The blood was rushing in my ears. “Oh? About what?”
Jeremy didn’t meet my gaze. He flipped open his laptop. “The usual.”
How infuriatingly vague. I laughed weakly. “I don’t know what that means.”
Jeremy huffed out a breath as he typed on his laptop. “Just….” He looked up at me with an inscrutable expression. “We’re friends, right?”
For better or worse. “Yeah, Jeremy. We’re friends.”
Jeremy stared at me for a moment before nodding. I barely kept from fidgeting. “He asked me out. That night. After the competition.”
Yeah, I figured it was something like that. “That’s great!” I said brightly. “You guys would… you’d make a great couple. All that… leather.”
Jeremy shook his head as he looked back down at his laptop. “Yeah, I guess.”
Something was off. I could hear it in his voice. “What’s the problem? Is he that bad?”
“No. It’s not that. It’s….” He closed the laptop again. The only light came from a lamp in the corner. The room was covered in shadows, and everything felt surreal. “It is what it is.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted. Coming here was a mistake. I wished he’d taken me home. I didn’t want to be having this conversation. Not now. Not after the night we’d had.
“It doesn’t feel real,” Jeremy blurted, looking surprised at his own words. “It’s… like Sandy.”
What the fuck was he talking about? “Sandy?”
He was frustrated. His mouth was curved downward, and he was tapping his fingers on the desk. “When he’s Helena, it’s… a show. It’s a performance. It’s not who he is.”
“It’s part of him,” I corrected gently. “It doesn’t define him.”
“What does Darren think?”
“Darren loves Sandy for Sandy. Not because of Helena. If Sandy decided to never perform again, it wouldn’t change anything for Darren. He sees Sandy for who he really is.”
Jeremy nodded slowly. “It’s the same. For me. The whole leather thing, it’s… not everything about me. I’m not entrenched in that life like others are.”
I had no idea what was going on. “Okay. What does that have to do with Griffin?”
“He only sees me as one thing. He doesn’t get the rest.”
I couldn’t believe what I was going to say next. “How do you know that? Have you tried to find out?”
Jeremy scowled at me. “I know the type.”
“Then just tell him no. It’s not that hard. Or say yes, and maybe you’ll be surprised. Either way, you’ll know.” I swallowed thickly, but I pushed on. “And if it’s not him, it’ll be someone else. You’ll see. You’ll find someone, and it’s going to be awesome. You deserve it.”
The silence that followed was deafening. The only sound came from the building creaking around us.
Then, “A lot of people don’t see me for me.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “Trust me, I get that.”
He nodded. “You do. Maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met. Why?”
I shrugged. “It’s about expe
rience, I think. Everything we’ve gone through. People see me as a man and think, oh, there’s this guy. And then the same people will see me as a woman, and it confuses them. They see the color of my skin and expect me to be a certain way. But I’m not here to satisfy whatever curiosity they have. I’m biracial. I’m bigender. And I’m proud of both those things, and yet I’m more than that. And that’s what some people don’t get, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need their validation. I thought I did once. But I learned that the only people who matter are the ones who don’t give a flying fuck about those things.”
“I see you,” Jeremy said. “For everything you are. For everything you’re not.”