The truth is that I’m pissed.

As I make this pie, those Grain Bar people are touring the offices, asking pointed questions about Vin’s business practices, bragging about how much money they have to invest because they just have things. Maybe they had to work hard for them and maybe they didn’t, but did they have to fight? For every inch of space, every truly safe moment, every person who sees them and likes them for who they are?

My arms fly twice as fast, slicing peaches and mincing basil with a fury.

Honestly, I hate the world that we live in for making it so hard for places like the Proud Muffin to exist. And then keep existing. I hate that this is normal — that places I love disappear overnight, and the place that I love most is on the chopping block and the worst kind of assholes are wielding the overpriced Santoku knife. It’s true that Austin is an oasis of queer life, but there are still no guarantees. We can lose whatever we have, at any moment.

I stir in the thickener with tiny, ferocious flicks of my wrist and I sincerely hate, hate, hate that I can already picture this place as the Grain Bar, the kitchen retrofitted with every expensive useless tool, the community space turned into an overpriced apartment for people who just moved here from Brooklyn because they fell in love when they went to SXSW that one time, the counter turned into a hookup spot for overpaid startup employees who have a thousand other places to meet people just like them.

My hands are slippery with righteous rage as I tip the filling into the crust, a little of it spilling on the floor. Ferocious tears show up as I top the pie with butter crumbs, and I barely hold in salty drops that nobody wants on their dessert.

I throw the whole thing in the oven.

After another forty-five minutes of wobbly, nerve-ridden work, I take the pie out and carry it to the front. Vin and Alec are both on the porch, saying a prolonged goodbye to the Grain Bar people. It looks painful and stilted, even from a distance. I should put the pie down and walk away — wait for them to be drawn to it, naturally.

I march out onto the porch.

“I need you to taste this,” I say, holding out the pie.

The Grain Bar people are looking at me like I’m a little too much, and I know that if they buy this place, I’m the first employee to go.

“Syd . . .” Vin warns, but either Alec didn’t get the memo about how much trouble I’m in for storming into the office and acting like a complete baby or he really needs to say something true, because he reaches for the pie like it’s a life preserver.

“Fine,” Vin grumbles. “Can we offer you some?”

The hipsters wave off the pie like it’s personally offending them.

Mr. Fine Print, on the other hand, looks like he’s trying to keep a lid on his enthusiasm. “Yes, please.”

Well, that wasn’t really part of the plan, but I don’t care at this point. As long as Vin and Alec eat the pie. As long as they break down the secrets and lies that have solidified into a brick wall between them. I grab three plates and cut three pieces and watch as all three of them chew, breathe harder, chew more.

Vin and Alec look at each other.

There’s a fire in their eyes, and it’s about to happen. That stare is going to spark into passion, and settle into love, and they’re going to send these rich entitlemuffins back to North Austin with nothing.

“I can’t believe you,” Alec says.

“You can’t believe me?” Vin growls.

And then they’re shouting, shouting, about how they each blame the other one. For the breakup. For letting things get this bad. For letting the Proud Muffin slip away. For not fighting harder.

“Wait . . .” I say.

“Well, this is intense,” one of the hipsters says with a nervous laugh.

“And I hate this,” Alec says, pointing at the hipsters, who are stuck in place by the sudden downpour of strong emotions. I can’t tell if they’re staying out of shock and respect, or if they want to take out their phones and put this whole thing on the internet. “I hate that I even let them in the front door.”

“I hate that I’m their accountant!” Mr. Fine Print pipes up, wiping away a bit of crumb from his mouth with a napkin. “Absolutely fucking hate it. I don’t think they even know that I’m gay and this is my favorite bakery.”

Huh. I didn’t see that twist coming. Though, now that I’m looking beyond his suit, he does seem familiar.

The lead hipster backs up, down the steps, away from the earnest display of emotion. “Oh, dude, you should have said something . . .”

“It’s not my job to tell you basic things when we’ve been working together for eight years, Kevin!” The guy in the suit grabs the rest of the pie, squares it up with Kevin’s beardy face, and lets it fly.

