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He first hears the word ‘bisexuality’ when he’s fourteen years old.
It’s a word that slows everything for a moment, resonating a little too well with him. He thinks about it, over and over, in soft voices, but he doesn’t dare say it out loud. There’s something about it that sticks like the walls inside of his head have been lathered with super glue, and he pretends he doesn’t know why that is.
::
Sometimes Dan thinks about kissing boys.
This is something that he’s never shared with anybody. He’s a nervous teenager and he had a couple of spots on his face and he has skinny, shaky knees and he doesn’t like answering questions in class. He skips P.E and sits on the side of the sports field with one earphone in, and his friend insists that he has to listen to this new band, and puts on the track. Dan wants to lose himself in the song, but that’s not what happens.
A boy in his year jogs past, and Dan looks up at him. The boy doesn’t catch his glance, or the way that Dan’s eyes momentarily rest upon his face, the warmth of his eyes and the curve of his smile as he calls out to a friend across the way. Dan looks away, a handful of butterflies fluttering in his chest, but even when his eyes are laying upon the tufts of grass mixed in with layers of mud beneath his feet, he isn’t looking at the ground because he’s thinking of the boy.
“Do you like it?” his friend asks, and Dan is startled, gapes at him with wide eyes until he realises that there’s still music thumping in his ears, and the boy who’d caught his eye has long since moved away out of sight. (But not yet out of mind.)
“Oh, yeah,” Dan says. “It’s good.”
His friend grins. “Right? I’ll play you another song.”
Dan nods, absently. He looks back down at the grass and he’s not thinking about kissing boys, except he is. He can’t help it, and he tries to push the thought out of his head, when anxiety creeps up his throat. The thought is layered with variations of, I don’t want that, and what the fuck, but it’s there, all the same. He imagines kissing him, the softness of his lips, the bright in his eyes, and it makes his heart flutter in a nice way until the waves of worry crash down and disrupt the calmness of the sea inside him.
He feels guilty, too. It sticks in his head and in the sweat of his palms when the worry washes over him. He feels perverse, for looking at him that way. He wonders if the boy would hate him if he knew and he swallows back the thoughts and repeats in his head I don’t want that, again.
Later, Dan tells himself that it’s his wandering mind, that it meant nothing. Thinks, I don’t want that, again, but thinks it firmer. He can’t sleep at night, though, shifting and tossing and turning. He buries his face in his pillow, and whispers, “I don’t want that”.
::
Dan likes girls.
He tells a lot of lies, to other people, and to himself, but this isn’t one of them. He does. Some days, he’s in awe of them – girls are pretty. Girls are nice, and soft, and warm, and sometimes they scare him and he feels a stutter moving up his throat, and he feels embarrassed and red-cheeked and ten years old. They laugh, but not often in a cruel way.
He thinks about kissing girls a lot, when he’s in his early teenage years, age creeping up upon him and churning around his thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes, girls aren’t nice and soft and warm. But that’s okay, too. Dan likes all kinds of girls. They’re worth liking, after all. They smell nice, and they’re pretty, a lot of the time, most girls are. They make him laugh, though sometimes they make him feel about three feet tall.
This isn’t a lie.
::
His first kiss is with a girl with long hair and Dan feels it tumbling down her back and brushing against his skin, only encouraging the nerves that settle in his stomach and fuel the sting of butterflies and the way that his fingers tremble.
It’s not his real first kiss, probably, if he counts the truth or dare incident – but it feels like it is. Nobody’s watching, and this girl actually likes him. She’s not as shy as she is. He likes it that she takes the lead. She makes him feel less nervous.
He’s fourteen, and it’s his first proper kiss aside from chaste pecks and dares and stupid games that he never really wanted to play. He doesn’t think about anything, while she kisses him, and nor after when she smiles and laughs and her voice is soft, and she says “come on”, and they go off somewhere else. Her hand is smaller than his.
A few days later he sees a boy and he stares too long. He swallows down the sickness he feels and he thinks about her soft lips and her soft long hair and the way that he liked to kiss her, liked to look at her and he tells himself, “see, you do like girls.”
