“So, what does it mean, anyway?” Tristan asked, leaning against your side. “Are you gay or something? If you are, that’s cool. It doesn’t change anything.” Your best-friend was a bit of a dimwit, but he tried his best for you. You were his best friend, after all, and nothing would change that for him. It was a struggle trying to get him to go home at the end of the day and not show up somehow in the middle of the night.

It had taken you a while to come out as asexual, but you felt that the label fit you. At least, it fit you better than the hundreds you’d cycled through before that— ones that he’d also done his best to look up and research to better understand you. If you thought you were attracted to women, he was happy to be your wingman, and if you thought you were attracted to men, he was introducing you to his friends. You’d known him for years, and he’d been with you through thick and thin, despite your personalities being damn near opposites.

He dropped his head down on your shoulder as he waited for you to explain, drawing shapes in the soil with a stick as you sat in his backyard. “You don’t like… reproduce like a starfish or anything, yeah? That’s where we saw it in bio,” he tells you. “But if you did, that would be pretty freaking cool.”