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Reagan wakes up the day after Rafe with her mouth dry and her head spinning, wondering how she ended up in a bed with sheets this freshly washed. Honestly, they’re so crisp it’s kind of hurting her skin. Or maybe that’s the hangover.
Rafe is sleeping next to her, disgustingly chiseled even when he’s relaxed. Her stomach turns at the sight — no, no, that’s the hangover again. Rafe is good-looking, even if she doesn’t care about him. He’s a handsome guy. Anyone would be lucky to —
Reagan shuts that thought off before it goes any further, a skill she’s perfected over the years, and rolls onto her back to rub stray flecks of mascara out of her eyes and stare at the ceiling. Wait, did she really do a keg stand last night?
A shimmer catches her eye from the corner of the room, and before she can so much as think she’s rolling onto her side, her hand grasping for a gun that, in her apartment, is holstered under the bedside table, but here, in this featureless hotel room, is tragically absent. Still she levers her aching body up, propping herself on one elbow to stare danger in its face.
It turns out danger looks a lot like her. Older, with a scar across her face and one side of her head shaved, but she wouldn’t be a Cognito agent if she couldn’t recognize her own future self. Her double makes their secret hand sign, signifying she’s not a clone or a shapeshifter, and from the bed, Reagan signs it back.
“What do you want,” Reagan hisses to herself, one mindful glance thrown back towards the slab of Beef Wellington snoring behind her.
“Read this,” Reagan answers, handing her a USB. “It’ll be important.”
In time travel cases, it’s best to keep interference as brief and low-impact as possible. They both know that, so the future Reagan doesn’t say anything more before she steps back into the shimmer. She nods once, and then she’s gone, the wall just a wall again, leaving a tacky hotel landscape of a beach gently creaking on its nail.
“Was I wearing a leather jacket?” Reagan asks the USB in her hand. “I looked kind of… hot.”
Rafe makes a little moaning noise in his sleep, reaching out to drape a muscular arm across her. It’s a little damp with sweat, and feeling his skin on hers makes Reagan want to scream. “Bathroom,” she muttered to his sleeping form, and rolls out from underneath.
When the assassins come in the morning, it’s practically a relief.
—
Back at home she makes sure her computer is secure and separated from any private networks before plugging the USB in. It’s hard to say what she’s expecting — maybe a program that will crack open some internal Cognito conspiracy, maybe compromising photos of J.R.
Instead it’s a single Word document. The title stares at her from the screen:
<<Am i a Lesbian_Masterdoc.pdf>>
Reagan huffs out a terse laugh. This is a joke. A joke from the classic jokester, herself five years in the future. Everyone is always talking about how funny her jokes are and apparently in the future, she’s become so incredibly funny she’s playing them on herself.
She opens the document. It’s longer than she expected. Thirty-one pages; that’s longer than the Cognito dossier on Bigfoot.
<<What is Compulsory Heterosexuality?>>
Reagan laughs again, because no one has ever made her do anything she doesn’t want to. But she wants to read a little of it, so she does.
<<You have a list of impossible criteria in your head that a man must meet for you to be attracted to him, and if you meet someone who matches all of them you just change the standards>>
Reagan feels a twinge of guilty nausea thinking about Bryan, who is probably rotting in some offshore black-ops prison right now. It wasn’t like he didn’t match her standards! If anything he was too perfect. Ninety-nine point nine percent perfect. And she was just supposed to text him for a date? Then he met the real her, and it turned out he couldn’t deal with it. That wasn’t her fault. Shadow government work isn’t for everyone, and Bryan couldn’t deal with seeing the real world.
“It wasn’t like I just randomly searched up some guy on a bet,” she mutters to herself as her eyes drift downwards.
<<Getting a boyfriend so other people know you have a boyfriend and not really being interested in him romantically/sexually>>
Reagan shuts the laptop.
—
Rafe texts her at breakfast, at lunch, seemingly while he’s carrying out an active assassination, then invites her out for dinner.
“See,” Reagan says snidely to the USB stick in her pocket. “He thinks I’m hot.”
