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Dennis walks across their living room like his feet are on fire. He opens the front door just to slam it. He does it again, three, four times, going faster until the hinge is rattling and his hand is starting to hurt from grasping the handle too hard.
There is too much going on inside of him. He's not sure if he’s breathing; his heart and lungs may be imploding in his chest. Maybe that’s what that painful, squeezing sensation is.
Mac is somewhere just behind him, probably watching him attack their door. Probably thinking about how Dennis is a fucking freak and waiting for the opportunity to yell at him. Dennis wants to burn their entire building down. Mac found the goddamn dresses. Mac found the goddamn dresses and now he's going to leave him. Dennis slams the door shut once more, the sound echoing around their apartment, then rattles the doorknob, clinging onto it like he’s trying to pull it off.
The jingling of the door in its place only works to grate against Dennis’s ears. He lets the handle go and punches the door. It hurts a little, and his fist makes a loud bang against the wood. With a growl he swings to punch it again, but finds he can't move his arm. Mac's body has stepped up beside him, and he's holding onto Dennis's elbow, using his stupid muscles to keep Dennis’s arm still.
Took him long enough to do something. Dennis half thought Mac was just going to let him take the whole door down. Maybe he was hoping Dennis would flee out of it and never come back. Dennis has half a mind to, but he can’t do anything with his elbow in Mac’s grasp.
“Get the fuck off of me,” Dennis says wildly.
"Sorry, Den," Mac says, somewhat like a question. Mac doesn't release his grip. He rubs his thumb once softly over the skin of Dennis’s arm, and Dennis can’t take it. He yells and tugs his arm out of Mac’s fingers with all of his strength, pulling it in and down so that his elbow makes hard contact with Mac’s face. It sends Mac veering backwards.
Mac doesn’t do anything fun like trip or fall over from the blow. Instead, he only huffs out a surprised breath and takes a stumbling step back before righting himself. He shakes his head like a dog shaking water out of its fur, then looks at Dennis. Dennis searches his eyes for any sign of the fire that a younger Mac would have had, the fire that would mean he could expect Mac to punch him back.
The fire isn’t there. Mac’s expression is a terribly mature one that makes it all too obvious the gears inside of his head are spinning. Dennis rushes to speak before Mac can: he doesn't want to talk with Mac about the dresses. He doesn't want to think about the dresses at all.
“That’s what you deserve for looking around in my space,” Dennis spits. He leans his back against the door self-consciously, happy to have an easy escape route. His elbow stings from making contact with Mac’s bony face.
Mac rubs at his eye. Dennis wonders if it will bruise. He seems to be trying to decide how much he can push before Dennis attacks him again. Dennis would maybe feel guilty, if his entire being wasn’t on fire. “Dennis, can we please talk? I don't understand," Mac says.
Mac can never understand. That's the entire point. That's why Dennis has spent the last few weeks miserably avoiding his dresses, wearing less makeup, stopping Mac from calling him pretty. Mac can't know the reason. Dennis is fucked up; he's trying to be better, but he's not really getting anywhere. Mac can never know.
“Fuck you, Mac!” Dennis says, the words falling easily from his mouth. “No, fuck you for snooping through my things and then making it my problem you found something you don’t like! I don’t owe you shit!” He leans a little away from the door then falls back against it, finding comfort in the way his back crashes against it.
Mac crosses his arms over his chest and tilts his head. He's trying to use his big dumb brown eyes to bait Dennis into complying. “I'm sorry, Den. Don't be upset.”
Upset? Dennis isn't upset. He is a god and this is his reckoning. The smoldering inside of him is a full blaze. He feels wrong wrong wrong. He feels like a child caught stealing. He wants to sprint until he runs himself off of a cliff. He wants to hit the water and disappear.
Dennis gestures largely around their apartment. He’s not entirely sure what he’s meaning to highlight; everything looks as it normally does. The kitchen is tidy but there are dirty dishes on the counter. The coffee table is cluttered with remotes and empty days-old beer bottles. There are blankets thrown haphazardly over the couches.
The only thing out of the ordinary is that the door to Dennis’s bedroom hangs open. Dennis always closes his door. He always closes it.
“What the fuck were you doing in my room?” Dennis yells, close to tears. Mac would have had to open his door. He would have had to put his hand onto the doorknob and turn it, knowing the whole time that what he was doing was against everything Dennis would ever want.