::
Sometimes he thinks of boys when he shouldn’t. When he really shouldn’t and the lights are off and it’s late at night, when he’s itching to kiss someone, to touch them.
And it happens like this: a boy’s face will inhabit (infiltrate) his mind’s eye and he thinks about stronger jaw lines and laughing eyes and rougher touches. He imagines dryer lips and bigger hands, and it doesn’t repulse him. For a moment, he indulges it. He’ll never say he likes it, but he does. For a moment. He likes it.
He realises what he’s doing, then, what he’s thinking of, who he’s thinking of. The anxiety settles around his bones and in his blood and inside his stomach like a poison. He blinks several times as if to make the picture go away. He closes his eyes tight, and when he sees a boy’s face he opens them and stares with wide, watery eyes at the wall.
::
In the morning Dan tries not to think about it but when he inevitably does he pretends that he didn’t like it, just for that moment. He knows he does, deep down, feels it stinging every time he tries to settle his own anxiety, but Dan’s very good at pretending.
::
When he’s fifteen he learns the meaning of intrusive thoughts. There’s an element of delight to it. He knows that he experiences these at times with awful, flooding imagery, of kitchen fires and parental deaths and car crashes, though they never really linger past a moment of fear soothed with a “I’m okay”, and a look around the real world bathed in daylight, a thousand leagues away from his imagination. When he learns however that intrusive thoughts can include sexual themes, he can’t help but smile, breathe a sigh of relief.
He tells himself that that’s what it, that’s what makes him doubt his sexuality at times, that’s what makes the pretty boys appear in his dreams and in his fantasies and in his wandering daydreams.
(He pretends that the way he thinks of these boys is different to the way he thinks about himself walking into a car one day.)
His eyes rest on the words 'unwanted sexual desires’ and there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. He pretends he doesn’t feel it, but that doesn’t mean it goes away.
::
Dan kisses a boy for the first time and it feels like fire.
It’s at a party, and it’s all a laugh, and Dan laughs, too, moving a little too wildly and pretending the beat of his heart isn’t louder in his ears than the thump of the baseline on the too loud music. He tells himself, drunkenly, that everybody kisses their friends when they’re drunk, but he also thinks about what it was like to kiss the other boy, how his slight stubble had brushed gently against Dan’s skin and how his lips had been as soft as a girls but his kiss rougher and how his touch was harder and he’d loved it. The other boy shoots a grin at Dan and wipes his mouth with his hand, and Dan laughs, shakily, and does the same.
He tells himself: everybody kisses their friends at parties. It was just a laugh, just banter, because he’s comfortable enough with his own sexuality to do that. He tells himself this over and over though he can barely hear his own thoughts beneath the music.
He wonders if it says something that the other boy has moved away, uncaring, blasé, letting it go, while Dan stands and squeezes his new can of drink and feels like he’s going to be sick. And it’s not because he didn’t like it, it’s because he did.
A kiss is a kiss, Dan tells himself. Kisses are always nice. But he thinks about the boy who kissed him, and he feels butterflies stab at his stomach.
Everybody kisses their friends at parties, his silent dialogue insists, but a voice replies, do they always like it this much?
::
He thinks about kissing that boy far too many times in far too many intimate moments. Mostly, he fights it, he thinks of something else.
Sometimes he doesn’t.
::
Dan gets a girlfriend. This isn’t a lie, either, neither in the nature of their relationship or the way that he feels about it.
She’s called Alice and she’s pretty and smiley, but she’s got a sharp sense of humour and she doesn’t take anyone’s shit and Dan likes her so, so much. He likes kissing her and he likes holding her hand. It’s smaller than his, still, but he doesn’t mind.
Sometimes he thinks about a bigger hand enclosing around his but he doesn’t mind.
Her kisses are gentle and she has soft lips. Dan doesn’t mind, but sometimes he lets his mind wonder.
Their relationship is good, and it’s nice. Dan likes being with her, likes spending time with her, he likes her, and this is not a lie.
Except, sometimes, it’s like being fourteen again, and that first kiss where his hands shook and her long hair brushed against his skin, it’s like lying awake in the dark and whispering, just so he could hear it out loud, “see, you do like girls.”
::
He hears the word bisexuality again. He pretends that he doesn’t.
