Daisy “Day” Lane wished she was gay. Being straight had been the bane of her existence for most of her life. Not that boys in general had been a problem. It had always been very specific boys. Always the one-in-a-million delightful weirdo who could sing well and who smelled nice and who spent the next four years slowly driving her insane. It wasn’t that all boys, all men were the problem. It wasn’t that, it was never that; men as a whole were fine, from a respectable distance (now more than ever). But the boys and men she’d been attracted to had always been a problem and she could have done without the heartache and the trouble. 

 

So Daisy Day, lover of cats and hummus and the smell of gasoline, who hated summer but loved the sun, wished she was gay. She sat at the living room table, her leg bouncing, waiting for her roommate Ellis. She called him “L,” something she and one other person she’d never met -- never would meet -- called him.

 

He was outside, which shouldn’t have been anything special or particular, but there was a government lockdown on and going outside was a horrifying adventure every time. The pandemic going on wasn’t particularly lethal or scary when watched from the outside, when the only reference you had was horror movies and thrillers, when what you expected was corpses in the street and rioters kicking down your door. But when you were in it and living it and the initial shock of it, the week or two of dissociation where your brain is trying to pretend you’re just roleplaying, wears off, then it suddenly becomes very scary.

It had become very scary for Daisy Lane. Daisy loved swimming, running and hiking and did exactly none of those, because her lungs didn’t work very well, not anymore. “No good reason,” the doctors had said. “Here’s an inhaler. It might help.” 

 

It didn’t. So she didn’t run as much as she used to and she stopped swimming, because whatever they used to clean pools with made it hard to breathe and she stopped going outside much at all after that. There wasn’t much out there for her anymore. She did her work from home, simple code review, usually in her underwear on her bed with a delightful cat named Morse gently chirping on her feet. From time to time, when she coded she would wiggle her toes and Morse would make that “brrp?” noise that cats make, making her smile every time. 

 

And now she sat inside, waiting for Ellis to come home, because he’d gone out to do groceries and she was eating herself raw with nerves, hoping he hadn’t been infected out there, too anxious to do anything but wait for him to come back, wishing she was gay, wishing she wasn’t in love with the person she was in quarantine with.

 

Ellis was a good guy, a great guy, one of those people you wouldn’t mind being in quarantine with because he kept his distance, he was respectful, he used women’s shampoo because he didn’t like to smell like “Rage, For Men”, and he respected the rule of the remote. And he did the groceries now, because they’d agreed that risking her getting infected now, at the height of the pandemic, when medical resources were low, wasn’t worth it. But she worried about him, for no other reason than that his thin face made her happy. 

 

She knew he was going to be back in just minutes and she felt like a golden retriever, ready to run towards Ellis when he got home, knowing full well that she wouldn’t, not until he’d peeled off his coat and gloves and washed his hands for a solid minute, and his face for good measure, at which point she would keep her distance, thank him for the groceries, and call him a dipshit for being so late, because admitting your feelings to people was something for other people. In the words of Uncle Fester: “What if he says no? What if he says yes?!”

 

The door unlocked and she jumped up and hurried to the living room to pretend to be doing something else. After a few minutes, he walked in and made a beeline for the kitchen sink. She heard the running water as she tried to make the blanket look like it had somehow slowly drifted onto her from the ceiling, rather than hastily grabbed and wrapped. She almost had her book upside down when he walked into the living room, letting his hands drip-dry. He had a goofy grin on his face that he often had when she saw him around the house and it made him annoyingly endearing. She was trying not to follow him in her peripheral vision.

 

“Hey,” he said. “I’m back.”

 

“Oh, hey, I didn’t hear you come in,” she lied. “How’d it go?”

 

Ellis leaned against the table and almost put his hands on it, decided not to, and then spent a few awkward seconds trying to figure out what to do with his arms. Salvation came when Morse bumped against his leg and he picked her up. 

 

“Mrrr?” Morse asked. Ellis held her like a baby and gently scratched her chest. 

 

“It went well. Not a lot of people in the store. Paid with the mobile thing.”

 

“Nice. How long were you gone?” She tried to make it sound like she hadn’t been counting the minutes since he left.

 

“Dunno. Thirty minutes?”

 

“Jackass.”

 

“What?” He seemed a little offended. That’s not what she’d wanted but it was unclear even to her what she’d hoped to achieve by calling him names. It wasn’t this, leastways.

