Page 1 of Snake

Prologue

the previous fall

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Drumming her manicured nails on her leather-wrapped steering wheel, Autumn Rooney watched the twenty-something try to navigate her way into her Mini Cooper while juggling her phone—on which she was holding an animated conversation—and a cardboard tray barely containing four large coffees.

She stopped, set the tray on the top of her Cooper, and leaned back against it to settle in for her gabfest. In the only potential spot anywhere near the coffee shop.

Autumn was going to kill her. She was going to step calmly out of her own car, stroll placidly to that bright red Cooper, and waterboard the inconsiderate twit with those coffees.

With an agitated flip of her arm, she checked her watch. Oh. Actually, she had almost ten minutes to spare. Rather than perpetrate her first homicide, Autumn took a long, deep, cleansing breath and tried to find a drop of serenity somewhere in her head while she waited for the twit to clear out of that spot.

Not actually late but stressed as though she might fall into a hole in the space-time continuum and lose the time she needed was Autumn’s steady state. From the moment her eyes popped open in the morning, usually three minutes before her alarm, to the moment the melatonin kicked in at night, she ran at full speed, trying to do everything, be everything, get everywhere. Even things she did for herself—salon days, yoga, twice-weekly lunches with her dads, monthly trips to The Fashion Mall with Ida—had all the relaxation of a cage match ... at least until a couple glasses of Jameson were warming her insides up.

Worried about her stress, her dads each had a regular lecture about ‘work-life balance.’ They weren’t wrong; she’d read all the same influencer posts, seen all the same videos. She knew all the same trendy buzzwords. But they’d also pushed and supported her all her life to chase all her dreams, be all she could be, kick the Man straight in the face with the Louboutins they totally expected her to be able to afford.

Guess what? You couldn’t both grind your way to the top and kick back and smell the flowers. And Louboutins only came with the grind.

Autumn had decided to wait and smell the flowers at her funeral.

On some days she thought that lengthy rest might not be all that far off. She was thirty-four years old, and she was exhausted. Though she loved food and made a fair effort to eat healthy, really she lived on caffeine and protein bars. But she was building the life she wanted, so she kept going.

The spoils of the daily cage fight that was her life: in addition to several pairs of Louboutins and a wardrobe full of designer labels, she had a gorgeous condo (in a historic school building!) in Broad Ripple Village, she’d already paid off her grad-school loans and repaid her dads for the down payment on said gorgeous condo, she paid off her credit cards every month, and she drove a BMW i5.

A few months ago she’d been made Vice President of Commercial Development at MidWest Growth & Progress. At the company meeting where her promotion was announced, and in the press materials that went out to local news, her boss, Charlton Isley III, the president of the company, had stressed her drive and commitment to MWGP’s success.

She was both the youngest person with an office on the executive floor and the only—and first—woman there. More than a quarter through this century, the C-suite at MWGP was clinging as hard as it could to professional gender dynamics that should have died out in the previous century. Chase (what Charlton III preferred to be called) had told her, during one of his scotch-soaked ‘work nights,’ that his father, their CEO, considered her a double-dip diversity hire. Not only was she a woman, but she had two fathers.

That Autumn herself was straight did not seem to factor. She’d been raised by gay men, so obviously she bled rainbow.

They’d put her on the cover of the latest annual report. The related story had a whole paragraph about her family.

And you know what? Fine. She was used to it. From her earliest days, Autumn had been perceived as some sort of token. She was the kid with two dads. They had adopted her as an infant, from a fifteen-year-old girl whose pregnancy was the result of incestual abuse. That was all she knew; her poor bio-mom wanted no contact, and Autumn had never felt a need to meet her, nor any shame about her conception. She knew who she was: the daughter of Eliot March and Richard Rooney.

She adored her fathers, and she felt blessed that they’d chosen her. They had given her a wonderful life full of love and joy, and with plenty of privilege. But as a child her very existence had always been perceived as political. In the suburban Indianapolis town she’d grown up in, and the private school there she’d attended, she was almost always the only one in her class with even one gay parent (who were out and proud, at least), let alone two. At home and at school, anywhere and everywhere, there were always people who believed she shouldn’t have the home she had. People who accused her dads of being ‘groomers’ and other terrible things. People who called out nasty slurs while she and her dads were just trying to walk by. Conversely, there were people who looked on her family like a museum—or a zoo—exhibit, with little condescending smiles and unwarranted, unwanted comments about how ‘brave’ or ‘inspiring’ it was for her dads to be out in public with her like a family.

Autumn was used to being a token. Now she meant to make it work for her. So if the Charlton Isleys II and III wanted to consider her a ‘diversity hire,’ she didn’t care. When Chase got drunk and commented on the sleek fit of her skirt or the neckline of a blouse, she smiled and let it pass—and wore that cut more often. He liked her hair long and loose, so that was how she wore it.

If he ever actually touched her, she’d put the heel of her Louboutin So Kate black-patent pump through his jugular, but he could look all he wanted, and she’d give him something to look at.

Taken as a whole, people were jerks. Straight men, additionally, were mostly libido-addled morons. Autumn would use whatever tools she had at her disposal to climb over every lump in her way.

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~oOo~

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Autumn finally entered the coffee shop with almost five minutes to spare, but her dad Eliot was already seated and had been there long enough to have ordered, collected the order, and arranged their table into his own personal nest. He sat there, posed like he was sitting for a painting, and sipped his coffee. Another coffee and what Autumn hoped was a pumpkin muffin sat before the empty chair across from him.

His face lit up like a spotlight when he saw her. “Gingersnap!! There’s my girl!” Her father had dozens of nicknames and endearments for her and added to the list regularly, but ‘Gingersnap’ was one of the oldest and most common.

“Hi, Pom.” She kissed his cheek and got two brisk pats of her cheeks in return. “You look good.”

He did look good. Pom (a portmanteau of Papa and Mom that she’d come up with when she was still in Pull-Ups) was a slender, beautiful man who had no doubt been considered a twink back in his youthful clubbing days. Though he was past sixty, he was fighting the natural aging process with all he had, and he still had a Timothée Chalamet thing going on.

It was cliché, and of course it didn’t work this way in all or even most queer families, but her family had a pseudo-traditional aspect to it. Neither dad had been the ‘wife’ in the relationship; that framing was reductive and offensive. But one of her dads had strong, stereotypical Mom energy—that would be Pom—and the other had strong, stereotypical Dad energy: Richard, whom she called Pops.

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