The mystery of what the fuck any of it means exactly

Author’s Note: Based on narrative outlined by @Cuchuilain.

He says these unexpected words in such a rush it takes you a second to actually register their meaning. When you do, your face floods with heat so fast it steals your breath and you just stand there frozen while your heart begins to beat fast and hard in your chest. You know he must be practically holding his breath waiting for your reaction, and even with that and the microwave done-beep for motivation you can’t seem to make yourself turn around and find out what this new complication means. “Bridge?” he asks uncertainly, when you don’t manage any reply or move to take your coffee. “Birdie?”

His voice jolts you back to yourself. “Uh. Sorry,” you say quickly, opening the microwave and picking up the cup too fast, yelping when some of the hot coffee sloshes onto your hand. He jumps up, but you’re already at the sink running cold water over it. You’re grateful for the few extra seconds of not having to look at him, because this was so unexpected that you kind of feel like crying.

You’re clearly no expert on romantic love, but it never occurred to you that someone expressing it toward you for the first time would make you feel… so vaguely mournful. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t seem all that happy about apparently being in love with you.

Dex is next to you now, worried about your hand, even though it’s fine, probably far less bad than your sunburn. “Are you all right?” he asks uncertainly.

“I think you already know what a world-breaking thing that was to lob at me, Teddy,” you say in a small voice, fixing your eyes on the cold tap water disappearing down the stainless steel sink so you don’t have to look at him. “You’re just being a coward right now so you don’t have to own the ambush.” You turn off the water, wondering where these words are coming from. You’re the agreeable one. The girl everybody likes. The builder of harmony who looks after everyone.

The pushover, probably, if you thought about it hard enough.

“Right, okay, yeah, you’re right,” he says guiltily. “I—” You think maybe he hoped you were going to cut in and say something and he’d get credit for having been about to say something not totally useless, but you don’t have anything so he just cuts himself off and acts awkward about it when that actually does kill the conversation.

You wet the little Swedish dishcloth thing next to the sink and use it to wipe the sticky coffee mess off the counter and your cup, while Dex hovers anxiously nearby. You don’t let your eyes stray in his direction, because the nervous, jittery energy rolling off him right now is not helping you feel better about the decade-plus friendship he just tossed a grenade into, and okay, because you’re a little scared for the rest of this conversation now.

But you don’t have a good enough excuse anymore not to just sit down, so you finish wiping down the inside of the microwave and close it with a thunking sound. While you were cleaning up, Dex moved your coffee to the table. Probably he was just as **** for something to do.

“Well,” you say awkwardly when you sit back down. “I guess I didn’t figure the first guy to fall for me would be you. Or that he would be so openly miserable about his condition.”

“Sorry,” he says, wincing again. “Scott kind of really let me have it. I’m still reeling a little.”

You pick up the cup, but your stupid coffee is still way too hot to drink, so you wind up just setting it back down again and staring at the table. “Well are you going to tell me about it?” you say after a second. “Or is that all you have to say and now I get to solve the mystery all by myself of what the fuck any of it means exactly?”

Dex flushes with embarrassment. “Yes. Sorry. I guess whatever conversation you had earlier really affected him. He was kind of pissed about it—not at you,” he adds quickly, when this makes your head jerk up in surprise. “At me. He said our dynamic sucks and he never should have gone along with this trip in the first place. He feels bad because he only came here for your sake and all it accomplished was that our drama convinced the most attractive girl either of us knows that she’s some kind of unfuckable hag.”

“I never should have insisted on this stupid thing,” you say, feeling very tired about it even though you slept something like one million hours. “Though on the unfuckable hag front, your case would be more compelling if I weren’t quite so… unfucked? Sexually,” you clarify. “Obviously I’m plenty fucked in other areas.”

Dex nods, fiddling absently with the towel again. “In our defense, he abstained on principle since you were drunk and he saw you as the subject of someone else’s affection.”

“What’s your part of that defense?” you ask.

“Oh,” he says. “Just that I’m an idiot.”

“I admit I’ve heard more sympathetic arguments,” you observe with intentional dryness.

“Fair enough.” Dex offers you a rueful, sad little smile that makes you feel unexpectedly more grounded.

Half against your better judgment, you slide your hand over to him. “This is not being offered in the context of your earlier announcement,” you inform him, because it seems important that he understand that. “This is being offered in the capacity of our long-standing friendship.”

You see him swallow pretty hard. But Dex nods at you, with shining eyes, and accepts your hand. It makes you feel a little better—less fragile, somehow—to feel his warm, familiar, smooth skin against yours. The two of you sit there for a moment, quiet except for a couple of sniffs from him that you legitimately can’t identify as being emotional, or just allergies. “I’m not trying to make you feel worse,” you say after a short silence. “I promise. I’m just… it’s kind of a lot.”

“Which part? Me figuring out my feelings for you, or that those feelings shied Scott off making a move on you himself?”

“Aah!” You take your hand back so you can pantomime a dramatically exaggerated too much! mock silent scream with hands pressed to the sides of your face. He knows the move. It’s somewhere between Edvard Munch and that old Home Alone movie Mom likes.

A casual observer might not identify that as a calming gesture, but he understands you’re trying to ease his nerves. Dex smiles faintly at you, and you let him have your hand back. “So I guess tell me what has Scott so convinced that he in turn convinced you,” you say. You’re not quite ready to say words like, he’s in love with you.

“It’s real,” he says softly, not lifting his eyes from the table. “I really am.”

