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You walk into the nightclub, early enough in the night that people haven't crowded the dance floor yet. Vague nerves pluck at your fingers, trying to make you adjust your clothes, but the dim lights and the smells of the venue wash you in nostalgia whose tides soak away the anxiety of coming back after so many years. She takes the lead, tracking to a bartop on the far end of the main room, bypassing a few that she clearly doesn't care for as much.
A quick glance back at you, and then she's ordering the drinks. You finger around for your slim wallet in your bag, but by the time you pluck it out she's tapping her card on the reader. It's adorable, she feels like she's treating you to drinks, but your birthday gift to her would cover a month's worth of overpriced drinks, and her voice acting commissions don't cover what other parents would charge their adult daughter in rent. Yet. The expensive microphone and sound canceling foam panels were worth every penny, her voice is gorgeous. She took to voice training with an enthusiasm rarely seen outside of the pressures of olympic parents pushing competition on them, and you're dead certain she could make a career out of it if she wants. Singing too, maybe.
'You can do anything you put your mind to' is usually just a phrase, material for motivation if it gets through someone's insecurities, but success is in Chanté's heart and those dedicated eyes. She turns to you with a wink, a drink, and an excuse not to think. Either she perused the bottles of liquor on top of the cabinets at home to figure out a simple cocktail you'd like, or her mother dropped a detail about what you like to drink before she left. Her other mother. You're just you, so Angelica got 'mother' in your mind and you got 'mom' in Chanté's voice. She just calls your ex by her name, in the rare times that your daughter even refers to her.
The fog machine is timid this early in the night, and you watch its wisps eddy and swirl in the air a foot off the ground and take in the moment. It smells like a Halloween costume store, but heavier, nights of neon sweat instead of autumn days of latex masks. The drink kicks, and the first swallow is a threshold, but she got a flavorful liquor mixed with sweet soda, so a quick stir with your finger, a surreptitious suck of the liquid off it, and the drink goes down smoother. Your daughter sidles up next to you, leaning on the bar, flicking a glance at you, and then she peruses the 'crowd' with you. You just might be eyeing the same girls, though there's still a little sting at being here. You picked up her mother at a place like this, twenty-three years ago. Nearly to the day, it's only a week off.
Chanté doesn't know that. She knows it was a club, she knows it was this club, but your anniversary was always an overnight babysitter visit while you and your danced, and then a cheap motel where you and your wife paid for replacement sheets on checkout.
Your daughter starts to bob along to the beat beside you, hips already moving more than the other nearly sober people in the venue. You have to wonder how many times she's been here before. She invited you out because you'd been looking down for a few days, or maybe a few weeks. The anniversary feels different every year. Sometimes rueful, mad that Angelica left, sometimes regretful, that you let your daughter grow up without her other parent, sometimes depressed that she never tried to reach out and contact you or Chanté again. This year it was mourning - you still miss her, even with the anger and spite that play tug-of-war with your heart.
The music started industrial, and as it drifts into hip hop your daughter switches the elbow she's leaning on to catch your eye and twitch her head to indicate a solitary dancer already enthralled by the music. She's got your dark hair and your flat shoes, and you can see someone in her that you used to see in the mirror a long time ago. There was a little reflection of that old self in the mirror earlier when you checked your makeup for the last time and adjusted your bra straps to be a little tighter, for better support when dancing.
You smile and make a little gesture with your shoulder. You doubt your daughter would try to get with someone that reminds her of her mom, and you doubt you could wing-woman for her even if you tried, but maybe she'd like dancing with her. You'll probably dance too, eventually. It's what you came here for, not the nostalgia that keeps making every flash of the lights feel like a flicker from the past.
Chanté smiles and bobs along with the music, apparently unconcerned. The first round of drinks ends and you turn to ask for another. The music is loud and you have to ask for a double four times before the bartender nods and turns away. You gesture wordlessly to your daughter to place her order as well, and after conferring with the topless man behind the bar she leans up to your ear to tell you that he needs to check your ID again.
Tedious, but you already had your wallet out to pay, so you pull out the plastic card to flash at him. He gives you a dismissive smile and waves you off. You shrug and turn to the card reader, and-
She paid again. A coy little smile dances across her face, and she playfully takes a sip of your drink before she hands it over. It twinkles in your head again, the symmetry.
