Lotus17

CW for the first half of this chapter: Emotional abuse by family, lots of anxiety.

 As always, this story is co-written with the wonderful Elamimax.

For Dan, lying to his parents was like walking. He stumbled, when he was young especially, but each slip up was just practice. It took years, he couldn’t count the number of mistakes he made that cost him trouble with his parents, but in time, he became confident in his ability to lie with a straight face. He could tell someone the sky was green just as seriously as he could give a correct answer on a test.

But just being able to lie well wasn’t everything. He’d learned how to make an alibi, with at least two exes he knew would vouch for him in an instant. His sister, too, was good at keeping their parents off of his tracks. Their parents still thought the two of them went to a young people’s church group every Friday. It was surprising that they never tried confirming that with anybody else, but they had always trusted his sister more.

“Morning, Mom,” Dan greeted as the slightly less awful of his two parents stumbled into the kitchen. It looked like she was still groggy. It was a good thing Dan had set aside a pot of coffee; his actions might’ve actually bought him a moment of appreciation from her.

“Eh,” his mom grunted as she took the pot and poured herself a mug of coffee. It wasn’t a second before she was drinking it, despite how blisteringly hot it was. He used to worry about her health, but years of being chastised for the incredibly feminine quality of ‘caring for his family’ had taught him not to express those anxieties. 

“Sleep well?” Dan almost didn’t ask, but anything else would have been seen as rude. Until she left, he was trapped in the normal expectations of social interaction.

His mom took another sip of coffee before nodding. “I did. There was no noise keeping me up later than necessary, this time, so thank you.” 

Dan held back a sigh. Guilt tripping was normal, and hiding his response was always the safest option. “I’m glad,” he chose his response as carefully as possible. An apology would be met with a lecture, and acceptance of her appreciation would be met with a longer lecture. 

“How was last night’s lesson? Cassandra apparently went to bed soon after, so I never received a call from her.” 

“Oh, it was fine,” Dan lied through his teeth. “We’re still covering the book of Job.” He had to hope that was right. Maisie’s coming out had distracted him from texting Cass to confirm the week’s alibi, so he resorted to the same lesson they’d lied about the week before.

But the lie was a mistake, one quickly proven by his mother’s suspicious glace. “Oh? Odd. I could have sworn your sister mentioned last week that you all had finished your study on Job’s story.”

Fuck. “She probably did, but David was out sick this week. His wife took over the lesson for today, and she had wanted to talk more about Job’s loss.” Dan made a mental note to text Cass the second he got back to his room. The conversation would have been disastrous had Cass called their mom the night before. 

“Huh. Well, text David to let him know he’s in our prayers. Illness is never easy, especially at his age.” ‘David’, the fictional teacher of their youth church group, was a sixty-seven year old retiree. He also religiously avoided social media (‘the Devil’s influence’, as Cass put it), and hated when pictures of him were shared online. Dan and Cass had, of course, shown pictures of them with David to their parents, but otherwise he didn’t exist.

It was spectacular, the work someone would go through to avoid dealing with overly strict parents. 

Dan didn’t let his worries show up on his face as the conversation with his mom continued. Thankfully, it moved on to more mundane things like school and how he was ‘too smart to do so poorly’, but tuning those lectures out was second nature. He’d been ignoring calls for him to improve in school for years. They didn’t even punish him for that, anymore. 

Eventually, finally, his mother finished drinking her coffee and excused herself to get ready. Dan, not wanting to deal with a talk with his dad, too, quickly made himself a bowl of cereal and tore through it. He practically ran back to his room as soon as he finished washing his bowl. 

Once in the relative safety of his sanctuary, Dan shot several texts to Cass to explain everything. She was probably resting off a hangover, or cuddling with one of her partners, but he could trust her to respond once she was available. 

He did not expect her to respond so quickly.

And she never called him.

Dan answered the phone in under a second, trying to bite away the worry rising in his chest. Something was very, very, wrong. “Cass?” Dan’s voice betrayed his fear. Did he fuck up? Were his parents already discussing whether or not to take his car as punishment for lying? Were they going to try putting more spyware on his phone and computer?

“Danny, stop. Breathe. You’re okay. Okay?” Immediately, Cass’s voice began to soothe him. His heart slowly stopped trying to escape his chest. His breathing steadied. He was fine. Or he was going to be.

“Okay. I’m fine.” He answered, after several long, deep breaths. But what was wrong? She didn’t call for anything that wasn’t serious. He needed to find out. “Please tell me what’s going on. You don’t call.”

 “Let’s wait a second, okay? You’re obviously high strung, Danny. Take another few breaths. This news is important, but I promise that you’re safe.”

Dan listened long enough to take a single extra breath. Any more waiting, though, and he felt as if he was going to explode. “I’m fine, Cass. Please just tell me.” 

“Fine. You know Alice? Jack’s sister?”

Dan furrowed his brow. They went to the same school, and he was pretty sure she was a sophomore. They’d met maybe twice? Why was she important? “Yeah..? She okay?”

“She just shared this with me.”