::
Eventually, Dan does have sex with his girlfriend for the first time, and he loves it, loves being that close to her, loves everything about how it feels. He doesn’t think about anything in that moment except her and the soft curves of her body and her small hands and her hair. It’s short now, but it still brushes gently against his skin, and he likes the way it feels.
See, you do like girls. This isn’t a lie.
::
Seeing two men kiss is something that brings waves of feelings up through his stomach and past his lungs and through his throat. It’s not nausea, though, nor repulsion, but he kind of wishes it was. He isn’t homophobic, and he doesn’t hate gay people, or anyone else who sleeps with the same sex. It’s just.
He wishes he didn’t have to see it, and not for the traditional ways. Not because he’s attempting to disguise his bigotry beneath a cry of, “think of the children!” or because it makes him uncomfortable or because he thinks it isn’t right.
It’s because it tightens the knot in his stomach and it makes him think of being thirteen again, and trying not to stare at a boy in his maths class. It’s because it makes the world go quiet and when the world feels quieter it’s harder to ignore the voice that replies to every thought in the back of his mind and says, “you want that.”
I don’t, he tells himself. I don’t want that.
But watching the two men on the TV screen in some storyline of a soap opera makes his fingers tingle and his knees itch to shake. It makes him think of kissing his friend, at that party, the one with lips so soft he could have kissed them forever. His hands were bigger than Dan’s.nly
It’s only a tentative kiss, gentle, not sex-driven, but Dan almost envies them. And he thinks: I want that.
Moments later he thinks: no I don’t, but it’s too late.
::
His girlfriend breaks up with him months later and Dan tells himself that he only thinks about kissing boys because he’s lonely and he misses having someone to kiss no matter who they are.
A kiss is a kiss, he tells himself. Kisses are always nice.
He does though, think about kissing boys, a lot. He tells himself it means nothing but he’s not really sure anymore. Afterwards, when he realises, he feels sick and he feels scared and he repeats the usual mantra like some kind of prayer but it never helps.
::
Seeing a clip of two boys kissing in a way that is most definitely not tentative and gentle, breathless with tousled hair and bodies too close makes his heart almost stop and he stares at the screen with eyes the size of the moon and he wants. He hadn’t looked for it intentionally, it’d been an accident but he feels like the image has burned into his eyes and his head and he can’t stop thinking about it no matter how hard he tries.
He deletes all of his internet history and he closes his laptop lid and he swallows, hard, and feels the burning of his own cheeks, and the way that his mouth is dry.
He washes his hands.
::
Dan thinks about boys when he probably shouldn’t.
He thinks about the things that he likes about them, like hands with long fingers, and shapely legs, maybe, and boys with longer hair, and warm eyes, and shaped faces and necks that he kind of wants to kiss. Thinking about it makes his own tingle.
He thinks about boys kissing boys, too. He thinks about kissing boys and he thinks about boys kissing and he’s sure it shouldn’t make him feel the way he does, it shouldn’t turn him on like it does, he shouldn’t want it like he does.
Dan tells himself that it doesn’t count in the dark. Tells himself over and over and over. Maybe if he keeps on repeating it, he’ll actually believe it in the morning.
::
Dan google searches the words, 'am I gay’ on google incognito. And then he searches 'do I like boys’, because the two aren’t mutually exclusive but it feels like they are.
He closes the page and he thinks about his girlfriend’s thin wrists and the way that she laughed when she kissed him and her breath smelled nice.
I like girls, he thinks. He looks at his laptop screen and can almost see the shadow of a google results page that suggests otherwise, but he pretends resolutely that he doesn’t. He tells himself that he can’t be gay because he likes girls, and pretends that this is the answer to all of his worries and tries for a smile even though no one is watching.
He doesn’t think about the alternative. Not because it doesn’t cross his mind. It does. There is a word hanging over his head but if he refuses to think about it then it won’t exist and like a wish, it won’t come true.
(But something in his head says, you can’t be straight either though, because you like boys.)
When you don’t hear something out loud it’s very easy to pretend that you didn’t hear it at all.
::
And then there’s AmazingPhil.
