She wrinkled her nose and he laughed.
“You got a problem with that, St. James?”
There he went again, saying her name. Saint James.
“Your mascot is a tree, McCrory.”
Colin scoffed. “Unofficially. Officially, we’re the Stanford Cardinal. Not that there’s anything wrong with trees. They’re, uh, sturdy.”
She snorted. “Oh, that’s right. A color. So intimidating.”
His tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek, lashes lowering as he cut his eyes. “Don’t tell me you went to USC.”
“No, you had it right the first time. I did go to UW. I just didn’t graduate. The interview’s for my high school alma mater.”
At nineteen, she hadn’t a clue what she wanted to major in, let alone what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Rather than waste a bunch of money on classes trying to figure it out, she’d taken a gap year and worked at the box office at the Emerald City Repertory Theatre to make a little money, a job that gave her plenty of downtime to read.
And that was around the time she’d started writing.
Part of her expected him, successful attorney that he was, to balk at her not having a degree. But leave it to Colin McCrory to defy her expectations. “Shouldn’t they have awarded you an honorary degree by now?”
A laugh escaped her. “What?”
“For all those times you hit the New York Times bestseller list. I mean, doesn’t Taylor Swift have an honorary doctorate from NYU?”
She snorted. “While I’m flattered you just compared me to the Taylor Swift”—and weirdly turned on that he even knew that about NYU—“you’re delusional. She’s Taylor Swift.”
Colin shrugged. “And you’re Truly St. James.”
She stopped laughing. Be still her fucking heart.
She cleared her throat. “Well, no. No honorary degrees for me.”
“Not yet.”
She rolled her eyes, suppressing a smile. Ridiculous.
“So this interview—is it about your books?”
Truly ran her thumbnail along the edge of a peeling sticker on her laptop. “Kind of? The school paper is running a series of alum interviews, so most of the questions are pretty standard, but the Gender and Sexuality Alliance asked if I’d be willing to answer a few more specific questions on bi-erasure and biphobia in media. Those are the questions that are tripping me up.”
She wrote queer romance novels. She’d typed the word bisexual at least a hundred, two hundred times, but she’d said it out loud a total of fifteen? Twenty times? The number of people she’d come out to in person was even smaller: her parents, Justin, Lulu...
She’d been in a serious, monogamous relationship with a guy for the last six years, during which time she’d worked out that her appreciation of women transcended mere admiration and fell firmly into the camp of attraction. That straight girls didn’t look at each other and feel the things Truly felt. They didn’t zone out thinking about how soft another girl’s skin was or get a jumpy thrill in their stomach when they shared lip gloss or sipped from the same can of soda because holy shit it was like their lips had touched. They didn’t eagerly agree to play spin the bottle on the off chance they might land on their best friend the way she had in eighth grade. They didn’t drink too much vodka as an excuse to make out with each other the way she had in high school. They definitely didn’t feel sick to their stomach the next day when everyone laughed it off because no harm, no foul, guys got off on watching girls do that sort of thing.
By the time she’d discovered this part of herself, put a name to it, she was two years into dating Justin and being bi was just an ancillary part of who she was. She wasn’t about to break up with him just so she could—what? Explore that part of herself? She didn’t feel the need to explore something she already felt sure in.
But it made coming out kind of weird. Unnecessary? She was in a serious relationship with a man; did anyone really need to know? She didn’t have a problem saying it; the words themselves came easy. If she was doing a book event and someone asked—as people often did, curious about what had drawn her to queer fiction—she’d answer. But in her day-to-day life? She could probably count on one hand the number of people she’d come out to. She’d hardly had any practice, not that practice mattered when each time felt brand-new.
She stole a glance at Colin from beneath her lashes.
He didn’t look weirded out, not even confused the way Justin had when she’d told him she was bi. He just looked curious, a wrinkle forming between his brows she’d feel tempted to give him shit about under any circumstance other than this.
“What’s tripping you up about it?”
“I guess I don’t feel the most... qualified,” she admitted. “I feel like there’s got to be someone out there who’d be better suited to answer these questions than me.”
His dark brows slanted low over his eyes. “I’m not sure I follow.”