He didn't change out of his uniform right away.
He dropped his bags by the desk, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on top of the covers still fully dressed, which he never did because his mother would call it unladylike. Tonight he did it anyway. He stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling was the same as always. White, slightly textured. He'd stared at it plenty of times before, usually for manageable reasons. Tonight his brain had gotten itself into a corner it wasn't finding its way out of quickly.
Austin and August Montgomery.
He'd been so focused on Austin, on whether Austin knew and whether he'd stay, that he hadn't properly thought about the other part. The part that came attached to Austin the way things always came attached to people. A whole background. A whole family. A son who went to the same school and gave people matching black eyes and had looked at Alice today like he was an unremarkable fixture of the hallway.
What did their family look like, normally? Were they the kind of people who cared about that sort of thing, the background of a person, the particular strangeness of Alice's specific situation? He didn't know. His mother had never actually told him much about them.
And here was the part that surprised him. He cared.
Not about what they thought of his mother. Not about the wedding or the logistics. About what they'd think of him specifically. Whether they'd look at him and not know what to make of him and let that be a problem.
Alice had spent a very long time not caring what people thought of him. It had been deliberate, practiced, and he was good at it. He'd had to be. And now here he was, genuinely invested in the opinion of two people he barely knew.
He lay there with that for a while.
Then he sat up, looked at the shopping bag by the door, and decided there was no use in it.
His mother had handed him the bag herself. That was the part he kept coming back to. She hadn't hesitated, hadn't made a face, hadn't turned it into a conversation he'd have to navigate carefully. She'd just folded the shirt back, handed the whole thing over, said put it in your room later, and gone back to the counter.
That was her approval. Small and quiet and unmistakable.
He pulled the bag over and went through it properly. The fabric samples and his mother's pieces he set aside. What remained for him was a handful of things. The dark blue shirt. A grey one. A pair of dark trousers, and a lighter pair that was a little more casual. All simple. All clearly cut for a boy.
He held the dark blue one for a moment, and then, because he was alone and the door was closed and there was no reason not to, he changed into it. The trousers too. He stood in front of the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door.
His hair was still long and slightly messy from the day, falling past his shoulders. His face was still his face, the cheekbones and the jaw and the dark eyes that didn't give much away. The shirt fit fine. The trousers fit fine.
The overall picture was not bad. Not uncomfortable.
Just tomboyish.
That was the word that came to him. He stood there and considered it from a few angles and decided he had no strong feelings about it either way, which was maybe the most honest reaction he could have had.
He changed back.
His usual clothes went back on, the soft familiar ones his hands found without looking. He folded the boy clothes neatly and put them in the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, the one he'd half-emptied last year and never refilled. They sat there looking perfectly normal, which they were.
He turned off the light and got into bed properly, under the covers, head on the pillow.
He thought about Austin saying either way like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Then his phone lit up on the nightstand.
Bryan: You good?
Just that. No context. Which was Bryan's way of saying he'd been thinking about it and wanted to check without making a whole thing out of it.
Alice: Yeah.
Three dots. Then:
Bryan: Okay.
Alice set his phone back down.
It was almost funny. He'd sat through so much in his life without feeling very much about any of it. The surgeries. The hormones. The way people looked at him in hallways and tried to figure him out. All of it had rolled off him with the ease of someone who had decided a long time ago that caring too much was more trouble than it was worth.
And now here he was losing sleep over what a man he'd met a handful of times and a guy who gave people matching black eyes might think of him.
He thought about the word he hadn't been able to finish in the kitchen. Son. Daughter. Neither one had felt right. Neither one had felt like a lie exactly. Just like clothes that almost fit.
He closed his eyes and decided it was a problem for some other night, when he had more energy for it.