Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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I couldn't let him carry the entire weight of this choice. It's not like I'd told him he could ask something monumental of me, right? I didn't want to pressure him into something he didn't want, but now we were here, and my stupid seduction plans were out the window.
Forget being bold like a Doritos Locos taco. That wasn't me. Give me a regular hardshell any day. To make it a supreme added over a dollar, just for some tomatoes, lettuce, and sour cream. When the shell couldn't even survive five seconds before it crumbled into soggy corn, what was the point in that?
"I love you," I said, "and you love me, yeah?" It wasn't lost on him that I flung his words from the fall cookout right back at him. "That puts us in a relationship, doesn't it?"
His voice came out gravelly. "It does."
"I identify as ace," I said, looking away from him. For someone who had never "come out" to anyone or was even sure this was the right term, it was a lot less nerve-wracking than I'd thought. But I was still scared of disappointing him. "You may be unfamiliar with terms like that, but for me, it means that I don't have a—" the words kind of died, and though I tried to resurrect them, I felt I had started this all wrong.
I tried to push myself off his lap, but he caught both of my legs before I could.
No retreat, huh? Alright.
"Let me start over. For most of my life, I never had the urge to be in a relationship with anyone. I often felt that there was some disconnect between me and my classmates. I was missing something, I just didn't know how to pinpoint what it was. And so I tried dating—peer pressure and all that." I laughed awkwardly. "It didn't do anything for me. The world didn't suddenly right itself. I didn't suddenly realize I was just like everybody else. No. The feeling of being different only grew."
My eyes turned downcast, which was a mistake, because he was right there. "For years and years, I worried I was just—broken—"
"You're not broken," he said, quickly.
"I—I know that," I said, but even I knew my voice was unconvincing. "The point is, I've never experienced this type of love before, and it makes me question whether I was ever actually—uninterested. I hesitated to name myself as ace because I wondered if I was choosing not to have sex and be in a relationship. If it's a life choice, then that's not...genuinely being ace, is it? I wasn't sure. I'm still not." I sighed. "The point is, you're new to me. I don't know if I can give you what you want—"
"What I want."
"Like, what if these feelings are superficial at best, and I can't follow through with them? What if we get to the point—the point," scrounging, I remembered my first penis, then blurted, "where your pants are off—" did he just laugh?— "and your thing is out in the room with us, and I can't follow up?"