He’s a guy on YouTube and he makes little videos that should be stupid but they make Dan smile. He’d like to say that he’s an escape from thinking about real life and the real world, like some of the nice fans of Phil’s do in the comment section which he has definitely visited a few times, but in reality, that isn’t true.
He can’t ignore real life, because real life, for Dan, is a constant edge where Dan feels something and pretends resolutely that he didn’t. And the issue here is that he looks at Phil and he thinks about kissing him, like the boy in his maths class, like the boy who jogged past in P.E and the boy at the party who kissed Dan and made his skin feel like it’d been touched with a stroke of wild fire.
Phil has blue eyes, bright and kind, the sort that smile. He smiles a lot too and he says stupid things but they make Dan laugh, and Phil laughs a lot, too. He has dark hair and Dan imagines how soft it might feel. The problem is that he’s so attracted to Phil and maybe that’s one of the reasons that he keeps clicking each new thumbnail, that’s the reason he follows him on Twitter.
It’s easier over the internet, he finds. It’s very easy to approach Phil under a screen name that suggests nothing of his real identity but his three letter first name. It’d even be easy to flirt with him, probably. If it’s not real life, then maybe it isn’t real at all, but still his heart beats too fast and he feels unsure and childlike and way out of his depth.
Phil is a good fantasy to have because he’s far away, he’s unobtainable, he’s safe.
The problem starts when Phil begins to reply.
::
Dan sees the word 'bisexuality’ again on a post of Phil’s with a lot of smiley face emoticons and clearly, no shame, no embarrassment, no denial.
He scrolls past and pretends that he didn’t.
::
He and Phil become fast friend. Dan learns that he lives in Manchester and he went to University (something Dan doesn’t really want to discuss at all, in the midst of his gap year with no real certainty on whenever he wants to pursue a course at all) and he’s allergic to cats.
He also flirts with him, shameless and overtly.
Dan flirts back too. It’s like he thought it would be, easy over text, where it’s not the real world and he can pretend that it’s all a game. It doesn’t feel like a game though. Not when Phil has blushes crawling up Dan’s pale neck and not when he has him wanting and not when he thinks about Phil in the moments where he really shouldn’t.
::
He kisses another girl. Her lip gloss is sticky and it’s nice, kissing her, but he can’t help but think of what it would be like to kiss another boy again. He can barely remember how it felt, all those years ago, but he remembers that he liked it.
::
At a family dinner Dan’s cousin asks if he’s gay because he has the 'look’. His aunt chastises him, but his uncles and another cousin laughs, and Dan wants to cry even though he knows it’s stupid. His cousin is fourteen and trying too hard to be cooler than he is, and he should brush it off. His mum looks at him and says “it would be okay if you were” and Dan wants to scream I’m not.
He doubts any of them even know that being gay and liking boys can be mutually exclusive. He wants to explain, but he can’t. They think he’s straight, really.
And he is.
Am I? Phil texts him, and Dan doesn’t reply.
He laughs off his cousin’s jibes, despite the fact that he kind of wants to throw up all over the nice meal laid out all over the nice table and the pretty tablecloth. He thinks about the distinctive fear he has of his own feelings and puts circumstances such as this one on the list.
“I didn’t know being gay had a look,” he says, more coolly than he feels.
“Ignore him, Dan,” his aunt says. “We know you’re not gay.”
“Sure,” his cousin interrupts. He has a smirk on his face and a mouthful of food and he’s gross, reminds Dan of the bulky guys at school he hated to be around, despite the fact that he’s four years older.
“I’m not gay,” Dan tells him.
But no one’s listening anymore. His mouth feels dry.
::
Skyping with Phil is a little different. But his voice is low and nice and Northern and Dan likes listening to him talk. At first, it’s friendly, awkward maybe, but they settle into easy conversation and Dan thinks that the lull of speech voice is soothing.
They talk for hours. Far longer than any conversation Dan’s ever had with any other kind of friend, internet or otherwise. It’s as if they don’t run out of things to talk about though; one conversation ends, and another will begin, and it’s the easiest thing in the world.
