomped to the kitchen knifeblock, produced the scissors, and came back.

“Fine! Fuck!” She had the patch a quarter of the way off by sentence’s end, didn’t lift her head for Lavinia’s reply, didn’t need it: any answer besides yes was dishonest. When she was done the jacket bore a series of ragged holes in distant suggestion of a cat’s shape. Only by divine intervention did her fingers escape a similar fate.

Lavinia stood four paces from the table. Her eyes were as though witnessing murder.

“Is this what you want?”, Natasha asked. This time it was an earnest question.

Lavinia just dropped her shoulders, and left.

When Natasha undressed for bed that night, she found her underwear crusted with stale excitement.

She got downsized. It wasn’t fair. She’d been putting in more hours than ever to keep Lavinia around. Boss said she was always looking at her phone. How couldn’t she? Texts to her girlfriend went unanswered daylong. In her malignant curiosity she’d check Reina’s socials and get stunlocked in the bathroom stall. Reina didn’t post on weekdays, which only drove her compulsion.

At a red light Natasha flipped open socials. She didn’t realize the light turned green until the honking started.

Natasha had more time than ever to appreciate the size of Lavinia’s absence. When her girlfriend was home, she spent most hours in a faraway smile. Often her earbuds were loud enough to leak tinny, inscrutable instrumentation. Natasha looked up metal acts. She thought she’d begun to understand, but every time she got as far as mentioning a band name Lavinia would give her the look.

Masturbation indeed was just another hobby. At first Natasha refused it, but she’d tried sex one time in twice as many weeks. Her sessions went long: she’d spend hours chasing a single orgasm that didn’t derive from the memory of Reina claiming her girlfriend. Erotica didn’t stick. Porn was cold comfort. Lavinia’s old nudes took her back to square one. Often she would peel from her reverie in a powerless haze, giving up on completion. She’d go about her day with soaked panties, wondering if others could see or even smell her frustration through her clothes, grateful that she only wore black.

She bought a hair curler, and burned one end before giving up.

It was the last band practice before Lavinia and Natasha had to confront rent. They drove in silence, without so much as the radio. Natasha’s best effort gave her worst performance. She could not even find it in her to blame Lavinia, who drummed with more precision and style than ever.

“Everyone has bad shows,” the guitarist offered, but didn’t mean it.

“Sorry,” Natasha answered on reflex. “There’s just a lot on my mind.”

The bassist: “We can tell.”

It wasn’t a cue to start dumping about her problems, and Natasha didn’t manage to not take it as such. She kept tight to finance complaints. Maybe she’d made too many impulse purchases, maybe the price of everything had gone up. Both were correct, but the more profound truth was that she and Lavinia had been out of a job for weeks. Well, Lavinia for months.

“Actually.”

Natasha raised her head: Lavinia’s expression was a murky, sopping tangle.

“I have rent money,” she said.

Fear exhaled off Natasha’s shoulders. Up she went into Lavinia’s hug. It felt like watching the dead movie cat get up for pets in the behind-the-scenes. But why was her girlfriend so muddled about it? Natasha pulled back to ask: “Lav, where did you get that?”

Lavinia gulped so hard Natasha felt it through her shoulders.

“I got signed.”

“What?”

“Purgatorium.” A terrible happiness crept up on Lavinia. “Proud of it actually. We didn’t even think the label took demos.”

Natasha lingered in the hug for lack of elsewhere to move. Tension in her lower gut. She blinked hard like it might wipe away reality, or at least tears, but she wasn’t even crying, just paralyzed.

“Babe, this is good news,” Lavinia said in a conciliatory tone Natasha had never heard because she’d never betrayed her before, “I have like four months of rent in advance. It’s the start of a career.”

“You went behind my back.” Natasha, belated.

It was Lavinia who broke the hug. Natasha’s arms loitered for a second before she had the presence of mind to put them down.

Lavinia: “I don’t want you to put it like that.”

“Well I’m putting it like that. You cheated on me.”

Lavinia’s expression opened at last into gape upset, and then clamped down like steel. It was the most like herself she’d looked since she met Reina. Natasha berated herself for enjoying the sight, for the force of her recrimination, and for the fear that she’d never get to see that face again.

“You know what? I did cheat on you. And I think you liked it.”

What the fuck?

“You don’t get it,” Lavinia continued. “Maybe you can’t get it.” She turned to the bandmates Natasha had forgotten about: “Sorry, girls. Call me for anything. You know I’m there. I’m taking an Uber, I can afford that.”

Natasha couldn’t put her finger on when Reina moved in. Oh, she remembered when she started coming over to see Lavinia instead of the other way around: the shock of seeing her on the couch, shirtlessness kissed by perspiration, brazen dickprint on the singular layer of underwear. Locking eyes and knowing that her presence didn’t register, even as Reina lifted a hand in a lazy heyyy.

