“After I tell you all my riveting life stories, you pick up on one time I hadno choicebut to help myself tooneslice of pizza?”
“Okay, save it for the jury.” I held out an arm, scoping out if he was a hugger, and he gave me a tighter hug than I’d expected—my experience with femme gay boys was that they’d give you this little fairy-tap hug, but Sam was about ready to crush my lungs. “Good to see you,” I laughed. “Am I ever glad I’m not the only outsider assailing this scary fortress.”
“Okay, level with me,” he said, stepping back, “and I’m not the only gay one assailing it.”
“Oh, yeah, no, for sure,” I said. “I mean, don’t… talk about it, I’m not out to anybody, but yeah, I’m a lesbian.”
“Uh-huh. Did Vicky tell you about the situation?”
“Meeting her family, they’re scary, that’s about the extent of it.”
“Vicky’s mom thinks you two are—” He made scissoring gestures with his hands, and I spat.
“She thinkswhat?”
“From the sounds of things, Vicky’svery serious insistenceshe come live with you instead of the family got read the wrong way.”
Oh my god. If they went asking me about dating Victoria, I’d explode. I put my hands up. “Did anybodytellher we’re not?”
“Not yet.” He winked. My face burned.
“Okay, wanna take a shot explaining why we’re slow-walking it?”
“Their mom was not cool with Vicky dating a woman at first, but she’s been grudgingly coming around. So we’re kind of hoping we can just… transfer that acceptance over to me and Kevin.”
“That’s not how anything works.”
He put his hands up in vindication. “See, that’s what I was saying! But Kevin assures me that’s how it works with his family.And I trust he knows this family better than I do, so what the boyfriend says, goes. Or in your case, as the girlfriend says.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
He folded his arms. “Okay, but you wish she were.”
I put my head in my hands. “God, you think it’s obvious then, huh?”
“I saw you two flirting yesterday. Kevin thought you two were a couple too when he saw you two on a dinner date that first day—”
“Oh my god, she was taking me for dinner to say thank you.” And I’d about attacked him to keep her for myself. Dammit, I hated facing the consequences of my own actions.
“And you two on the couch? You’re a couple of cuties.”
“Spare me,” I groaned. “She’s mad at me right now.”
“Mad?” He dropped his arms. “How come?”
“I wish I knew. She’s been stony and distant with me all day, and I want to ask her what I did, but she’s denying anything happened. We’ve had breakfast together every day—”
“Like a couple,” he said, the most helpful thing anybody had ever added to any conversation.
“—but she had finished breakfast before I’d even gotten into the kitchen this morning. Ran off to her bedroom to do work, when we normally spend all this time after breakfast together too. And she didn’t say a word on the way over here. She won’t even look at me.”
“Maybe she’s just stressed about her family.”
“I asked her, and she said it’s nothing like that. I don’t know. If she’s suddenly refusing to share stuff like that with me, then that’s its own problem.”
“Maybe she masturbated thinking about you last night and now she can’t look you in the eye.”
“Uh-huh… yeah, I’m gonna say it’s probably not that one.”