Sometimes, Dan has questions, on the tip of his tongue that he wants to ask Phil. Sometimes he wants to talk about things, that he knows he can’t go to anyone else with. He trusts Phil more than anybody else but in some respects he’s the hardest person to talk to. However hard he tries, he can’t tell him, but then that’s no surprise. He feels like he can’t talk to anyone about this.
Once he gets the words out, it won’t be his secret anymore, it won’t be a maybe, floating around in the air. Sometimes he’ll allude to it in a conversation with Phil, and he could continue, but he doesn’t. If he says it out loud it’ll all become real and so he doesn’t.
(He thinks he’s a fucking joke. Eighteen years old and caught up in a web of denial, still. He might be a fucking joke, but thinking so doesn’t change anything.)
Sometimes, Phil flirts with him, testing the waters.
Dan returns it, hesitantly. It’s out loud, but after nightfall, usually, and so he tells himself once again that it doesn’t count in the dark.
::
This time, when he sees the word 'bisexuality’, it’s because he googles it.
Immediately the page floods with responses and articles and questions and answers. Dan doesn’t click on any of it, though. Before it’s even entirely loaded he exits the page and he shuts his laptop lid.
::
In the middle of the night, when Phil is offline and his parents and his brother are tucked up in bed and it feels like he’s the only person in the world alive, he tests the word out.
“Bisexual,” he whispers. It feels like a cut into the chest, with a jolt of anxiety, and fear, and Dan wonders what he’s so afraid of but he couldn’t tell you if he asked.
It’s not bisexuality itself that scares him. He doesn’t see anything wrong with it anymore than he does with the concept of being gay. It makes sense to him that if you can be attracted to one gender, you can be attracted to more.
It’s just… it’s not him, it can’t be. Because Dan doesn’t want to be gay and being bisexual isn’t being gay but it sure as hell isn’t being straight. It’s not the label that scares him. It’s what it means.
Dan’s a joke and he’s in denial and he hates himself for it, but sometimes he hates himself more because he knows he likes boys, but he doesn’t know how to admit it, not even to himself.
::
It frequents his thoughts, though.
He thinks: I could be bisexual. In the night again, no one watching, no one listening. He doesn’t say it out loud but the voice is a whisper even in the privacy of his own thoughts.
He thinks: I’m probably bisexual.
That night he cries, but in the morning it feels better even though he won’t let himself think about it.
::
In his frequenting of websites and blogs and places that discuss different sexualities and what they are and what they mean, Dan has come to know and accept that labels aren’t for everybody. Sometimes, no 'label’ of sexuality fits and sometimes, people just don’t want to use them.
Dan knows he doesn’t want to use a label. The scary part, to him, is how accurately one fits.
::
The train to Manchester feels as if it takes one hundred hours and Dan can’t stop himself shaking from half of it. It could be the October cold, the way the chill sweeps in through the train doors when they open and tickles at his skin, rests on his neck and between his fingers. More likely, though, it’s the prospect of seeing Phil in just a few hours.
Phil is his best friend. He’s finally meeting his best friend, the only one he’s ever really had. The thought of it brings a smile so wide to his lips that his jaw aches and the people sitting nearest to him give him funny looks.
They text the entire time and Dan lets the hours pass by listening to his iPod on shuffle and trying to imagine what it’ll be like, being with him in actuality, getting to hug him and finally beat him on Mario Kart, to hear his laugh without the crackle of a dodgy internet connection and see his smile underneath the white light of day instead of the dull shadows his webcam paints around his face.
(The song his friend had played him way back in that P.E lesson, when the boy had jogged by, comes on shuffle. Over time, Dan’s inadvertently let that song become associated with kissing boys. He lets it play.)
He’s scared of meeting Phil though, in some respects.
He has the usual fears. That they won’t get along in real life or it’ll be awkward or uncomfortable – but he has some others, too, ones that don’t quite work.
He thinks: God, I hope he kisses me. And moments later his face flushes and he hopes and hopes that Phil won’t kiss him.
He wants Phil to kiss him, is the thing. He can’t suppress it and so he lets it sit uncomfortably upon him, lets it rest. He wants to tell himself that it’s an intrusive thought, a moment of confusion, a fleeting phase, that he’s lonely.
Over time, Dan’s talents in lying aren’t what they used to be.
