Jesse's house smelled like cumin and love.
That was the only way to describe it. The Martinez home was everything mine wasn't—loud, chaotic, filled with the sounds of three younger siblings arguing about whose turn it was to use the Xbox and a mother who sang along to the radio while cooking and a father who came home at reasonable hours and actually knew his children's names.
"Charlie!" Mrs. Martinez enveloped me in a hug before I was even fully through the door. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, but she hugged with the force of someone three times her size. "Jesse says you were attacked by a horse!"
"It wasn't really an attack."
"He punched it in the face!" Jesse said proudly from the kitchen doorway. "It was awesome."
"It was self-defense," I corrected, but Mrs. Martinez was already clucking over my arm, examining the bruises with maternal concern.
"You need to put arnica on this," she said. "And I made extra enchiladas. You're too skinny. When was the last time you ate?"
"I ate lunch."
"School lunch doesn't count. Sit. Eat." She pushed me toward the kitchen table, where Jesse's siblings—Diego, twelve, Sofia, nine, and baby Ana, who was somehow already six and not a baby at all—were already engaged in what appeared to be a territorial dispute over the last juice box.
"Charlie!" Ana abandoned her argument and climbed into my lap, which she had been doing since she was two and I had rescued her from a particularly aggressive goose at the county fair. "Did you really punch a horse?"
"He bit me first," I said, because it was reflexive at this point.
"That's what Jesse said you'd say." Ana settled against my chest, her dark hair tickling my chin. "I think horses are scary. I wouldn't punch one. I'd run away."
"Running away is also a valid strategy," I agreed.
"Charlie's brave," Jesse said, sitting down across from me. "He's the bravest person I know."
I felt my face go hot. "I'm really not."
"You punched a horse, man. That's objectively brave. Or stupid. But I'm going with brave."
The enchiladas were, as always, incredibly,spicy and cheesy and exactly what I needed after the day I'd had. I ate three of them while Mrs. Martinez fussed over me and Mr. Martinez asked me about my college plans and the younger Martinez children argued about whether Thor could beat Superman in a fight (Diego said yes, Sofia said no, Ana said she didn't care because Wonder Woman was better than both).
This was what I wanted, I realized. Not just Jesse, though definitely Jesse. But family, warmth, acceptance, the feeling of being loved not despite who you were but because of it.
And I couldn't have it. Not really. Not if they knew.
Because as much as the Martinez family loved me, and they did, I knew they did, that love came with assumptions. It came with the expectation that I would eventually bring a nice girl home to my own family, that Jesse and I would be best friends forever with our wives and children playing together on weekends, that we would grow up to be the men we were supposed to be according to a script written long before we were born.
"Charlie?" Jesse waved a hand in front of my face. "You okay? You zoned out."
"Yeah, sorry. Just thinking about the English test."
"Liar. You already read the book twice. You're going to ace it." Jesse stood up, grabbing my empty plate. "Come on, let's go upstairs. I want to show you something."
I followed him up to his room, which I had been in approximately one thousand times before but which felt different now, charged with something I couldn't name. Jesse's room was a disaster zone of clothes and sports equipment and books he meant to read but never did. Posters of bands and basketball players covered the walls. His bed was unmade, a blue comforter tangled with sheets that smelled like him.
"Close the door," Jesse said, and I did, my heart hammering against my ribs.
He was going to tell me something. This was it. This was the moment when he would look at me and say "I know how you feel about me" or "I feel it too" or "why have we been pretending this is just friendship when it's obviously something more?"
"Check this out," Jesse said, and pulled out his phone.
Not what I was expecting.
"I found this app," he said, scrolling through something. "It's for... people like us. People who are figuring things out."
I stared at him, my brain short-circuiting. "People like us?"
"Yeah, you know. People who don't quite fit in. People who feel... different." Jesse's voice was careful, measured in a way it usually wasn't. "I thought maybe... I don't know. Maybe you'd want to check it out too."
He turned the phone toward me. On the screen was an app called "Spectrum"—a social network for LGBTQ+ youth.
I felt the floor tilt beneath me. "Jesse, I..."
"I know," he said quickly. "I know you haven't said anything, and you don't have to. But I've noticed things, Charlie. The way you look at me sometimes. The way you change the subject when people talk about dating. The way you flinch when someone says something homophobic in the locker room, even when it's not directed at you."
He knew. He knew, and he wasn't running away. He was standing there, holding out his phone, offering me a lifeline.
"How long?" I managed to ask.
"I don't know. Awhile, I guess. I wasn't sure until the horse thing." Jesse smiled, small and nervous. "You only punch horses when you're really stressed about something. And you've been really stressed for months."
"And you're... you're okay with it? With me?"
Jesse set down his phone and stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell his shampoo, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes.
"Charlie," he said, "I've been in love with you since we were fourteen and you gave me your jacket when I was cold at the homecoming game."
The world stopped.
"I didn't. What?"
"You didn't notice. That's okay. I didn't want you to notice. I wasn't ready." Jesse reached out, his hand hovering near my face, not quite touching. "But I'm ready now. And if you're not, that's okay too. But I couldn't keep pretending. Not when you're walking around punching horses because you're scared."
"I'm not scared," I lied.
"You're terrified. I can see it." His hand finally made contact, his fingers brushing my cheek, and I leaned into the touch like a plant reaching for sunlight. "You don't have to be scared with me, Charlie. You never have to be scared with me."
I kissed him.
