It's Like This by Anne O'Gleadra Page A

just give you some fucking time. I mean, coming out and everything is a big thing, and I know that, and you’ve got family you didn’t want to disappoint, but they don’t care. And we’ve got straight friends, but they don’t give a shit, and so I’ve just been waiting and waiting and fucking waiting for you to tell me the capacity in which I exist to you, and you never, ever do. And this has been going on for three fucking years! I’ve been waiting for three years for you to just be able to say it, and you haven’t! All you can tell me is that you didn’t know we were even a thing? What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Are you seriously just trying to—to wreck me?”
    “I’m sorry,” I whisper. It’s all I can come up with.
    “Don’t,” he says, “Please don’t. Don’t be sorry. Don’t just sit there and say useless things. Tell me what is going on or how it got to this, or fucking anything, really, but please don’t just not talk. I can’t stand another minute of not talking.”
    And…it’s actually terrifying? Because I want so, so much to just lie down and close my eyes, stop thinking, stop moving, even, because somehow I know if I did, no matter how much he’d want to get up and leave, eventually he’d lie down too and hold me up against him and we’d never have to say a word about this again. But I can’t do that. He…fucking…bought my little sister a book about sharks, and gives an actual shit about my family, and he takes me to the symphony and he can read me, in sex and life and sleep, and he knows what to do with me even when I don’t know what to do with myself. So I say it. It’s thick and bulky and unused, but it’s true.
    “I love you.”
    His eyes bore into mine—I wanted it to be enough but he’s still waiting.
    “I seriously do,” I insist. “I love you so much that mostly all I can think about is what will happen when I lose you.”
    “You’re not going to lose me,” he says incredulously. “Where the fuck would I go?”
    “I don’t know! I just know that…I don’t know. Fuck. Like…the girl. Woman. The bride, you know, at the club?”
    “Tell me you’re joking.”
    “What? Why?”
    “The bride, Niles? Seriously?”
    “Yes, the bride, seriously! She was all over you and you were all over her and it was like you were putting on a show about how much you didn’t need me.”
    “Jesus Christ, Nigh. You have it, like, absolutely ass-backwards. Can I tell you what was going on there? Which I would have told you if you’d asked. Or I would have told you if I thought for even a second that it would have crossed your mind that I want anyone other than you?”
    I don’t give him an answer and he doesn’t wait for one.
    “Look. She comes up to me and is all, ‘So…I know this is totally un-PC of me, but my girlfriends dragged me here and said I needed to find a man on my so-called last night of freedom, and I know it’s stupid, but I don’t want to disappoint them, because they put all this energy into this thing and I’m actually a total people-pleaser, but I’m really not that interested in like, you know, hooking up with anyone, so…Are you gay? And I’m not asking that because you are flamboyant or anything, not that there’s anything wrong with being flamboyant, it’s just I saw you kissing a dude, so I’m hoping you won’t hate me for asking to participate in a little charade?’ And I said something like, ‘Happy to help a lady out!’ And then we danced and hung out long enough to satisfy her friends. Do you see where I’m going with this, Niles? She was dancing with me because I am gay and she didn’t want to feel like she was cheating.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yeah. Oh, and by the way, Nigh, I’m gay. Really fucking gay. I am into men. Not women. Men. And not just any men, but a specific one in particular, namely, in case you haven’t noticed, you . Do you get me?”
    I nod and feel like a general idiot-freak.
    “Do you hate me for