::
Phil doesn’t kiss him at the station and Dan shouldn’t feel disappointed but he does.
::
When Dan looks back in four years he’ll call this 'the best week ever’, and it won’t be a lie.
The silences are a little lengthy at first, pauses in conversations and overt shyness on both of their parts but it fades, quickly, disappearing with the Autumn wind that blows Phil’s fringe and chills the back of Dan’s neck. They’re laughing together about an inside joke on the street with strangers shooting them looks of confusion, but it doesn’t bother either of them. Phil grabs Dan’s hand to show him something along the street. He probably doesn’t need to, but he does, and it makes Dan feel warm inside despite the cold against his skin.
Phil is a very tactile person. Dan learns this quickly. Dan himself over the course of the week learns that he too is a tactile person. He’s never had much knowledge of this before – never had a friend close enough to pull into a hug that lasted an hour, never had the courage to cuddle up to anyone and he hasn’t even been particularly touchy with his parents since he was a little kid, a mixture of too cool and too embarrassed in his pre-teen years that left a mark that kept.
With Phil though it’s all the opposite. They spend their time cuddled up together when they watch a movie or play a game, they seat too close against each other when really, they both know that they don’t need to.
Phil holds his hand, too.
The last person Dan held hands with, properly, who squeezed his fingers and moved his arm so that their hands moved, too, up and down and made him laugh, was his last girlfriend.
Phil’s hands are the same size as his own. It’s really nice.
And in the middle of the night when they stay up far too late and they’re lying down next to each other, looking at each other and talking, Dan thinks that he really wants to kiss him.
He doesn’t, of course. They don’t kiss. Their eyes flit from a shared line of vision down to each other’s lips and back but they don’t kiss. Dan doesn’t make the move and he wonders if Phil sees the way he tenses up, whenever it looks like he’s about to lean in. But whether he does or he doesn’t, they don’t kiss, and Dan hates it because he wants to, he wants to so badly and he’s sure that Phil wants it, too.
But he’s too scared. Not of kissing him, maybe – Phil’s lips look soft, and he’d kiss gently, Dan bets, at least at first, tentative, letting Dan learn the way he feels without saying a single word. But he’s scared of what comes after, the cold light of morning. He can’t control the things he feels and that’s a part of the problem.
He wants to kiss him but he’s far too scared of what doing so might mean.
::
When he gets home he looks up the word 'bisexuality’ again, and this time, he reads the articles, and the blogs, and the questions and the answers.
::
There’s an interesting question in one of the blog posts Dan reads that makes him wonder a few things. The wording is mixed up in his head, but it was something along the lines of asking whether you’d hate another person for feeling the way you feel.
And Dan imagines another teenage boy, lost and confused, who definitely likes girls, but maybe likes boys a bit as well.
He wouldn’t call him creepy or perverted for looking at a boy and wanting to kiss him whether they were friends or not, the way he thought of himself when he was fourteen, and he saw a boy he liked and felt bad for even looking.
He wouldn’t call him weird for the things he thought and felt. He wouldn’t think that he was wrong. Because it isn’t wrong. It isn’t at all.
He wouldn’t feel disgust or hatred or loathing, not a speck of it, not at all.
The question stays with him for a long time. He thinks about it that night, looking in the mirror, brushing his teeth, underneath the hot steam of the shower and as he lies in bed with all of his thoughts written out on the walls for him to stare at.
::
He’ll never admit it to himself and he still deletes the history but sometimes the thing that makes Dan feel a thousand times better is to read blog posts of other people in his position, who are confused and questioning, and think they know but they don’t want to say it.
He reads and he breathes and he hopes they’re doing okay, too.
::
One night, when Dan’s parents are out for dinner and his little brother is out at a sleepover, Dan sits on his bed with the lights on and the curtains open, and he takes a breath, and he thinks about kissing Phil, and what he should have done beside him in the bed that night, when Phil looked at him with smile like Dan hung the moon.
And he says, out loud and quiet, “I might like boys”.
::
It’s still a bit scary, thinking about it at all. But Dan finds that the more he tests the waters, the more he lets himself say it, no matter how hesitant and questioning, it feels a little bit easier, and there’s a little less anxiety cutting sharp inside of his stomach each and every time.