You take the lead this time, heading over to an empty corner of the floor, and you start to move your hips, mostly glancing at the stage the paid dancers will climb onto once the night really starts to get going. The drink in your hand abates any emphatic movement, so you're left with a few songs to ruminate again.
Your daughter has the same eyes. Her mother only saw a year of them, and she was gone before they shifted from blue to green. It was a fight, because your daughter deserved for you to put up a fight. Son back then, and it was why your wife left. Her ex-girlfriend moved back from Canada, and she had a newborn daughter with her. It took a year for you and Angelica to concieve, and she was the one who really wanted to not know the baby's sex before their birth, ready for anything.
She wasn't though. Something changed when the doctor announced it. You didn't see it in her eyes right away, but you caught her staring out the window more often, found her more hesitant to participate in parenting than she should have been. The ex came back, they caught up in a coffee shop once, and then things changed for Angelica. She was more affectionate with her son, and everything seemed right, until she dropped a 'she'. Something washed through your soul when you heard it. There was one minute, one brief period of ambiguity, and then she admitted it. 'Maybe she'll be trans, like me!'
That was the first part of the fight. You couldn't accept her raising her child as though he were a trans girl before his first birthday. No matter how much you tried to make her see that statistics said that the odds were better that he'd be cis, and that raising him as trans could be bad for him, she insisted. Wouldn't take gender neutral parenting either, and it broke your heart.
You tried to hold the glue between you together as long as you could, but she dissolved it the night she came home and told you she was leaving to be with her ex. You didn't even have to ask. It was because she always wanted a daughter, and she'd rather parent a step-daughter than her own son.
Your eyes drift to your daughter again in this dark room, and she's like a mirror of her mother. Taller, lucky enough to get HRT early in mid-adolescence instead of in her early adulthood, but those round cheeks, happy eyebrows, imperfect teeth, racy clothing choices. Confident from a life spent well supported and loved. Your drink is done, you point to hers, and she hands it over.
The crowd has grown alongside your buzz, and seemingly Chanté's has as well. Her movements are more emphatic, she's turning and stepping further, a little smile is curving her lips. A pop remix on the speakers, adding reverb to some lyrics and dropping out others, just enough to make you wish it were your daughter's voice on the track instead, giving her a chance to make her love for the song heard somewhere outside the echoey shower you share at home.
Maybe she is actually singing to it a few feet in front of you, or maybe you're just hearing what you want to. Someone called you a cougar the last time you came here, and though it felt unfair, she wasn't wrong. You can't help being attracted to youth, the energy, the spark, the candor. It never changed as you hit middle age, and you like to think you can still get away with the short shorts and low cut shirt you dusted out of hiding tonight.
Your daughter is certainly pulling off her miniskirt, and you can't help but let your eyes linger on her legs, for too long. You blink away. Another drink maybe.
The first has settled in, the second was good company, and the bite of the third washes away the stress from two weeks of nonstop work. Chanté seems to be enjoying dancing on her own, so you lean on the bar and close your eyes to let the trance music spin your feelings around in time with the colors pulsing just outside your eyelids. It could have been two songs or two years before a hand touches yours. Soft and tender, not demanding. It's her again, a smile on her face and body language clearly inviting you to join her again.
You can feel the alcohol in your steps as you follow her through the crowd, your hand held resolutely in hers, unshakeable even through the bumping bodies. She grins at you as she turns around, and she was right. Right to bring you here, for you to come here with her. To join someone as happy as her, happy to be herself and to share her company with someone that she loves. She starts to move with that smile, carrying it in each of her movements and through every song, fully present, letting everything outside of this room fall away.
You follow her into it, letting the drinks and the movement of the crowd take you deeper alongside her. You have more energy for this than you've had for most of your life over the last few years, and though you know it'll be a tired morning, it's a night for life and living and being. Blue light flashes, and it catches your daughter in a perfect freeze-frame with a joyous grin, eyes closed, nowhere else but the present, right here, right now, with you.
