It was a good idea, Simon thought to himself, doodling nonsensical words with his fingers on his whiskey glass. It was a good idea for him to not wear the wig or the dress. Just a little bit eyeliner, dark brown, foundation, and a little bit of pink on his lips and cheeks. Not too heavy. A few of the girls told him once that he was lucky that his skin was so smooth, and Simon supposed that was true enough. Definitely not as smooth as a girl’s, though Simon supposed he should be happy for that too. He was a bloke, wasn’t he? It was hard enough trying to get his professors to take him seriously already without having smooth, girly skin.
(Is that what ya like to tell yerself, sweetheart? Alright, alright, I’ll leave you ta it. Just don’t try ta forget ‘bout me, love. Ya know ya can’t.)
Of course he knew. He’d tried plenty.
He was talking to himself. Wasn’t that the first sign of insanity? Simon chuckled, ducking his head down and tugging on the earring. He shoved himself even more against the corner where he had hid himself in the bar as a couple swung themselves past, dancing. Good looking men, both of them bearded, their hands running up and down each other as they laughed to the music. They could only be so free here, in this place. Outside, you tell people you’re gay, or you say anything about liking your own sex, and people start crying AIDS.
Simon drained his drink. The whiskey burned as it went down, and he covered his mouth as he coughed, hard.
“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be drinking whiskey with coke, you know,” a voice half-purred in his ear, and Simon nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Wot?” he winced as his accent came out full-force. Damn, but he was trying to keep a handle on it. Hard to get people to take you seriously when they think that you sound like you just came out of the mines, hollering for a beer.
The man standing in front of him was gorgeous. Smooth, tanned skin, with barely a few lines around his eyes, though he looked at least ten, fifteen years older than Simon’s twenty-and-change. Thin lips, cheekbones sharp enough to cut leather on, and a dimple on his chin. Simon’s breath caught.
(Oh, he looks good enough ta eat. Wonder what that little dot tastes like. Ya think that it’d be sweet?
I’m not going to-
Sweetie, ya haveta at least try if ya not gonna let me out ta do it fer ya.)
Gorgeous set down a light orange drink in front of him in a heavy glass. “Someone as pretty as you shouldn’t drink something that heavy,” he said, smiling. His eyes looked so blue under the bar’s lights. “Here, try this.”
“I’m not pretty,” he countered immediately, but it was more of an automatic reaction than anything that had any feeling behind it. Simon looked at the glass for a long moment before he gave a heavy, exaggerated sigh (being a little too much like me there, sweetheart) before he picked it up and sipped at it. There was a straw, but it was far too girly to drink with a straw and Simon wasn’t a girl, so he just drank from the rim.
His eyes widened slightly, “Hey, it tastes good.”
Gorgeous leaned in, “It’s called a Multiple Orgasms.”
Simon choked on the next sip, sputtering hard, and Gorgeous was laughing. He had a high-pitched laugh and he sounded really weird, but Simon liked it anyway.
(Ya should ask him fer his name. Nicknames are my arena, doll.)
Sometimes Simon wished that he hadn’t bought that first eyeliner pencil, or if he had bought it, he never used it on himself. Never looked at his own face with makeup on, wondering what it would be like to dress as a woman and be confident, to be someone who was entirely different from Simon, from the hair all the way down to the toes.
“Hi,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Simon.”
“Walker,” replied the stranger. His hand closed around Simon’s, fingers trailing underneath, stroking around the lines of his palm before he turned it around fully. His eyes—no longer blue, but a murky sort of green, and that was just a little freaky—raised to fix upon Simon as he ducked his head down and kissed against the nails. Simon’s painted nails, black and glossy with just the smallest smattering of glitter—just enough to catch the light, but not much else—with tapered cuticles.
“Are you, really?”
Of course I am, he almost said, but he swallowed the words. He wondered how he looked right now, a man with a too-strong jaw and a giant nose with eyeliner and painted nails. What the hell did this stranger know anyway?
(Oh come on now, darling.)
Simon took a deep breath. He bit his lip, his fingers curling slightly within Walker’s grasp before he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, his smile came a little easier, a little brighter. Reaching up, he dug his fingers into the small hairs at the nape of his neck before he threw his head back. The effect would be much better if he had long hair—or that rich blond wig he had at home, stuffed under several pairs of old sweatpants. But it didn’t matter, not really, because there was a smile on Walker’s face, and Simon was just a soppy romantic, because he couldn’t help but feel his heart skip a beat. Just the tiniest little bit.
