Hours later, she awoke to the sound of her phone buzzing with a message from Vanessa telling her to be careful and stay safe. She had to laugh a little at that. Even though she'd tried her best never to let it show, she'd never truly felt safe in Ohio. Little Lucy had been plagued by nightmares, constantly fearful of monsters and other intruders, and later on, the leering looks of Midwestern men had terrified a teenaged Quinn.
But personal safety wasn't high on the list of Lucas's concerns, not anymore anyway. It had taken her a while to realize that no one was interested in messing with a six-foot-three former jock, but once she had, she'd found it tremendously freeing. Now Vanessa was the one who couldn't go out at night alone without getting hassled. But whereas Quinn had had only a barbed tongue for protection, Vanessa had no qualms about throwing a punch.
There was a sudden peal of laughter from outside, and she looked out the window to see two little girls running around in circles in the parking lot, dressed in matching coats and hats. One of them flashed a toothy grin in her direction, and she jumped, the blinds slipping through her fingers and clattering shut. For a split second, she lost her breath, her balance, and she stumbled back across the room toward the sink to fill one of the little paper cups on the counter with cold water.
It still happened like this from time to time, the sucker punch of female ghosts slipping their way through Lucas's male body, leaving her light-headed and winded. People probably thought Lucas was some kind of pervert, the way his eyes would sometimes glaze over when a young girl would walk past. But it was just that the body called Lucas was sometimes still haunted by the twin spirits of Lucy, the little girl with auburn pigtails and perpetually bruised shins, and Quinn, whoever she had been.
Sometimes on the street, without warning, these spirits would take hold, and suddenly the male posture Lucas had spent so much time perfecting would falter. A hip would jut out to the side, and before she could help it, Lucas would be walking down the sidewalk with the same swaying gait Quinn had used to take the halls of McKinley by storm.
Moments like that were beyond frustrating for Lucas, who'd put as much focused effort into his masculinity as Lucy (and later, Quinn) had put into being feminine. Lucas studied John Wayne and James Dean the way Lucy had studied Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. And just as Quinn had worn her yellow dresses on Mondays and never left the house without at least a light coating of make-up, Lucas took care to keep his shoes polished and his face clean-shaven.
But neither performance had been perfect, and she was left wondering what it meant to be unable to successfully enact either gender.
There was another reason, too, why the sight and sound of giggling girls had a tendency to send her reeling, though she could hardly bear to admit it.
Beth was almost seven years old by now, probably close to the same age as those girls outside running rings around her parked car.
Quinn had spent so much time fretting over the traces Beth had left on her body. Every stretchmark and scar a grim reminder of the violence wrought by pregnancy and childbirth, of her own misspent girlhood being torn at the seams. There were times she'd even prayed for a second skin, a fresh, blank canvas she could slip over herself to conceal all the evidence of her shame.
But now Lucas longed to look down and see those silvery white lines webbing across his abdomen. And even all these years later, the instinct would still come at times to put a hand down over the place, low in her belly, where she'd carried Beth inside herself in those long, grey months of her pregnancy. But Lucas didn't have a womb, and running his fingers across the skin where one might be left her feeling cold and empty.
Vanessa was the one who bore all those traces now, the only connection Quinn would ever have to the little girl growing up as Shelby Corcoran's daughter. Vanessa, who had only a vague notion of the gravity of the marks on her skin, of what it might mean to carry someone else's life inside your body.
She sat down on the bed and ran a hand through her hair. Lucas's stomach growled loudly, and she realized she hadn't eaten since leaving New Mexico. On the way in, she'd noticed a diner down the block from the motel, but she desperately needed a shower first. There was a change of clothes in her car for just such situations, but she had forgotten to bring it in with her in her exhaustion when she'd arrived.
It was with nervous steps that she crossed the room again and peered out the window once more. To her relief, she saw the little girls were gone.