 

“The longer you stay out there the higher the chance of carrying something in.”

 

“I’m careful, Day.”

 

She sighed. He’d used her name and now they had to be honest and shit. She hated it when he used her name, because she loved the way he said her name and she wasn’t ready to ask him to say her name over and over again, to whisper it like it was the only word that still mattered. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. That was scary. 

 

“I know you are, El. I’m sorry for giving you shit. I’m just…”

 

Oops. She’d unlocked the door again. Since the pandemic had become a stark reality and they’d both started limiting their access to the outside world, she’d kept some doors locked. She tried not to worry too much about her grandparents. She tried not to think about the people with conditions like hers who were already affected too much. It all weighed heavily on her and she felt like a terrible person for keeping those feelings out, but she was buckling under the pressure as it stood. 

 

The last door was, of course, the fear. There was something about living in quarantine that some people got and some people didn’t. Some people were pretty well off. They were healthy and their friends were healthy and they sat in the park and threw a frisbee back and forth, and took their work-at-home breaks four hours early and four hours long, got their stuff done at night, and the whole thing was a summer vacation. And for other people, once the weird wore off, only the scary remained. 

 

For weeks, Daisy had lived in a state of fear. It had replaced her mood altogether. Her mood didn’t fluctuate, her fear did. Sometimes the fear was manageable and sometimes it was overwhelming, but it was never not there, a creature buried in her chest that squirmed and made it even harder to breathe, and then the difficulty breathing just added to the fear, and she’d hyperventilate.

 

“I’m so scared,” she said. Or tried to say, because the words got stuck in her mouth, stopped by the short inhales that indicated the upcoming panic attack. Words weren’t going to happen. The door had been unlocked. Fear, like the neighbourhood cat who eats from your dog’s bowl and pees against the furniture, had snuck in. Her breathing rasped as her lungs struggled to keep up. Failed to keep up. 

 

Ellis stood powerlessly by the side. “Do you want me to come closer...? Do you want me to go or--”

 

She shook her head violently and just reached out to him. She had to trust he hadn’t gotten infected out there, not today, because what she needed was to be held. He rushed over and sat down next to her as the tears came, the ugly, stuttered crying that broke her throat and he held her to his chest.

 

“I’m sorry,” she tried several times as her whole body tensed and cramped up as the fear rolled over her in waves, crying that seemed to come from nowhere but the constant anxiety and stress, admission of their presence enough of a catalyst for her to break down completely. She tried to apologize for him being stuck here with her, for having to comfort her, to do the outside chores she couldn’t, was too afraid to do. For being a burden. 

 

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. Her hair clung to her face, wet from tears, and he stroked it out of the way. He didn’t say much beyond that, just held her to him and swayed gently and cried a bit too, though she couldn’t see that until he pulled away when she’d calmed down.

 

“Thank you,” she finally managed. It was very small and the woman who had tried to keep herself aloof was gone. She was too scared and pained for anything like that.

 

“You’re fine, Day. I get it. I really do,” he said. “I’ll go make us some dinner.”

 

Dinner was nice, though Daisy couldn’t taste much. Crying congested her something fierce. She didn’t say anything to him, though; she didn’t want him to think she didn’t appreciate the effort he put in for her. They talked about television and movies, things they’d missed or still needed to catch up on. They both realized that the path of their conversation, by omission, had drawn a perfect profile of everything they’d avoided talking about, and it had felt a little stilted, right up until Ellis had made a joke that was the perfect blend of self-deprecating and still hilarious that Daisy almost snorted her drink out through her nose. Things were a little more comfortable after that. 

 

They both enjoyed each other’s company immensely, something neither had expected when they’d first moved in together. She’d been apprehensive of living alone with a man, because she’d heard the horror stories, but the rent had been too good to pass up. Ellis had been apprehensive, he confessed to her during pizza-and-beer-night some months later, because he knew how unsafe women could feel. He’d heard the horror stories too, and he didn’t want any woman to feel unsafe if he could help it. She’d trusted him a lot more after that. Ellis had clearly put in the work to empathize, even if he hadn’t experienced that fear himself. He was a good guy, and she enjoyed hanging out with him and she wanted him to pick her up and kiss her until she forgot her own name. But she only mentioned the first two to him, and he blushed a little bit. She grinned with satisfaction until the end of dinner. 

