16. July #2
Dex asked if he could bring Jasmyn and his mother along, and even though Cya was nervous to meet Mrs. Triever, they’d agreed. They didn’t want Dex to have to choose between seeing his mother—when he so rarely did, given their conflicting schedules—and coming to the pool party.
“Are you sure you want your sister tagging along?”
“Yeah, Jas is cool. She’s pretty much my best friend,” he said, voice crackling through Cya’s phone speaker.
“Your best friend is a thirteen-year-old?” they teased, making him blow a raspberry.
“Um, your best friend is your fifty-year-old butler, so you have no room to judge.”
They glanced at their phone lying on the bed beside them. “Touché.”
Since Cya had only ever hosted parties for rich snobs, they’d enlisted the Lupyn’s help in planning the menu and entertainment, and Dex was taking the responsibility very seriously.
“Don’t hire musicians, by the way.”
They paused their pen halfway through the word cellist. “Why? Then it will be quiet and awkward.”
“Um, think about the people coming to this shindig. You really think awkward silences are what you need to worry about?”
Well, Dex had them there.
“Okay, but isn’t music still a nice touch?”
“Just have a Bluetooth speaker play one of your playlists.” Dex paused. “Actually, you probably listen to boring classical music or something. I’ll connect my phone and we’ll listen to one of my playlists. I have so many good ones.”
“Classical music isn’t boring, and I have broader tastes in music than just that,” they snipped. “But fine, you can be in charge of the playlist.”
“Shweet.”
He grunted, and Cya frowned down at their phone. “What are you doing?”
“Uh, talking to you?” he said, snickering like he’d told a funny joke. Then he grunted again.
They probably didn’t want to know the answer, but they still asked, “Why are you grunting?”
Dex snorted a laugh. “Oh, I’m doing push-ups.”
“Why?”
“Seemed like a good idea.”—grunt—“Why waste the moment when I can do both?”—grunt—“Why? Is it distracting?”
The way he said distracting held a layer of, not accusation, but expectation or significance. Like if they said that it was, indeed, distracting, it would confirm something, something Cya didn’t want confirmed.
“No,” they said, even though they did find it distracting.
“Cool,” he said with another grunt. “Then I’ll keep going. I’m starting to feel the burn.”
“Lovely,” they deadpanned. “What about food? I can arrange a caterer, but—”
Grunt
“—the ones we usually work with only do large events, and—”
Grunt
“—I imagine the usual menu we’d order wouldn’t agree with—”
Grunt
“—oh for deities sake, would you stop it with the grunting?” they cried, flushed and flustered now.
Dex laughed. “You said it wasn’t distracting.”
“It’s not, but it still sounds—” They swallowed the word erotic in the nick of time, shoving it back down their throat where it would never see the light of day. They could never say that; they couldn’t even think it!
The shame of ever admitting, or even hinting at, carnal feelings for the Lupyn would be too much to bear. Cya would rather strip naked in the middle of campus and streak through the dyscus field during the play-offs than admit to Dex that they found him attractive. It just wouldn’t do.
“It still sounds?” Dex prompted.
“Annoying,” they said primly.
“Sure,” he said doubtfully.
To add insult to injury, Dex released a low, satisfied moan, and Cya scrabbled to cover the phone with their hands to stifle the inappropriate sound. They prayed Hemersyn was in the other wing of the house; they didn’t need him to think they were watching pornography.
“Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff,” he rumbled so low in his chest it ended in a little growl, and a wave of heat washed over Cya, from the top of their head to the tip of their tail.
Even their scalp prickled, and their rattle shook, though they couldn’t decide whether it was from annoyance or—annoyance. It was annoyance!
“What in the deities are you doing now?” they demanded in a hiss.
“I was just stretching! Gods, what crawled up your ass and died?”
This time, their tail definitely rattled out of aggravation. “Would you just stretch quieter?”
“I am literally just a person existing. Newsflash, Cy, people make noises.”
“Well, you’re on speakerphone, so could you at least attempt to keep your noises from sounding like a porn?”
The silence that settled over the phone connection was heavy, and Cya nearly hung up to save themself the humiliation.
They didn’t, because the last time they’d hung up on Dex without a goodbye, he’d given them a rather impressive lecture the next day about manners and how “friends don’t hang up on other friends like that, unless the friend is actually a douchebag. ”
When Dex spoke next, his voice was thick with amusement. “A porn? Like, one singular porn?”
