Chapter Text
Nursey tapped his pen against his page to the beat in Nina’s words. Her rhyme was nice—he liked the internals she was pulling at the center of every third line—but it felt a little too constructed. Ages better than her last piece, though, he could tell she’d had more time (and been less constrained by bullshit workshop guidelines).
She trailed off. “So—that’s where I stopped, like. I’m not really sure how to end it.”
“Literally the worst part,” Nursey said, commiserating. “If the point is to channel emotion especially it’s like, of course you can’t end it, you just have to bring it to some kind of pause.”
She sighed and cracked her neck. “Yeah. Anyway. What do you think?”
“Really good,” said Nursey, honestly. “Really good.”
Her face broke open in a smile. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “Seriously. I like especially that you hint toward the lyric pattern we’d expect from a sonnet but don’t follow through, pulling us out to the longer line instead. It works really well, subverts—“
A door slammed down the hall and Nursey cut himself off, frowning. “Was that—“
“Dex,” Nina confirmed, and sighed. “He broke up with Dan last night.”
Nursey—carefully—kept his face at distant concern and didn’t let it slide at all to overjoyed panic. “Really?”
Nina shrugged. “Might’ve been the other way around, with how pissed he is, but I doubt it, Dex really didn’t seem particularly into it. Honestly I’m shocked they ever dated at all, they barely spent any time together. Plus I heard Dan misgender him the other day, and that’s like. Pretty serious, no?”
Nursey bit his lip. “They started hooking up before Dex did the pronoun thing, I think Dan had some problems with that.” He shrugged, trying to rid his shoulders of their sudden tension. “He’s a douchebag anyway.”
Nina raised her eyebrows at him. “So, good news.”
Nursey nodded. “Yeah, good news.”
She cocked her head. “So how come you look like you’re dying?”
Nursey smacked her shoulder with his notebook. “Shut up,” he muttered, feeling warm.
Nina smirked at him. “C’mon,” she said, “you might be able to hide your source of inspiration from the other fools in our workshop but I know the guy and some of your references are a little on the nose.” Her smirk widened. “Kinda like Dex’s freckles.”
Nursey tried to make his face as warning as possible. “If you ever—“
“Please,” she scoffed. “You think I don’t know about hopeless lit crushes? That feeling where you don’t even know if it’s real, because maybe you’re making stuff up because it sounds romantic and then painting the real person with the color you made? I get it, dude, I won’t say shit.”
Nursey relaxed. “Thanks.”
She watched him sideways. “That doesn’t mean, if it turns out it is real, that you shouldn’t say shit.”
Nursey shook his head. “Shouldn’t, though,” he said. “We’re teammates, it would be weird.” Plus, like, all of the other reasons it would be weird, including Dex’s absolute confusion and hostility when he’d flirted with him the first day they met. And the fact that they couldn’t spend longer than fifteen minutes in the same room without fighting, but hell, that was part of the problem, wasn’t it. Thin line between anger and desire, et cetera, et cetera.
Nina narrowed her eyes at him. “Jocks.”
Nursey rolled his eyes at her. “Funny, my teammates always go poets in the same exact tone.”
He let himself out of Nina’s room a while later, intending to just head back to his own—listening to other people’s work always made him hunger to make his own better—but Dex’s door was ajar, and he found himself unable to just step past it without saying anything at all.
He lingered, a little awkward, in the doorway. “Dex.”
Dex didn’t sit up. “Nurse.” He didn’t sound surprised.
Nursey worked his tongue around in his mouth, not really knowing what to say, how to. Their relationship didn’t really include emotional conversations.
“They’re gonna think I’m gay,” Dex said from where he was lying on his back in his bed. “My parents. I cut my hair and now they’re gonna think I’m gay.”
It was as good an invitation as any. Nursey stepped inside. “You are gay,” he pointed out.
Dex pushed himself up on his elbows to glare at him. “I mean a lesbian,” he said. “They’re gonna think I like girls.”
Nursey smirked at him. “Oh,” he said, “so they’re gonna think you’re straight. Truly, every parent’s worst nightmare.”
Dex had that twisting kind of expression that told Nursey he couldn’t decide if he should be pissed or laughing. Good. It was better than the anger that had been there before, the fragile kind that was only the eggshell between him and fledgling terror.
“Shut up, Nurse,” he said, but he didn’t really seem like he wanted Nursey to go away.
Nursey wandered closer, leaning against his desk, and Dex flopped back down onto his back. “I was going to bring Dan home,” he said. “At Thanksgiving, like. Here, ma, pa, I’ve got this stupid muscle-head lacrosse douche of a boyfriend, please ignore how much more like him I look than when I left.”
Nursey made a face. “You don’t look like Dan.”
Dex rolled up on his side to look at him. “What?”
Nursey shrugged. “You don’t look like Dan. You’ve gotten more muscle and there’s a certain similar douchiness—“
“Shut the fuck up—“
“—but you pull it off way better than he does. For the record.”
Dex stared at him. Nursey fought not to fidget. He’d just been trying to—
“Thanks,” Dex muttered after a minute. “Appreciate it.”
Nursey shrugged again, hesitated, broke eye contact. “Why don’t you just bring someone else home? Get a friend to come, act the part.”
Dex snorted. “Who? Nobody’s going to do that for me. Besides, who could even pull it off? Chowder can’t lie to save his life, plus he looks like he’s about five. Bitty—I, I can’t ask Bitty. There’s no one outside the team that I trust enough with this, so unless.” He raised his eyes at Nursey.
Nursey stared at him. “What?”
Dex sat up fully, crossing his feet at the ankles and giving him a wry look. “You wanna come pretend to be my boyfriend, Nurse?”
There were a lot of reasons Nursey was glad he wasn’t white. Subtle blushing ranked really high up there. “I, uh,” he started.
Dex shook his head at him. “It’s okay, I was kidding. I appreciate the suggestion but I know you weren’t offering—“
“I would,” Nursey heard himself saying. Which he’d always thought was a dumb literary convention, but here he was, words coming out of his mouth without his useless fucking brain’s influence at all. “If you actually want me to, I would.”
Dex’s eyes went wide. “I—really?”
Nursey shrugged for the third time in as many minutes, feeling like he was trying to press up against some weight he’d definitely just made heavier. “Yeah,” he said. “If you think it would get your parents off your back, I’d go with you. I’m a good liar, and I think I could stand to hang out with you in the backwoods of Maine for a few days.” He made himself raise an eyebrow, trying to get his composure back. “Barely.”
Dex was frowning at him, but it was his confusion frown, not his anger frown. “Why?”
Nursey jammed his hands in his pockets. “Because we’re friends?” he said, instead of because when I have a crush I turn into the stupidest person alive? “Besides, my mom’s half Navajo, we don’t exactly celebrate Thanksgiving, I’d probably just be rattling around here otherwise.”
It’s not quite true—he’d been planning at least to head to the city for a few days, and he and his mom usually had a kind of anti-Thanksgiving just the two of them, but the holidays were coming up and he was sure his mom would be swamped with cases. Everybody always wanted to get divorced during the holidays.
He was, in fact, a good liar, so Dex didn’t question it, though he did frown even more and ask, “Why don’t the Navajo celebrate Thanksgiving?”
Nursey made a face at him, back on familiar Dex doesn’t know shit ground. “Uh, because it commemorates the time we welcomed some white folks to a land that they then systematically murdered us for?”
Dex hesitated. “I mean, okay, but Thanksgiving itself was peaceful–“
“Yeah, we should probably ignore the Holocaust because Hitler and FDR had a nice meal one time,” Nursey shot back. “You’re right.”
