Before she could answer, the restroom door swung open, and two women walked in, chattering loudly. The spell between us broke, and she stepped back, suddenly looking nervous.
“I should go,” she said quickly. “My friend is probably wondering why I’m taking too long.”
She moved past me, and without really thinking, I reached out and caught her arm gently.
“Hey,” I said, my voice softer than I’d intended. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about the airport. I was having a shitty day, but that’s no excuse for being an ass.
She looked down at my hand on her arm, then back at me. I noticed the faint hitch in her breathing, the quick flutter at her exposed collarbone before she stilled herself, breaking eye contact.
When her eyes met mine again, something passed between us that made my pulse quicken, and suddenly the air felt warmer.
“Thank you,” she said.
I let go of her arm.
Then she was gone, leaving me standing there alone, thinking about what had just happened.
III
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
— Audre Lorde
Chapter Four
Kelechi
After being caught gossiping, the first thing I remembered when I left that restroom two days ago was, one, I didn’t wash my hands because I was basically escaping, and two, I couldn’t rest until I fed this growing curiosity in my head, which meant googling what “butch women” meant.
And that was exactly what I had done.
In fact, my Google history was filled with searches related to the term.
“What does butch mean?”
“Butch women explained”
“Difference between butch and tomboy”
“How to tell if someone is butch”
“Butch lesbian meaning Urban Dictionary”
“Is butch a slur?”
The last search had made me cringe so hard I almost threw my phone across the room. Thank God, I hadn’t asked that out loud in the restroom. The second-hand embarrassment would have killed me faster than malaria.
I ended up spending the entire evening going down what my mother would call a “rabbit hole of enlightenment,” learning about things I never knew existed. Growing up in a sheltered home in Nigeria, the extent of my knowledge about different expressions of sexuality had been limited to whispered conversations and whatever Nollywood deemed appropriate for family viewing.
Turns out, there was a whole world I had been completely oblivious to.
And the worst part was that the more I read, the more I realised how absolutely clueless I must have sounded in that restroom. No wonder she had looked at me like I was some naive idiot who had never stepped outside her parents’ castle.
Which, let’s be honest, wasn’t entirely wrong.
But still, the accuracy stung.
That’s probably why, when some random girl named Funmi from the Vancouver ‘Japa’ WhatsApp group posted asking if anyone near the Mapleridge area wanted to meet up for drinks at a place called Roxies, I quickly typed “I’m in” before I could chicken out.