“Tracie,” he said. The name sounded wrong on his lips, but Walker was right—like this, he wasn’t Simon either. Either or, one or the other, but if he had to choose to be one, he would choose to be Tracie.
So she was Tracie.
“Tracie,” Walker repeated. He lifted her hand up and kissed against the knuckles, and there was a strange pride shining in his eyes. “It’s a pretty name, suitable for a pretty girl.”
Tracie snorted. She raised a finger and shook it in Walker’s face, “I’m not that easy ta please, sweetheart. Buying me a drink is the least of it.”
(Where the hell is all this coming from?
I’ve always been with ya, doll. Just waiting for ya ta be brave enough ta acknowledge me.)
Walker looked surprised for a moment before he threw his head back and laughed again. Ah, she was completely right to call this man ‘Gorgeous’. She smiled to herself as she leaned forward, taking a small sip of the drink before she jerked his head towards the door.
“Come on now, Gorgeous. Let’s take ta the road, and ya can tell me where ya get that charming accent.”
“Gorgeous?” Walker raised an eyebrow, but he held out a hand, palm up. Such a gentleman. Tracie placed her hand on it as the two of them started walking out of the bar.
“I like ta call a spade a spade, darling,” she winked as the two of them stepped outside to the London air. Walker’s hand wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her close and draping part of his jacket over her. She wasn’t entirely cold, because she had jeans and a shirt on—entirely not of her taste at all—but she liked the weight of his arm around her, so she let him do it.
Walker made a small noise. They were strolling now, rather aimlessly, and Tracie didn’t exactly care where they were going or who looked at them. Everyone could look if they want to—Tracie knew there was plenty to look at with her—but she wasn’t at all obliged to look back. She looked only where she wanted to.
“Ya were going ta tell me yer story?” she nudged Walker slightly at his side.
“It isn’t really a very interesting one,” Walker said, his voice barely above a murmur. “I’m from America—that’s where my accent is from—and I can’t say which part, really, because my family and I, we lived mostly on the road.” He fell silent for a long moment, “Hey, you ever heard of Woodstock?”
“Some kinda music?” Tracie hazarded. She vowed to keep a closer eye on music in general, because Simon was so stuck with his centuries-old poetry that he wouldn’t even notice anything written after his grandparents were born.
“Yeah, it’s a music festival. Best three days of my life.” There was one of those pauses again. “It was a few years ago.”
Now the thing was, Tracie learned everything that Simon learned, and some things she learned better, quicker. Such as learning how to watch people, how to read their reactions—she wasn’t particularly perfect with it, but Walker’s sudden stillness and the slow clench of his fingers around her arm spoke loudly and she knew enough of the language to interpret it.
“Ya met someone there?”
“I brought someone there,” Walker stopped suddenly. They were the same height, so it was a little ridiculous when Walker tipped her head up to look at him, his fingers rough against her skin.
“I’ll rather listen to yours, Tracie.”
“I haven’t got much of one,” she said, grinning lopsidedly before she stepped back. They were on a bridge, she realised, and she reached out, placing her hands on the railing. It was cold—gloves, she realised. She needed gloves, and she wondered where she could get them. “Tonight’s the first night Simon’s let me out of his cave.”
“Congratulations,” Walker’s grin was near-manic. “It’s a girl.”
Tracie stared at him before she burst out laughing. It’s strange, it’s really strange, because Simon didn’t trust easily and neither did she, but there was just something about this man, about how his eyes never seemed to waver upon her even when he took in the whole of her—the flat chest and the men’s shoes and even the wisps of chest hair visible beneath the V of her shirt.
(My shirt, I would think.
Oh shut up, dear.)
“Do ya want ta—” she bit her lip for a moment before deciding that she should just go for it. “Do ya want ta go... find a room?”
Walker looked at her for a long moment. His hand cupped against her cheek, tracing the curve softly, before he leaned in and kissed her on the lips. Tracie leaned forward, nearly stumbling, but Walker had a hand on her waist and pulled her forward—she only had a single moment to mourn the strange feeling of her flat chest against his before his mouth opened and she darted her tongue inside. It was probably too daring, but Tracie was daring, was everything Simon never was, and who turned away from a chance like that?