Dex shook his head. “Jesus, Nurse,” he muttered, “how do you go from offering to do me a giant favor to calling me a holocaust denier in the space of like four sentences?”
Nursey grinned at him. “I dunno,” he said, “how do you go from being my friend who I wanna help out to being just another ignorant white boy in the same?”
Dex threw a pillow at him, and Nursey caught it just before it smashed into his nose. When he dropped it, Dex was watching him again, face serious. “Hey,” he said. “Thank you.”
Nursey almost shrugged again, but stopped himself. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s—you know.”
“No, I mean.” Dex pressed his lips together. “I don’t just mean for the Thanksgiving thing, though that’s—huge, and. Amazing of you. I just mean for generally—for coming to talk to me, and for always being so good about the gender thing—everyone’s good about it, but it always seems so natural from you, it’s. Nice.”
Nurse raised his eyebrows at him, warmed down to his toes. “You mean you like it when I call you an ignorant white boy? Noted, I’ll do it more often.”
“Jesus,” Dex snapped, “could you ever take me seriously for one fucking second? I’m trying to be really genuine here—“
“Yeah, it’s gross,” Nursey shot back, because he—really cannot take Genuine Dex, not when he now had to think about pretending to be his boyfriend for four days straight. “We’re supposed to be all snark and fire, Poindexter, this mushy stuff is no good.”
“I hope you’re better at mush in front of my parents,” Dex warned.
Nursey smirked at him. “Don’t worry, darling,” he said, “we can hold hands for hours.” He wiggled his fingers. “This D-man’s hands aren’t just good for blocking.”
Dex swung out a leg in a halfhearted attempt to kick him in the shin. “We’re both D-men,” he pointed out, in that absent way he did when his mind was on other things.
“Yes, I’m sure your hands are immensely talented too,” Nursey said placatingly, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.
Thankfully Dex didn’t seem to pick up on the innuendo, or if he did he didn’t care. Nursey hoped it was the first—he tried not to flirt with Dex, but when he slipped up he would hope there’d be a little more response than Dex just going “hmm” and staring past his ear. Shit like that could wound a man’s pride.
He wouldn’t have to not flirt, when he was at Thanksgiving with him. He in fact should flirt, and Dex. Should. Respond.
Oh, god, this was the worst idea he’d ever had.
He cleared his throat. “So—“ he said, “um. Think it over, let me know.”
That seemed to wake Dex up a little, and his eyes flicked to Nursey’s face, his lower lip between his teeth. “Yeah,” he said. “I will.”
Nursey nodded. “Cool.” He paused, wondering if he should extend his sympathies about Dan, but he wouldn’t mean them, and it’s not that he thought Dex would know—he’d said he was a good liar and meant it—he just. Something sat wrong, about lying about this.
One of these days he was gonna map out all the weird stuff his conscience twinged him about and all the weird stuff it didn’t, try and get to the heart of the thing, but he was a little worried about the picture it would make. One man can only do so much self-examination, and honestly Nursey preferred to do his in the form of poetry.
“See you at practice,” he said instead, and left.
+
Dex was perched on the wall outside Faber, early for morning practice because sleeping was a joke these days—maybe he’d drunk enough coffee that it was just permanently running in his veins now, or maybe it was the fact that his fucking brain wouldn’t stop telling him how much he was ruining his own life. The autumn sun was nice, though—he was trying to concentrate on taking that in, maybe in lieu of sleep, get all his energy from the sun like a plant. Or Superman.
His phone was open on his knee. no hard feelings yeah?
Dex jiggled his leg, staring at the text from Dan, the first in a few days. Before they broke up it wasn’t like they texted that much, mostly they just met up to drink too much beer and make out and not talk and yeah, okay, this had been a long time coming, probably should never have happened in the first place but Dex had thought maybe dating a guy—as guy a guy as he could find—would make him feel. More. Well, normal. Girly. Real.
He should’ve given Dan up when he gave up “normal”, but. Thanksgiving.
no, he typed, and then, no hard feelings.
good, Dan said, and then bc i was talking to that guy on your team. brendan or brian or bryce or w/e.
Dex stared at that for a long time, frowning, and then he responded, you mean Shitty?
sure, said Dan.
There was a long pause where Dex wondered if maybe that was all he got, a mysterious “I was talking to Shitty” as if he should know what the fuck that meant just magically out of thin air, but just as he was about to tuck his phone away and start getting ready to go inside it buzzed again.
he told me to think of attraction as like. a history or whatever? so i guess i just wanted to say that i’m not gay or whatever but i think you’re a good-looking dude and you’re gonna make some gay guy really happy sometime.
Dex blinked at his phone, his heart flung up between his ears to pound loudly in his skull. What—what the fuck was he even supposed to say to that, how was he meant to—
“Dex! Good morning.”
Dex whipped his head up fast enough to wrench the too-tense muscles in his neck. “Bitty,” he greeted, quickly locking his phone and tucking it away. “Hi.”
Bitty hopped up on the wall next to him. “A little bird told me something interesting yesterday.”
Dex bit his lip, looking sideways at him. “Yeah?”
“Mhm,” Bitty said, sipping his coffee. Dex glanced around--he couldn't see Jack anywhere but he was sure he'd be carrying a matching paper cup. “I heard you broke up with Dan the lacrosse douche.”
Dex looked away from his little inquisitive smile. Bitty was like sunshine—he was never anything but warm and bright, but even so sometimes Dex felt like an ant under a magnifying glass.
“What was really interesting to me was that I had no idea you were even dating Dan the lacrosse douche,” Bitty said conversationally, “which probably means Chowder also didn't know, because Lord knows that child can't keep his mouth shut worth a damn.”
Dex shrugged, trying not to feel sullen or resentful or. Or whatever he was. “I wasn't exactly advertising it,” he muttered.
Bitty sipped his coffee again. “No? Why?”
“It’s right there on the tin, isn’t it?” Dex pointed out. “All my friends refer to him as Dan the lacrosse douche, and they’re not even wrong, he is a douche.” He remembered the texts sitting behind his lock screen. “Mostly.”
“He’s also straight,” Bitty pointed out. “A little more confusedly so because of you, maybe, but basically straight.”
“Yeah,” said Dex, “that was the point.”
Bitty took a breath, his face full of concern. “Dex—”
“Look,” Dex interrupted him. “It’s over, right? It was a bad idea in the first place and now it’s over and it’s fine, okay? You’re not my mom, I don’t need the lecture.” He caught sight of Nurse making his way into Faber, gym bag slung over his shoulder and headphones jammed in his ears. “Excuse me.”
He hopped off the wall, gathering his own stuff before he could think about the dismay on Bitty’s face too hard, and hurried after Nursey.
He caught up to him in the locker room as he slipped off his jacket, and not for the first time Dex found himself distracted by the muscles of his arms, the kind of distraction that was half attraction and half envy. His gaze caught on Nursey’s tattoo—it circled the impressive muscle of his bicep, a kind of armband pattern of black darts. It looked like the kind douchebag hipsters at music festivals always had, or looked like what they wished they had. Nursey was what all of those douchebag hipsters wished they looked like in general, the beautiful asshole.
Dex cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, “Nurse.”
Nurse turned as he opened his locker. “Dex,” he acknowledged.
Dex unzipped his own jacket slowly. He wanted to ask were you serious, wanted to make certain it had been a joke or an idle promise before he actually thought about bringing home Nurse—Derek fucking Nurse—home to his parents. As his boyfriend.
But he couldn't quite make himself ask. It was half that he was certain that it hadn’t been serious—why the fuck would Nursey voluntarily spend Thanksgiving with him instead of going home to Manhattan, even if he didn't actually celebrate the holiday?—and half terrified by the idea that it wasn't, that Nursey had actually meant it.