It lands with a squelch of cooked fruit, bits of broken crust sticking all over Kevin’s face as the pie slips down and finally falls.

Now the cameras really are out, the customers on the porch and in the little garden and sitting in the windows holding their phones up to catch this. I turn to find D.C. and Lex and the rest of the counter staff looking stuck halfway between laughter and horror.

“I hate that we can’t do that every day,” Vin says, looking at Alec with green-brown eyes that go from gruff to puppy in about two seconds. “Hey, at least we agree on something, right?”

Alec looks disgusted, and not just by the collateral damage of fruit and buttery crumbs on his best shoes. “No,” he says. “We’re a mess.” Vin shakes his head and follows Alec toward their car — fighting all the way.

I back away, retreating to the safety of the kitchen. As much as I loved watching Kevin take a pie to the pretty face, I’m pretty sure I just made everything worse. I didn’t give Vin and Alec Honest Pie. I baked something else into the peaches, the strawberries, the pastry. A truthful feeling, yes, but a very specific one.

I was rage baking.

That was Anger Pie.

I run back to the walk-in and collapse on one of the crates. The tears that I was holding back before start falling, hitting the concrete floor, turning it from pale gray to a darker, stormy color.

A minute later, I hear another crate scraping over toward me. Marisol sits down and drapes an arm around my back.

“They weren’t fighting because Alec thought Vin was cheating,” I say in a finely shredded voice, finally getting it. “Alec thought Vin was secretly planning to sell the bakery. He thought Vin was being wooed by buyers who wanted the Proud Muffin, not guys who wanted to date him.”

“That’s why they were fighting,” Marisol confirms.

“Are we still fighting?” I ask, looking up suddenly, my face red and my cheeks hot with the aftermath of tears.

“We need to stick together, you and me. Just . . . no more messing with Vin and Alec. They have it hard enough right now.”

“I’m trying to make things better,” I say.

Marisol nods like she knows this feeling, like she’s already tried in her own way and run into her own walls. She ropes me in close with her arm, spreads her fingers over my shaved head. “You just have to keep baking, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, thinking of all the ways I might be able to salvage this with sugar. “I can do that.”

After everything that just happened, it feels wrong to go out with Harley, but it also feels like the only right thing left.

The night is fresh-baked, warm, scented with April leaves and the vanilla of Harley’s body wash. They’re standing on the top step, hands in their pockets, rocking on their heels. Harley is wearing a shirt the color of bluebells, black jeans, and cowboy boots. Real, cracked in the grooves, ground down at the heel, dusty, dirty, these-have-chased-after-cows cowboy boots.

I flash on W just long enough to realize that despite everything she and Harley don’t have in common, they both have these boots.

Apparently, this is my type.

“I thought we’d go dancing,” Harley says, rocking forward in a way that brings them right into my space. “Since we never got to at the gay bar.”

“That sounds great.” My words are so confident. My feet feel a little less certain. They’re worried that we’re not very good at dancing. My hips are also pretty nervous about this plan.

We get in my car anyway, and I follow Harley’s directions to a place over on South Lamar, with wooden porches slung all the way around it, big Christmas bulbs wrapped around every post, and rocking chairs all lined up and waiting for butts.

We shuffle into the dance hall. The air in here feels smoky, even though people obviously aren’t allowed to smoke inside. The dance floor is packed tight with couples spinning and swapping and reeling. The age range is impressive: from late teens to what looks to be early nineties. The crowd is pretty one-note in other ways, though. It’s a lot of white people, with a few Latinx and Black folks. And while I can see one old, delightfully dykey-looking couple with fringe vests and clipped gray hair dipping each other with vigor, the overall vibe seems pretty straight.

But Harley looks comfortable here. I try to absorb a little bit of that feeling.

They hold out their hand and lead me onto the dance floor, and soon I’m a half-beat behind them, whirling and stamping and clapping and generally confused. The music is a fiddle-heavy sort of country, not the kind of country they play on the radio, laced with pop or cut with classic rock.