He always said to himself that it didn’t count if it was in the dark. It was okay in the dark. He thinks about incognito pages and 'delete history’ and feeling sick in the night and wanting to scream but not being even able to speak because of the quiet needed underneath the shadows. It’s still daunting in the light, but Dan’s never particularly liked the dark, actually.
::
Sometimes, Dan thinks about boys.
In the morning, he remembers, but maybe it isn’t such a big deal.
::
When he’d thought about kissing Phil the world didn’t implode and asteroids didn’t fall from the sky and toxic rain didn’t shoot out from the clouds. The world went on and the only thing that happened was Dan’s heart beat sped up, and they’d shared a shy smile.
It was like before, with his girlfriend. And there’d been nothing to be scared of there, with her small hands and soft hair and kind smiles, and maybe there isn’t anything to be scared of here and now, either.
Maybe.
::
When they do talk about it – him and Phil – it’s Phil who brings it up, voice cracking slightly when the connection pulls, looking serious yet unsure in the small square on Dan’s screen.
“Do you mind that we – God, this sounds kind of awkward, when you say it out loud – do you mind that I like, flirt with you, and stuff?” he sounds awkward and uncomfortable and Dan would probably cringe if he wasn’t frowning in confusion.
“No,” Dan says. “Why would I?”
Phil takes a breath. “It’s just, it’s different over Skype and texting I know, but like, you’re responsive and stuff over on here. You seem into it. And then, when we met up, you didn’t really seem like you wanted to or anything. You looked uncomfortable.”
Dan is quiet for a long moment, and he wants to shy away and change the subject, wants to run a thousand miles into comfortable territory, but he tells himself not to.
This is your chance, he tells himself. He doesn’t particularly want the chance, but he takes it, begrudgingly.
He tells Phil.
His legs shake and his fingers tremble and his voice falls over itself in a hazy stutter, over and over, but he tells him, finally. He tells someone is the point. He makes it real. No one is home, no one can hear his thin voice carrying through the walls and tell his secret to the world.
It shouldn’t be a big deal, he thinks. But to him, it is. It feels like a step, though, not like a wrong turn, one that leads to crashing cars and drowning.
“I… It doesn’t make me uncomfortable,” Dan tells him, speaking slowly, looking down at his finger tips and not at the camera, not at Phil. “Not… as such. It’s just. Fuck. I’ve – I’ve never spoken about this before, okay? And, like,” he pauses, not sure where to go from here.
“It’s okay, Dan,” Phil says, voice gently encouraging as always. “Whatever it is it’s okay.”
“It’s like,” he takes a deep breath. Just say it, he thinks. He feels like this conversation should be done in person, with Phil sitting beside him ready to hold him together if he caves beneath the removal of this weight that’s sat benign for so many years now. Just say it. “I think I’m bisexual.”
Phil nods, slowly.
Dan continues. “I think I like boys.”
“You’re not sure?” Phil asks, sounding a little concerned now. “I didn’t pressure you, did I?”
“No, you idiot,” Dan shakes his head. “You being around kind of made me… have to acknowledge it more, I guess. I’ve always been kind of. In denial, I suppose. I’ve never let myself think about it until now but I – I’ve felt it since I was twelve or something. I just pushed it away and made all of these excuses, and I feel bad 'cause – there’s nothing wrong with being gay or being bi or being anything, no one has to be straight, I get it, it’s just. It’s just I wanted to be.”
“It’s okay,” Phil says, voice soft again, he speaks slow, his voice is a kind that lulls you into peace and Dan wishes he was here. “It’s okay, Dan. It’s not bad that you felt that. Like, most people are brought up that way, and it sucks but they are, and it sticks with you. That’s not your fault.”
“I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening,” Dan tells him. “Like. That I didn’t feel it but that didn’t stop it because I still did, and I liked all these boys and pretended I didn’t, pretended it didn’t matter because I still like girls. And I do, I still do, girls are – girls are great, it’s just-”
“You like boys, too.”
“I do,” Dan says. He takes a deep breath. “Fuck. I do. And now I’ve said it out loud and I can’t take it back, right? This makes it real.”