He wasn't sure what he would do with that.
Nursey leaned back against his locker, watching him. “Have you thought about it?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “My offer.”
Dex shrugged out of his jacket and unzipped his bag. “You, uh. You meant it, then.”
Nursey frowned at him. “Of course I meant it,” he said, “I don’t make idle offers.”
Dex rolled his eyes at him. “What about that time you offered to walk all the way to that away game with Lardo on your back because we thought we weren’t going to be able to use the van? Or the time you told me you would sing every One Direction song off the Haus roof, in discography order, if I did a kegstand? Or that time you told Bitty you’d—”
Nursey smirked, waving a hand. “Fine,” he said. “I don’t make idle offers sober.”
“We weren’t drinking that time with Bitty,” Dex pointed out.
Nursey raised an eyebrow at him. “I’d been hanging out with Shitty and Nik all day, you think we weren’t high as fuck?”
Dex made a face. “Fine,” he acknowledged.
“I was sober last week,” said Nursey, “and I’m sober now, and I’ll still do it. If you think it would help to have me there, I’ll go with you.”
It was the same promise, but somehow his phrasing—if it would help to have me there—gave Dex a different sort of pause, pushed it from him struggling to both think and not think about Nursey as his boyfriend into a, a supportive kind of space, something—anchoring.
He must have stayed silent too long, because Nursey gave him a little smile and pushed himself back up to his feet, starting to strap himself into his gear. “Think it over,” he said, “and let me know either way.”
Dex got ready, also, the motions of buckling himself into his equipment so familiar now as to be automatic. He stood at the edge of the ice and thought about safety, and comfort. Thought about speed, and power, and the singing stretch of his muscles working in harmony. Thought about gliding across life on the edge of a knife.
He remembered visiting Faber his first week, watching the team tryouts with a kind of wistful longing—the idea that he could be down there nothing but an impossible hope. Samwell had no women’s ice hockey team, and anyway Dex had never felt comfortable on women’s teams of any sport, plus—god, the idea of skating with Jack fucking Zimmermann—
He remembered staring down at the ice and catching sight of a familiar face—newly familiar, just from orientation the week before, a mocking sort of face with moss-green eyes. As if feeling Dex’s eyes on him, the asshole turned, their gazes meeting for a moment before the coach’s whistle drew him back into play.
Over a year later Dex again stared at Nursey, gliding easily across the rink, and thought about bringing a piece of home home.
+
“So this might be a kind of insanely personal question,” Nursey started, “but what the hell else are road trips for, right?”
Dex tried not to spill his coffee on his leg as he dropped it back into the cupholder on his dashboard. “Right,” he said, kind of vaguely.
The world stretched away golden and warm in front of them—too warm, weirdly warm for late November, but they said the world was dying. Death by slow-roasting. Dex tried not to think about that “they”, about how much it had expanded from the original group of ecologists—Nursey would call them climate change experts, Dex’s father had called them crackpot liberal pseudoscientists—into, well. Pretty much everyone in the world except a few people who also still believed the earth was flat.
The drive from Samwell to Maine was a beautiful one. They could have taken highways—it would have been faster, and there was a part of Dex that itched and itched and itched to be home, even as he dreaded it. He felt as though he could figure out exactly how to bear this weight, if only it were already settled on his shoulders. Bracing to bear it before you knew the poundage and balance of it was an exercise in paranoid futility. But when Dex had proposed the two routes to Nursey, the latter had immediately chosen the more meandering, scenic way, just tapping the map with his fingertips.
Why rush? his little shrug seemed to say, but why rush? was written into Nursey’s every movement. He wasn’t lazy, there wasn’t a lazy bone in his body—nobody who produced as much art and power and speed could ever be called lazy. He just didn’t give a shit, or if he did he was very, very good at hiding it—there was a constant spark of amusement in the back of his eyes, like the fact that everyone else gave a shit about stuff was secretly hilarious.
He was also, Dex realized, still waiting for an answer.
He swung off left, the roadway before them strewn with golden leaves going brown. “Your question,” he prompted. “Shoot.”
“Right,” said Nursey. He had his feet up on Dex’s dashboard, his coffee balanced on one of his knees. Dex resisted the urge to take the next turn too sharply and spill it all over his expensive jeans. “Um. Are you ever going to tell them?”
They hadn’t talked about it. Honestly they hadn’t talked about the trip at all since the beginning of the week. Dex felt the question in every vertebrae of his spine; knew the answer was no; knew that wasn’t what Nursey wanted to hear.
“I don’t know,” he said instead. “Not for a long while yet, if I do. They’re not—“ He shook his head. “They wouldn’t get it. They love me,” he said, and felt, wincingly, the warning note creep into his voice, “but they wouldn’t get it. It’s too new.”
Nursey hummed. “It’s not, actually.”
Dex blinked at the road, and then at him. “What?”
“It’s not new,” Nursey said, and sipped his coffee. “Oh, it’s new to them, and it’s new to you, but that doesn’t make it new.”
“What are you talking about?” Dex asked. “Are you saying there were trans kids running around during, like, the French Revolution? Because, dude—“
“During in terms of timing, sure. Not necessarily in France, though.” Nursey ran a hand through his hair. “Though I don’t know, I haven’t done the research.”
“Get to the point,” Dex said. “I don’t actually give a shit about the French Revolution.” He ran a hand through his hair and added a muttered, “Sorry, Jack.”
“Like I mentioned when we first talked about this trip, my grandma’s Navajo,” Nursey said. “On my mom’s side. My mom grew up on a reservation in Arizona before she met my dad.”
Dex concentrated on driving. Nursey’s family was something he never talked about, and there was a kind of delicate care to his voice that Dex had never heard—not a crack in his flippant mask but a deliberate unveiling of the things behind it, and Dex was afraid that if he looked at him the curtain would fall again, cutting him off from whatever sliver of Nursey’s heart he was getting to see.
“The Navajo have this word—it was a thing in a lot of Native American cultures actually, but in Navajo the word is nádleehi, sometimes translated as “two-spirit”. They were people who didn’t fit for whatever reason into the binary—maybe they were intersex, or people ‘born male’—“ Nursey tucked his coffee between his knees so he could do the air quotes and Dex bit his lip at the inexplicable tightness in his chest, “who end up dressing in traditional female dress and playing traditionally female roles in the community, including taking husbands. And. Y’know, vice versa.”
Despite his resolution not to look, Dex found his eyes sliding sideways, flickering over Nursey’s profile as he talked, waiting for—something. Some twist of his lips that conveyed confusion or disgust, or worse, some indication that he was lying, using Dex’s ignorance of his culture to pull one last prank, offer him this—this connection, this impossible history that could be an anchor and a certainty that he’d never had—and then pull it away like Lucy from Peanuts, leaving Dex flat on his back, gasping and alone.
He ran a hand through his hair, not quite used, yet, to its shortness, and tried to convince himself that it was paranoia, not self-preservation, talking. Maybe both.
But there was nothing in Nursey’s face except calm and peace and a kind of wistful memory, and it simultaneously made Dex’s heart lift and drop to the pit of his stomach. There was a history there, but it wasn’t his. It was Nursey’s—a thread stretching back and tying him to this golden-brown world Dex drove through in a way that all his stubborn familial white-boy clinging to America never would.
Sometimes he hated the way hanging out with Nursey made him feel. It was like pointing a gun at yourself and having your best friend hand you bullet after bullet.
“The Navajo consider all spirits to be androgynous,” Nursey was saying. “So grow up enough and you can choose to shape it male or female or whatever. If your body doesn’t match, so be it.” He glanced over at Dex, catching him staring, and Dex flicked his eyes back to the road, his neck prickling with heat. “They’d call you nádleehi,” he said, casually, like he wasn’t giving Dex an incredible, impossible gift. “Me, too, maybe, what with my penchant for making out with men.”
