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Jon does not like boys.
There are a bunch of boys in his class throughout his school years. Half of it, in fact. Quite a few of them he hangs out with regularly, on account of being forced in the same room for eight hours a day five days a week. Even a handful he would call friends, if asked, although even at that young age he would give it a good think before using the term. None of them he likes in that particular sense; he does not get lost staring into his peers’s eyes, does not get flustered in the PE locker rooms, barely notices puberty.
But in year 9, Stefan Nowak finds out he’s a horror fan and starts hanging out with him after school, and it is nice, it is fun and warm, discussing disgusting and frightening things that do not exist. Stefan has a loud laughter after jumpscares in films, but when he’s reading intense bits he frowns and there’s a dip between his bushy eyebrows and his lower lip falls open, and he keeps giving Jon new books or VHS saying, “I thought of you, I think you’ll like this one!”, no matter how many times Jon spends an hour ranting and picking apart shoddy narratives.
When they are fifteen, one sunny late afternoon in autumn, Stefan brings over a bunch of falling-apart Goosebumps from the library, and because he asks Jon gets over himself and he reads a bunch of them, aloud, just to make fun of them, just to make Stefan laugh his loud laugh. It’s all very silly — reading Goosebumps, like children, when they are high schoolers — but at no point does Jon fear that Stefan is going to make fun of him. He feels safe, with Stefan, safe enough to read strange creepy books with him around.
Lying beside Jon on the floor of Jon’s bedroom, in a ray of cold sunlight, Stefan slowly stops laughing, lies there just breathing for a while, and then asks, very quietly: “Can I kiss you?”, and Jon thinks about it.
He thinks it over, and he thinks kissing still does not sound like something he’s interested in in general, but, kissing Stefan?, being the one person that Stefan kisses?, that sounds nice, that sounds thrilling in a way that still feels safe, and he decides to move the paperback away from his mouth and whisper: “Okay.”
Jon does not like boys. He likes this one.
Jon does not like girls, either.
In the first year of uni, first term, Jasmine happens to sit down next to him at the first Medieval English seminar.
It ends at noon, and there’s a sandwich place across from the building and most of them have the next class nearby afterwards, so it becomes a habit for almost the whole group to have lunch together for the rest of term, and Jon and Jasmine sit side-by-side and eat the same sandwiches every week without making eye contact. At first, it is a quiet, comfortably calm affair, and then three weeks in she pipes up out of nowhere: “Grendel’s mother did nothing wrong, though,” and Jon frowns and says, “Go on,” and that keeps them going for the entirety of lunch break that day and also the next week. By the end of the month, when they sit down for lunch, their elbows and hips and knees keep knocking into each other as they gesticulate along with their arguments.
Mid November, he comes down with a cold and misses a few days of classes, and the next week Jasmine puts down a copy of her notes on the corner of his table.
“Didn’t have your phone number,” she mumbles, not looking at him.
“Oh,” Jon says. “Um, I was sick.”
“Oh,” she repeats. There’s a missed beat before she asks: “Feeling better?”
“Yes.”
And he thinks about it, looking at her clear notes and opinionated tangents in the margins in her horribly messy handwriting, and her thin hands fidgeting nervously with her dark purple ink pen on her table, and thinks about how dating sounds like a boring hassle but he is looking forward to lunch and chatting with her, specifically her, and about the two separate lists he has in his pocket of, one, reasons why Beowulf is a dick, and two, JSTOR articles on linguistics he thinks she’ll find interesting.
So he decides to ask: “Would you like my phone number?”, and her hands freeze and there is a probably awkward pause, then she mutters, suddenly, very quickly, not looking at him: “Yes. Would you like to go on a date at the weekend?”, and he replies, “Not at the weekend, but at another moment, yes, I would,” and she says, “Okay,” and he says, “Okay,” and then class starts.