“I accidentally washed one of your shirts with mine, man! It happens all the time!” Mac says. He’s finally starting to raise his voice. Maybe Dennis will get a fight out of him yet.
“You don’t go in my room — in my closet! — to put it away. You leave it here hanging over one of the chairs like every single goddamn time before!” Dennis’s voice raises nearly an octave by the end of his sentence. He takes a breath, lowers his arms from where they sprung to in the air, and adds, “You for one should know about closets being private, Mac, since you were too weak to leave your own for so long.”
Mac bristles, but doesn’t bite the bullet. “It was your blue button up,” he says like that explains everything. He tries to take a step closer to Dennis. Dennis kicks his foot out at him, keeping him away. Mac sighs and pulls a chair away from the dining table, flipping it so he can sit on it and face Dennis.
“It was the shirt you say always wrinkles, so I wanted to hang it up for you,” Mac explains painstakingly.
“Housewife bitch,” Dennis says.
Mac stands, and Dennis thinks he’s finally pushed him far enough. He sinks a bit as tension leaves his shoulders, watching Mac’s back as he retreats. But Mac doesn’t head to his own room. He enters Dennis’s, and before Dennis can do anything other than yell unintelligibly after him, Mac reemerges holding one of the dresses Dennis buried in the back of his closet.
Dennis nearly gags. If he wasn’t having a heart attack before, he is now. “Put that back,” he forces out. His voice is shaking.
Mac sits again on the chair. He holds the dress out in front of himself, eyeing it. After a moment, he pulls it in and lets it pool in his lap, holding an edge of it in his hand and rubbing it between his fingers.
Dennis wants to snatch the dress from him and toss it away, but that would be too much of an admittance. He forces himself to stay glued to the door, and tries to see if he can still breath.
“You haven’t worn this one with me,” Mac says lightly. “I like the material, but the color hurts my eyes, man. It’s tomato-ey.”
“Crimson,” Dennis snaps, then bites his tongue hard.
Mac considers the dress again, then repeats, “Crimson.” He holds the dress in Dennis’s direction. “Put it on?”
“Fuck you,” Dennis says coldly.
Mac frowns. He seems so genuine it drives Dennis crazy. “Why not?”
“Haven’t you noticed?” Dennis all but screams. “I have been working so hard! So hard! Don’t you fucking taunt me, Mac. It’s not funny.” Dennis doesn’t realize until a few seconds later that he’s said too much. He turns and puts his hand on the door handle and is about to open it and run away and never come back. Really, he is about to.
“Working hard? On what? Dennis, what are you talking about?” Mac asks slowly. His hands find Dennis’s shoulders, and he gasps softly. “Den, your back is tight as a rock. Have you been stretching?”
“Have I been fucking stretching,” Dennis mocks icily. He tries to duck out of Mac’s touch, but the door and the wall are in his way. He tries to convince himself that the soft massage Mac’s fingers are doing into his shoulders and neck isn’t comforting.
Dennis fails. He’s leaning into Mac before he can help it, closing his eyes and sinking into the nice touches. He knows he doesn’t deserve this, that soon it will end — that it came so close to ending just now — but he can’t resist enjoying it. He lets Mac lead them both to the couch.
Mac sits then pulls Dennis in against him, so Dennis’s back is resting on Mac’s chest. Mac’s arms circle around him, holding him. Dennis’s emotion flip so quickly it’s nauseating. With Mac's arms around him, Dennis doesn't feel quite so broken. He doesn't feel quite as bad about wanting to wear the dresses again. He wants Mac to hold him forever.
Mac, unfortunately, has other plans. As soon as Dennis’s breathing has evened out, Mac says, “Dennis, what have you been ‘working hard’ on?”
Dennis starts to pull himself away from Mac’s embrace, but Mac tightens his arms and doesn’t let him. “No, Den,” he continues, “talk to me. I’m not letting you go until you talk to me.”
Dennis thrashes around, trying hard to free himself from Mac’s grip. Mac has to adjust a little and swing one of his feet onto the ground for balance, but genuinely Dennis can’t escape him. Dennis settles back against him with a huff, feeling both tired and a little turned on.
“How dare you confine me like this,” he says. "Unhand me!"
“I guess we’ll be staying here for the night then,” Mac says, and he means it. Dennis is only able to escape an hour later after Mac has fallen asleep. If he weren't already overrun by emotions, he might be thankful for how easily Mac can drift off.