Dex felt like someone had tossed his brain into a tornado. He seized on the last part of the whole deal because it was easiest, and because it wasn’t about himself—he would store the rest away to think about later. “Wait,” he said, “You’re bi?”
He’d seen Nursey hook up with girls—well not. Not seen, not—he took his brain in firmer hand. He’d seen Nursey pull girls out of dark, crowded rooms, or into his lap while in dark crowded rooms, so he’d just. Assumed. Bisexuality he understood in theory but—other than Lardo he’d never really met a bisexual, and Lardo was so secretive about her hookups and now she was maybe possibly dating Shitty and he’d never really.
There was a short silence. When Dex glanced at him, Nursey was staring at him like he was crazy. “Uh, yes? I thought you knew, I’ve never exactly been closeted. Surely you can tell from my poems—“
“You mean the poems I’ve never heard?” Dex shot back, finding his footing in the fight, rather than the flight his heart so desperately wanted. “Because someone never tells me when his goddamn readings are?”
Nursey squinted at him. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
Dex frowned at the road, offended and a little puzzled by the note of guilt in Nursey’s voice. “Why the hell not? We’re friends. You’d come to my shit if I had shit, right?”
“Yeah,” said Nursey, easy in a way that was somehow gratifying.
“So what the fuck,” said Dex, his offense only growing, because there was some part of him that refused to put the words “bisexual” and “Nursey” anywhere in proximity in fear that they’d snap together like two magnets and he’d have to confront the inseparable whole, think about what it meant. “What, you think your poetry’s too good for me?”
“No,” said Nursey, and then he huffed a kind of laughing sigh that, if Dex didn’t know for a fact that Nursey’s ego was off the fucking charts, would have sounded kind of self-deprecating. “No, not at all.”
“So what the fuck,” said Dex again.
“Sorry,” Nursey muttered, and Dex cast him a startled glance. He was staring at his knees, his brows drawn together. He licked his lips, and Dex forced his eyes back to the road. “You know how sometimes you divide your life up into spheres, and then it’s hard to like. Cross the boundaries? Like, bringing the team into my artistic life feels weird, like. There are two pieces of me that don’t understand each other and maybe that’s how it should be.”
“Lardo went to your reading,” Dex said. “I know because she told me I’d really like it.”
He felt Nursey’s eyes on him. “She did?”
Dex nodded, licking his lips. “Said you were talented as hell.” Lardo’s exact words had been he’s like if someone slowed Kendrick down and gave him a rose garden to languish in but he figured that basically translated to talented as hell.
“Oh,” said Nursey, sounding pleased. He coughed. “Lardo’s—different though, she was there as her art-self rather than her hockey-self.”
Dex rolled his eyes. “Oh my god.”
“What?” Nursey asked.
“You can’t fucking pull that crap. Everybody’s just themselves, dude. It’s not like if someone asked Lardo a question about hockey at your reading she’d be like ‘oh sorry bro idk I have to go retrieve hockey-Lardo from where I hung her in the closet and you can ask her’, like, c’mon. Just because you have multiple interests and you’re too much of a coward to let me hear your poems doesn’t make you into some kind of, like. Were-poet.”
There was a small pause, and then Nursey chuckled, low in his throat. “We are pretty much just as insufferable about the full moon.”
Dex took a swig of his coffee. “Next reading though I’ll be sure to come as car-mechanic Dex, or maybe acoustic-guitar Dex. He’ll be just as bad at understanding your lyrical crap as hockey-player Dex, because guess the fuck what, they’re all me.”
Swigging from his own cup, Nursey made a choking noise that might’ve been a laugh, and there was something in Dex that felt smug at that. The times that Nursey was laughing with him and not at him were few and far between and should be treasured.
Nursey finished his coffee, squinting through the hole in the lid to make sure. “You play acoustic?”
Dex nodded. “Yeah,” he said, pulling up to a stop sign. “In Maine half your social events involve bonfires and the other half involve beaches, and both of those experiences are definitely enhanced by being the kid with the guitar.”
Nursey shook his head, popping the plastic lid off his paper cup and spinning it between his hands. Dex watched him for a minute. “It’s a shame you don’t like girls,” Nursey said casually, and Dex checked the rest of the intersection and pulled out into traffic. “I hear they flock to dudes with guitars.”
The still-unfamiliar rush of that casual dude gave Dex courage enough to tease, “and what about you, obvious bisexual Derek Nurse, have you never fallen for a boy with a guitar?”
He glanced at Nursey to see his reaction, caught his raised brow. “Well,” Nursey said, “now that’s a very personal question.”
Dex’s heart was pounding a little fast in his chest. He ignored it, muttered, “What else are road trips for?” and felt that stab of pride again at Nursey’s quiet laugh.
It trailed into silence, and then Nursey said, just as quietly, “Yeah, I have.”
Dex waited, but the silence pulled taut and awkward and he didn’t know if Nursey expected him to ask or wanted him to accept that and back off, and whichever it was he clearly didn’t do it well enough because Nursey said, in a quick, too-bright voice, “So what kind of boyfriend are you?”
Dex blinked, rerouting his brain from its unprompted images of Nursey and some unnamed musician boy, laconic and wrapped up with each other in a Manhattan apartment somewhere. “I won’t be your boyfriend though,” he said, hearing it come out a little bit grim. “You gotta treat me like your girlfriend.”
Nursey hummed. “I’m not gonna do that.”
Dex went cold. Had he made some kind of terrible mistake, was Nursey going to out him to his parents? “You’re fucking kidding, that’s the whole —I’ll turn around right the fuck now if that’s—“
“Chill, Poindexter,” Nursey said, in his worst, most placating voice, holding up his hands.
“Don’t tell me to fucking chill, Nurse—“ Dex snapped, feeling himself tap into that well of familiar anger that was fighting with Nursey, but Nurse cut him off before he could do more than dip a toe.
“Your parents,” Nursey said firmly, “are gonna see what they want to see. I’m gonna act like we’re dating. I’m gonna act like I’m head over heels for you, but I won’t act like you’re my girlfriend. For one thing, I wouldn’t have a fucking clue how.”
Dex stared sideways at him, suspicious. “What do you mean?”
Nursey raised an eyebrow at him. “Would you know how to pretend I was your girlfriend?”
Dex tried to think about that. Thought about taking Nursey on dates, pulling his chair out for him, picking him up and dropping him off and all the other masculine bullshit stuff Maine boys had always done for him. Thought about serenading him, buying him flowers. And through it all Nursey remained Nursey, beautiful and mocking and kind of dizzyingly male, and Dex. Really needed to stop thinking about this. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”
“So.” Nursey shifted his seat a little bit backwards, folding his hands under his head. “I’m gonna act like you’re my boyfriend, and because of their own assumptions they’ll never suspect a thing.”
Dex licked his lips, his heart sitting a little funny in his chest. “Well,” he said, and then coughed. “Well, what kind of boyfriend are you?”
He could hear the smirk in Nursey’s voice: “I’m an awesome boyfriend.” He paused for a minute, then: “I bought us NHL tickets for our six-month anniversary.”
Dex blinked. “You—what? No you didn’t.”
“I would have if we were dating,” Nursey countered. “You’re not supposed to know because obviously we’re a few weeks out from six months—“
“Obviously,” Dex muttered, aiming for scornful but not quite making it all the way there.
“—but I know you hate surprises, so I told you.” Nursey crossed his feet on Dex’s dashboard.