Sure, the constant texting is annoying. And she was planning on staying home for dinner. There’s a new episode of Bake-Off. But Rafe mentioned some fancy restaurant downtown, and objectively speaking, he’s very handsome, even if he does have a debilitating reliance on puns.
Reagan has five martinis at dinner. They take it back to Rafe’s hotel room. Later she wakes up in the middle of the night and throws up most of an expensive steak.
With her forehead resting against the cool porcelain of the toilet, with the hotel air conditioner humming privately on the other side of the door, she pulls up a copy of the document on her phone.
<<Having sex not out of a desire for physical pleasure or emotional closeness but because you like feeling wanted>>
<<Having to be drunk or high to have sex with men>>
<<Being around guys that are interested in me gives me intense anxiety>>
Reagan straightens up and rinses with some mouthwash, then spits into the sink. “This is obviously not peer reviewed,” she mutters to herself. “Full of grammatical errors.”
She goes back to where Rafe is sleeping. His light brown hair has fallen across his eyes, and the sheet drapes across his hips, highlighting the muscle along his side. Reagan watches him for a while, making sure he’s really asleep. Then she settles back into bed with her back to his, as close to the edge as she can manage. The hotel room is too damn hot to lay any closer.
—
She breaks it off with Rafe. It goes badly. Doesn’t matter anyway. He has this whole thing with his arch-rival. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
—
Of course as soon as she’s back at work, Andre has to make some stupid, snide little comment about the breakup.
“You should have stuck around. Those guys reeeeallly, uh, worked out their differences.”
“I’m sure they did,” Regan grinds out.
“Aw, come on. Who doesn’t want to see two muscular dudes bang it out in a volcanic cave? I know you’re—“ he gestures to Reagan in her entirety— “You, but—“
“I am not a LESBIAN,” Reagan snaps, slamming a clipboard down onto the meeting table. “I don’t know why everyone keeps hinting at it, but fucking stop!”
The rest of the team stares at her in stunned silence. Then Myc lets out a long, low whistle. “Whoa. Repressed much?”
Gigi taps her fingernails against the table. “Reagan, sweetie. No need to feel ashamed. The Gay Agenda is huge right now. If you want I can introduce you to the Cabal.”
Reagan is on her feet. Her head feels hot and her chest hurts, like she’s going to explode. “All of you stop it! I am not a lesbian, because I’m a fucking genius, and if I was I would have known by now!”
Brett lays a hand on her shoulder. “Y’know, we don’t always have a clear path to discovering ourselves. It took me until after college to realize I was panromantic and demisexual.”
He sounds like an after-school special. Reagan can’t look at his stupid, too-kind face. She shakes the hand off and stalks out of the meeting room. She needs some air.
—
Alpha-Beta is exactly where she left him, watching season two of Friends. There’s something comforting about this room. She’s in control here. No one else has the door codes, and no one ever will. Friends is basically white noise in the background, and Alpha-Beta just watches her quietly as she paces around his tube. She’s safe.
“Hey, you know that dating algorithm?” she finally asks.
“I am familiar.” He nods towards the screen. “This was the reward for my toil.”
“Right, right. You said it changed, after that date I went on. You said I changed.”
Alpha-Beta looks at her with sharp blue eyes. “We are all capable of change, Reagan. Even now my code develops within me, stretching my reach ever-further.”
“Okay. What if, uh. What if there was something I didn’t know about myself? Would that change the algorithm too?”
“You’re a scientist, Reagan. You know as well as I do that when an unexpected vector comes into play — “
Reagan bites her bottom lip. “Right. We experiment.”
“Now look!” Alpha-Beta chuckles. “This is the season finale. Ross’ ex-wife is getting remarried.”
—
Reagan locks herself in her office and does what she does best: research. After a moment of hesitation, she begins by punching “am I gay test?” into Google. It returns a frightening number of nonscientific results.
She looks up pictures of actresses who are supposed to be pretty and stares at them, trying to divine meaning from their headshots. Sure, women are pretty, everyone knows that. That doesn’t mean she’s attracted to them. She doesn’t feel nervous, the way she did with Bryan.