I try to find a way into the music — a sort of flow where you stop overthinking and just keep moving — but I can’t quite manage it, and Harley’s smile, when I look up from my awkward feet, sets me back a full beat.

Every time.

There’s also the fact that, in the few cases where I’ve done any kind of couple dancing with W, I’ve always taken the lead — the part that’s traditionally reserved for guys — so even when I start to find the patterns in the dance, I’m always pushing forward when I should be going backward, mashing into Harley’s face.

At least it makes them laugh.

After five or six or seven botched dances, I tug at Harley’s hand. There’s a stitch in my side, and I wore the wrong shoes based on the vicious blister rising on the back of my heel, but I’m still smiling. My face is wide open, without any kind of defense. We go outside, collapse into side-by-side rocking chairs, and sip at the cooling air.

“This isn’t exactly what I expected when you said dancing,” I admit.

“This is only our first stop,” Harley says, jumping right back up. They stroll across the parking lot and I follow, enough distance to appreciate the way they swagger in those boots. They make Harley’s hips jut out and their torso settle farther back, a balance that’s totally different from their usual forward bounce.

I like them both.

We park in a lot and head into the downtown crowds, quickly becoming anonymous like we did that first night together. This crowd is mostly students, young and — otherwise — diverse. I should feel more at home here than I did on the country-western dance floor, but this just feels like high school, the sequel. Like a big party that I’m crashing, where I’ll always be stuck in some corner, not because everyone hates me, exactly, but because I never bothered to learn the rules or play the game.

After a few blocks of being pushed and pulled and pitched around by everybody moving at different speeds on the sidewalk, I grab Harley to the side. I know that they have ideas for our night, but I want to show them that I can contribute, too.

There’s a pocket of an outdoor club, nestled into the nightly pandemonium, where the band is dressed in full eighties regalia — pegged jeans and neon — and they play stunningly accurate renditions of radio smashes that were big when my parents were my age. I know all of these pop confections and power ballads; this is what I grew up listening to on car trips, or jump-dancing with Tess on our twin beds. When I made my first-ever batch of cookies, I was listening to “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” while Tess did a highly dramatic lip sync in the background and stole bites of dough.

Even now, the sound of this music finds a matching groove in my brain. I shout-sing Paula Abdul — “Straight Up” — while Harley looks at me with this incredible crinkly face, amused but also concerned.

“Don’t you know this?” I ask as the band hits the opening lick of “Jessie’s Girl”, which is the gayest’80s song, and a personal favorite.

“Um, the music I know is the stuff we were just dancing to!” Harley shouts.

We bop along to a few songs, but I can tell that Harley is having more fun watching me do the Molly Ringwald than actually listening to the synthesizers, so we head back into a night as warm and clingy as a heated swimming pool.

“Okay, now that we’ve had our warm-ups . . .” Harley says, grabbing my sweaty hand. “Time for the best dancing in Austin.”

We push our way up Sixth Street, people giving way around us.

I check my phone. It’s already eleven, but my curfew isn’t until midnight and I’ve tested that fence with W so many times that I know exactly where the holes are, and how to duck through them. Being proactive is key.

I thumb a quick text with one hand, not willing to let go of Harley. Home by one. Extra salted caramel in the fridge. Put some on the vanilla ice cream! See you soon!

We end up at a club on Red River, where we cut straight to the back door. A large, burly person who accepts deliveries seems to know Harley. Apparently, that’s the magic of being a bike messenger. They let us in and snap NO DRINK bracelets on our arms, and then we’re set free in the fake-fog-and-laser-strewn darkness. There’s a long bar, a few banquettes, a back room with a pool table. Most of the club is taken up by a sunken black dance floor. And most of the dance floor is taken up by total weirdos.