Dex leaned over and smacked at his ankles until he yelped and withdrew his legs. “So when you say you’re a good boyfriend you mean you throw your money around,” he snapped. “Typical.”
“I mean that I know you,” Nursey insisted, “and yeah, I'm gonna use my money to make you happy, why wouldn't I?”
“Because it's a fucking waste?” Dex said. “I’m not dating—I wouldn't be dating you for the money, so don't—”
“Oh, I see what kind of boyfriend you are,” Nursey said, and when Dex cast a glare his way, he finished: “a pain in the ass.”
Dex drained his coffee, making himself relent, reminding himself of the huge favor Nurse was doing him. “Yeah, well. Why break with tradition, right?”
Nurse laughed softly, and they lapsed into a surprisingly comfortable silence.
As Dex drove, though, anxiety crept under his skin again. He couldn’t stop imagining all the things that could go wrong—Nursey slipping up and referring to him by male pronouns, Nursey not being able to keep up the sham, Dex himself not being able to keep up the sham. What if his siblings found out? What if one of them had checked into the hockey roster online and seen his name—listed just as M. Poindexter—on the roster of the men’s hockey team? He’d talked to Lardo about keeping him out of the publicity photos for the most part and it wasn’t like they really noticed him with Jack around but—
“So what am I gonna be walking into here?” Nursey asked. “I know you’ve got a bunch of siblings, right?”
Dex nodded, a little weirded out at their synchronicity of thought. They got like that sometimes, but usually only after coming off the ice—whatever spirit of teamwork they channeled in games taking a while to fade out of their systems. “Three,” he said.
“Are you the oldest?” Nurse asked.
Dex blinked. Usually people took him for a younger sib. “What makes you think that?”
Nursey didn’t say anything, and when Dex glanced at him he had his eyes closed. Dex hit him in the knee with a knuckle. “What the hell, I asked you a question.”
“I shrugged, didn’t I?” Nurse answered lazily, without opening his eyes.
“I’m not fucking looking at you, am I,” Dex retorted, even though he was—probably too much. “I’m driving the goddamn car.”
“Touchy, touchy,” Nursey said, but Dex—eyes now fixed fastidiously on the road—heard him shift to sit up. “Anyway, I’m listening, I promise.”
“Right,” said Dex sourly, and then sighed. “I’ve got an older brother and two younger sibs, a brother and a sister.” He licked his lips. “Owen’s the oldest. He’s—for a while I thought he was everything I wanted to be.” Tall. Muscular in an easy, nonchalant way that Dex could never be, because muscle on Dex always warranted comment, whether disparaging or complimentary, comment that separated him out from normal. Reckless and territorial in a way Dex felt but couldn’t act on. “Didn’t help that he was always smarter than me, as well as being stronger and taller and whatever else.”
“Dex—”
Dex waved a hand, his cheeks heating like they did whenever anyone caught him being self-deprecating. “Okay, whatever, just a different kind of smart. Owen wouldn’t last a semester at Samwell, not with all the writing requirements. But he’s—y’know, math smart.” The better, practical kind of smart. “I’m doing liberal-arts-level engineering. Owen will probably end up in like, biochemical or something. Physics.”
“Will end up?” Nursey asked. “You said he was older than you?”
“Yeah,” said Dex. “You won’t meet him, either.” He took a breath. “He’s in Afghanistan.”
“Oh,” said Nursey, and then, “oh, like. Oh.”
Dex willed his shoulder muscles to relax. “You get money for college after you serve,” he said evenly. “Last I heard he might be home by next Christmas.”
Nursey was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “I hope he is.”
Dex let his breath out again. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “Next after me is Nora. She’s—” He made a face, remembering how she’d refused to talk to him for three days when he’d gotten back from his first year at Samwell. “We’re too close, I think.”
“Close, like, you get along?” Nursey asked.
Dex snorted. “No, no, just in age, though we used to when we were littler. She’s only a year and a half younger than I am, and we’re—I think in a weird way she’s jealous of me for. I don’t know.” He stared hard at the road, grasping at something he’d felt all his life but had never tried to put into words. “Even though I never plan to tell my parents I’m trans, and it’s so outside of their worldview that I don’t think they’ll ever come to it on their own, they always knew there was something—” He almost said wrong with me and stopped himself with an effort. “Different, about me. Whatever they thought it was, it freaked them out enough that I think I got away with shit that she never could, because she was more. I dunno, like, they were holding her to a higher standard.” He licked his lips. “Maybe—maybe they were trying to make her into the perfect daughter they wanted, once it became obvious I would always fail to live up to that ideal.”
“Doesn’t sound like she’s doing too good a job either,” Nursey said quietly.
Dex shook his head. “She dropped out of high school in tenth grade,” he said. “Got her GED eight months later.”
“She did two years worth of high school in eight months?” Nursey sounded impressed.
Dex felt suddenly and fiercely proud. “She’s smart as hell,” he said sincerely. “Never did get the hang of authority though. No interest in college, and she’s been fired from the same waitress job twice in the last year.”
“Why keep hiring her back?” Nursey asked curiously.
Dex shrugged. “She’s cute, and everywhere’s short-handed. This isn’t Manhattan, there’s not sixteen hundred applicants per job.”
“Dig at Manhattan out of nowhere,” Nursey said mildly. “You got something against my hometown, Poindexter?”
“Your hometown’s got a lot of shit against me, mostly,” Dex snapped back. “And I don’t understand how anyone lives like that, jammed in like sardines.”
He glanced at Nurse—because what was the point of needling him if he couldn’t watch whether or not it worked?—and caught a weird, lazy grin on his face, his eyes somehow sharp. “Yeah,” he said, and Dex shifted suddenly sweaty palms on the steering wheel. “I’d take you to Brooklyn, I think. If I were your boyfriend. You’re much more a Brooklyn boy, with your flannel and your guitar.”
“Bite your fucking tongue,” Dex muttered. “Fuck those Brooklyn kids. You know how easy it used to be to buy a good cheap pair of work boots? And now because all of a sudden they’re hip they all cost upwards of a hundred fucking dollars.”
“It might surprise you to hear this,” Nursey said conversationally, “but I have never actually tried to buy a good pair of work boots.” He grinned wider. “And damn, that appropriation must sting, I have no idea what that feels like.
Dex shot him a glare. “Anyway. My brother Rowan is two years younger than Nora.” He smiled a little despite himself. “He’s a little shit. Annoying as hell. You’ll probably love him.”
“Implications aside,” Nursey said loftily, “thank you. I’m. Not awesome with kids, though.”
Dex rolled his eyes. “He’s fifteen, not a toddler,” he said. “Just treat him like a human being.” He caught site of roadside sign. “Hey,” he said. “You hungry?”
“Sure,” said Nurse, and Dex swung onto a side street in search of a burger and fries.
The spent the rest of the trip in post-food silence. Nursey had a notebook open on his knees and would occasionally jot something down, his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, and Dex felt no need to interrupt him. The sun was fading, clouds rolling in across the blue of the sky, and his stress had faded to a kind of itching, waiting buzz as the miles between him and home shrank and shrank and shrank.
“Oh,” he said, as they pulled into the driveway with the first drops of rain. “One other thing—don’t tell them you play hockey.”
Nursey looked at him, confused. “What?” He asked. “Why?”
Dex rolled his head on his neck. “My parents don’t pay much attention to college sports,” he said. “If they did, I never would’ve risked joining the Samwell team—even without Jack, we’re pretty high profile.”
“Oh,” said Nurse, and then realization dawned. “Oh—”
“Yeah,” said Dex. He pulled around the loop of his driveway, parking next to Owen’s old pickup. “Last thing I want is my mom looking up pics of my charming boyfriend playing hockey and getting a nasty shock.”