The more Reina was there the more Natasha hid, failing to escape the moans. She tried not to eavesdrop, because when she got close she started fantasizing, not that she had the slightest what she’d do when faced with the debauchery beyond. She was horny all the time now. It was killing her. No release provided more than an hour of defense against the fleeting fantasy and frequent reality of Reina fucking her girlfriend. Her biological imperative stole the little time she once spent applying for jobs, and she had no hobbies. If she wanted to join Reina and Lavinia she would not be denied, and that only made it worse: the thought of Reina’s radiant mercy threatened to drive her over the edge. She flinched, washed her hands and decided for a rare tryst with the outdoors.

The moon snuck up on her. Before losing her job she wouldn’t have stayed up late, much less by accident. She was glad for it anyhow: this far into the summer even the nights were hot, but by now it was a balmy luster rather than a fever. Plus she was goth. The moon gave her strength. Sure, even out here she could smell Reina. By some miracle the scent resisted mere nose blindness. But the longer the stars shone, the less meaning that held. It was not so raw a deal that she could not take it back. So her girlfriend had a girlfriend. They’d never broken up, and all she had to do was ask for more time together. The band stopped meeting up because they hadn’t found a drummer. She’d begun suspecting that one or both bandmates had struck out on their own, maybe even flirted with Purgatorium. So what? Natasha was an artist in her own right, frankly all she had to do was lay back and wait for the label’s backstab. She and Lavinia would get jobs. With each day shared they’d wake from the daydream together.

The ridiculous heft of the situation hit her when she walked into the apartment. Every room had been rearranged to the interloper’s whims. One night Lavinia and Reina fucked on her bed, the only bed. Natasha had slept on the couch, under Reina’s record player, which never felt the caress of Natasha’s favorite album, buried wherever it was under the archive of cartoon gore and facepaint in forests and unreadable, unintelligible, unendurable pretentiousness. That’d become their standard arrangement. They balled up Natasha’s covers into a corner when they wanted to lounge: the bitch seat.

Well, she’d never officially surrendered her room, so she had the right to tromp back in.

Reina was getting her dick sucked. The sheer fondness with which Lavinia worshiped her cock bordered on obedience. And Reina deserved it. Reina deserved everything that anyone could think to give her because she took so well: shining in her indulgence, never rushing, never stopping, possessed of the only size that could sate the newly ravenous Lavinia. Every so often, her fingers would drop Lavinia into doe-eyed near coma by a stroke of the hair. Every so often? How long had Natasha been staring?

“Heyyy,” Reina drawled. “Do you want to join us?”

That pulled Lavinia out of delirium by inches. She whined wordlessly before burying her face back in Reina’s pubic hair, breathing her in. Her bliss was beyond reach: Natasha’s addition could only tarnish it. All that was left to do was for her to shake her head no without a word, no she did not want to join, no she was not meant for it, and no, she did not have the strength to stop watching.

Natasha possessed a particular sensitivity towards music, and could not deny that, for all that Purgatorium’s surpassed her, it was not boring. The crowd agreed. It was magnitudes beyond any that had ever shown up for the Porn Categories. In a sense they’d shown up for both: her guitarist was up there for a double ax attack, and her bassist had found a calling as their sound engineer.

“Good morning,” It was half to midnight for the headliners, but Reina was incandescent like the dawn. “and thank you. We have a special song for our hometown. It’s about killing the person next to you.”

Other trans bands in the scene weren’t rivals. Natasha had to support them. And she had nothing to do the day after, or maybe ever. She hadn’t heard back from any jobs or bandmates or dates since she started couchsurfing. She could go back to the apartment, her name was still on the rent agreement, any day. Instead she stomped into the pit. Already a half dozen werewolves in denim awaited her, with more soon to join, all heights, all ages, even trans women, none of which paid her a smidgen of attention.

Soon the dance floor was a formless crush. She could not keep up. It spat her out somewhere into the center-front of the crowd, where all she could do was surrender the little volition she had to the frontwoman’s incandescence. Reina was no interloper: she was a sovereign. Lavinia played for her with a technical vigor that she’d no need to summon up for a lesser band.

Natasha had thought the frenzy of the past months had left her, replaced with a convex hollowness. What she discovered, as both flooded her at once, as she rushed to the bathroom, illuminated at last that feeling that had been spearing her from chest to crotch since the beginning of summer. Watching a better woman fuck her girlfriend was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And she’d blown it. She’d never broken up with Lavinia and she’d never have what it takes to get her back, even enough to get to see Reina fuck her again. That thought, at last, pushed her over an edge of months, only she’d had plenty of chances to get off to the real thing: the wan imitation of pleasure spurting into her hand would never compare, and was all she could aspire to. She had no afterglow to speak of. Outside the band played on.