Every kid who didn’t fit in at every high school in the greater Austin area must be collected here. There are about a hundred people on the dance floor, and another dozen on a small stage in front of a screen that plays music videos. Usually that bothers me, the feeling that you’re supposed to be watching TV instead of dancing, but in this club it’s like moving wallpaper, a page for our bodies to scribble our own ideas on top of. People are swirling their arms, slashing steps in all kinds of interesting directions. Some are dancing in loose, barely knotted groups. Others are completely alone in the crowd, but they don’t look lonely. They look deep into what they’re doing. People are wearing everything from goth velvet to candy-plastic stilettos to frayed denim overalls with very little beneath them. One person is rocking frayed pointe shoes. They’re all dancing in little worlds that rub up against each other. Worlds that only need to be big enough for two things: a body and a beat.

Harley and I find an empty patch of the dance floor, pushed so close by the presence of so many other people that we’re nearly touching. And then we are.

I sigh against Harley’s skin and loosen into the music.

Their hands slide over my shoulders, then down, but they don’t linger in the same places W’s did. They travel and discover things about me, and I feel like I’m discovering those things, too, finding my own shape.

And I smack into something in the dark. Not another dancer. I’m too aware of everyone else’s bodies for that. I slam into the way W used to touch me — the way she gave so much special attention to my chest and hips and everything people consider girly. She thought it was cute for me to play-act the boy part sometimes, to dance the lead at other peoples’ weddings, but at the end of the day she touched me like she wanted to be touched. She touched me like I was a girl.

Even when I told her I was agender, W was so used to me being a girl — in her mind, in her arms, in her bed — that she never treated me like anything else.

It was bothering me, and I didn’t even know it. And because I didn’t know it, I never told her, I never asked if she could change. Knowing that is like a tiny stone in my shoe, throwing me off. It scares me that I could be feeling something so important and also holding it down so completely.

But there’s a new feeling rising through my feet and my legs, my hips and my chest and my arms, spreading all the way to my fingertips. A floating rightness that has everything to do with how Harley touches me.

They bring their face close to mine, and there’s something about how close our cheeks are hovering, how our lips are nearly kissing, how long we’re able to hold off while our hips are already pushing into each other, a slow pour of feelings that we’re not even pretending to hide. “I’m glad that we let that guy in the purple baseball cap at the gay bar have his fun,” Harley whispers. “Because you’re really, really good at this.”

I won’t ruin the moment, but in my head I rush to disagree. W is the good dancer.

But maybe W is just the one who’s always known steps that work for her.

When nobody needs me to be a girl, or a boy, I can be really, really good at this.

I put my arms around them, slide my entire body up and down theirs, shake out a year’s worth of stale worries. I want to tell Harley that their body has whispered something true, and now it’s shouting through my blood, warm and unstoppable. Their dancing is a blur of wild, joyful motion — but they look a little nervous about keeping up with me now that I’m really letting go.

“You’re amazing,” I shout, but it’s so loud in here that I might as well be whispering straight into Harley’s ear.

They grip my waist, palm my hips. They keep up with me.

But this isn’t just about me. It’s about everyone in this room, it’s about all of us, and what shape we get to be when nobody asks us to fit in.

I know where I want to end the night.

“I thought you didn’t want to think about the Proud Muffin,” Harley says as we pull into the mostly emptied-out parking lot.

I turn to Harley in the dark, their curls faintly backlit by a streetlamp filtered through the trees. “I changed my mind. After all that dancing, I need dessert. And I don’t know a better place, do you?”

“No,” Harley says. “Perfect ending, for sure.”

“Don’t talk about things ending, please,” I say quickly. “Not right now.”

Harley nods — then reaches out and touches my hand, not really holding it, just stroking a finger along the back of my knuckles. “Is that . . . is that okay?”

After the way our bodies pushed together on the dance floor, it’s strange how this tiny touch makes my heart flare up.

“Better than okay.”

Harley’s smile widens. There’s a silky silence in the car — that perfect pre-kiss silence. I could lean in right now, I could ask Harley right now, but our first kiss deserves a bigger, better moment. Something unforgettable. And the truth is that I want to kiss them in my favorite place in the world.