Dan wanted to vomit the second Cass sent the image. It was Maisie’s face, obviously photoshopped to make her look like a cartoonishly offensive parody of femininity, captioned with a slur about trans people. 

Fuck.

*****

“Hey, do you have a moment?” Amy tried not to fidget too much. It was usually easy to keep her composure. All things considered, she liked to think of herself as a fairly put-together person. But the way Sean had been acting toward her had made it very difficult not to stammer, stutter, and otherwise show some cracks in her confident demeanour. The fact that he was so comfortable flirting back, even in character, had her blushing even now. 

“Sure, what’s up, Ames?” Even his little nickname for her made her happy. A part of her wanted to be angry at him over it, but she couldn’t. Not when he looked at her like that. With his eyes. It was just the two of them left, after the others had gone home, and ‘trepidation’ felt like an understatement. She led the way to the kitchen and poured them both a glass of water, keeping an eye on him and taking the time to collect her thoughts.

“So… there’s a couple of things…” she said. There was a moment of hesitation, and Sean sipped his water as he looked at her patiently. “It’s nothing you did. Well, nothing you did wrong.” She really hoped she wasn’t coming off as the bumbling mess she felt like she was. “So… after the session, you mentioned some things…” He put the glass down and leaned against the counter. Gosh, he just looked so… good. She wanted to stop talking, curl up against him and have him hold her until-- 

“I’m not sure I remember,” he said, popping her fantasy like a balloon with a needle. “I told Maisie I liked her name.” She nodded. It had been the way he’d said it, though. She opened her mouth to bring it up, when he, perfectly oblivious, looked her deep in the eyes in a way that made her heart catch in her throat and the glass in her hand almost shatter from the sheer force exerted on it. “I love your name too, Amy. It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she squeaked. “That’s not--”

“It is true,” he said, misinterpreting her completely. “And so are you. Don’t doubt that, okay?” With a steel will she could bend bars around, Amy managed not to slap herself in the forehead. Instead, she tried to take a sip of her drink while she composed herself. She only missed a little bit. This wasn’t going to work. There was no way for her to have a serious conversation with this… this… ugh. Not until she talked about the other thing. “Are you okay?” Sean asked, clearly noticing her unease. “I hope that wasn’t out of line. I really don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but you’re one of the coolest, most amazing people I know and I feel like I just don’t tell you en--”

“I like you!” Amy managed. Sean blinked a few times, stunned into silence, and Amy brought her hand to her mouth in shock, forgetting that she’d been holding her glass. It shattered as it hit the ground. Both of them jumped, but neither of them looked down. It was very dramatic and thematically appropriate, Amy’s DM-brain told her with a smug little voice. She smothered it with a pillow. 

“You… like me?” Sean seemed to be completely taken aback. Amy’s jaw was clenched, shut tight enough to turn coal into diamond. All she could do was stare back at him. Voices in the back of her head were screaming for her to do something, anything. “Like… as a f--”

“No, Sean,” she managed, his dumbassery shaking her out of her fugue state. “I don’t like you as a friend. I mean, I do like you as a friend. You’re an amazing friend. But I mean that I like you as more than a friend, too, and…” She had to pause to take a breath, and looked into Sean’s eyes, pleading for him to pick up what she was putting down. 

“But…” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear it, and her gaze was fixed on his face. Of course. Of course he wouldn’t like her back, not that way. He was her best, closest friend, and she was ruining it, destroying the trust and companionship they’d built, and sure he was accepting of her being trans but to even make the leap to think that would make her-- He cut through her thoughts like a knife. A dull knife. A dull and wonderful knife. “I thought you were gay.”

“What.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just… thought you were into girls. For some reason. I don’t know, I just can’t really… imagine you being with a guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” He brought his hands up quickly to emphasize his point. “I just didn’t want to presume that you liked me that way and I--”

“But I just told you I like you,” she said, exasperated. “I don’t know how to make it clearer than that that I like you.”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“Sean…” She raised a hand, partly because she wanted to thump him in the chest softly, but she also didn’t want to come too close or make things too weird because he still hadn’t said anything. Well, nothing about how he felt. Or anything useful at all, for that matter. “I like you. You’re my best friend and I have… feelings. For you.” She looked him dead in the eyes. “The romantic kind of feelings.”

“Like… as in… boyfriend-girlfriend feelings?” It was hard to read his expression, and that was partly because she was out of breath and it wasn’t getting any easier for her to focus. She swallowed and nodded. Sean bit his lip for a moment. “But… is that okay?”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Amy wanted to tear her hair out. “Like, are you worried about people at school? Do you think people are going to talk? Because I will fight them, Sean, I--”

“No, I mean like… I’m…” He seemed confused, almost lost. His eyes locked onto hers and that quadruple backflip off the high dive her heart had learned to master recently was back. “I like you too.” A part of her wanted to scream at him, ask him if that had really been so hard, but, in his defense, it had been just as hard for her. 

“Do you want to…” she asked.

“I mean… if you want…” he stammered, now looking at the floor.

“We don’t have to…” Amy said.

“No, I want to…” 

“Sean…”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to try maybe… and we don’t have to…”

“Can I kiss you?” he whispered.

“Yes please.”