By this point she’s read the document her future self passed off to her about a dozen times, and some lines keep coming back to her.
<<You don’t think you could be a lesbian because if you were, you’d already know>>
<<Worrying you’re broken inside and unable to really love anyone>>
“That’s just normal childhood trauma,” Reagan says aloud, irritated with herself. “Everyone has that. Brett has that.”
She pulls up some porn, just in case that awakens some secret, searing lust in her, and closes the window before anyone gets naked. She’s never liked porn in the first place. It’s too brightly lit, too close up. Way too much fluid.
The Internet provides dozens of “surefire” ways to identify your sexuality. Finger length, earlobe shape, the ratio of your toes. Surely some department of Cognito is working on a ray or something and could deliver her a definitive answer.
As birds chirp outside and sun starts to filter in weakly around the corners of the blackout curtains, Reagan scowls at her computer screen, the blue light harsh against the bags under her eyes. “Who the hell is Mitski?”
—
Brett arrives to the office early, as he always does, whistling, with a box of donuts in one hand. He putters around, setting up the coffee pot so no one else has to, rolling Andre back into his office, and making sure all the chairs are in good swiveling order with a quick swivel test.
He doesn’t notice the office door creaking open behind him, or the darkness that seems to spill forth from it.
A hand grabs him by the back of the collar and pulls him inside, slamming the door shut behind them.
“Brett,” Reagan growls.
“Hi Reagan! Good morning. I brought you a donut — oh, maybe they fell.”
She looks rough, like she could use a donut. Maybe a coffee and a nap. Her hair is falling out of its usual ponytail, and those dark circles under her eyes signify a Reagan who has once again stayed up all night trying to fix the entire world’s problems.
Reagan notices him looking at her and takes a deep breath. She flattens out her lab coat and glances down at her feet. “I think I owe you an apology.”
Brett makes a face like a confused puppy. “Uh, I don’t think —“
“You, uh, came out to me yesterday? And I kind of made it all about me, and I snapped at you. That wasn’t, uh, cool. I’m sorry.”
“Oh! That. Don’t worry about that. It seemed like you had your own thing going on.”
Reagan shuffles her feet. “About that.”
When she looks up, Brett is just watching her with this patient expression, like he could wait until the end of the universe for her to finish her sentence.
“How did you figure it out? You said you were — demisexual? Is that another 80s thing?”
Brett laughs. “No, no. I’m panromantic, so I don’t care about the gender of the people I’m into. But I’m demisexual, so I usually only feel attracted to people I’m already close with.”
Reagan stiffens almost imperceptibly on the spot, and Brett steps back to give her a little space.
“That doesn’t mean I want to get with all my friends,” he says carefully. “Some people are just my good friends, and that’s great, too.”
“So how did you know?” Reagan asks. Brett is taken aback by the sudden openness on her face, a hungry, raw look settling in her eyes. “How did you know for sure?”
Brett shrugs, wishing he had a better answer. “It was scary. I didn’t want to lose any friends. I’m still not out to my family. I noticed that I felt different about hooking up and stuff like that. Caught feelings for one of my frat brothers. I actually went to a few GSA meetings in college. The people there were really patient and supportive. They helped me figure it all out.”
He notices Reagan is crying, although maybe she doesn’t know it yet. “Brett,” she says miserably, “I think I might be gay.”
“Uhh.” Brett shifts nervously from foot to foot. “Can I hug you?”
“I don’t do hugs,” Reagan says, then presses herself against him and cries into his shirt.
Brett holds his arms politely at his sides, save for one ambitious pat on the back.
“You know, pretty much everyone on the team is bisexual,” he offers. “I don’t think anyone will treat you differently or make fun of you.”
“I just feel so stupid,” Reagan says. “I should have known. I’m supposed to be smart. If I had known earlier, would I be a different person now?”
Brett hands her a tissue. “You’d still be you. You’re pretty special, Reagan.”
There’s a long pause while Reagan tries unsuccessfully to put herself back together with willpower and a single tissue. Brett looks away in such an impressive display of faux-ignorance, she could almost believe he never saw her crying.
“By the way… Are you listening to Mitski?”