Page 91 of A Quick Stop in Paradise

She scowled. “I thought you were the one telling me how I’m all old-fashioned like Grandma because I want guys to approach me.”

“Youseem more upset than anyone that it’s ‘supposed’ to be guys approaching you. Is it that you want guys to approach you, or is it that you feel like you’re not allowed to approach them?”

She chewed her cheek. I shrugged.

“You don’t like guys being emotionally unavailable, you want soft sweet romance from both parties, and you enjoyed being able to reverse it with Allison, where she makes it clear she’s interested and you approach her. And it sounds like you don’t dislike men in bed, it sounds like you dislike men being stereotypically manly in bed.”

“Do you think?” she said, letting her gaze drift out to the horizon. “Um… so… what? Am I straight and just want a guy without the toxic masculinity?”

“I want you to take a minute thinking about the things you’ve done with Allison and tell me if you’d describe another woman as straight if she did that.”

She looked out to the distance, quiet for a good five seconds, before, quietly, she said, “I think I’m not straight.”

“Cool, yeah, me neither.”

“Seriously? What are the odds of that?”

I laughed. “Like I said, there’s a lot of bisexual women… sometimes we just don’t get to realize it without other people helping us see it. Would you have realized if you didn’t have a bisexual sister who dragged you into a group of queer girls, one of them with a crush on you?”

She looked down, kicking at the ground. “It just feels like an arbitrary label. I feel like everyone’s alittlebit bisexual, you know?”

“I don’t think everyone is, but I think a lot of people are at least a little flexible. Some people are completely straight, some people are completely gay, a lot of people are more to one side or the other. Some people are smack-dab in the middle.”

“I think that’s me.”

I stopped, giving her an odd look. “Smack-dab in the middle? Seriously?”

She picked at the rim of her glass. “I don’t know. I mean, girls are really cool. I just never thought of it as, like… attraction.”

It was kind of obvious now that I stopped and thought it over… she’d always stuck to her female friends, gushing over them. She’d been furious when her one-time best friend had dated areally gross guyand how she was way out of his league, and looking back, it was pretty clearly the cry of a girl with a crush on her best friend upset the friend was dating someone else. Maybe I’d never paid that much attention to Stella either.

Maybe she was kind of cool.

“I think I like girls better,” I said, looking back out over the ocean. “I still like guys, but it just feels a little more… right, with a woman.”

She looked sidelong at me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think…” I sighed heavily. “I’d like to have a girlfriend. Once I’ve had some time to… well… recover.”

She watched me for a long time before she turned back to the beach below us. “Yeah… me too. I think it’d be fun to try. Just…”

“Just once we’ve had a minute.”

She ran her fingers idly around the edge of her glass in lieu of answering. Her middle two fingers. Had she always been this obvious? Christ, how embarrassing. “Yeah,” she said quietly.

My chest ached watching her, seeing that far-off look in her eyes, suddenly hurting with the injustice that she and Allison couldn’t try what they clearly both wanted. I wanted to tell herjust travel more in the future, come see her more,as if that wasn’t what everyone had been telling me and I’d been pushing away from me all this time.

I sighed, hard, pointedly, following her gaze out to the distance. “Feelings kind of suck.”

“I just want to fall in love,” she mumbled.

I tried to push Brooklyn out of my mind. Couldn’t, though. That was probably going to be a description of the next three months… six months… six years. Who the hell knew?

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Me too.”

Chapter 23

Brooklyn

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