Just like her mother was, right here, in this very club. Same blonde hair, same rhythm, same hands above her shoulders in violation of the tenets of dancing you'd been told decades ago. Too much joy in her to hide, to obscure behind social convention, to shy away from out of social pressure.
You thought about calling Angelica when your daughter came out as trans. She'd been right, in the end. Maybe she'd visit, try to be in Chanté's life again. But she didn't earn that. You raised her, you supported her, you were on top of her new pronouns within days, and she asked you to help her find a name. You recalled stories of how your ex-wife found her name, and suggested that your daughter look for a character that felt like her 'trans awakening'. She picked an alternate spelling of a video game character she'd liked since she was a kid.
She always knew her mother was trans, and maybe that was why she transitioned herself. She never asked you to contact her mom after she came out, and she never asked for contact info herself. Maybe she always considered herself yours alone too.
Her eyes open and a glint from the disco ball catches her green irises, flecked red by the glitter on the ornament spinning above you. The DJ makes a smooth transition from one trance song to the next, and the crowd pulses around you, pushing you closer to your daughter. The drinks have kicked in and her energy is infectious; your arms are moving as much as hers, hips swaying and feet tapping, losing yourself in the moment with her like you've always been able to do in this place.
A few beats of darkness and your eyes open again, and she's so close, eyes on yours, energy matching, just the right distance to put your hands on her-
She reaches up and wraps her arms around your neck. You match her timing on the beat unconsciously, and she takes a half step forward that invites your hands onto her waist. So chaste a place compared to everyone else in this club, right now and in years past, yourself included. There's no time to be self conscious, because her eyes are hot and unwavering, and she's mouthing along to the lyrics of a song that was contemporary when you first danced here. The glitter in her lip gloss is bright in your peripheral vision, a shining beacon you're too entranced by green irises to see.
As the moments pulse past, you're drawn further and further into the moment, and it all feels perfect again, you belong in this building, in this night, in this life. A shiver runs through you as the time stops and it's just you in the moment, dancing with a gorgeous woman who wants to be close, even closer to you as your hands drift down to her hips and you can feel her plush curves. Your exerted breaths get hotter and she steps closer, swaying with you, touching her chest and hips against you, so close you could kiss.
You can feel that desire within you now, and it dawns on a soul watered by drinks and years of knowing this girl for who she is and everything she wants to be. Maybe some of it is the possessiveness of hiding her away from someone thousands of miles north pulling you too close into your daughter's embrace. Maybe some of it is the fact that your daughter just happens to be exactly your type. Maybe some of it is loneliness, maybe some of it is lust, but it doesn't feel like that, you know her too intimately to see her as some one-night. After decades of being the one to show initiative with younger women, you feel all the pressures of desire withheld by an invisible net across your lips, forbidding you from leaning closer and touching your lips under the strobing lights like you're drawn to.
You have to wonder what Chanté is thinking, why she came here with you. She loves you, of course, she wants to see you happy, but she could have gotten you drinks and found you a nice corner and a dance partner, then looked for one of her own. She could have danced side by side with you or kept in front of each other a few feet away, like earlier. A mother and daughter sharing an activity, not making much eye contact, just being mindful of each other's movements to not step on toes.
But she's all the way on you, those smoky eyes tracing over you every moment that passes. You've never known the difference between attraction and love, not properly, and right in this moment, there's something made of desperation inside of you, begging an unspeaking reality to let you understand, to be able to see what she's feeling properly and not misread it, to know why she's choosing to be so intimate with you every beat that goes by, why she's staring at your lips now, why she-
Kisses you.
Years of practice and symmetry with past moments here over the years keep you moving in time with the music, but suddenly everyone else in the club has disappeared into blackness, all that's left is the beat and her soft body under your hands. Her arms wrapped around your neck, the strands threaded between your eyes and hers as she pulls back but stays close, paying attention to see how you're responding, if it was unwanted, if she just crossed a line, but to you right now, you're just two women on a foggy dance floor sharing attraction and unignorable physical chemistry.
You don't flash a yes in your eyes, you don't wait for her to try again, you definitely don't pause enough to let her pull back and think she's made a mistake. You move into your role in this and lean forward in the scant space to kiss her again. It feels just like kissing her mother, only now the sheath of vulnerability you were wrapped in when Angelica left you is a shelter, a tight copse for you to share with someone that you're sure will never leave you, not like she did.
