Chapter 8
What the actual fuck?Izzy walked back toward the greenhouses, feeling discombobulated as fuck.Fuck!
He just kissed a guy. A pretty as hell, sort of feminine looking, but definitely a guy. Or…not? Wyatt had said he was sometimes a girl?What the fuck?
Because it was lunch break and he’d had his lasagna quickly and had had some time, he’d thought to go to the house to be polite. Instead he’d gone there and practically mauled Del’s teenage son and would’ve probably not stopped until he felt the hard dick against his own, equally hard one.
What the fuck?
Izzy wiped his mouth, then licked his lips again, the sweet taste of whatever Wyatt had been baking—he’d had some flour on his shirt—lingering behind.
That hair and eyeliner and just…all of Wyatt had been different today. He’d been—not a boy.
Izzy stopped so fast that he almost stumbled. He stood there without seeing anything and rewound what Wyatt had said.
“I could be. A girl. I might be. Sometimes.”
Which meant that while Wyatt was a guy, he wasn’t always one. Today Wyatt hadn’t been a guy, he’d been a girl. Or as close to a one that he could probably be.
Izzy’s attention was pulled to the dirt road in the distance as it started to billow with dust when a delivery truck drove toward the greenhouses.
Okay, okay. He had work to do. But then he would sit down and figure this out, because the expression on Wyatt’s face, the heartbreaking hope of someone seeing him had turned into shame and even fear and…no, Izzy was a lot of things, but he would never…
He’d hated the scoffing and sneers from Morales when he’d fixed the car. The slurs and the vitriol aimed at Wyatt’s family because of who they were. The huff when Izzy had said he liked to work there and the Abbots were nice.
No, he had to make sure Morales would never set foot on this property again. The Abbots deserved more than that. If Izzy’s car broke down again, he’d fucking hitchhike back home instead of having anyone potentially dangerous anywhere near Wyatt.
* * * *
“Izzy! Can you give me a hand?” Patty, the hippie lady, called when she spotted him crossing the parking lot.
“Yeah, sure, what’s up?” He jogged last of the distance to her tiny old car.
“I just got back from the post office and we’ve got bees!” She held up a cardboard box with tiny holes in the sides and smiled victoriously.
“Bees?”
“Yes! To pollinate the rest of the tomato plants! We don’t have to do them by hand anymore, not with these guys bumbling in!” She looked at him more seriously then. “You’re not allergic, are you?”
“Not that I know of,” Izzy said, shrugging. “I don’t generally go searching for things that might sting me, though.”
“Well, if you come with me and open the doors so I can get these guys to the right greenhouse, they’ll stay happier. A pissed off bumble bee is no joke!” Her tone was still cheerful, like she was getting a real kick out of this.
It was infectious, and for the time being, Izzy forgot about Wyatt and concentrated on getting Patty and her bees to their correct destination.
* * * *
Izzy was going through the cucumber plants and picking out dead leaves and other weird stuff, when the manual labor let his brain loose again.
He’d been an asshole to Wyatt who had enough problems as it was. Izzy had sent mixed signals like, whoa, and that was inexcusable. As he tried to wrap his mind around the whole gender thing, he suddenly remembered there having been a guy like that in prison for a while.
Izzy hadn’t talked with him, but his cellmate at the time had actually had a few conversations with the guy and he’d tried to explain Izzy what they’d talked about.
Apparently there were more than two genders out there, for starters. Well, Izzy also had vague memories about that being discussed in high school when it came to the Native American tribes or something like that. Those people had more than, what was the word again?
Izzy frowned. He concentrated on combing through all the stuff he heard on the TV and online since he’d gotten out. He must’ve looked grumpy as fuck, because Sam, who walked past him actually stopped.
“Everything okay?”
