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Foggy doesn’t exactly come out to Matt.
Well, he does, but it’s not, like, a sit-down-and-talk thing like it was when he was fourteen and he needed to do the “hey, you know how you’ve been calling me Foggy for so long that none of my baby cousins even know my legal name, and how I’ve spent the last two years living in the same huge thrift store hoodie and the jokes about my Anaheim Ducks phase are getting old, and how I burst into tears the first three days I had to go to school in a uniform with a skirt? Because stick with me, these are all related,” conversation, in the way only a feisty ninth grader with unsupervised internet access for the first time in his life and a burning need to prove he was right about this newfangled transgender thing could.
Come to think of it, he’s pretty sure that conversation had a lot to do with what made him want to be a lawyer.
But anyway. With Matt, it’s not a whole thing, or at least it’s not a whole thing when he actually does it. It’s sure as hell a thing in the three months they’re roomies before he rips the bandaid off, considering he spends most of those three months agonizing over it—oh crap what if he’s super Catholic versus so’s Gram and she happy cried when I told her I was naming myself after Grandpa Frankie, and also Matt may actually be the sweetest person alive, with a mix of I actually totally pass for once because, like, blind, versus oh my god I’m an asshole, and the general logistics of living together meaning Matt’s probably going to find out eventually, and Foggy doesn’t even really want to be totally stealth and he’s been eyeing some campus LGBT groups and if the trans thing is going to be what brings out Matt’s secret inner douchebag he should probably get it out of the way so it can suck as little as possible, but. Still.
What makes him actually do it, though, is that needles are awful inventions and he hates them.
He can totally do his shots himself. He’s been managing for three months, and he even tried to train himself before he moved into the dorm—which involved a lot of chickening out and calling Candace for help—but it still makes him queasy and it’s awkward to reach and he doesn’t want to pass out and smack his head on the toilet and die with his ass out, which, sans the ass thing, was also the reason Matt had given for looking like a sad puppy when Foggy had tried to give him and their poor beleaguered toilet some privacy while he discovered the glory of tequila hangovers, so he feels, like, at least pretty confident that the “kind of awkward and TMI and maybe a little weird to ask your roommate” part isn’t going to be the dealbreaker.
He does start the conversation with “So, how do you like needles,” though, and Matt may be nearly upside down in the boneless and weirdly, ungodly hot way he’s sprawled over their tiny futon but Foggy can still recognize exactly the journey his face is going on as he tries to puzzle out whether this conversation is leading to hard drugs, weird alternative medicine and a possible multi-level marketing scheme, or super kinky sex.
“I mean, like, do they bother you?” Foggy clarifies, hopefully putting the brakes on that whole crazy train before he has too much time to contemplate the last stop. “Like. I faint when I get blood drawn, y’know? You?”
“Uh—not really,” Matt says, shutting the book he’d been lazily running his fingers over and flipping over onto his stomach with way too much grace, suspected wildcat-given-human-form that he is. “I guess I don’t like them, but they don’t really bother me.”
“Cool, so.” And suddenly it’s the moment of truth, so Foggy takes a couple breaths and reminds himself that it’s not the end of the world if Matt’s a dick after all, even though the thought makes him want to cry and it hasn’t even happened yet. “Is three months long enough to be friends before I ask you to help me stick a needle in my butt?”
“Sure,” Matt replies instantly, like this is in fact a perfectly normal thing to ask of your new roommate, which will someday be a footnote somewhere on Future Foggy’s List of Reasons I Think Matt Thinks Some Weird Things About Friendship, but one of the ones with the But In a Good Way, Question Mark? caveat. “Like—medicine, or?”
“Sort of,” Foggy says, and then, because Matt looks worried— “I mean, not really? I’m not sick, it’s just. It’s testosterone.”
The couple seconds it takes for Matt to go from neutral to confused to realization last for-fucking-ever, but he never makes it to grossed out, just kind of opens his mouth in a quiet little “oh.” The not answering isn’t the worst case scenario, but the silence is still terrifying.
“Sometimes I call it dude juice,” Foggy—ever unable to keep his mouth shut in an awkward moment—offers, just in the hope that it’ll actually get Matt to respond.
Matt’s silent for another moment before he says, very somberly, “Yes, Foggy, I’ll shoot your butt full of dude juice,” and laughs harder than Foggy’s ever heard him when he grabs him by his feet to yank him off the futon in retaliation.
They don’t really talk about it for more than a month after that—Matt turns out to be kind of creepily good with needles for someone who can’t see where he’s sticking them, and even better at finding the perfect thing to say to distract Foggy while he’s doing it, and outside of that, nothing really changes between them. It makes Foggy feel like a complete jerk that he doesn’t trust it, at first, because what did he do to deserve lucking out this much? But the other shoe never drops, and Matt’s just—cool.
And then they’re walking across the quad one day and Foggy’s listening to the tap tap tap of Matt’s cane and finally starting to get used to the fact that Matt’s graduated from pinching his sleeve to putting his hand on his forearm, and Matt says, apropos of nothing, “Can I ask you something kind of—personal?”
Foggy weighs that for a second, looking at the stiff, nervous look on Matt’s face.
“If you get a trans question, I get a blind question.”
Matt’s face splits into a smile and Foggy feels his heart do a backflip, making it officially the only part of him that can do a backflip, which is just all kinds of unfair. “Deal.”
“What’s up, bud?”
“When you figured it out, did you ever—did you think it might be easier if you didn’t tell anyone? Like, what if they hadn’t—what if it had gone badly?”
Someday Future Foggy will realize how much there was to unpack about this question and be like, oh, duh, there is totally some deep personal shit going on here.
Present Foggy just laughs it off as best he can. “No way. I would have died, dude. Like, actually died.”
He says it like a joke, but it’s not quite a joke, and he can tell by the way Matt’s jaw moves that he knows it’s not quite a joke. Matt’s scarily good at reading people, sometimes, and being on the receiving end of it always feels weird as hell.
Then again, Foggy’s probably being way more obvious than he’d like to think.
“I’m so bad at keeping secrets I blew every single surprise party my little sisters ever had,” he says, just to get away from the dark crap and back to things that might make Matt smile again. “Even if it went badly, I just figured, like—I couldn’t live a lie forever, you know? I’d explode. Literally. Bits of Nelson all over the walls.”
“Huh,” Matt says, and Foggy can’t tell if it’s an agreeing huh or a skeptical huh or a questioning his worldview huh, but then he just squeezes Foggy’s elbow and starts walking again. Foggy finds himself watching his profile so intently, trying to read whatever he can from his blank expression, that it feels more like Matt is guiding him than the other way around. “—Your turn.”
“What?”
“You get a blind question,” Matt says, the corners of his mouth tugged up.
“Oh, right.” Foggy makes himself look away, out at the snow-blanketed campus spread out in front of them. “So, dogs, dude. What is your deal with dogs? If I had an excuse to bring a dog with me everywhere I went…”
Matt chuckles beside him, bumping his shoulder into his. Foggy can tell for sure it’s totally intentional because Matt doesn’t stumble at all as he does it, he even picks his cane up off the pavement first—and, he thinks, even if Matt could see the way his face flushes all the way to his ears at such easy camaraderie from someone who’d needed a few weeks to get over some unknown hangup about fist bumps, he’d still be able to blame it on the cold.