Especially if I’m about to lose that place.

We head in through the front door right as the last shift of the night is winding down. Harley doesn’t hold my hand, but I’m aware of exactly how far their fingers are from mine, the way they stir the same space. Gemma and Lex are wiping down the counter and wrapping the cakes and cleaning the espresso machine, steam from the wand making that unmistakable hiss. It hits me with the kind of familiarity that you can’t fake — the kind that only comes from knowing a place by sound and smell and touch as well as you know it by sight.

I was planning on picking out a Harley-friendly dessert and taking it upstairs to the community room for some privacy. We always close it a little early so the counter staff can clean it before they start on the downstairs. I start perusing the sweets behind the glass, but Gemma pulls a little plate up from below the counter.

It’s a dreamy slice of golden pie.

“I saved this for you,” Gemma says. At first, I think it’s a slice of Anger Pie that somehow didn’t wind up in Kevin’s face — not exactly the perfect ending to a perfect date — but then I realize that the crust is definitely Harley’s handiwork. Those perfect crimps are unmistakable. “I found this while cleaning up, and I hated to think that you’d made the whole thing and didn’t even get to taste it.”

“I’m glad that you and Jessalee and Javi enjoyed it so much,” I say as I grab the little plate, plus a napkin and forks from the silverware stand.

“Oh, we did.” She shakes her head emphatically. “We really, really did.”

“It feels like I missed a story there,” Harley says.

I want to tell Harley what happened at brunch — they’ve been my partner in magical bakes since the beginning. But nothing can really stop me from getting up to that community room right now.

“You want to play a game of Truth or Pie?” I ask, heading for the stairs.

“Always,” Harley says. “Wait, what’s Truth or Pie?”

Gemma gives the counter a long wipe. “I’m going to head out soon,” she says. “Lock up when you’re done?”

“You have a key,” Harley says as we climb the narrow stairs. “How have we not been sneaking in here all along?”

“Most people don’t sneak into work.”

Harley puts one hand to their chest, mock-offended. “We aren’t most people.”

And this isn’t just some after-school job. I feel the magic of the Proud Muffin all over again as we top the stairs and arrive in the community room. The floors shine like a mirror glaze. The scent of cinnamon in the air never really fades. The room feels enormous with only the two of us in it. I’ve never seen it empty before — I’ve never had it all to myself.

“Okay,” I say, holding out the little plate in front of Harley. “Truth or pie?”

“I need to know how this works,” Harley says, looking far too serious, which is far too cute.

“This pie inspires quick and complete honesty. It’s highly magical and not to be meddled with. It’s also the most delicious peach-based pie I’ve ever made, and I’ve seen you attack a Texas Breakfast muffin when you think nobody’s looking.”

Harley’s eyes go wide. “You saw that?”

I cross my arms and squint in a decent imitation of Vin. “I see everything that happens in this place.” I push the pie a little closer to Harley’s nose, waiting for the toasted scent to work its wonders. “So, if you pick truth, you have to answer a question. If you pick pie, you have to answer three questions.”

“Those rules make no sense,” Harley points out.

“Oh, they absolutely do. To get a bite of this superlative pie, you have to spill more truth.”

“There’s that baker’s logic,” Harley says, following up the sass with a shyness that I never see coming. It gets me every time. They tug at a back-of-the-neck curl. “You really want to know more about me?”

“Everything,” I correct. “I want to know everything about you.” I feel a shock of nerves at my own boldness — and the fact that I’m ready to reveal anything Harley wants to know about me, too.

“Truth,” Harley says, diving right in.

“What’s the first time you remember flirting with me?”

“The day we met?” Harley says, sitting on the arm of a couch, leaning back with a flicker of a smile.

“Really?” I ask.

“You were working at the counter and I showed up for my first delivery day. We bantered a lot. You told me you liked my shorts.”

“Ugh, I did?”

“To be fair, they are my best bike shorts.”