Nurse grinned at him over the center console as they both undid their seatbelts. “You saying you think I’m charming?”
Dex returned his grin, teeth and all. “I’m saying you’d fucking better be.”
He got out of the car.
+
Dinner with the Poindexters, Nursey decided, was like trying to walk on a tightrope above a net whose every knot contained a bear trap, only instead of physical pain to yourself the traps would cause emotional pain to someone you cared deeply about and were maybe crushing on enormously hard.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t his best metaphor in the world. But. Fuck, he was too stressed to think of a better one.
Dex’s father was sitting at the head of the table. Nursey didn’t really know what he’d expected—some kind of stereotypical Blue Collar Working Dad, with an intense farmer’s tan and a beer gut and perpetual stubble?—but it hadn’t been the man currently holding out his hands to his family, his wide palms and blunt-tipped fingers curled upward, prompting someone to say grace. Mr. Poindexter was a large man, but he was built entirely of muscle, his red-bearded jaw jutting out over the thick column of his neck like the prow of a ship. He had a crooked nose, maybe broken once—or more than—and hard blue eyes, currently shifting over the faces of his children.
“Derek,” he said, though his eyes lingered on Dex, “what about you?”
Absurdly, it almost made Nursey feel better to be so directly challenged, but he saw Dex stiffen at his side. “Dad,” he protested, a note of panic in his voice, “Derek’s our guest—”
Nursey reached over and squeezed his knee under the table, and Dex cut himself off in surprise. “I’d be glad to,” Nursey said firmly.
Mr. Poindexter inclined his head, and, like dominos, his family followed suit, each taking hands with the person next to them.
Nursey took a breath, bowing his own head, though he didn’t close his eyes. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive through your bounty. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
He raised his head to find Dex staring at him. He allowed himself a small smirk in return.
Everyone else raised their heads, and Mr. Poindexter opened his eyes. “A little Catholic for my tastes, but it serves.” He released his wife’s hand, and Dex’s.
Nursey let go of Nora’s, but—daring—kept his fingers linked with Dex’s, hanging between their chairs, under the table but still in view of Dex’s parents.
Mrs. Poindexter smiled at him. She was slight and wrinkled, her wisps of thinning brunette hair going grey at the temples. “I doubt God minds which version of Him we thank, hm?”
Her tone was nothing but kind, but Nurse still couldn’t quite let out his breath until her bright eyes—so like Dex’s—had moved on to the rest of her family. “So,” she said with a sigh, “dig in, everyone.”
Nora immediately served herself an enormous helping of mashed potatoes. Dex was right—she was cute, brunette to Dex’s redhead but still with all his freckles. There was something about her that made her seem younger than seventeen, though, some jarring edge that made every move one of defiance.
“So, how did you two meet?” asked Rowan in a falsetto voice, propping his chin up on one hand while serving himself turkey with the other, piling slices of white meat haphazardly on his plate. He was small, with a sharper face than Dex and longish hair in a red-brown muddle like riverside clay.
“Rowan,” Mrs. Poindexter said warningly, but then flashed Dex a Look. “I am curious, though, I admit.”
“We met our first week, actually,” Dex supplied. “We were in orientation together.”
Nursey nodded. “We kept seeing each other around—you know, there are all those, like, dumb orientation exercises you do, and we were always paired up by last name, so.”
Dex nodded, glancing sideways at him. “We were friends for a long time before he asked me out,” he said, and for some reason that more than anything so far got under Nursey’s skin—Dex’s voice was soft, like he was remembering something fondly, and it itched at him. What was he imagining? How should Nurse do—have done it? He bit his lip and cut that thought short. Eyes up. You’re in the spotlight, he reminded himself. Don't think about being his boyfriend. Think about pretending to be.
It was an enormously grounding, cut down the butterflies in his stomach by half. Derek Nurse was good at Pretending.
“Well,” he said. “Had to get up my courage. Dex is so—” he stopped. “It was important I not screw it up.”
“I bet,” Rowan muttered. “She’d tear your head off if you did.”
Nursey glanced sideways at Dex’s face. He was scowling at Rowan, who made a face back.
“Sounds like you two got along immediately,” Mrs. Poindexter said pleasantly, and Nursey made a supreme effort not to snort at that.
Dex didn’t bother. He shook his head when they all looked at him in surprise. “We fought all the time,” he said easily. “Still do, if you set us off. But I think—” he glanced sideways at Nursey, a deliberate motion, meant for his parents to see, but they wouldn’t, couldn’t have known the way his grip on Nursey’s hand tightened very slightly, “I think that’s what makes it so good.”
Dex’s father smirked. “You like a girl with fire, Derek?”
Nursey returned the squeeze that Dex had passed him, like kids playing games at summer camp, only there was no rest of the circle, just the two of them sending little echoed reassurances back and forth like sonar—I’m here, I’m here. “Dex has a lot of—opinions, is all,” he said, exaggeratedly diplomatic, “and—”
“Why do you keep calling her ‘Dex’?” Nora interrupted, stealing turkey from Rowan’s plate.
Dex froze for a split second of shock, and then said smoothly, “it’s a team nickname.” He let go of Nursey’s hand and started eating, as if suddenly remembering that that was, in fact, what they were there for.
Nursey himself had forgotten to even take food, and was serving himself green beans when Dex’s father asked, “Team? What team?”
“Wildcats,” Nora murmured, and if Nursey hadn’t been so terrified he might have laughed at her. Instead he thought fast, remembering Dex’s no-hockey rule, which obviously—by the tension in his shoulders—he’d forgotten himself. “A bunch of my friends are on the lacrosse team at Samwell,” he said finally. “We hang with them a lot, and they’ve all got sports nicknames, so. I’m Nurse—” he jerked a thumb at Dex. “She’s Dex.”
The pronoun came out a little clumsy, but no one seemed to notice. Instead, Dex’s father folded his hands over his plate. “You must be pretty close to these boys,” he said mildly, though there was something ugly in his undertone, “for them to be giving you cutesy nicknames and all.”
Nurse had a flash of cold panic—had Mr. Poindexter somehow read him as not straight?—before he realized that the man’s gaze was pinpointed on his son, not Nurse, and the fear in his spine turned to anger.
“Dad,” Dex said steadily, though his knee was bouncing under the table. “They’re my friends.”
“You know,” Mr. Poindexter said, sitting back in his chair. “When I saw your hair, I thought maybe I should be concerned with the female company you might be keeping up there in Massachusetts. Turns out maybe it’s the opposite I should be worrying about.”
Nursey’s jaw was clenched so hard his teeth ached, and before he could stop himself he’d gritted out, “what exactly are you implying?”
Mr. Poindexter’s eyes opened innocently wide. “Nothing,” he said. “All I’m saying is, in my day the only girls who got cute nicknames around the locker room were the ones that had, shall we say, been around the locker room.”
Nursey was on his feet, angrier than he could remember being in a long time. Mr. Poindexter looked at him for the first time, raising red brows above his smiling eyes. “You have something to say, son?” He ran a hand through his beard. “You have a problem with the way I’m speaking to my daughter?”
Nursey had about a million things to say, starting with he’s not your daughter, he’s your fucking son, and continuing with and if he were your daughter the way you’re talking to him would be just as horrible and misogynistic and no fucking wonder Dex has internalized this shit so intensely—but. But he really super couldn’t say that, and Dex was looking at him, flushed and angry and perfectly capable of snapping back to his father if he thought it would do any good, and he wasn’t, which means it wouldn’t, which means Nurse shouldn’t, but, god, he couldn’t just. He couldn’t just sit back down and eat like nothing had happened—
“Nurse,” Dex said quietly, just to him, and Nursey took a breath, stepped back from the table.