That relationship does not last very long. In hindsight, Jon thinks part of it is both of their insistence on trying to Date The Proper Way, hitting all the relationship milestones and struggling through uncomfortable expected standards. Jon likes her, and he likes being kissed by her, and he doesn’t not want to date her, but he can’t help but think they messed up, perhaps, by changing things. He definitely messes up inviting her to Saturday lunch with his grandmother.
It isn’t particularly more or less comfortable than it ever is; none of them are very good at conversation, but three separate efforts are made, and while it is not a good time by any stretch of the imagination, it is not especially unpleasant, either. After, Grandmother needs her nap, so they leave and go to the beach, even though it’s a moody grey day, and walk hand in hand debating about medieval jerks until it’s time for Jasmine to catch her train back.
Later, when Jon is doing the dishes through the belated realisation that perhaps the correct thing to do would have been to go back to Oxford with her, or to have invited her to stay the weekend in the first place, Grandmother comes down, sits on her bench just outside the kitchen’s garden door, and asks: “Have you changed your mind, then?”
Jon almost drops one of the plates he’s scrubbing in surprise, because his grandmother stopped asking him questions when he was twelve. He can’t say he regrets that, but it does mean he is quite out of practice now.
“I thought you liked boys,” she continues, lighting a cigarette. He hears the scratching of her struggling to turn on the lighter, but his own hands are soaked in dishwater, so he doesn’t offer to help. “Weren’t you dating that tall boy in secondary, Stephen?”
“Stefan,” Jon says, his mind blank. They never discussed Stefan, not when he came over and not when he stopped. Jon has no idea what to say about that now, so what he says is: “Well, I’m dating Jasmine, now.”
“Nineteen years and I still don’t understand your decisions,” Grandmother says, in the same tone she described Margaret’s bridge plays every single Sunday of Jon’s childhood. “She seems nice, I suppose. Stefan was a nice boy too.”
Jon remembers her speaking to Stefan perhaps twice.
He finishes the dishes and steps out to have a cigarette too, which is what gets her scowling at him, but they don’t talk about it again before she retires to bed.
They never talk about it again, at all, actually, which is unsurprising, but Jon keeps thinking about it, trying to make the pieces fit, to understand what it is about that conversation that is sticking to him.
He’s still thinking about it when he and Jasmine break up less than two weeks later (not because of that dismal weekend, but not unrelated to it, either).
He’s still thinking about it over a year later when he suddenly realises, in the middle of a café date with Noah, that it is in fact a date. Second, even. Noah laughs when Jon stumbles his way through that thought process aloud, and says, “What about a third on Friday night?”, and Jon thinks about it.
He says yes, in the end, because he has dated a boy before, right, and he doesn’t dislike Noah, but it feels a little wrong. His grandmother would definitely not understand this decision, although that’s mostly because Noah has piercings and tattoos and combat boots.
Because he is still thinking about it, Jon mentions the story, on that Friday night date at a bar. “Oh, lord, that, yeah,” Noah sighs. “Not a decision, not a choice!”
Three things come out of that, not caused by each other, but not unrelated, either. Firstly, the date goes and ends, and Jon decides there isn’t going to be a fourth one. It was fine, it was okay, there is no particular reason to call it off, simply: Jon just does not want another date with Noah. He just doesn’t. Secondly, he calls his grandmother and confirms that he is coming home tomorrow morning for the weekend, as usual. And thirdly, he continues to think about it all night, staring at the ceiling of his student room.
The thing is, he thinks, perhaps, Grandmother got it a little wrong and a little right at the same time, and so did Noah, in the opposite way. It has never been a decision, indeed; he hasn’t chosen what genders he likes, nor changed his mind: he still doesn’t like boys, men, in general, and he doesn’t like women either, and he still has liked one specific boy and one specific woman. He’s found out about non-binary people and thought for a minute that might shake up some things, but no, Adrian from AmDram club is a perfectly decent person but they don’t make Jon go stupid or horny like people in romcoms, either. Not so far, anyway.
He doesn’t like people, in general. Attraction, crushes, love at first sight, are nebulous concepts he suspects he hasn’t and never will really feel.