 

She went to bed soon after. She always did. She had never chosen to be an early bird, and it was a weird habit for a coder to do something as pedestrian as going to bed on time, but her breathing problems left her almost permanently tired. Exhaustion usually knocked her out early, shortly after dinner. She did have the advantage of waking up at around sunrise. She was quite happy about it, all things considered. She got to watch the sun come up, and she didn’t miss out on going out because she didn’t really go out to begin with. 

 

She carried Morse under one arm and her book under the other as she went upstairs, thanking him for the food and the company. He just waved at her. He was going to stay downstairs a bit longer, hang up some laundry. That was very nice of him.

 

Morse beeped in protest as she laid down and held her like a stuffed animal, but didn’t mind enough to actually wriggle out of Daisy’s grip, and soon they both snoozed off comfortably. 

 

At some point during the night, Morse had a bad dream, spun around, and kicked Daisy hard in the face, sprinted off the bed and ran full force into the door.

 

“Okay,” Daisy mumbled, “I’m awake, you little gremlin.” She wrapped herself in the biggest bathrobe she owned and grabbed Morse. 

 

“Brwah?” Morse asked.

 

“I’m taking you with me against monsters,” Daisy said. That seemed to satisfy the cat’s curiosity. She figured that, being awake, she might as well go to the bathroom. She looked at the alarm clock and sighed, because it was between the hours of ‘you should be asleep’ and ‘some people are getting up already’. Soon there’d be the chirping of early birds outside. She groaned in frustration and opened the bedroom door. 

 

Ellis froze, like a deer in headlights. He’d just walked through the hallway, on his way to his room.. 

 

“Ellis?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Is that my…”

 

“Yeah…”

 

“I’m going to the bathroom, Ellis.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“We should probably talk about this.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Make sure to, eh…”

 

“...”

 

“Don’t stretch it.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Daisy had gone to the bathroom and washed her hands as long as the medical broadcast recommended and then again that long. Then she picked Morse back up and went downstairs, because she saw the lights were on. It looked like her roommate wanted to have the talk now, which was fine and dandy with her because she hadn’t planned anything, or at least nothing that wasn’t just kind of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and asking herself questions she didn’t have the answers to.

 

Her roommate sat at the kitchen table, no longer wearing her clothes, instead all doofed up in what appeared to be the largest, fluffiest, comfiest hoodie she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t help but smile. Morse kicked her legs a little bit and she dropped the furball gently on the ground. 

 

“Brrrep,” Morse said, and went looking for something. Whether that thing would be food or a toy remained to be seen, but she was going to have a go at both eating and playing with it regardless. 

Daisy sat down at the table and tried to sit in a way that didn’t make her feel like she was performing an interrogation. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, clasped her hands together and realized that that made her look like a concerned mom, and finally pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. Better small and vulnerable than faux-confident, not when talking to someone who most likely felt very small and very vulnerable. 

 

“So, eh…” she mumbled. 

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I don’t know how to start this,” she said.

 

“Me neither. I’ve never…”

 

“You’ve never talked to anyone about this?”

 

Nod nod.

 

“Is it… just wearing my clothes? Is… is this a sex thing?”

 

“No! No… No it isn’t.”

 

“Wait… El, you said you get it… being scared all the time…”

 

“Hmm.”

 

“Is that what you’re talking about.”

 

“Part of it is, yeah.”

 

“Part?”

 

“I’m also very scared for you, Day. I don’t want you to get sick. You’re very important to me.”

 

Daisy started to tear up. She’d gone from confused to worried to overwhelmed in a very short amount of time. 

 

“Awww,” she managed, quietly. “You’re important to me too. I want to… I want to understand what’s going on.”

 

Shrug. It was one of those shrugs that tried to look noncommittal and casual and ended up illustrating just how tired and worried you really are.

 

“I don’t really understand myself, Day. I just… I feel better…”

 

“Wearing my sweater dresses?” she said with a bit of a smirk.

 

“I… yeah.”

 

Her smirk disappeared. “Is it just that?”

 

“No.”

 

Daisy paused. She’d heard about this; she’d come into contact with people who were like this, but she didn’t know, didn’t know what to say or do or feel, but she knew she cared about her roommate and she wanted to do what she could to make sure this house was still a house both of them could live in comfortably and happy. Most of all, she really didn’t want her roommate to leave. 

