American Goth by J. D. Glass

figure it out from there?”
    “Sure, then. Here’s my number,” and she pulled a business card out from her wallet and handed it to me. Hannah Meyer, Kit and Percussion, Drum Tech and Repair it read, with her number beneath. Own Equipment and Transport it said across the bottom.
    “Is that important?” I asked.
    “Which?”
    I pointed out the last line.
    “Well,” she said with a little drawl, “it can be.” The accompanying gleam in her eye let me know I’d stepped into something I hadn’t meant to and I felt a rush of heat crawl up my neck.
    She let me off the hook. “I’ll be here Wednesday, about five-ish—what say I stand you a drink and we can talk about bands, since you’re a bass player?”
    “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll see you Wednesday,” and I sat back down to dinner with my uncle.
    “So,” he said brightly, unable to hide his mirth completely in the lift of his brows, “did you have a nice chat? Oh, I think your cow’s cold, by the by,” he said, indicating my plate with his knife.

    *

    The place had begun to fill up by the time we were done, and Hannah waved to me and yelled, “Wednesday, right?” across the room as we made our way through the other patrons and to the door.
    “So, the oldest pub, and the oldest gay bar in London,” I commented as the cool autumn air blew against our backs and we rounded the corner on Dean. “Any particular reason you picked that, or…” I let that hang in the breeze.
    “Simply figured you’d never been, and this one’s so very nearby.” He shrugged in his thick, brown workman’s jacket. “That and you may want to do a bit of socializing there, so you might as well get comfortable with the place, right?”
    We walked in companionable silence as I thought on that. I was confused. He was right, I’d never been to a bar before, and especially not a gay bar, but was he trying to help me out, was he trying to tell me something about himself…or both?
    “Do you go there a lot?”
    He gave me a sidelong glance as we neared the door next to the shop, the door that led directly to the steps into the flat. “No, but often enough. That bother you?”
    “No,” I shrugged, “but it’s, well, it’s unexpected, I guess.”
    He unlocked the door and swung it open, then waved me past him again. I rested my hard shell case on the floor and waited for him at the bottom of the landing. I watched his shoulders work as he took a deep breath and locked the door.
    Tiger eyes met mine, deep amber flames in their depths.
    “Samantha,” he said, the first time he’d called me that since I’d asked him not to, and that, combined with his tone, made something clench in my chest.
    “You’re making two assumptions, the first one being that I’m straight, and the other being that if I were, I wouldn’t be comfortable around people that aren’t.”
    I had assumed exactly that and attributed his comfort level with me to two things: first, he was my guardian, and the second—well, I wasn’t exactly a “girly” girl, by most standards. Other than biology and appearance, there was nothing I said or did that I could think of that marked me as a girl, and Cort didn’t treat me like one either. I guess I’d assumed that he was comfortable with me because he could treat me like, well, a guy.
    “I know, I mean, I’m not like regular girls,” I said, “you know, like besides the gay thing.” I stared down a moment at the case that rested against my thigh and took a breath. “I’ve always sorta hung out with the guys at home and I guess maybe I’m more like them than a girl.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “I figure that’s why we’re, you know, cool.”
    Uncle Cort laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and gave me an even gentler smile. “First, no one, absolutely no one , is completely straight or gay, not me, not you, not anyone, and we’ll leave that there for now. As for the rest…” He motioned me up the stairs before