I moved my foot to the outside of his under the table and kept it there. “It’s not bad. It’s just… this is probably going to sound corny, and it’s probably too soon to dump this on you, but I’m so glad I met you. To finally find someone who not only understands me, but is like me… it feels like I won the lottery.” He looked about to say something, and maybe this was crazy-fast, but I felt something in my very core for Jordan. I put my hand up. “Maybe I’m not saying this right and I don’t want to scare you off. But for me to meet someone who not only gets me but who is the same as me, well that’s pretty amazing.”

He frowned at his plate. “No, I get it. I really do. I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was just different and that was who I was. And like I told you at the support meeting, I have so many labels already, I didn’t really need another one. But I’m thinking now maybe it wasn’t the label I had the issue with. Maybe it was finally admitting there was something different about me, because if I admitted it, it made it true and then I had to face it. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “I do, yeah.”

He smiled. “And that right there is why I’m glad I met you too. Because you’re like me. There are other people who are like me. There’s nothing wrong with me, there’s nothing abnormal about me.”

“No, there’s not. The word normal should be thrown in the garbage.”

“I’m thinking of writing Merriam-Webster a sternly worded letter,” he joked. “It needs to be removed. Along with the word baccalaureate. Not for any other reason that I just don’t like it, and I can never spell it right on the first go.”

“Do you have to use it often?”

“Too often. You’d be surprised.”

“Then it should be abolished immediately.”

He smiled at me, a half-smile. A comfortable, lazy kind of smile that made him look as cute as hell. “But getting back to my point,” he said. “You’ve shown me that it’s okay to have hard limits and likes and preferences, and that I don’t have to endure unwanted sex just to feel like society tells me I should feel. Because that’s not who I am; I know that now, and I know it’s not a defect. So for that reason, I’m really glad I met you too.”

I grinned at him.

“I mean there are other reasons I’m glad I met you, the most perfect second date in history, notwithstanding.”

“Such as?”