Nathan was quiet for a long moment. The Toronto skyline behind him, faint through the glass.
"No," he said.
I didn't push.
There were things you didn’t push on. I was learning which ones were Nathan’s.
I lay there and thought aboutthere's no onesaid into a phone while I was three feet away, and what it cost him to say it, and how long he'd been saying versions of it.
"Do yours?" Nathan said.
"Yeah," I said. "My mom cried a little. My dad shook my hand, which was very him." I paused. "Dylan already knew. He said he'd known since I was sixteen and I was apparently the last to figure it out."
"How old were you?"
"Nineteen," I said. "First year of juniors." I moved my hand slightly on the bed. "It wasn't a big thing. I told them and then we had dinner and that was it."
Dylan had gotten a speech about responsibility when he got a B in chemistry sophomore year. I had come out to my parents at nineteen and cried a little and then we had pasta. The same pasta they always made, nobody made it a thing. I think mom had been more worried about getting it right than about the thing itself. That was how it always went with me. They were always slightly afraid of getting it wrong.
With Dylan they just expected him to be fine.
He usually was.
I wasn't sure if that was better or worse.
“You told them; you had dinner,” Nathan said. "Just like that?"
"Just like that," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You were nineteen."
"Yeah."
"I'm thirty-five." Said like a fact about the situation. Not self-pity—just Nathan noting data that he's been sitting with. "You've been out for four years and I've been—" He stopped.
"Nathan."
"I'm not saying it as a complaint," he said. "I'm just—" His jaw moved slightly. "You're twenty-three. I keep thinking about that."
"Does it bother you?"
A pause. The longer kind. "I keep waiting for it to bother you," he said. "You date people your age. People who go to Broderick's and—" He stopped again. "I have a fountain pen and a cat and a very particular relationship with tea. That's not—" He moved his hand. The gesture covering: me, this, the whole situation. "That's not a pitch."
"Nathan," I said.
"Yes."
"I knocked on your door tonight," I said. "In Toronto. At midnight. With no excuse."
He was quiet.
"I have been knocking on your door," I said, "for a while now.”
"I know," he said.
"So the fountain pen is fine," I said. "The cat is great."
"You're developing a palate for the tea," he said.
