CHAPTER EIGHT
FOURTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
I knew by fourteen.
Not because anything happened.
Because nothing did.
And I was starting to understand what that meant.
· · ·
It wasn’t a realization so much as a settling in the pit of my stomach. Like something that had been slightly out of focus for years finally sharpened without warning. I didn’t have a moment. No dramatic before and after.
Just — one ordinary Tuesday, lying on my bedroom floor with Cassian asleep beside me, I looked at the side of his face in the dark and thought —
You’re so beautiful.
And then I looked away.
And didn’t think about it again until I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And then it was all I could think about.
He was different this year too.
Harder to reach in the specific way that had nothing to do with distance. He could be right next to me — shoulder to shoulder, our usual — and something in him would be somewhere else entirely. A door closed behind his eyes that he wouldn’t open for me.
And I’d learned not to knock on it.
Instead I’d just stay. Keep the window open at night. Make sure he knew the option was there.
That was the year he started arriving later.
Tap tap at midnight sometimes. One in the morning. I’d be half asleep and hear it and be at the window before I was fully conscious, the way you respond to something your body has decided is important regardless of what your brain is doing.
I never asked why later.
I never asked why at all.
I just made myself available whenever he needed me.
· · ·
There was one night in October.
We were on the floor, backs against my bed, some movie playing that neither of us were watching. His knee was touching mine. It had been for an hour. Neither of us had moved.
He went still.
Not asleep — I knew what that looked like. Something else. Aware, suddenly, of the exact same thing I was aware of.
We looked at each other.
I didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
Neither of us even breathed.
And then he laughed at something on screen that wasn’t funny and reached over and shoved my shoulder and the moment dissolved like it was never there.
I let it.
We were good at that.
· · ·
Then in November he mentioned a girl.
Someone from school. I don’t even remember her name now — she was gone by spring, barely a footnote. But the way he said it was different from how he’d talked about girls before. Less abstract.
More real.
I nodded along the way I always did.
Said the right things.
And somewhere in the middle of it something clicked into place in my chest. Quiet and final, like a key turning in a lock.
That’s what that is.
That’s what I am.
I didn’t say it out loud.
I wasn’t ready for it to be real yet.
But I knew.
And knowing, it turned out, was its own kind of loneliness.
· · ·
His dad was worse this year.
I didn’t know the details. Cassian wouldn’t give them and I wouldn’t ask. But I could measure it in other ways — some nights he’d just lie there staring at the ceiling for an hour before he finally exhaled.
I’d pretend to be asleep.
Give him the privacy of thinking no one was watching him come back to himself.
It felt like the least I could do.
· · ·
That was the year I started understanding something about the way I loved him.
It wasn’t just that I wanted things I couldn’t have.
It was that I’d built my entire interior life around someone who was disappearing in real time and I didn’t know how to stop it.
I also wasn’t strong enough to let go.
That was the bigger problem.
One night in December he fell asleep before me.
I lay there in the dark listening to him breathe and let myself think it properly for the first time.
Not around the edges.
Not almost.
Fully.
I love him.
Which probably means I’m gay.
Which I guess everyone else knew since I was eight but it took me a couple years to come to terms with it.
These two things are going to be the most important facts of my life and I can’t tell anyone right now.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.
Then I turned onto my side, away from him, and closed my eyes.
By morning he was gone.