Page 97 of Finance Bros

“To clarify,” she says, “You pushed him away out of a misguided sense of wrongness, not your feelings for him.”

I nod. I like the way that sounds. Not because it gets me off the hook, but because it sounds way better than saying I was the asshole.

“And that did damage to you both,” she concludes.

I exhale. “Yeah.”

“You need to back off,” she says. “Don’t you think?”

I grind my teeth, and another tear falls, but I nod again.

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “Let him know you’re available if he wants to reach out, and back off.”

“Why is this so hard?”

“Well, I’ll have to think about that. You’ve dropped a lot in my lap today. Granted, I feel pretty strongly that you should officially break up with Kaylin because neither of you are doing each other any favors by staying together, but I didn’t realize you were contending with a sexuality issue. I’ll have to re-contextualize my thinking on our prior sessions.”

“All of them?”

“Don’t worry about me, Malcolm. I have a good memory.”

I roll my eyes, wipe my face again, and lean back on the couch.

“I have one more question before we wrap up, though.”

“Fine,” I say.

“When did you start questioning your sexuality?”

The last two days without Ryan have given me plenty of time to pinpoint that. “It was the first day of eighth grade. There was a gay kid named Ivan who’d just transferred into our school. He was out and obvious about it. He was wearing rainbow Converseand had painted nails. By the end of the day, he also had a bloody nose and a black eye. Courtesy of the defensive line of the football team. He never came back to our school after that.”

“You…liked Ivan?”

“No. You asked when I started questioning myself. I already knew I liked boys. That’s when I started questioning whether I should or not.”

“You were thirteen?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d known you were gay since…?”

“Since I was seven.”

“Mal,” she whispers.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because…it wasn’t a big deal until I knew to be ashamed of it, and then once I was ashamed of it, why the fuck would I tell you?”

She makes a pitying noise, and I don’t mind it. I’m glad someone feels at least partly as sorry for me as I do for myself. “I guess the genie’s out of the bottle now,” she says.

“Yeah. Well… solves the Kaylin problem.”

She laughs. “I can cross that off the list. Same time next week?”

I nod, wipe my hands on my pants, and stand.

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