 

“Do you want me to call you something other than El?” she tried. 

 

“I… I don’t think so. I mean, you’re already using a name other than my given name.”

 

“So no more of that one, then? Just El?”

 

“Yes. Yes, please.”

 

Daisy nodded. “I can do that. And if you… if you ever want to try something different, just let me know, okay? I don’t want to… hurt you.” Her voice got quieter and softer as she approached ‘openly admitting how she felt’ territory. She got up and walked to the kitchen, wiped down the kettle with a sanitary wipe, and put some water on as she thought about things. 

 

“Are you okay, Day?”

 

“M-hmm. Just processing. Putting you in a different box in my head, if that makes sense.”

 

El smiled. “It does. I’m… thank you.”

 

Daisy smiled back. “Of course. Is there… is there anything else about this you want to tell me?”

 

“I… I don’t know. I’ve been using El online a lot. My headset has a voice-changer… I… oh, there’s something I’ve always appreciated.”

 

“Oh?” Daisy asked curiously as the water started to boil. She gestured at El with a cup, who nodded gratefully. 

 

“So, like, you’ve always complained about how much you hate being straight, right?” 

 

She nodded. It wasn’t something she’d kept a secret. In fact, she’d complained about it to El loudly over their time living together. Whether she’d hoped that it would lead to her roommate going “I’ll be the right one for you” and kissing her then and there, or if it had been a kind of self-defense tactic where she’d made it clear that she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. She realized that it could kind of go both ways, the way she’d moaned at length about how truly terrible men were. As it was starting to turn out, she’d sort of missed her target audience by half a gender at the very least.

 

“Well,” El continued, “I always appreciated the fact that you never made a pass at me. I know you mentioned that you didn’t fall for a lot of guys but it always, you know, made me feel a little valid, you know?”

 

“What do you mean?” Daisy cocked her head.

 

“Well… if you’re straight, and you didn’t like me that way, that meant that I was, you know…”

 

El trailed off.

 

“Not a guy?” Daisy tried. 

 

Nod nod. 

 

“Do… do you think you’re a girl, then?”

 

Another nod.

 

Now was probably not the best time to confess the full extent of her now months-enduring crush on them, then. Daisy had already moved El out of the ‘man’ box in her head, but she hadn’t known where to put them. Not that everyone needed a box, obviously. Even ‘no box’ was a good space. But now she had confirmation that El fit in the ‘girl’ box and it seemed to fit her well.

 

Daisy looked at her in a new light. She thought back to the sweater dress El had been wearing earlier. It hadn’t been unflattering. It was novel, to look at El in this new way, to look at her as being a fellow girl, and she was mentally reframing their interactions over the past few months. El having been a fellow girl made sense. 

 

There was a snag, of course, a big one. Daisy had wanted to make a pass at her roommate this entire time, but she also knew that all of her relationships with men usually ended in disaster. She knew that her taste in men was so terrible that falling for one was usually proof of them being terrible for her. But now El had turned out to be a girl.

 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” El said bashfully. She seemed a lot… smaller, now, than she had earlier. The confidence, the strength in her shoulders, seemed to have dropped. It was just a trick of the light, a change in posture, but El seemed to be slimmer and softer now. “I… Is something wrong? Did I say something wrong?”

 

Daisy panicked, because the last thing she wanted right now was for El to feel looked at, ogled at, seen as a curiosity. She wanted the opposite, she wanted El to feel comfortable and safe.

 

“No! Not at all! I’m just… I’m thinking of you as a girl and it…” She paused, a little bit for effect as she smiled the most genuine, warmest smile. “It suits you.”

 

El blushed and looked down. “Thank you. You’re not… not just…?”

 

“I’m not just saying that. I mean, I wish you’d asked before you pilfered my dress,” Daisy laughed softly, “but, well…”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“It looked… It looks good on you. It suits you.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“I think you looked very pretty in it.”

 

“Thank you,” El said again, even softer.

 

“Can I hug you?” Daisy asked. “It’s the least I can do after you helped me out today.”

 

Nod nod.

 

Daisy walked around the table, sat on the chair next to El’s, and hugged her. El was warm, probably completely worked up and still blushing furiously. 

