Page 122 of The Lies We Play

“What?”

“The part where you make it sound clinical so it doesn’t sound like it hurt.”

His face stills.

I wonder how often people let him get away with that.

Probably often.

He looks down at his glass. “It didn't always hurt.”

“No?”

“No. Sometimes it was only tiresome.” He looks back at me. “Women who thought my attraction to men was an experiment they could manage. Men who thought my attraction to women made me undecided. People who treated desire like a courtroom where someone had to prove jurisdiction.”

I laugh once despite myself.

He almost smiles.

“Sorry,” he says. “Law school has damaged me.”

“No, that was good.” I lean back, studying him. “Accurate too.”

His gaze moves over my face. “You understand.”

“I do.”

“Because you’re bisexual too.”

“Yes.” I pause. “And because I’ve had the same conversations with different vocabulary.”

Halston’s shoulders lower a fraction.

There. That is the thing I want. Not surrender. Not relief exactly. Just the moment a man realizes he may not have to explain every injury before someone believes it happened.

“My parents were good about it,” I say. “When I told them. They loved me before. They loved me after. My father’s concern was never whether I loved a man or a woman. It was whether the world would use either one to take something from me.”

“The career.”

“The career. The press. The room I wasn’t in when people decided what version of me was easiest to sell.”

Halston listens with his whole body. Still, but not distant. His eyes on mine. One hand wrapped around the stem of his flute. The other resting on the table, fingers relaxed, though not as relaxed as he wants me to think.

“So you know,” he says.

“I know.”

A beat passes.

Then, I say what I came here not knowing I needed to say.

“I also know I don’t feel less interested in Liv because I’m attracted to you.”

His eyes lift.

The air tightens.

I keep going, because if I stop now, I’ll turn it into a joke, and I don’t want to.