“Not today,” Walker said, and he was such a contradictory arse, because his lips were slipping down to nibble against her throat. “Not today.” He pulled away slightly, his fingers on her thin hips as he looked at her.
“Let me send you home today, and let me pick you up tomorrow. Let us go to the mall and get you some things to wear that suits how pretty you are.”
“I’m not pretty,” Tracie snorted, though she couldn’t help but lean forward, just a little bit. “There’s nothing in the world that can make me pretty, or even ta look like a proper woman.”
“Maybe not like a real woman, no,” Walker said, and there was a soft smile on his lips. “But it didn’t mean that you can’t look absolutely stunning still.”
A girl like her should never should vulnerable, or even not confident, because Tracie had heard plenty of slurs aimed towards gay men to know that girls like her would get even worse insults; that she would never be able to go outside as Tracie and not be looked at. She knew that, but there was something in Walker’s eyes that had the words tumbling out of her mouth anyway.
“Ya really think so?”
Walker smiled sweetly, his thumb tracing the edge of Tracie’s lips.
“I know so.”
***
“Stay still,” Walker murmured.
Tracie stayed still. She was tempted to wiggle around just because Walker told her otherwise, but she didn’t. She was too old for that.
The brush stroked over her skin over and over, spreading foundation on her skin, burying the lines in powder until it was girl-smooth. Tracie’s fingers—still with the glossy black shine, though she was planning to change it to deep red soon—tapped by her side so she wouldn’t rub at her face.
“Where did ya learn ta do this?”
Walker smiled, dabbing at her nose with the brush. “I travelled all over America, remember? I did a bunch of odd jobs. Once or twice I’ve worked as a stage hand and an assistant makeup artist for a travelling theatre troupe. Or something like it. It was fun.”
“Why London?” she paused, then lowered her eyes. It was, she thought, how girls always showed her bashfulness. It didn’t seem entirely natural to her, but she tried, nonetheless—who else could she have tried it with if not this stranger who seemed to know her so well and whom she seemed to know nothing about?
“There was this woman,” Walker said, and he was looking away. He placed the foundation and brush on the table before he picked up the lipstick. “The one I brought to Woodstock. She was married—I knew she was married—but I thought that maybe she had wanted freedom, and I asked her to run away with me.” He paused, sighing quietly.
Tracie already knew the next act, but she let Walker continue anyway.
“She refused to leave her family. I don’t blame her for it, but I thought I should go somewhere else, maybe. Other countries. I shot a dart onto this huge map on my bus—I used to own a bus, selling blouses—and it landed on London,” he grinned and poked her lower lip with the tip of the lipstick.
“What if it had shot into the ocean, eh?” Tracie asked. Only when the words were out then she realised that the words could have another meaning. She winced, waiting for Walker to tell her that it wasn’t her business.
But Walker only looked laughed quietly, capping the lipstick. He buried his hands into her hair (wig, Simon insisted, but Tracie was used to shutting him up by now) and shook it out a little bit, loosening the strands.
“Then I’d pick up the dart and throw it again. There’s no reason to give up just after one try, right?”
Tracie looked at him before she smiled. This time, she didn’t bother to look down, instead looking Walker straight in the eyes. That was how she was; that was how she should be.
“You’re beautiful,” Walker said. Tracie didn’t think so, even made up like this with her blond hair falling down to hide the rough edges of her face, but she thought that she could believe it, if she saw it in Walker’s eyes and heard it from his voice.
“Thank you.”
Walker leaned in, pressing their lips together. His hand slipped from her shoulder down to splay out against her still-flat chest before moving down, curving over the too-hard planes of her stomach before it closed around her hip.
“It’s tomorrow now,” he murmured.
“Yes,” Tracie smiled. “Yes it is.”
She should have known by then, but Tracie had always been an optimist. She was a good time girl, wasn’t she?
*
“I can’t stay for tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Walker said afterwards, when she was sitting against the headboard and he was still lying on the bed of his hotel room. Her breath hitched, but that was easily explained by the slide of Walker’s hand up and down her side. “I’m leaving.”
Tracie closed her eyes. She was not surprised, not at all, because Walker seemed that kind of man—the kind that blew himself into someone’s life and blew himself out with just as much urgency and suddenness and force.
“Where are ya going?”
