For me, that read loud and clear that if there wasn’t some ugly stigma associated with orientations outside of heterosexual, everyone has a little bit of bi in them. Like nature itself, it’s a spectrum, and even if you’re all the way to one side, that one exception means that perhaps you’re not 100% but 99%. In a grayscale, it means that you’re so solidly one color that you can’t exactly see that your 000000 is actually 000001. But that 1 is still there. It still exists.
From the time I was ten, I was trying to figure out what gender and attraction meant and why it was somehow tied to religion and politics. For the latter, the bottom line is that it’s simply impossible for people to let others live their lives without having an opinion and trying to control them to fit into their own ideologies. It’s control and opinion.
Nothing is based on fact. Everything is based on faith, belief, and judgment.
However, gender and attraction can be seen as a spectrum all over nature, in every species of flora and fauna. Sometimes you click. Sometimes you don’t.
When I was fifteen, I began examining myself to see how it fit within me. Where did I fall on the spectrum? That’s when I started the deep dives into gender and found all the craziness that is chromosome arrangements. It’s not as simple as an X and Y, regardless of what the uneducated middle-school-level understanding would have you believe. It’s actually quite fascinating.
However, I quickly realized that the research on the social construct of gender wasn’t truly what interested me after all. Yes, I wanted to know, so I’d continue to learn, but it came down to attraction.
I stare at Brek now, as he gets comfortable on the couch opposite the one I’m sitting on. Over the last several months, I’ve realized that I’m attracted to him. Is it personality? Chemistry? The fact that he’s a little broken? Maybe because he’s kind of grumpy and inaccessible?
Whatever the case is, Brek has become somewhat of an obsession of mine.
Most people are like lab rats to me. I like to study them until I have them figured out. But unlike his friends, with perhaps the exception of Levis, because he’s a pretty private person, Brek keeps most things bottled up. I don’t think he’s careful about only talking to his friends when there aren’t interlopers around. I think he keeps most of his feelings and thoughts to himself, even with them.
He’s somewhat of a vault, and I’m fucking intrigued. Also, he’s pretty to look at. I love that effortlessly defined chest and stomach he always has on display. I’m hypnotized by his low-hanging pants and what’s hiding under them. I want to know what’s going on in his damn brain.
“How was work? You sell any houses?” I ask.
Brek glances up at me. Daylight from the window to my right reflects off his glasses, partially obscuring his dark eyes. He shrugs one shoulder. “One. Two showings. Mostly returning calls.”
“Good. Congrats.”
He gives me a bemused look. “On making calls?”
“No, for selling a house. You said you sold one, right?”
“Oh, yeah, I did.”
“Then congrats.”
Brek nods absently. From what I know about him, he’s never proud of what he’s accomplished because he’s always been made to feel like it’s not good enough by his family. But he’s a damn good real estate agent. It’s rare that a week goes by when he hasn’t sold at least one house, though I think two is his average.
“How was your work?” he asks.
How domestic of us. I smirk as I glance at my phone. It’s finishing setting up the mirror application to Brek’s phone. Another three minutes and it’ll be complete, as long as Brek doesn’t shut down his phone.
“Normal. Not interesting.”
He nods again and glances at his bag. His face scrunches a little. “What do you do again?”
I laugh. He asks me at least once a month. Probably because I’m vague. This time, I decide to give him a little more than I usually do. Just for fun. To see where he goes with it. “I have two major avenues. One is cybersecurity. I’m hired by companies to break through their online security systems. Then they hire me to build it up so no one else can do that.”
“That seems like a waste of time,” he says. “You’re hired to break something and then fix what you broke.”
“I’m the best in the world at my job,” I say. Okay, maybe I boast a little. “If I can break in, that means their security isn’t as strong as it should be. So I fix it so that no one other than me can get in. If I’m really successful,Iwon’t even be able to get back in because all the back holes and weaknesses I exploited should be fixed.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Yep.”
“The second thing?”
“Research. I help out private investigators often.”
“Oh. That also sounds boring.”
