Chapter 75: There Goes My Straightness
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The ride home should’ve been easy.
The limo was warm and quiet, the city lights drifting past the tinted windows in golden and white streams, the soft glow inside making everything feel detached from reality.
Harris drove smoothly, like he’d done this a thousand times, so it felt completely ordinary. The seat was, as previously established, ridiculously comfortable.
Everything on the outside seemed fine. Better than fine.
But my brain, sensing this, decided to retaliate by making a mess of things.
I stared out at the city lights while my thoughts spiraled back to the same territory they’d been circling all evening, landing at the same conclusions each time.
Melanie, Damien, the date, tonight, the kisses.
I’d kissed Melanie outside Callington Hall on a Saturday evening. It had been sweet, warm, uncomplicated in that way things are when they’re right and good for you.
I’d kissed her back and meant it and felt comfortable after, like enjoying a perfect cup of coffee on a slow morning something you savor, something you appreciate, without any difficult expectations.
Then there was tonight. Damien’s hand on my jaw, steady and unhurried. His mouth against mine, carrying the weight of a decision rather than an accident. The unmistakable feeling of being kissed by someone who had thought it through enough to know exactly what he wanted.
Just the thought of it was sending my heartbeat racing in a way Melanie’s sweet kiss simply hadn’t done.
Fuck...I was so gay.
I shifted in my seat, focusing harder on the window.
Maybe I was confused. Maybe I was tired. Maybe Joey’s running commentary had really seeped into my brain at a cellular level and I was just feeling the effects. Maybe—
I was fucking bisexual.
But when I examined those excuses under the light of reality, they fell apart one by one. Each excuse crumbled against the same set of facts and those facts were crystal clear.
Huh...who would have thought I was a part of the LGBT. I suppose we really do discover more about ourselves every single day.
Damien occupied my thoughts like nothing else did. Not as a problem, not as an annoyance, not even primarily as a confusing situation, just as a presence, persistent and unmistakable, like some people just naturally stay in your awareness more than others, and I could no longer explain it away as coincidence.
The coffee every morning. The notes. The way he picked up on things I hadn’t said, solved problems I hadn’t voiced, and waited in dark apartments with cold coffee. The way he’d reacted when I mentioned my date.
The way he looked right this moment, actually, calm and quiet in the seat across from me, gazing at the city outside, and I was sneaking another glance at him without realizing it.
Then it hit me.
He was beautiful.
Not handsome, not attractive, not the distant acknowledgment I had allowed myself until now. Beautiful, in that way things are when you’ve stopped trying to view them from a neutral perspective and simply started to see them.
I immediately looked away.
Oh.
Oh.
No way. Absolutely not. That was not a thought I was having. I was erasing it. I was professionally, permanently erasing it, effective immediately.
My hands were in my lap. I glanced at them, they were normal hands, attached to a normal person, having a completely normal evening in a limousine after a hockey game where a kiss cam had documented evidence suggesting several complicated things I was avoiding.
Except I was examining them. And that was the issue. Every diversion I attempted, every redirect, every layer of sarcasm I reached for, they all just led back to the same clearing in the same forest with the same signpost pointing to the same destination.
Because there was a term for all of this. A very specific, very clear term that clarified every confusing reaction, every traitorous pulse, every moment of noticing things I had no real reason to notice.
A term that, once acknowledged, reorganized a ton of my past few weeks into something that suddenly made a lot of sense.
I wasn’t ready for that term, I needed significantly more time before I was prepared to confront that concept. Possibly years, maybe an entirely different hemisphere.
The notion that I might not fit the neat little straight box I’d assumed for twenty-one years settled in my chest and looked at me like it had been waiting for a while.
And what made it so complicated, what changed the way it landed, different from how I expected it to, was that it didn’t feel wrong. It felt overwhelming and sudden, like something I needed to wrestle with in a dark room for a long time. But not wrong.
Which was, in some ways, the most disorienting part.
I glanced up.
Damien was already watching me. He’d turned away from the window at some point, and now his eyes were on me with the quiet attentiveness of someone who has noticed something and is deciding whether to ask about it.
"You okay?" he asked.
Two words, soft and straightforward. No theatrics in them.
If I answered honestly, I would spontaneously combust. That much was clear. My emotional state had barely enough structural integrity to survive an honest response to that question right now, with those eyes on me.
"Fine," I replied.
He studied my face for a moment, reading whatever I was giving off, which was probably more than I intended and then nodded slowly, like he was filing something away rather than letting it go. He turned back to gaze out the window.
I exhaled.
The city glided by, indifferent and sparkling, the limo felt warm, the keychain sat in my pocket, small and metal.
And I sat there in the peaceful luxury of a moving car at night, thinking about how somewhere over the last few weeks, without any announcement or permission, something had shifted so completely that I could no longer pinpoint where things had changed.
Melanie’s kiss felt like a pleasant thing that had happened to me.
Damien’s kiss felt like something I’d been approaching for longer than I was aware.
That wasn’t confusion. I had been trying to label it confusion because, in that case, confusion had an exit, it resolved once you gathered more information, more time, or a broader perspective. But what I was grappling with now didn’t have that kind of quality. It felt like something that was already settled, already decided, simply waiting for me to catch up.
I stared at the window.
The real problem, I understood now with a clarity that would have felt very inconvenient three weeks ago, had never been Damien.
The issue had always been me, and everything I’d been carefully avoiding, with the realization that I had been avoiding it long enough that it had gotten quite comfortable and wasn’t planning to leave.
Across the limo, Damien sat quietly, watching the passing city, and I watched him watching it, and the space between us felt different than it had on the way to the game, less uncertain, somehow, that uncertainty having been replaced with something else, something simpler yet considerably more daunting.
I still wasn’t quite ready to say the word.
But I was, I thought, looking at Damien Lockwood in the serene of a moving car at night, getting pretty close to being ready to stop pretending I didn’t know what that word was.