“And yet it never came up once in the literal decade we’ve been friends,” you point out mercilessly. “And okay, sure, being prepubescent for most of it gets you off the hook for a lot, but it’s not like you made a move or even made any effort to make me think your queerness had room for me.”

He sits there, eyes down, in silence for a minute while he considers that. You’re glad he’s at least giving the question real thought and not popping off stupid bullshit answers out of nervousness. “Birdie…” he says finally. “Do you know what it means to be bi? Like really functionally what that means?”

“Yeah,” you say, warily. “I mean not from my own personal experience, obviously. But I know it’s a distinct orientation in its own right. I’m not like… disregarding it or can’t understand it at all.”

“Could you describe your understanding for me, in your own words?” he says in a voice so low it’s almost a whisper and it’s starting to unnerve you again. You halfway had a bullshit popoff remark loaded just to try to lighten the mood, but now it seems more important to him than you expected, and being flip about it feels like the wrong move.

When you don’t speak right away, he says, “It’s okay. You won’t offend me.”

Well, now you really feel like there’s a right and wrong answer and no key to tell which from which. “Okay…” you say slowly, then decide to just keep it simple. “You’re neither entirely gay nor heterosexual. You can feel physical attraction for both men and women and might choose a partner of either gender.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

You blink and sit up a little straighter in the chair. You kinda figured the thing you said was about as textbook as it gets. “No?”

“Not can. I do. I do feel arousal for both. I do want to be with both. Actively. That’s how I’m wired.”

Well. You sort of thought that was basically what you said, but since there’s evidently a distinction and it matters, you stifle that reaction and do your best to listen instead.

“When I lie in bed at night, who do you think I’m fantasizing about? Who am I beating off to?”

You have a nervous split second where that question doesn’t feel rhetorical and you’re fumbling for an reply, and then he moves blessedly on from that and saves you from answering.

“Men, women,” he says. “It changes all the time. Some nights I imagine myself with a woman and it seems like that’s all I’d ever need. And Jesus, life around here would be so much easier if that were true. But it’s invariably the next night that I get off to a video of a guy fucking a fleshlight and dirty talking about how hard he’s going to cum in his eager little twink’s ass. And it feels pretty reasonable then that his eager little twink could be me. Oh, unless I’m him and he’s the twink. Depends on the night. There’s no, partner singular, for me to choose.”

Your face is so hot right now, hearing this, that you can’t muster an answer right away.

“Sorry. Probably you didn’t really want to hear that,” he says. “Or need to know quite how often it’s relevant,” he adds with a touch of color in his cheeks. “But I think you get the idea. There’s no phase. I just… I’m not built to be with only one or the other. I have no fucking earthly idea how bisexual people are supposed to make relationships work. Maybe I’m some abnormal, like, pansexual variation on the bisexual theme, and other people don’t have this issue. I dunno.” He sighs.

“I actually kinda thought you might be ace,” you say to the table. “I thought you hadn’t figured it out. So you’ve been with both, then, and I just never knew it.” You didn’t expect how much that would hurt your feelings, to know he’d been through rites of passage that you neither experienced with him or knew about.

Dex’s hand is starting to sweat a little against yours, which has the combined effect of being a little clammy, but also a little comforting, to know you’re not the only one affected by how high-stakes this conversation feels. He shakes his head. “Uh, actually, not yet I haven’t.”

For a second you’re pretty sure he’s about to elaborate on that, but then his face flushes awkwardly and he changes his mind about whatever it was. “Um,” he says, face still red. “Something I really want to explain though is, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my ability to commit. I don’t want just… women. I don’t think I want meaningless casual sex with lots of partners just for the novelty.”

You’re a little curious if this is Dex’s indirect way of telling you he’s jacked off, a lot, thinking about sex with you. Probably you’re supposed to be put off by that, but, well. Impropriety doesn’t seem like the real reason your face feels so red right now. “So… does that mean you know what you do want?” you ask, trying not to let your body and its exponentially increasing interest in this line of discussion eclipse everything going on in your head right now.

Trying not to yield your better judgment to baser instincts is easier said than done, though. There’s a quiet intensity shining out of Dex’s face as he raises his eyes to meet yours, that sets a warm throb pounding between your legs in rhythm with the renewed thudding of your heart. “I think what I didn’t understand until tonight is that I need… you,” he says in a sort of small voice, tightening his grip on your hand. “Any life I can imagine, that doesn’t have you at the center of it, just feels… silly and incomplete. It’s like, when we were kids I just stupidly assumed everything would work out because we’d be able to make sense of it just like we did everything else.”

His voice gets really small again. “I love you. I want you. I want us to have all the adult life experiences together, that everyone takes for granted. I want to cook dinner at night together and talk about places we can’t afford to travel to yet and have a life. I guess because I don’t know how to exist in the world if I’m not by your side.” Dex’s eyes are swimming with unshed tears. “Maybe I’m being ridiculous with all this big dream shit. But it’s like, if I can’t grow old with you, what’s the point of doing it at all?”

“But how come that makes you so sad, Teddy?” you ask after taking that in, and this question shatters whatever composure he had left. Dex breaks into sudden **** sobs, pulling his hand out of yours so he can bury his head in his folded arms.

This is so unexpected, although in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have been, that for a second you simply stare at him, startled, until you catch up enough to react. Your chair makes an unpleasantly squeaky scraping sound on the kitchen floor as you slide it closer to his and put your arms around him. He immediately leans into you for comfort.