Remember this, I told myself, and I closed my eyes.

Chapter 10

January 1995

“Alex, are you even listening?”

Blinking rapidly my eyes darted between Molly and Orla who were both staring at me expectantly. No, I hadn’t been listening. I was barely aware there was a conversation taking place, let alone one I was supposed to be a part of. My cheeks tinged ever so slightly, and Connie’s lips twitched into a smirk.

“God, Alex. Try to keep up,” she chimed in, her voice unmistakably smug.

I clenched my jaw, glaring at her as subtly as I could manage, while Connie smiled back. The hand making tantalizing strokes on my inner thigh moved a few centimeters higher, and I had to bite down on my lip to keep a whimper from escaping. I slid along the bench as delicately as I could but she casually followed me, the table between us and the others hiding the way her hand tipped just slightly past the bottom of my skirt. What the table couldn’t hide, however, was the red in my cheeks.

“Sorry,” I coughed, just as Connie edged her hand higher. “I just got a bit distracted.”

“For someone so smart you sure do get distracted a lot,” Molly grumbled. “Anyway. As I was saying—”

I took the opportunity to grab the hand on my leg. I was just trying to stop her from teasing me, nothing more, but all of a sudden, our fingers were knotted together and we were holding hands beneath the table. Short of someone crawling beneath the table, nobody was going to see it. Holding hands. Inappropriate touching and teasing and tormenting was fine, sure, but holding hands in secret felt like a whole different game. Our eyes met and I raised an eyebrow, watching Connie intently before she relaxed and gave me a barely perceptible nod. She squeezed my hand and I ignored the voice at the back of my head, that ever-persistent chorus of maybes.

“If you wanted to hold my hand,” I whispered into her ear, when Molly and Orla’s attention was stolen elsewhere, fighting back a smirk, “all you had to do was ask.”

“How did you know you were gay?” she asked me later that evening. Her head was on my chest and I was playing with the loose strands of hair framing her face, both of us lying in her bed.

How did I know? It was a difficult question, and always had been. “I think I’ve just always known,” I answered quietly. “I mean—you said it yourself, before. It was obvious.”

“You never thought you might like boys?”

“I—no, I didn’t. Never. Before I even knew what all of it meant I knew I was different, that I liked girls and not boys. I never struggled with it either, really. When I realized that being gay was, you know, a thing, it was sorta like—well, that’s the answer to that then.”

She smiled up at me, but there was a hint of insecurity in her gaze. “Always so sure of yourself.”