But he does choose someone, every time, in the sense of: that one, and not another.
That’s not what either Grandmother or Noah were talking about, he doesn’t think, but it is still a good way to describe what he does feel, sometimes. Not consciously, not deliberately, he chooses some people, those ones, specifically, singles them out as special in his eyes over all of the other just as perfectly decent people around, with the only real difference being that he likes them. A completely unhelpful and indescribable ouroboros of causality. He liked Stefan, in particular, and he liked Jasmine, out of everyone else in the class, he liked them and their endearing or maddening idiosyncrasies, before dating them, before wanting to date them. That’s what made him want to date them in the first place — he cannot even begin to imagine doing it the other way around.
And he doesn’t really like Noah, so he isn’t interested in dating Noah, even though Noah shares many traits with people he has liked before, such as being male, nice, smart, opinionated.
“Wait,” says Georgie on Monday, “wait. I don’t get it. So if there was nothing wrong, and he’s so completely your type, and so hot, why didn’t you just keep him?”
“Is he?” Jon mutters.
“Uh, yeah,” Georgie says, looking up from his half-done nails to give him big wide eyes and a wiggle of her perfectly drawn eyebrows. This is part of why Jon is fairly sure he isn’t attracted to people-in-general: the comparison with Georgie, who definitely is. “I thought you must have some big huge reason for turning him down.”
“No. No, he was perfectly nice.”
“So what’s wrong? It doesn’t have to be big ultimate romance every time, you know.”
“See, I don’t get that,” Jon starts, immediately so wound up he starts flailing a hand around without thinking; she grabs his wrist and pulls it back down before he can ruin her hard work. “I really don’t see, what’s the point of dating someone you don’t like?”
“I’m not saying date someone you hate, of course, but you know,” she shrugs, “sometimes it can be, oh, you don’t know them very well but they seem cool enough, why not, it might be fun.”
“Hmm.” Jon chews it over sombrely, staring at his nails as she meticulously applies a coat of glittery varnish over the black. “Well, this was my first attempt to make myself date someone when I didn’t know them very well, and review of the data so far indicates: no. Stick to people I already like a lot.”
“Hmmm. I mean, I guess that does make sense too. If you feel so strongly about it, at any rate, then yeah, sure, that’s probably significant.” Georgie shrugs again, and then frowns, returning to focusing on her handiwork. Her tongue sticks out from her dark-lipsticked mouth; today, she’s wearing the pink stud piercing.
Georgie has a tattoo as well, floral vine sneaking up her shoulder to the back of her neck and her hairline, and combat boots she sometimes wears when she dresses up for the weekend, and Jon is thinking that is also something he might like, though. Good thing he’s not too fussed about getting Grandmother to understand his decisions. Though most of the week Georgie doesn’t have the energy to bother and he likes her just as much showing up for 8 am English in her pyjamas.
Georgie puts the brush cap back into the bottle, holds both of his hands up by just touching her palms to his, carefully, gently blows over his shiny nails. “Aaand all done,” she concludes, grandiose. “Ready for a week of looking great while single.”
“Thank you,” Jon says, sincerely, and thinks about it some more, thinks about how he likes finding the cat video that will make her actually coo out loud and when she gives devastating but accurate and helpful teardowns of his performance in rehearsal, thinks about Georgie specifically out of everyone from class and from AmDram and from Noah’s bar mates, and decides to add: “Would you like to go on a date?”
She blinks, squeaks: “Jon!”, and then bursts out laughing, but she’s blushing, and her eyes sparkling, and she says, “Oh, wow, Jon, okay!”, and yeah. Yeah, this one, he likes this one.
(On the other hand, years later, on the first day of his new job, he scowls and decides that while he knows that Sasha is brilliant and diligent and Tim is witty and attentive, this one, this Martin Blackwood specimen, he actively dislikes this one in particular, and does end up changing his mind eventually. About this one, this one, this one.
So, still makes sense.)