 

“Thank you,” El said again, and then again, and then over and over again as Daisy softly rested her cheek on El’s head. 

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

They both went to bed again not long after that, though it wouldn’t do them much good, the sun coming up some half hour after that. They both stayed in their respective beds for a long time that day. El didn’t have to go to work, not anymore, not with the lockdown on. Her boss was getting a government grant for staying closed and she was getting her normal salary, thank heavens. She tried to read, but ended up just staring at her phone for hours. Her mind was on other things. She’d outed herself to her roommate now, who had all the time in the world to change her mind about being understanding about this. Of course, El hoped her trust hadn’t been misplaced, and she liked to think she knew Daisy well enough to know that she wouldn’t deliberately hurt El. There was, of course, also the matter of feelings, but Daisy was, after all, straight, so El had put those thoughts aside a long time ago. 

 

In the other room, Daisy tried to code for a little bit but it didn’t look like it was going to happen. She kept thinking about El. El the girl. El the girl who had secretly snuck away her sweater dress and who felt good in them and looked even better. El, her roommate, who was challenging her preconceived notions of what boys and girls, men and women could look like. She tried to focus, but it wasn’t happening, just images of El smiling and crying and saying thank you in that wonderfully small and cute voice. 

 

The worst thing for Daisy, of course, was that she’d been lamenting the fact that she was into men, and that the person she lived with was one of them. Now it seemed that neither might have been true. 

 

On the one hand, she’d figured that, if El had been a girl, then she wouldn’t have been into her and that would have solved the problem, because she was, as she’d stated to herself so many times over the years, ‘straight’. On the other hand, if she hadn’t been straight, then she wouldn’t have been into her roommate, who had seemed to have been a man. 

 

El was a girl, that was becoming clearer and clearer to her as time went on. It became more and more difficult to see her as anything but another woman. There was something about her that was just distinctly feminine. A woman-y quality that she couldn’t pin down, and wasn’t going to try to. El was a woman. 

 

However, Daisy was also still really into her. She chewed her lip as she worked through that thinking. This was, she thought to herself, some real monkey’s paw bullshit.

 

“I wish I was gay so I wouldn’t be into my absolute gem of a roommate,” she’d imagined herself wishing.

 

“Granted, but your roommate is a girl.”

 

She kept mulling this stuff over in her head. 

 

She’d always been into men, that was beyond question. That attraction had been real. But every girl always felt a little gay towards other girls, right? It was the inherent softness. But now this whole thing was forcing her to consider things a little more deeply and thoroughly. She was into El. Like a lot. A lot a lot. She was having to realize that she might be more than a little gay. 

 

Daisy was gay for El, and not just a little. To be less than outrageously gay would be doing El a disservice, would be invalidating them, invalidating how Daisy saw her now. She crossed her arms and Morse said “prrrrp” and nestled in between Daisy’s knees. 

 

Daisy Lane had always wanted to be gay, and now she was gay for the girl whose door was next to her own and she kind of wanted to tell her, to trust her with this information in the same way she’d been trusted. 

 

In the other room, El wasn’t aware of any of this. El was partly riding the high of coming out, which was to her almost like catnip. Having come out was a huge relief, but it also made her feel like she’d achieved something, overcome something. And Daisy’s reaction had been perfect. So perhaps now was the time for another confession. And it would be okay if those feelings wouldn’t be reciprocated, they just had to get out.

 

They both sat in their beds and thought about each other; both had a dozen conversations with the other in their heads. Then both of them got up, and came to the same decision simultaneously. Both sent each other a text asking to talk, and went to their door to wait for the other to open it. They almost bumped into each other when both their phones started to buzz, and they both looked and laughed.

 

“What was it you--” Daisy tried.

 

“You wanted to--” El said at the same time.

 

“No, you go fi--”

 

“You g--”

 

“No, you go first,” Daisy finally managed.

 

They both laughed again. The tension between them had become a real thing, like a coiled spring that pulled them towards each other, something much more tangible than it had ever been. There had been unspoken things before, but now there were secret feelings in the air, of the kind you can’t hide from yourself, let alone from others.

 

“Day,” El said, softly, and looked in her eyes, long, too long for a look between friends or housemates. Daisy didn’t mind. 

 

“El?” Daisy responded and looked right back, and she wasn’t all that scared anymore.