“Excuse me,” he said as steadily as he could manage, and left the room.
He ended up in an old-fashioned living room/parlor—there was a couch, and a deep armchair, and a fireplace, a TV on a stand that could be wheeled to various parts of the room. Other than the TV, which was relatively slim and new, it looked like a room that hadn’t changed since maybe the 60s. He stared hard at the clock on the mantel, willing his fists to unclench.
Dex cleared his throat, stepping into the room carefully, like he wasn't sure Nurse wanted him there. Nursey turned, trying meet his eyes like a normal person and not someone about to explode. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Dex said, and then: “I’m. Sorry about that--”
“You’re—” Nursey started in disbelief, then stopped himself. “Dex, jesus, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
“My dad,” said Dex, “he was needling you, testing you—making you say grace even though you’re—”
Nurse shook his head sharply. “Stop,” he said, stepping closer to Dex. “God, I'm not mad about the shit he's doing to me, dude. The grace thing, whatever, I didn't think it was a great foot to start things off on, hey guys this is my heterosexual boyfriend, he’s Navajo & thinks God is a great spirit, and anyway I’m not and I don't, I don't think God is anything but people and the universe and love if She’s anything at all, I'm.” He forced himself to calm down. “It’s. Fine.”
“I was surprised you knew the words,” Dex admitted, still watching him warily.
Nursey cracked his neck, going back to staring at the clock. It was stopped, clearly for show in a house full of people with cell phones, but the second hand twitched against whatever mechanism had broken inside, an endless rhythmic struggle. “Yeah, well,” he said. “My dad’s Catholic.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dex open his mouth and then close it again. “Oh,” he said. “I always thought he was—”
“Dead?” Nursey filled in wryly. “Nah. He's very much alive, lives out on Long Island with his family. My white dad with his nice white wife and kids. Haven’t seen him in.” He stopped, then grinned. “Oh, hey, ten years exactly. Which is also the last time I said grace.” He shrugged. “Guess that shit sticks with you.”
Dex stared at him, leaning against the arm of his couch. “What happened?”
Nursey cracked his neck. “Nothing dramatic,” he said. “My mom graduated law school and started her firm, we stopped depending on him for money, so we stopped making the requisite performing-monkey Thanksgiving visits, too.” He made a mock-praying gesture. “Thank god, amiright?”
Dex’s eyebrows twitched. “Nurse—”
“Jesus,” muttered Nursey, crossing to him. What the fuck was wrong with him, pulling his own weird dad-problems into this already tense space? “None of this—it doesn’t fucking matter. Okay? It’s so incredibly not the point right now.” He wanted to reach out, take Dex’s hands, reestablish that nonverbal communication, but alone in the dim living room it would be—weird, too much. Probably. Right? “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dex said, crossing his arms over his chest, something hard and defiant in his eyes. “Are you?”
Nurse took a breath. “Yeah,” he said, and leaned against Dex’s couch at his side, hip brushing hip. “Yeah.”
+
Dex shut his bedroom door and leaned against it, staring at the floor. The rest of dinner had been quietly tense—Dex returning first, then Nurse finally sitting stonily at his side—and the conversation with his father afterward had been so one-sided that Dex felt like maybe he’d gone mute. The click of the lock on his door felt like the pop of a balloon, releasing him from its breath-held, performance-space silence.
“Hey,” said Nursey, and Dex raised his head to look at him. He was hovering awkwardly by Dex’s bed, and when Dex met his eyes he smiled, tentative. “There you are. I feel like I haven’t seen really seen you all day.”
There was something in his voice—apology, and relief, and something else that made Dex itch. He sagged, exhausted. He wanted to—to beckon Nursey closer, to have him as close as he’d been in front of his parents, have him as a bulwark against the world outside his bedroom door, but of course the relief of being able to be himself, the relief of reality settling in around him, brought with it a distance between them. Because that was real, too.
He ran a hand over his face. “My father approves of you.”
Nursey stared at him. “But—what? I fucked it all up, I ruined dinner. I wanted to punch him in the mouth—”
“Yeah,” said Dex, feeling sick and weary, “he was testing you. If you hadn’t wanted to defend his little girl from slander with your fists you’re probably some kind of pansy.”
Nursey sank down on the edge of Dex’s bed. “Jesus,” he said, his voice quiet but heavy with scorn. “I should’ve known—you’re my property, right, so of course I should defend you.”
Dex crossed his arms over his chest, but he was too weary to really fight. “It’s not like that,” he said firmly, because it. Wasn’t, mostly. “It’s—to him it shows you care about me.”
Nursey didn’t look at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Well.”
Dex pushed his weight back onto his feet, the silence suddenly crushing. “I’m sorry about. You know, the bed situation,” he said, because he was, and to say something, to get Nursey to look at him. “They assume—”
“Dex,” Nursey interrupted, “I know, it’s fine, you don’t. Have to apologize.”
Dex stepped toward him, cracking his knuckles out of nervous habit. “I do, though,” he said. “Maybe not for the bed thing but for. You didn’t exactly know what you were getting into, and I didn’t exactly warn you.” He settled cross-legged at Nursey’s side. “So. Sorry.”
Nursey finally looked at him, the corner of his mouth curling up. “Actually,” he said, “they’re exactly what I expected. Although I thought there’d be more guns.”
Dex made a face at him. “Wait til tomorrow,” he said. “Now that my dad likes you he will definitely take you out to the range.”
Nursey’s face turned horrified. “You’re kidding.”
Dex held his eyes, keeping his face entirely serious. “Hope you’re ready to bag your first bird, Derek.”
Nursey shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “No, no way, I refuse—Dex, I’m a pacifist and also very terrified of guns, as I believe basically everyone in their right mind should be, not to mention the fact that we are pretend dating, I am not going anywhere near your father when he’s armed—”
Dex cracked up, dropping his face into his palm. “Chill,” he said, when he stopped laughing at the sheer panic in Nursey’s eyes. “My dad just met you, he’s not gonna trust you with a firearm. If we do this again next year, that’s a different story, but you’ve got some time to confront your cowardice before then.”
“It’s not cowardice, asshole, it’s common sense,” Nursey muttered, but there was something distracted about it. He rolled his shoulders. “And I’m sure by next year you’ll have a real boyfriend you can bring home and I‘ll be out of a job.”
Dex flushed, staring down at his hands. “Yeah,” he said, “I—maybe.”
He expected Nurse to just move on, crack some other joke about how surprised he was that Dex’s siblings had all their teeth or something, but instead he turned so he was mirroring Dex, knees almost brushing knees. “Yo,” he said. “You okay?”
Dex grimaced, not liking the tightness in his chest. This—he’d been doing so well, not letting his guard down. A different kind of armor than the one he wore outside this room, closer to his skin, easier to bear, but armor nonetheless, only—he’d only ever needed it to deal with the kind of glancing, roundabout attacks that defined his relationship with Nurse. It wasn’t built to withstand direct blows. “I’m,” he said, and then stopped. “It’s funny,” he started again, though it wasn’t. “You’re the only person who’s not a family member to ever be in this bed.”
Nursey—because against all odds Nursey sometimes just fucking got it—said nothing.
“I used to think about it a lot. I guess everyone does, right, think about love and dates and stuff, think about what it would be like to have someone I cared about like that. But it was always one-sided, it was always me having the emotion and me acting on it, because every time I thought about the way they’d feel about me there was like this. Like.” He stopped, searching for words past the lump in his throat. “Mistranslation, or something, this displacement, because I’d think about them loving me and then the person they loved wasn’t me anymore, I was outside of it looking in and it looked nice, it looked good and happy and picture-perfect, a thing I should want but didn’t.”
