“Yes. Of course, I just... I mean, I have Claire and Iris. I have... I haveyou. I’m surrounded by queer friends and family. Wouldn’t I have known by now if I was attracted to women?”
Delilah shrugged. “Sexuality is complicated. It’s not static. People change and sexuality can change too.” She took a sip of her coffee. “But thisisyou we’re talking about here. You’re pretty much the poster kid for compulsory heterosexuality.”
Astrid frowned, that old defensiveness rising. “What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t get your undies in a knot. I’m not insulting you. I’m just saying... well, think about it. If you’d been attracted to a woman or anyone who wasn’t a cis dude in the past, oh, eighteen or so years since you hit puberty, what would Mommy Dearest have done?”
Astrid opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. Isabel would’ve lost her shit. Her mother had never said a negative word about Claire’s or Iris’s queerness. She’d never even said anything against Delilah’squeerness. When her stepdaughter came out back in eighth grade, Isabel had simply lifted a single eyebrow at the news and moved on, so Astrid didn’t think homophobia played a huge role in Isabel’s mindset so much as expectations. Delilah was Delilah. But Astrid... well, Astrid was a Parker, Isabel’s blood, and she was expected to wed a rich golden boy, pop out some golden kids, and join the Junior League.
Which was a kind of homophobia, Astrid realized. She’d just never thought about it that way before. But now, as she searched back for any evidence that she’d ever been attracted to women before, she found little clues.
Her keen attention to every detail of Amira Karim’s jeans in high school. She’d simply been fascinated by the way they fit her thighs, her butt. Then there was the way her eyes always seemed to notice how a woman’s chest filled out a shirt. Back in college, sophomore year, some drunken frat boys had dared her and Rilla Sanchez to make out at one of the few parties she’d attended, and she remembered a distinct and strange flare of disappointment when Rilla had told them all to go fuck themselves.
There were other memories, countless moments she’d long ago chalked up to admiration or envy. Just good old-fashioned jealousy. She wanted tobethose girls, or maybe even compete with them, as horrible as that sounded, not make out with them. And maybe that really was all it was sometimes. Simple observation. But maybe those tiny clues actually added up to a whole lot more, and she’d simply never let herself face it.
She liked guys, so she focused on guys. It was easy to ignore anything else.
“Shit,” she said, dropping her face into her hands.
“Yeah,” Delilah said. “You were expected to only see men as potential romantic partners, so that’s what you did.”
“Like, really, holy shit.”
“Look,” Delilah said, setting her mug on the coffee table full of photo thumbnails and lacing her hands together. “The big question here isn’t about a sex dream. It’s a dream. Dreams happen. Hell, I’m pretty damn sure I had a dream last year during that camping trip to Bagby Hot Springs that I was a vampire and full-on seduced your ex-fiancé so I could bleed him dry while he was distracted by my tits.”
Astrid’s eyes widened, setting her own mug on the table. “And you don’t think thatmeantsomething?”
Delilah’s upper lip curled. “I don’t do cis men.”
“Yes, fine, but the vampiric murderess out for Spencer’s blood?”
Delilah scrunched up her face in thought. “Okay, you make a strong point, but the sex dream is still not what’s important here.”
Astrid groaned and fell back onto the couch pillows, flopping her arm over her eyes.
“What’s important,” Delilah went on, “is whether or not you like Jordan Everwood. I mean, aside from wanting to fuck her brains out.”
Astrid sat up. “I do not want to... to...”
“It’s okay. You can say it.”
Astrid rolled her eyes. “I do not want tofuckher brains out. There, are you happy?”
Delilah grinned. “Very. And sure you do—you had sex dream about her.”
Astrid lifted her hands and let them fall back to her legs with a loud slap. “But you just said that wasn’t the important part!”
Delilah shrugged, picked up her coffee, and took a smug sip.
“You are infuriating, you know that?” Astrid said, picking up a pillow embroidered with the wordsTo be quite queerand tossing it at Delilah, who caught it deftly with one hand and threw it right back.
“Which is exactly why you came to me about this and not your BFFs,” she said.
Astrid opened her mouth to protest, but her stepsister had a point. She did go straight to Delilah, never even considered taking this toIris or even Claire first. She already knew exactly how they’d react. Iris would squeal and pop some bubbly, even at this early hour, going on and on about how Astrid completed their queer coven. And Claire—gentle, cinnamon roll Claire—would simply be too sweet about the whole thing. She’d soothe and ask soul-probing questions, and Astrid didn’t want any of that.
She wanted the hard stuff, the complicated truth, and she knew Delilah was the only one who would give it to her.
“So, do you?” Delilah asked.