Chanté's next kiss is greedy, but the one after she holds, hips bouncing, eyes closed, savoring the touch and losing herself in it just like you do. You can feel the love in her body and soul and how she's caring for and offering it to you when she knows you need it. You'll never know if she planned this the whole time, if it was an impulsive mistake, if it was the alcohol or the confident woman that she is that made this happen.
You release your lips first, and the club is back, the throng of people moving around you, the lights and sensations and smells, the alcohol buzz in your body and mind and under the aroused blush on your cheeks. You want to tell her that you love her.
You do, even though saying you love someone after your first few kisses is too soon. You mouth it for her to see, you say it with meaning, knowing that it's not coming from the correct place for a moment like this, that even though it's made from her beauty and life and your need and want, that its core is coming from your love for her as a mother loves a daughter. One that loved the person she was before she transitioned, that watched her grow and find herself in your care. She's found you now, and she pulls even tighter to you, foreheads together, her nose clumsily bumping into the bridge of your glasses on the offbeat.
She didn't say it back, maybe she missed it in the overwhelming music, maybe she didn't understand what you mouthed, but you can feel it in her all the same, the way her body moves with yours perfectly, in sync and in love, no matter whatever kind of love she holds for you or what it might grow to be beyond this moment.
You know you want it to grow into something new. You don't want to replace your ex with her daughter, but dear god she'd be an exquisite fit, completely your type and completely yours and you could be completely hers if that's what she wants. Entwined in your shared sensation of abandonment, but maybe she can show you the way out of that with her bright attitude and pure heart. A path for you two to walk and dance down together, in the club and out of the club, in your home and in your bed. Hers, yours, both, neither, the couch, the kitchen, the car, wherever and whenever you feel it for each other, and you know you'll feel it everywhere.
There's a part of you trying to calculate, to be responsible, to be a parent, to do your best to figure out the situation and see if there's anything you need to do right now to make things turn out right for her after this night, but instead you wrap your arms all the way around your daughter's waist and hold her to you, selfish in your need to feel this moment and let it cleanse all the years of loneliness.
After an eternity of moments far too short yet eternal in their expanse, the overhead lights kick on. Two hours danced by with soft, passionate kisses and warm, knowing smiles, and now this night is over, ready to shuffle on into the next, a new night, totally different than the one it was when you walked in the door. Still hours from the sunrise, there's an uncertain dawn in your heart that rises with the brightness of the room, and you selfishly hold your daughter to you, still now, foreheads still together, afraid to pull away and see her eyes, to let her see yours, to see how much you need this and what it'll pull out of your heart if she rejects you.
Strangers all around you, sweaty and tired and slow to obey the directions to leave. Witnesses to a moment technically incestuous, but pure of heart and love. Her arms retract slowly, and cold creeps in in their absence, the sensation an unwanted phantom in a stuffy room, but real to you all the same. You can't look at her, you won't pull back. She tries to pull away a few millimeters and you wordlessly push forward.
You feel fingers on your cheeks, gentle and considerate, ready to reject you with the sweetest words from the sweetest lips and the sweetest heart. She guides your head away from her and you give a long blink. You have to face her eventually though. She started this, but you're the one responsible for it, for accepting and needing it more than she knew. You're going to open your eyes and be her mother again, too close with your hands where they don't belong, savoring a body that isn't yours to touch.
"I love you Camille."
You open your eyes, and her tears match yours. Just on the verge of falling, but ready to be caught by each other.
She didn't say 'mom' like you would have subconsciously expected. She loves you, Camille, the woman she brought here and kissed and shared this night with.
You need her to kiss you again, right now, to seal whatever this is between you, to bind the two of you together forever as something new. It's not your place to push it on her, to offer it gently, or to ask for it. You need her to kiss you because she wants to, because she wants you and she means it.
You can feel from the way she presses her lips to yours again, cradling your face in her palms, that she needed to kiss you too, that this moment was everything to her too.
You'll live together in this memory forever. In your lips, in your hearts.
No matter what comes next.