"Sorry, I'm okay, really...it's just all of this is hitting me at once." Erin clambered around the table to sit on the comfortably padded floor behind it. She pulled herself together--she was finally among people like herself, and the world had gotten a bit smaller too. She felt good, at ease...for the first time since her transformation had begun. As it turned out, it wasn't over yet--the physical part was, at least, and was permanent as best she could tell, but the emotional part--the part of the transformation that had turned a happy, confident, outgoing girl into an emotional wreck--was being thrown full-throttle into reverse.
Something was bugging her, though, and she decided to get it out of the way, hoping it wasn't a sensitive subject. "So Lisa..." she asked, "you and John were...?"
"You tell her, John," Lisa said, smiling as Lauren rubbed her arm with her armless shoulder. Lauren nodded.
"Well, to start off, there weren't any hard feelings. I was delighted, in fact. Lauren was the first friend I made in this country, so I was happy to see her get together with Lisa, whom I know to be an absolutely wonderful woman. Lisa and I were pretty casual at the time, none too serious, so..." He shrugged, palms upward, then took their drinks from the centaur bartender, who'd just arrived. John thanked him, and handed a martini to Erin.
"So," Lauren piped in, having detected that John was going to be modest, "He convinced us to hook up."
Erin's eyebrows shot up. "You're joking."
Lisa grinned and shook her head. John was hiding his face with a wing in a bashful sort of way. "John's something else. If he takes a shine to you, he'll do just about anything to make you happy." She pushed John's wing down playfully.
Erin took a sip of her martini, looking deep into John's eyes, making sure he knew that even though she was replying to Lisa's comment, the words were meant for him. "I noticed," she said softly.