Nursey shifted, his hands hanging loose from his knees, and Dex remembered fingers threading through his, a nod to the audience, a show for the cheap seats, and shut his eyes. “It’s not that I don’t want a boyfriend,” he said carefully to the red-bright darkness of his own eyelids. “I just have a hard time picturing anyone wanting me right.”
He heard Nursey shift again. “Dex—”
“I don’t need your pity,” Dex snapped, opening his eyes. “That’s not what I’m fucking asking, okay?”
Nursey cracked his neck, his face placid. “Good,” he said, “because I don’t have any for you, and you’ve got enough for yourself. Sympathy, sure, I could spare some of that if I thought you needed it. But mostly I think you’re being an idiot.”
Dex stared at him. “What?”
“You’re not the only trans kid in the world,” Nursey said bluntly. “Hell, you’re not even the only trans kid I know. I just saw Grace last week and she’s very happy with her girlfriend. I’m not saying I know anything about the shit you’re going through, because I don’t. But there are people who do, and there are a surprising number of people out there who will look at you and think ‘hot freckled athletic boy’ and nothing else will matter.” He smirked. “I say surprising because I expect the rest to be put off by the ‘superior asshole’ vibe that oozes from your every pore.”
“Shut up,” Dex said, a little thrown by hot, especially in conjunction with freckled. “Like anyone is into freckles anyway, I look like someone ran over my face in cleats.” He stood up, suddenly filled with nervous energy. “My whole body, actually.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Nurse asked, his voice incredulous.
Dex wandered over to his dresser. “What? No, I’m fucking covered in the things.”
“I meant kidding about them being attractive, moron,” Nursey said, and Dex could almost hear his eyes rolling, though he didn’t know why the fuck they would be.
“Of course I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’ve been bullied for them my whole fuckin’ life.” He turned, fixing Nursey with a disbelieving glare. “You bullied me for them the first time we met, don’t tell me you don’t remember. We were in that bullshit orientation together and you called me freckles.”
Nursey stared at him, his eyebrows furrowed in genuine confusion. “Dex,” he said slowly, “I was flirting with you.”
Dex blinked at him. “What? No you weren’t.”
Nursey’s confusion was giving way to a kind of incredulous amusement. “Dude,” he said, “I think I’d know.”
“I think I’d know,” Dex countered, because. He fucking would, wouldn’t he?
Nursey muttered something unintelligible, flopping onto his back on Dex’s bed and covering his face with his hands.
Dex glared at him. “What?”
“I said, this isn’t fucking happening,” Nurse said, clearer, and then sat up. “And it’s not. Over, done, drawing a line in the sand.” He raised his eyebrows at Dex. “You got any pajamas I can borrow?”
Dex tried to get his feet back under him, frustration an anchor, a refuge.“You didn’t bring pajamas?”
“Don’t own any,” Nurse said with a smirk.
Dex opened a drawer, not thinking about that. “And it didn’t occur to you that anything i might have here would be for girls?”
Nursey shrugged. “So give me a nightgown, I’d rock it.”
“No one rocks nightgowns, Nurse, not even you.” He closed the drawer. “Just wear your boxers, I don't care.”
“Yes, sir,” muttered Nursey, and started pulling off his shirt.
Dex looked away, making a beeline for the bathroom. He brushed his teeth and washed stress-sweat and makeup off his face, then pulled off his own shirt, staring at himself. He owned a binder—Bitty and Chowder and some mysterious benefactor whose name he’d never managed to get out of Bitty had pooled their resources to get him one as a “welcome to the team” present—but it wasn't like he could wear it home. He ran his eyes over his reflection, his fingers over the band of his sports bra, touched the freckles on his collarbone, the scattering of them under his ribs on the left side like a little constellation.
Nursey had been flirting with him.
Nursey—bisexual asshole Derek Nurse—thought he was hot. Liked his freckles.
And—yeah, maybe he thought Dex was hot the way Dan had, the way boys always had. A buff, tomboy type. Cute, in a rough and tumble way. “One of the boys” the way only a girl could be.
But—
I’m not going to think of you as my girlfriend. For one thing, I’d have no fucking clue how.
Dex buried his face in his hands, pulling at his cheeks. Stared himself in the eyes, his hand over his mouth. Shook out his shoulders, took some long, steadying breaths. Then, very quickly, he pulled off his sports bra, stepped out of his jeans, slipped on a tank top, and left the bathroom.
Nursey was sitting in his bed, wearing only his boxers and apparently entirely at ease. His eyes were tired when Dex met them, seemed to drift over him with lazy interest. Dex felt his cheeks and neck heat, couldn’t help the tiny daydream blossoming in the back of his mind, the thing his parents thought would be happening—Nursey, sitting as he was, shirtless and watching Dex, raising a hand to beckon him; Dex crossing to him, leaning in to trail a hand down his bare chest and—
He made himself move, casually flick his gaze off the fucking miles of muscled skin that he really didn’t need to think about right now. He put his sports bra back in his suitcase, then crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge Nursey wasn’t monopolizing, his back to his friend.
“Do you snore?” Nursey asked. “Because I think that would definitely put a damper on our relationship.”
“No,” said Dex shortly, and then, because for once Nursey hadn’t even done anything to deserve that shortness, “but my dad does, you’ll probably be able to hear him through the floor.”
“Oh,” said Nursey. “Good.” He shifted over slightly, perhaps picking up on the aura of sheer panic and confusion that Dex was sure he was exuding and trying to give him more space.
Dex swung his legs up and lay down, staring at his ceiling, trying to find a kind of peace of mind in the familiar cracks and stains of his ceiling. He started at the wall and made his way across the ceiling, trying to shift his focus slowly enough that his eyes never jumped from one thing to the next. A sort of—meditation, a thing he trained himself to do in high school those times when he was so overwhelmed with helplessness and rage that it was this or—shit he couldn’t reverse.
This was a different kind of overwhelmed, sad and terrified and relieved and disbelieving and a whole bunch of other shit that Dex couldn’t or didn’t want to identify—but there was just as much danger of irreversible action.
“Dex,” said Nursey quietly, and Dex’s gaze jumped wildly from its slow, calming path across the ceiling.
He swallowed. “Yeah?”
“Have you thought about names, at all? Like obviously we can keep calling you Dex but eventually you’ll probably want a first name.”
Dex shifted, their shoulders brushing, made himself not pull away. “Yeah,” he said, “a little.” He licked his lips. “I’ve got this uncle. My mom’s brother. I really liked him, but. We—don’t really talk to him anymore.” He thought about the last time they had—he could remember saying goodbye, his uncle’s truck in the driveway. A large, gentle hand in his hair. A strong jaw, a sweet smile.
“Why not?” Nursey asked.
Dex took a breath. “When I asked,” he said, “my dad told me my mom didn’t have a brother, especially not ‘that faggot’.” He felt Nursey tense, moved on quickly to prevent the thickening of his voice. “So I thought I’d name myself after him. Keep it in the family.” Not that he’d ever actually tell them—one ostracized fag was enough—but he knew Nurse would fight him on that, and he was too fucking tired.
Nursey’s voice was blank, almost distant when he asked, “What’s his name?”
“William,” said Dex.
“William,” echoed Nursey, and Dex had to shift his eyes rapidly to stop them stinging. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” snapped Dex, unfairly, rolling his tongue around his mouth. “I was really looking for your approval.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Nursey, and he turned over on his side, the curve of his spine pressing warm against Dex’s arm. “Goodnight, William Poindexter.”
Dex leaned over and turned off the light, and then sank back, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and trying to cry as silently as he could.