Just got to Kat’s. Sleeping off the tequila at their room, from Pérez, sent at eight this morning.
Okay. We’re good. We’ve got a solid few hours before anyone’s coming back. After swiping out of my texts, I open Instagram, seeing pictures of Pérez and Kat from the party and a post from Leana underneath them and—
“Better,” Vale says softly as he walks back and crawls onto the bed and over to me, going right back to lying on top of me. “You miss anything important?”
“No, I just … you want to see something?”
He gives me a suspicious look, an eyebrow rising. “Is this going to be some weird, I have to close my eyes sort of thing? Or like when Orlando found that video of that guy—”
“No.That—no. Promise. This is normal.”
He readjusts himself, sitting up perpendicular to me, his legs draped over my stomach. I don’t waste a second before my hand is on the right one, rubbing and massaging him from knee to his foot, all my attention on him and his skin and how cute this boy in my bed is. And then I remember what I wanted to get off my chest, let out an “Oh, yeah,” and give him my phone, Instagram still open to a post under Leana’s of a shirtless boy with thick black curls sitting on the sand at some Los Angeles beach, smiling straight ahead.
“¿Quien es?”
“Friend from high school. His name is Jules. The guy I told you about who came out and had kind of a hard time with it. So, I … last year, at a Homecoming after-party, I kissed him.”
I wait to see if there’s any kind of immediate reaction from Vale, but all I get is calm. Like he realizes there’s a point to me bringing this up right now, and he wants to give me that space. “A bunch of our friends were there, and teammates. Not enough for it to be some frat house party but, you know.
“Anyway, we started playing Spin the Bottle, and when it got to his turn, he landed on me. And the thing about it was, like, one, we were already good friends outside of football. We had the same best friend, so, you know, proximity or whatever, and our circle of friends was basically the same. I was crushing on his other best friend at the time, but he’d also come out as gay a few weeks before. When the bottle stopped and was pointing at me, I could feel how nervous he was, and, in the moment, I was too. But I didn’t want him to feel a type of way. I wanted him to know it was fine. It was just a kiss.”
“Sounds familiar,” Vale says, his smile soft, and he lets out an even softer hum at my hand still massaging his calf muscle.
“Thought it might. Plus, it was with one of my boys; I could count on us laughing about this later, and who cares if he likes guys, right? I didn’t. It was just a game.
“It was just a game,” I repeat. “That’s what I told myself, and it was easy enough to believe. It was just Spin the Bottle. The prettiest girl in our whole school was my date. We’d been making out the whole night, practically. This one kiss didn’t have to mean anything compared to that, other than it being kind of cool that I got to be the first guy he ever kissed. Except I … I felt something in that kiss. I felt something that, really, wasn’t so different from kissing any girl I’ve ever liked. I felt the butterflies. I felt myself wanting to show confidence and that I had some game, even in Spin the Bottle. And I felt myself … wanting him. Wanting more.”
I bring my other hand up to Vale’s face, watching as he leans his head into it. Looking at him and seeing how, in a lot of ways, last night and even the night I met Vale really was history repeating itself. A boy. His girl best friend who had my attention from the jump. A kiss that woke something inside me up.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss for the rest of the night.” All those memories, so many moments I’d forgotten about until recently, are now playing like a movie I’ve got a front row seat for. “I remember typing and deleting and then typing again, trying to send a text to him all Sunday.
“He was on my mind nonstop, and I wanted to ask him if he liked the kiss too, for scientific reasons, or if maybe he’d be okay talking it out with me because his mouth had me going through it. In a way that had me stressed but not scared. But maybe, if he’d be down to try kissing again, just to make sure it wasn’t some one-off thing, I could unravel that stress. Or at least have someone to help me de-stress so I wasn’t just in my head all by myself.
“But I never texted him. And, when I got to lunch on the Monday after and walked over to our table, ready to just man up and ask in person if we could talk somewhere privately, I—I sawthat I was too late. At the time he was hiding it, but I accidentally saw the text messages on his phone. Thehey boyfriendandcan’t wait to talk to you laterandI miss hearing the sound of your voice. I think that, while I was typing and deleting texts, another guy was making his move. So, instead, I swallowed down everything about that night.”
There’s a heaviness in my chest. Like a little bit of that pain, the harshness that came with pretending I hadn’t basically been punched in the gut that day, the feelings I thought were completely gone were all now coming back up.
“I forced it down and decided thatwho cared if it happenedbecause it didn’t matter anymore. They weren’t going to be reciprocated. If he’s spoken for, why should I spend time thinking about how, actually, he’s really cute and maybe a part of me liked him in a lot of the same ways I’ve liked any girl? Or, at least, maybe for different reasons, but in a way that seemed so familiar.”
Vale takes my hand and brings it up to his mouth, kissing my palm. He looks at me, his eyes drinking me in while also looking a little sad.
“I’m really happy that you feel comfortable telling me this.”
“I just … every other not straight or nonbinary person I know seems to have always …been. Even if they struggled with it, they knew it was there. A part of them, the whole time. Right? Like, have you always known you’re gay?”
“I—I mean, basically.”
“It didn’t hit me until really recently that I’m bi. And besides the main struggles about where I go from here about it, I’m also having a hard time getting past why it took this long. Why it took seventeen years, kissing a boy at a party, and then another year after that and kissing a boy at a partyagain. And even then, I was so convinced that, obviously, I was straight. Every thought I had about you was like,Who cares it was just a kissandEvery guy’s jacked off to the thought of another guy. There was this big, stubborn wall that wouldn’t let me see myself clearly until it was too hard to ignore. Before that, one kiss and how it affected me didn’t define me. I got to drop it, forget about it, and go on living.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.”
“You know that it doesn’t make you any less bi just because you didn’t realize it until you were eighteen, right? There are so many reasons that happens, so don’t belittle yourself. You said so yourself, how so much of your life won’t let you be; it could’ve just been survival, Gabi. And you shouldn’t beat yourself up over that.”
“So, what? Now my brain is like, I found a reason that makes me want to stop hiding this from myself?”
“Maybe so. Hell, you’re doing a paper on a philosopher who would probably be the biggest supporter of people finding their queerness later than most, assuming he’s not queerphobic. Also, it’d be kind of iconic of me to be the guy who made your brain say, ‘Worth it.’ ”