“Ahhhhhh,” I groan as I locate the memory. Yeah, I did that.

“I flirt a lot, I guess,” Harley says with a shrug. “It’s easy and it doesn’t usually mean anything. People assume that being demisexual means you don’t like flirting, and for some folks I’m sure that’s the case, but for me it’s like . . . a fun game with really low stakes.”

“Ah,” I say. “So you didn’t mind me awkwardly admiring your shorts?” My face must be the color of a strawberry rhubarb tart right now.

Harley shakes their head. “Your turn.”

“Truth,” I say, matching Harley’s opening move.

“Okay. Okay. What’s the thing you’re awkwardly admiring about me right now?”

“Your cowboy boots,” I say a little too quickly. Harley laughs. “I just . . . really like them.” I breathe harder, and it’s only partly because I’m wearing a binder that I picked up at the Proud Muffin clothing swap.

“These boots?” Harley asks, kicking them off with a sigh. “I’m glad you enjoy them, but they’re murder to dance in.”

“Hey!” I say. “You can’t take those off. It’s a health code violation.”

“Truth,” Harley says, kicking off the other boot in complete defiance of my baking boss attitude, then sliding around the wooden boards in sock feet.

“What’s your favorite flavor?” I ask.

They tilt their head, let their thoughts collect. “Turkey?”

“Ughhhhhhh.”

“You asked for truth, Syd. You get what you ask for.”

“Truth,” I say, heel-toeing off both of my sneakers to catch up with Harley. I want to slide around the room, too. I take off in my socks and find a heart-wobbling moment of slippery bliss.

“What’s your favorite flavor?”

“All of them,” I say, spinning around with my arms out, embracing everything delicious.

“That’s not a real answer,” Harley challenges.

“Fine, if you need me to pick a favorite above all other favorites . . .” I discard half a dozen choices before landing on “Butter.”

“Is butter a flavor?” Harley asks.

I skid to a stop. “Think about croissants. Shortbread. A perfect slice of toast. Of course butter is a flavor.”

“Huh. I guess I like it too, then.”

“But not as much as turkey.”

Harley boldly skates over to the spot where I left the little plate. “All right. I’m ready. Pie.”

I follow and load up the fork with a fruit-heavy bite, cupping a hand under it as I fly it over to Harley. They chew with their eyes closed, a look of utter confusion spreading over their face.

“Do you like it?” I ask, shy for maybe the first time ever.

Harley licks a bit of filling from their bottom lip, and then I die. “Yeah. I do.” And I know it’s the truth, which is pretty amazing. I never wanted to push Harley into liking something they didn’t. I just have this need to know every single flavor they love. “Wait, is that one of your questions?”

“No!” I scramble. “That’s just a warm-up.”

“Hmmm,” Harley says dubiously. “Okay, let’s go.”

I have three questions to ask. I have to make them good ones. Harley’s letting this magic of mine take hold, and I can’t waste it.

“Do you want to dance?” I ask while their eyes are still closed.

That flicker of a smile, again. “Yes.”

I go over to the shelves and get to work. Even with all of our stops tonight, there was never really a slow song. I plug my phone into the sound system and cue up the first good thing I see: “Carefully” by the Little Brutes.

Harley’s mouth quirks as the beat bounces from speaker to speaker. When I get back to them, they’re already lifting their arms to hold me. It’s late, and we’re tired, and our bodies have already done the hard work of getting to know each other. We’ve been funny and sweet and fearless, and even though we’ve barely spoken all night, it feels like we’ve been talking for hours and hours.

We can just sway now.

In our socks.

It’s dark outside, dark enough that when I catch a glimpse of the windows, it’s just us, an echo of us. I play with one of Harley’s curls, teasing it apart into red-brown strands.

“This feels like a ninth-grade dance in the best possible way,” Harley says with a laugh.

This is it, the moment we’ve been working up to all night. Or apparently since the first time I saw Harley in bike shorts.

“Do you want to kiss me?” I ask softly while we sway.

