She doesn’t mean to click this one.
She’s midway through a scroll, thumb on autopilot, when her brain catches up with the title:
Gay Old Time.
Her first instinct is to keep going.
Not because she’s offended.
Because she’s… tired.
Tired in that specific way you get when every conversation about queerness feels like a quiz you didn’t study for, but your name is somehow still on the attendance sheet.
She scrolls back up anyway.
Curiosity 1, avoidance 0.
By paragraph three she’s snorting at “Spirit Halloween dick” and quietly mouthing “oh my god” at the locker-room story.
It’s not her experience — wrong gender, wrong town, wrong decade.
But the shape of it feels familiar:
People deciding what you are based on vibes, volume, and whatever jokes were in circulation that year.
She never got “gay Jesus.”
She got:
“You sure you’re not… a little bi?”
“You’re obsessed with her, dude.”
“You know you talk about girls more than your actual boyfriend, right?”
She always laughed it off. Rolled her eyes. Said something like, “I’m just picky, not gay.”
Then went home and spent an hour zooming in on some actress’s breast in a screenshot without fully examining why.
When he writes about jerking off to guys and feeling like it’s a thought-crime, she feels this tiny, sideways pang.
Not because she would admit to doing that.
Her porn search history is a whole different mess:
“Lesbian rough but not too rough”.
“Girl slapped” (and then frantically adding “consensual” like the algorithm cares).
“Choking soft fem dom”.
“Impact play tutorial” that she absolutely does not need for educational purposes.
There’s always a girl in the center of the frame she can’t stop tracking.
Sometimes the one doing the hitting.
Sometimes the one getting knocked sideways by it.
She tells herself it’s about technique.
Positioning.
Lighting.
Anything but the way her stomach flips when she sees fingers on a jawline instead of a dick.
She remembers being younger at a sleepover and getting caught staring a little too long at her best friend’s collarbones while they changed into pajamas.
Her friend didn’t notice.
Her friend’s older sister did.
“Wow, eyes up, babe,” she’d said, half-teasing, half-not.
It burned.
Not because it was wrong.
Because it wasn’t.
Later, in the bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror and tried on the word:
Gay.
It didn’t fit.
Neither did straight, exactly.
It was like putting on a shirt from somebody else’s closet: almost the right size, wrong shoulders.
She decided she’d just… skip labels until one magically felt good.
Then forgot to go back and check.
The part in the post about being “the gay one” before you’re anything lands harder than she wants it to.
She’s never been the designated gay friend.
She’s been:
The girl everyone confides crushes in.
The one who hypes other women’s outfits like it’s a sport.
The one who remembers every haircut, every perfume, every new outfit.
She clocked the art teacher’s undercut before she noticed the hot student teacher’s jaw.
She noticed the smallest detail on women first, always:
A ring.
A vein in a hand.
A bruised knee.
A lipstick shade.
and only later remembered to check if the guy next to them was actually her “type.”
The weird part is no one really ever gave her a hard time for it.
They just folded it into the running joke:
“You’d pull so many girls if you ever switched teams.”
“You’re like… gay-coded but with men, it’s weird.”
She laughed.
She leaned into it.
It was easier than saying:
“I don’t know what team I’m on. I just know which scenes make me forget my own name.”
Lately, the scenes that do that look a lot like:
A girl getting slapped (harder than she admits she wants).
A girl doing the slapping, eyes calm, voice low.
Shoulders pinning shoulders.
Hair pulled into fists that aren’t male.
She doesn’t picture herself as the guy.
She doesn’t always picture herself as the girl.
She just… hovers.
Wanting to be inside the gravity of it somehow.
The post talks about masc chaos and gay men coming on too strong. She doesn’t have that.
What she has is:
Boyfriends she liked “enough,”. a handful of men she actually wanted. and this quiet, insistent awareness that the women in the background were lighting up the same parts of her brain porn does.
She’s never said that out loud.
It feels dramatic.
Unearned.
Like she has to “prove” her way into some queer category by racking up numbers and heartbreaks first.
So she keeps it where it lives now: in browser tabs, in almost-comments she deletes, in that strange mix of envy and arousal she gets watching a girl take a hit and smile like she’s home.
When she reaches the line:
“When nobody’s looking, when you’re not performing for anyone,
whose energy actually feels like home in your body?”
…she doesn’t think of a specific person.
She thinks of a type.
Soft voice, sharp mouth.
Hands that could hurt if they wanted to.
Eyes that would notice a flinch faster than any dick.
The fact that it’s not gender-locked annoys her.
It would be so much easier if it were.
If she could just say:
“Yes, I am this, and I only want that.”
But her brain has never worked like that.
It’s always been:
That one guy.
That one girl.
That one moment where someone steps in close and her whole body goes very, very quiet.
She locks her phone and lies there for a second, staring at the ceiling.
Somewhere in her “recommended” tab is a new impact-play compilation she’s been saving for later.
Somewhere in her group chat is a friend calling herself “gay as hell now fr” and posting another thirst trap with a girl.
Somewhere in the back of her head is a small, annoying thought:
You know exactly what you’d be watching if nobody could audit your history.
She doesn’t rename herself.
She doesn’t draft a coming-out post.
She just lets herself admit — privately, silently — that if anyone ever turned to her and said,
“Hey, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in the world if you were into girls too,”
she wouldn’t argue this time.
She’d probably just laugh,
roll her eyes,
and say,
“Yeah, well. It’s complicated,”
while her body quietly, finally, stopped pretending it had no idea what they were talking about.
Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 10
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