Dennis is still angry at Mac for finding the dresses, but he’s more mad at himself for letting them be found. While he waited for Mac to start snoring, Dennis developed solid plans of tiptoeing to his room, throwing all the dresses out his window, then curling up in bed and letting this nightmare day end. He could just play dumb whenever Mac brought it up again. He was set on that plan.
He didn't account for the crimson dress to still be laid out on the dining room table. Dennis gravitates towards it, and picks it up without meaning to. His fingers hold the fine material of the dress tightly. He lifts it up, pressing it to his face and breathing in deeply. It smells like mothballs and a bit like Mac, but Dennis doesn’t care. He missed being close to it. He missed feeling it on his skin.
He misses the dresses so much. None of the feelings — whatever they are — have really gone away with Dennis’s attempt to repress them. Now they bubble under the surface, painful and hollow inside of him. He still wants to be seen as feminine in public, and he still wants Mac to call him pretty, to call him his girl…
He denies himself any acting on it, but the wanting, the wanting he’s unable to extinguish.
Dennis hugs the dress against himself, sniffling a little. He hurries into his room, and sits down cross-legged in front of his closet. The shopping bag that he hid his dresses in is uncovered, shining like a warning right there on the closet floor. Dennis doesn’t know why Mac was scrounging around on the floor if he really was just hanging up a shirt, but he also finds he doesn’t care.
Now that he’s uncovered one, Dennis can’t stop himself from bringing all of his dresses out of the bag. He holds each in his hands before draping them around himself. He feels bad for laying them on the floor, but he will be sure to carefully clean them later. He will enjoy that part as well.
He gets to the blue dress with the corset-type closing at the back, and he holds it up in front of himself. He wore this one outside once, just by himself. Just down the street and then back. Hardly more than a block total.
No one had said anything, no one had even really looked at him, but he’d felt terrible the entire time. It had already been a bad day, and maybe he’d been looking to punish himself. As much as he likes wearing the dresses by himself or with Mac, he’s petrified to wear them outside.
Outside, seen by other people, they start to feel itchy on his skin, and sometimes he’s overwhelmed by the urge to strip them off or cover them up. He can never shake the feeling that everyone around him hates him, hates what he is.
Dennis wants to be feminine but no one else wants him to, especially not Mac, who is very vocally not attracted to women. Dennis isn’t manly. He’s not burly and masculine like most of the men Mac is attracted to. Mac will only put up with so much. He puts up with the dresses and the makeup because he’s been stupidly in love with Dennis for years, but he surely will have a breaking point.
Dennis expects that the breaking point is somewhere right around Dennis feeling like he kind-of maybe sort-of is not a man, and doesn’t want to be seen as one anymore.
He was right to swear off the dresses. He hates himself. He hates himself for everything he’s ever wanted to have or to be. Being a man is so easy compared to not being a man, and if Dennis were stronger he’d be able to convince himself to be happy as he is. But he’s not strong enough, and ignoring what he wants is making him miserable. It’s been a miserable few weeks. Dennis holds the dress up to his face and cries into it, leaning down towards his knees.
He hears Mac walking into his room, but he doesn’t have time to do anything about it. He only cries harder. So here it is. Here is Mac, realizing what Dennis is, and finally leaving him for it.
“Get out,” Dennis says, voice muffled.
“You’re, uh—” Mac says, “What is this?”
“Clothes? A bedroom? The floor? Jesus, be more specific,” Dennis says, taking his face away from the fabric so he can speak. He drops the dress into his lap and runs his hands over his face, trying to scrub all the evidence of his tears away.
Mac lifts a dress up and places it onto another one so he can sit himself down next to Dennis. “Den,” he says openly, “if you wanted the dresses why did you hide them all in a bag at the bottom of your closet?”
The corset dress is heavy in Dennis’s lap. His emotions are still at a high from the crying, and so he can’t stop himself from admitting, “There’s something wrong with me.”
Mac places his warm palm on Dennis’s thigh. He waits for Dennis to elaborate.
Dennis blinks. The sun has set, and his ceiling light is on, buzzing faintly. “I don’t want you to leave me,” he hears himself say. “So I… tried to stop it.”
“Bro,” Mac says, “I’m gonna need a little more to go on here.”