“Yes, yes I do.”

Harley looks at me, and without the boots they’re barely an inch taller, which makes it absurdly easy for them to stare straight into my eyes. They get closer, closer, until I can see the individual dark chocolate lashes as Harley blinks, looking eager and nervous and ready. And I’m so happy that when the third question arrives too early, right before Harley’s lips meet mine, I blurt it out.

“Do you want to date me?”

“No,” Harley says.

I back away, fast, my body responding before my brain can even manage.

Harley spins away from me, like they can’t believe they said that. They walk in tight circles, distressing their curls. “I mean, part of me really does, but . . .”

The pie is in Harley’s system, working its magic, which means that what they just told me is true. Part of them wants to date me, but . . . “But you said no.”

There’s this horrible, hovering silence, the opposite of the pre-kiss silence.

“Wait,” I say. “Are we going too fast? Is this . . . is this too much all at once? We can take it slower! I know that W and I were having sex and everything, but we were together for a long time, and I want you to know that I’m not in any kind of hurry.”

Harley nods, still not looking my way. Suddenly the community room is too big, with all of this untouchable distance between us. “I’m not really worried about that, exactly,” Harley says, with painstaking slowness. For the first time, that drawl is not my favorite thing.

“Then what are you worried about?” I ask.

“I like you so much,” Harley says. “An absurd amount.”

“Then why wouldn’t you want to go out with me?” I press.

“Hey, I thought you reached your question limit . . .” Harley tries, but there’s no way I’m sticking to that rule now. This game feels very much like it’s over. And the song ends, making the silence between us even sharper.

“You were with W for a long time . . .” Harley starts.

“You think I’m not over her?” I rush to fill the next blank, to fix this problem. “I’m completely over her.”

Harley waves their hands, finally frustrated. “I’m not afraid you’re still hung up on W. I’ve seen you getting over her and talking about what you had with her and . . . honestly it scares me. Yeah, I sometimes take things slowly because I’m demi, but it’s not . . . it’s not just about timing. That’s making it all about sex, when really it’s about feelings. Whether you want this in the same way that I do. And I’m really, really afraid that you don’t.”

Wow, this pie is not messing around.

I take a few steps closer to Harley, but I don’t want to crowd them, so I stop short. “I like you, Harley. An absurd amount.”

“Okay, but . . . I need to be in love.”

“That sounds good to me,” I say, trying for a smile.

Harley stares down at their socks. “I’m afraid that I’ll fall in love with you and you . . . won’t feel it back.”

“Why?” I know I’m pressing, but I can’t let this go. Where is this coming from? What have I done to make Harley think I won’t fall in love with them?

Harley is staring at me with this heavy sort of disappointment — like the answer is obvious. They head over to the forgotten plate of pie. Slide a bite onto the fork. “It’s your turn, Syd.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

My lips close around the bite, but I can’t feel the loveliness of Harley feeding it to me, or even the taste of the pie. All I can feel is the tremble from their fingers taking over my whole body.

I swallow. Hard.

“Were you ever really, truly, wildly in love with W?” Harley asks.

The answer rushes up, and even though my hand moves to cover my mouth, I have to let it out.

“No.”

Harley takes a step backward, hands in their pockets, a wilted smile on their face. I can feel their sadness filling the huge room. No surprise, though. I didn’t see this truth coming, but they did.

And now we both have to put on our shoes and walk away.

 

1 or more parents who fell asleep on the couch waiting for you to get home

1 bedroom waiting for you, where you will probably never bring your crush

1 or more siblings who usually helps you get through your hurt, who aren’t around for whatever stupid but also perfectly valid reason, for example, college

3 half-hearted attempts to clean the room you now hate

2 fitful hours of not-really-sleeping

1 dawn that comes gray and sickly, reminding you that the rest of your life is still a disaster

1 thing that can’t even be called a breakup

1 heart that feels broken anyway

Mix all ingredients in one big, horrible bowl.

Add tears to taste.