I didn't mean to. Or maybe I did. Maybe I had been meaning to for three years and only just now got brave enough. But I leaned in and my mouth found his and it was clumsy and awkward and perfect, better than I had imagined in a thousand daydreams, better than any collarbones.
Jesse made a surprised noise against my lips, then his hands were in my hair and he was kissing me back, really kissing me, with tongue and teeth and the kind of desperation that comes from wanting something for a very long time.
We broke apart, breathless, foreheads pressed together.
"Wow," Jesse whispered.
"Yeah," I agreed, because eloquence had left the building.
"Should we... do that again?"
"Please," I said, and we did.
We spent the next hour making out on Jesse's unmade bed, pausing only to laugh at how ridiculous we were being, how long we had wasted pretending this wasn't what we both wanted. It was like discovering a new color, a new language, a new way of being in the world that had always existed but that I had never been allowed to access.
"This is crazy," Jesse said at one point, his head on my chest, his fingers tracing patterns on my stomach. "We're going to have to tell people."
"Not yet," I said, panic rising. "Jesse, please. Not yet."
"Hey." He propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me with serious eyes. "I'm not going to out you. I would never. But eventually, we're going to want to hold hands in public. We're going to want to go to prom together. We're going to want to be real."
"I know. I just..." I swallowed hard. "My parents. Your parents. This town. You know how it is."
"I know." Jesse's expression softened. "I know exactly how it is. But Charlie, things are changing. There are gay kids at our school. There's a GSA now. It's not perfect, but it's better than it used to be."
"Better isn't the same as good," I pointed out. "Better just means 'less likely to get physically assaulted.' The expectations are still there. The assumptions are still there. Everyone still expects us to grow up and marry women and have kids and be 'normal.'"
"Then we change the expectations," Jesse said simply. "We live our lives openly and honestly, and we show them that there's more than one way to be normal."
"You make it sound easy."
"It's not easy. It's going to suck sometimes. People are going to be jerks, and our families are going to need time to adjust, and we're going to have to figure out how to be boyfriends in a world that still thinks 'boyfriend' only applies to girls." Jesse kissed my nose. "But it's worth it. You're worth it. We're worth it."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that love could be enough, that the world was really changing, that I could have this: Jesse, happiness, acceptance without having to fight for every inch of it.
But I had been fighting my whole life, in ways I hadn't even recognized until recently. Fighting to fit in, fighting to perform the right kind of masculinity, fighting to want the right things and be attracted to the right people and follow the script that had been written for me before I was born.
And I was tired.
"I need time," I said. "To figure out how to do this. How to be... this."
"Take all the time you need," Jesse said. "I'm not going anywhere."
We lay there in silence, listening to the sounds of his family downstairs. Diego yelling about something, Sofia laughing, Mrs. Martinez singing along to Selena. Normal sounds. Happy sounds. The sounds of a life I wanted but didn't know how to build.
"Hey," Jesse said eventually. "You know what the best part of this is?"
"What?"
"Now when people ask if this is about a girl, you can say no." He grinned. "Technically, it'll be true."
I laughed, surprised by it, feeling some of the weight lift from my chest. "You're ridiculous."
"Ridiculously in love with you," he agreed, and kissed me again.
I went home that night feeling like I was walking on a different planet. Everything looked the same—the same streets, the same houses, the same stars overhead—but everything felt different. I was different. I had crossed some invisible threshold, stepped through a door I hadn't known was there, and now I was on the other side.
My father was waiting up for me when I got home, which was unusual. He was usually asleep by ten, exhausted from his long shifts.
"Charlie," he said from his armchair in the living room. "Sit down. We need to talk."
My heart stopped. He knew. Somehow, he knew. Mrs. Martinez had called, or Jesse's parents had figured it out, or someone had seen us through Jesse's window, and now my father was going to tell me I was going to hell or that I was no longer his son or that I needed to pray harder and want different things.
"Dad, I can explain."
"Mrs. Henderson called me at work," he said, and I blinked, wrong-footed. "She's threatening to sue. She says you traumatized her horse."
Oh. The horse. Right.
"I didn't traumatize him. He bit me. Three times."
"She says he's been off his feed since the incident. Won't let anyone ride him. She's talking about therapy for the horse, Charlie. Therapy."
I stared at my father, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for him to say "and also I know about you and Jesse Martinez and I'm disappointed in you."
But he didn't. He just rubbed his temples and sighed.
"I'll talk to her. See if we can settle this without lawyers. But Charlie, you can't go around punching animals. I know you're going through something, your mother told me about the girl, but that doesn't give you license to assault livestock."
I almost laughed. Almost. The girl. My mother had told him about the girl, which meant she had told him I was straight, or straight-ish, or at least following the expected narrative. And he had accepted that without question, because why wouldn't he? Why would he ever imagine that his son was anything other than what he was supposed to be?
"I'm sorry," I said, and I meant it, though not for the reasons he thought. "I'll be more careful."
"Good." My father stood up, crossed the room, and pulled me into a hug. He smelled like motor oil and Old Spice, the same smell he'd had my entire life. "I love you, kid. You know that, right? No matter what. No matter who this girl is or what you're going through. I love you."
"I love you too, Dad," I said, and felt tears prick my eyes.
He loved me. He really did. But he loved a version of me that didn't exist, a version that wanted the right things and followed the right script and would eventually bring home a nice girl and get married and make him a grandfather.
And I didn't know how to tell him that version was never going to be real.