75 AMAZING PICK UP LINES

Tendencies

A/N: YAS I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ONE. Enjoy!! :)))

“Are you homosexual tendencies? Because I don’t want to tell anyone about you until I’m ready.”

Mitch had always known.

It wasn’t one of those things where a certain person or event triggered the tidal wave of thoughts and feelings that most people in his Texas hometown would consider “unnatural.” It was just there, organically, almost.

He had known during every Valentine’s Day in elementary school, where it was a yearly struggle for Mitch to choose two or three girls at random to give last-minute storebought cards to. He would have much rather given one of the boys in his class a thoughtful, hand-made valentine, but imagine what his friends would say.

In fourth grade, when his school finally implemented the rule that every student had to make enough valentines for every other student in the class, Mitch was finally relieved of his annual source of stress. But even still, he always gave an extra-nice valentine to Kirstie (and vice versa) since they were best friends, and that’s why their classmates always assumed that they were totally in love. Now, granted, when they actually did date in high school, it was for Mitch to take his mind off of someone else.

But that’s another story.

He had known during middle school, when he was the goalie on the eighth grade soccer team. It was hard for his thirteen-year-old brain to not go haywire when he and his teammates would change in the locker room before games, after which he always felt guilty. Every time one of his teammates caught him staring, he’d turn the other way completely and look down at the floor for a solid ten seconds so no one could see how red he was.

It wasn’t his fault, he insisted. No matter how hard he tried, he never thought about girls the same way he thought about boys. Take Kirstie, for example. She was always cute, and as they graduated middle school and entered high school, she got even cuter until she started becoming pretty, too. That was the point where Mitch was supposed to start falling in love with her, according to every movie, but he never did. They were best friends and nothing more, and Mitch liked it that way. He couldn’t have felt different about it even if he tried.

Mitch, however, seemed to have missed the memo about going from cute little kid to handsome young man, because at fifteen years old, his voice still sounded like a sixth-grade girl’s. It proved useful in choir, where Mr. Lewis, the director, was always looking for tenors, but in everything else, not so much. It was the reason he got beat up at least once a week his freshman year. He’d been slammed into every locker bank in the school by the end of first semester. It was always the football players; the tall, brawny seniors who wore those disgustingly heinous camouflage baseball caps and Nike sandals with white socks. Since Mitch believed that two wrongs never made a right, he always wished that if they were going to kick the shit out of him all the time, they should at least be given a lesson or two from the Fashion Police.

Scott got them to stop eventually, though. He wasn’t a football player, but he was on the volleyball team and he was pretty well-liked. Most people listened to him, even the upperclassmen. Once Scott threatened to report them and get them all expelled for harassment, they never touched Mitch again because they knew he meant it. Scott and Mitch had been inseparable since they met in their summer community theater production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they were ten years old, and combined with Kirstie, they were known as “the Trio.” Everyone knew that if you fucked with one of them, the other two would answer for it.

After Scott told them off, the football players backed off Mitch physically, but it didn’t stop them from spreading rumors about him all through his freshman and sophomore years. Most of it was the same; little snippets of gossip claiming (with a few variations depending on who you heard it from) that Mitch and Scott were secretly dating. Scott was usually the one to laugh it off and set the record straight for people, but Mitch kept mum on the subject most of the time.