Throwing their hands up in exasperation, they snarled, “Of course that’s the part you focus on.”
His laughter was loud and boisterous and made Cya’s teeth grind. It also made them smile, and since they were alone, they didn’t have to hide it. Dex would never know.
“Okay, sorry. I’ll try to keep my noises from sounding like a porn.” He sounded smug, and it grated. “I should have known my raw, animal magnetism would be too much for you.”
He followed his vain declaration with a grunted growl, and Cya rubbed the space between their eyes. “You’re flexing right now, aren’t you?”
“You bet that slithering ass I am.”
“You keep my ass out your mouth,” they shrieked in outrage, blushing furiously when Dex guffawed. “I didn’t—that’s not—you know what I meant!”
“I mean, it’s cool if you’re not into ass play,” he said around his chortles.
“Technically, it’s anatomically impossible for me to be into ass play,” they said cheekily, and Dex choked on his next laugh.
“What?”
Triumphant at the power reversal, they adopted an overly innocent air. “Oh, I think I hear Hemersyn calling me. Gotta go.”
“Wait, you can’t just drop a bombshell like that and hang up!”
“I really must be off,” Cya trilled with a laugh. “Toodaloo.”
“Cya, don’t you—”
They rang off before he could finish, feeling far too pleased with themself.
The Lupyn continued to blow up their phone for the next hour, but regardless of personal growth and maturity, they were still—and probably always would be—a bitch.
So they ignored him for no other reason than entertainment on their part.
Before bed, they went for a soak in their dropped-floor bathtub, the water near scalding, the steam speckling their face in dew. They took out their phone but had nothing to actually do on it, so they scrolled social media.
After the disaster of their final year in secondary school, Cya had deleted their socials, but since they were, on some level, a masochist, apparently, they’d created a fake profile so they could internet-stalk their old friend group.
Niki posted about the parties she attended and the fun activities filling her summer break. And Kent. So many pictures of him.
They paused on a picture of Kent and Niki at the country club, and it might as well have been a reenactment of the pictures that had graced Cya’s profile three years ago.
Copied and pasted after replacing Cya with Niki.
Kent had held them that way, smiled at them that way, kissed them that way. Hadn’t he?
They wondered if it had looked as performative with them as it did with Niki? Probably. Everything about their life back then had been false, plastic. It had felt real because they’d never known anything else, but looking back, it had been so fake. They had been so fake.
Even in the small ways they’d tried to be themself, they’d never pushed too hard. They’d come out as nonbinary, and their friends had more or less accepted it. But they still got misgendered sometimes, and Kent always introduced them as his girlfriend.
“Partner sounds so weird,” he’d said every time they’d asked him to stop. “I mean, do you want people to think I’m gay?”
Eventually, they’d stopped asking. It wasn’t worth the fight, they’d reasoned. The fact it was even a fight at all should have been the first red flag, but they’d been young and stupid.
Dex had stopped calling them princess after the first time they’d asked him to. No fight. No pushback. Just acceptance, a simple apology, and then never again. He’d found a different, gender-affirming term to annoy them with instead, and it shouldn’t have been a remarkable thing.
Six months ago, seeing this picture of Kent holding Niki in the pool might have stung, might have hurt. Now, it just made them sad. It was surprisingly easy to click on Niki’s profile and tap the Unfollow button. Even easier to do the same for Kent and every other fair-weather friend they’d had.
Then they searched for Gem’s profile, and it was filled with ridiculous pictures of him and Rusty making crazy faces, and videos of the two of them playing pranks on Toni, and little doodles Rusty had drawn that Gem claimed would be worth millions someday once Rusty was a famous artist. Then there was Toni’s profile with posts of him and Jude, him and his nephew and nieces, him and Gem and the rest of his friends.
Then Oliver, Willow, Glyma, Dex, and Yve.
It was imperfect and cringey and messy, but it was wonderful and real.
With shaking fingers, Cya clicked the Edit Profile button and replaced the fake information with their real details.
They added a photo from the mineral fair, their smiling face next to Hemersyn’s, as their profile image, and nibbled on their thumb nail for almost a full minute before pressing that innocuous Save button.
They followed their coworkers’—their friends’—socials, and immediately received follow-backs from Gem, Yve, Willow, and Dex.
A text made their phone vibrate a few seconds later.