Dennis groans, then says, “Do you remember the, uh, Pride event a few weeks ago? Where they gave us pronoun pins?” He shivers. The memory is heavy in his stomach. He's not sure why he's close to admitting everything to Mac, except he's so tired of pretending. Maybe it's time to just tear off the Band-Aid and let Mac walk away from him.
“Yeah?” Mac says uncertainly.
“I—” Dennis says, and then his mouth clamps shut. He cannot physically force himself to finish the sentence. He squeezes a bit of the corset dress between his fingers and closes his eyes.
“Oh!” Mac says, and Dennis’s eyes open to swing wildly over to him because what on earth does Mac think he’s come to a conclusion for? “Oh, Den, you want to talk about gender?”
Dennis recoils, his brain flipping over. “No!” he says unconvincingly.
“Well, I’ve thought about my gender,” Mac says with a shrug. Dennis can feel that his eyes are bugging out but he can’t calm himself down enough to do anything about it. Mac continues, “After I came out, when I was trying to learn about the community. Being gay is a lot more than wanting to be with men!”
Mac laughs a little, then goes on, “Well, not always. Sometimes it is just that. Like when a beefy dude looks super hot and I think, ‘I am super gay.’ But it’s also a lot of other things, some of them I didn’t really understand at first. Do you know what nonbinary is?”
Dennis is frozen. He tries and fails to speak.
Mac doesn’t seem to mind. He blabbers on: “It’s someone who isn’t a man or a woman. And you can be gay and nonbinary, or be gay and date a nonbinary person, and still be gay! I thought it was like a black and white thing but it isn’t. Isn’t that neat, Den?”
Dennis can’t feel his hands, or his face, or most of his body. All he can feel is the spot where Mac’s palm is still holding onto his leg, hyper-focused and very warm. His panic must show on his face, because Mac asks again, softer, “... Den?”
“IdontthinkIwanttobeamananymore,” Dennis says in a rush.
Mac says, “Huh?”
Dennis forces himself to say, a little slower, “I don’t think I wanna… be a man.” He tenses, preparing for Mac to yell at him for tricking him and then storm out. Dennis closes his eyes. He can almost hear Mac’s words before he says them: I’m gay, Dennis! What the fuck is wrong with you?
“Ok,” Mac says calmly. He leans in to press a kiss to Dennis’s temple. “Thanks for telling me, Den. I love you.” Dennis hardly registers the kiss before he’s crying again, harder than before. He feels like he’s jumped off a cliff only to float in the air. There is a pain to the relief.
Dennis cries so hard he can hardly breathe. He gasps for air, chest burning. Mac’s arms weave around him, pulling him in and hugging him tightly. “Don’t cry, please Den?” Mac whispers. “It’s ok. Everything’s ok. I love you. It’s ok.”
Dennis presses his forehead hard into Mac’s shoulder. He holds onto him and cries into him until the tears finally slow, then he pulls away just far enough to ask, fearfully, “You still want to be with me?”
Mac doesn’t answer for a minute, and in the silence Dennis’s heart jumps. He pulls all the way off of Mac so he can see his face. Mac’s eyebrows are up and his mouth fraught in a mixture of surprise and worry that would be comical if not for the context.
“Dennis,” Mac says breathily, “of course I still want to be with you. Do you still want… with me?”
Dennis nods quickly. “You’re so loudly gay, Mac. And I—” he gestures at the dresses around them. “I don’t know. It’s different.”
“It’s you Den. Nothing is more important to me than you,” Mac is smiling. He looks stupid with it. Dennis loves him so much. Quickly, though, Mac’s face breaks back into more worry. “I want you to be happy. You haven’t been happy lately.”
Dennis looks away, embarrassed at the truth of it.
Mac continues. “I wish you’d told me why, Den. You didn’t have to be so sad by yourself.”
Dennis falls back against him, wrapping himself into Mac’s hard chest. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I love you I love you I love you.”
“Do you, uh… do you want other pronouns?” Mac stumbles over.
Dennis winces. Baby steps, or he’s going to implode. “No,” he says, then amends, “Not yet.”
Mac hugs him in closer. “I’m proud of you, Den,” he says. “And I love being gay with you.”
Dennis laughs wetly. He’s not sure how he’ll feel in the light of day, but right now he feels a lightness he’s never experienced before in his life. He hugs Mac hard and wonders what on earth he ever did right to deserve this.
Not that he does deserve it. Not that it won’t still all fall crumbling down. It will only get harder from here.