“It was always real,” Phil tells him. “Look around, nothings changed. Don’t panic, okay? Whatever you are, it’s fine, whoever you love or like or want to kiss, it’s all fine. You’re great.”
“I just didn’t know how to admit it,” Dan says. His voice is wet and shaky.
“I wish I could hug you,” Phil says. “I wish you’d told me.”
“Was it like this for you?”
“Not really, it was more – I’d kind of always known, but I didn’t push it aside so much, I kind of just…embraced it. But it’s different for everyone. It’s okay if you’re okay with yourself in an instant, but if it takes you a while to come to terms with who you’re attracted to, that’s alright too. You’re not in the wrong because it took you a while to figure out who you are.”
“What if I hated myself for it though?” Dan chokes out. He doesn’t want to cry on camera but he can feel tears stinging at the edges of his eyes and he hates it. “I don’t – I don’t hate other people for their sexualities. It was just. Because it was me.”
“It’s like I said,” Phil replies gently, soothingly. “We’re brought up believing we’re supposed to be and feel and love and want a certain way. The fact that it scared you and made you uncomfortable to think you opposed what everyone else expected of you doesn’t make you a bad person, it’s normal. But you don’t need to hate yourself. It’s okay, Dan. Everything you feel is okay.”
Dan nods, and maybe he does cry a bit. But Phil’s voice is soothing, and Dan listens, and he feels a bit more okay with every word he says. There are still thick layers of anxiety and self-loathing and confusion piled together inside of himself, and to anyone else, he might not want to admit it, just yet, but that’s okay.
He knows this now. It’s okay.
::
Sometimes, Dan thinks about kissing girls. This is okay.
Sometimes, Dan thinks about kissing boys. This is okay, too.
::
Saying it out loud, properly, in the light of day to another person, has helped in some respects. The thought of his own sexuality still terrifies him somewhat, but he knows that this isn’t his fault: when you’re born and raised with one route and one expectation shared by the people around you and yourself, it can be scary to deviate from it, even if that’s who you are and what you really want. It’s okay to be scared. This is not a lie. Sometimes, heteronormality can damage people, and sometimes it damages the way that they see themselves.
But Dan knows he doesn’t have to hate himself, even if some days he feels like he does.
Sometimes he looks up the word bisexuality, and he reads the meaning, and the eleven letters, and he feels fine. Some days the idea of a label intimidates him and he shies away from it, but that doesn’t mean he has to go back to the one that he once wore in denial.
It does count in the dark. Dan knows this now. But that doesn’t mean he has to hate himself for it.
::
The next time he visits Phil, he does kiss him, like he’d wanted to originally. The setting is eerily familiar in the middle of the night, and Phil’s laughing about some inside joke that had slipped out in passing, and Dan thinks: I really, really like you, and kisses him when his laughter fades but the smile is still there, bright at the sides of his lips.
He kisses him because he might be scared of what it’ll mean in the morning, but he isn’t now. He can work through that when he comes to it. A shaky step forward is better than an easier few steps back.
Phil does have soft lips, it turns out, as Dan had hypothesised The ghost of stubble brushes against Dan’s skin, and it feels good. He hasn’t kissed a boy in years and he still loves it, the way it feels. He loves it even more because it’s Phil.
Phil pulls away, after a moment, and asks, gently, “are you sure you’re okay with this?”
Dan says, “I am,” and kisses him again.
::
In the morning, he’s anxious, but he sits up in bed, and he takes a breath and counts to ten, and reminds himself that this is okay. That whatever this means, it’s okay.
It takes him a good few minutes, but he tells himself a few times over that loving someone isn’t a bad thing, and then mutters, out loud, “who fucking cares” and thinks, I don’t.
::
At university, a year later, Dan tells somebody who hits on him apologetically that he has a boyfriend.
“I’m so sorry!” the girl says. She’s nice, and Dan likes her, and she doesn’t look particularly upset by the revelation so he doesn’t have to feel bad about letting her down, either. “I didn’t realise you were gay.”
“Well, I’m not gay,” Dan tells her. Because it’s true.
“Oh,” she says. “You bisexual, then?”
Dan just smiles, and says, “probably.”