“France,” he said. “I’m taking a car down to the Channel, and I’ll see what will happen there. I don’t even speak French,” he burbled a laugh.
“I do,” the words burst out of Tracie even before she realised it. She turned around, almost looming over Walker as she looked deep into his eyes. “I can speak French. Take me with you. Take me with you when you go tomorrow’s tomorrow.”
“You know you can’t,” Walker said, and his hand was so soft on Tracie’s cheek, softer than her skin even after the makeup and the moisturisers. “You know you don’t want to, not really.”
She wanted to. There was nothing more she wanted to do than to run away, to live on the road forever and have no other eyes upon her except for Walker’s, who would never judge and whose tongue would always call her beautiful. There was nothing more Simon wanted to than to run away from the doldrums of university work, tearing up beautiful poems to pieces to analyse them instead of just appreciating their beauty and keeping the words deep inside his heart.
But she knew she couldn’t. There were Simon’s parents—a gay son was better than a dead son, a son who dressed up as a woman was better than no son at all—and there were the promises Simon made to the university, all the work he had put off so she could have fun. Most of all, she knew that if Tracie lived only in Walker’s eyes, then Tracie would not have lived at all. What would be the use of the wig and the eyeliner and the pretty dresses then?
What would be Tracie then?
“There,” Walker whispered, and his eyes were infinitely sad. “There, you see. You can’t go.”
“Write to me,” Tracie closed her eyes. “Write to me.”
***
I want ta go away in the mornin’ and I want ya ta come wi’ me.
Let’s just go away for a few days. See what 'appens.
I’m coming for ya in the mornin’.
***
Walker never did.
From then, she should have known. Or perhaps she did know, and she was a fool over and over again, breaking through the glass and looking out to Camelot, risking the curse even though there might never be a day when Lancelot would ever stop for more than just one booty call. Well, one Lancelot did, but he turned out to be Mordred in disguise, but Tracie’s face was never truly fair anyway, and she was utter rot at weaving. It was difficult enough to try to sew with French nails, much less try to handle a loom.
(The false nails were part of her now. Part of Tracie, someone who was not Simon but was Simon all at the same time. No one could deny it now, not when even the judge called her ‘Miss Tremarco’.)
The bar that used to be here wasn’t here anymore, but Tracie didn’t expect it to be anyway. She had been there when it moved, but she was here out of nostalgia. If there was anywhere that she could pin down as her birthplace, it was here—or further down, at the London Bridge.
“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be out here alone.”
High heels were tricky things to deal with; Tracie almost twisted her ankle when she whirled around. Her mouth fell open at the sight.
The hair might be entirely grey and there might be a pair of glasses sitting atop that nose, but the eyes were the same and the grin still just the right percentage of manic. He had a cane in his hand, but he made it look like an accessory—like that blond haired arsehole in Harry Potter or something—rather than something he actually needed.
God, Walker had to be at least sixty by now. Tracie knew that she wasn’t young anymore.
“I’m not that easy ta please, sweetheart,” the line fell from her lips the moment she got her jaw to work again. She swallowed and burbled half a laugh, biting on her lip.
“What are ya doing here?”
“There aren’t many places for an old man to roam, nowadays,” Walker replied wryly. He turned his head away and wriggled out a cigarette from his pocket. “A few weeks ago, I saw a couple of names I recognised on The Times, and I thought- why not?”
“I haven’t seen you in years.”
“But you haven’t forgotten me.”
“No,” Tracie said, and she couldn’t help but smile. She was a fool, but she would rather be a fool than boring, better a fool than bitter, because if she was bitter she would actually do something about Simon’s urge to not wake up every morning.
“No, I haven’t.”
Walker limped forward—the cane wasn’t just for show—and he took her gloved hand in his. He turned it around, palm up, and pressed a soft, heated kiss against the fleshy heel.
“I think this time,” Walker said, hoarse and low, “I should come with you.”
“Come on then, love,” she said, and she laughed as she nearly stumbled on the pavement for the first time in years and Walker flailed his arm exaggeratedly.
“Come on then.”
Summary: “I repressed it for a long time, but Tracie's not a girl who takes no for an answer.” Once upon a time, Simon met a stranger in London named Walker.
Rated: PG
Categories: Crossovers Pairing: Tracie Tremarco/Walker Jerome
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 3699 Read: 641
Published: 23 Aug 2012 Updated: 23 Aug 2012