it didn’t stop him feeling shitty and hurt.
He wondered briefly how Solace was feeling. If he was sad as well, or angry, or confused. Or maybe he was hurt because he’d thought Drew knew, and he hadn’t, and that what he’d said after was right: Drew had only been nice because he thought Solace was a girl. Or maybe Solace didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and was just weirded out that Drew had thrown a wobbly.
Which got him onto chunk three, which was, well, Solace himself. And it occurred to Drew that it was really odd to be thinking so hard about this guy when he didn’t even know what his name was.
And he wanted to know. He wanted to know all that stuff.
What he was called, and what he was feeling, and what he was thinking.
Except even that was weird now, because every time Solace came into his head, he’d do a kind of mental stammer and have to switch the she for a he. And that meant he couldn’t tell if it was really Solace he was missing or this imaginary girl who’d never even existed.
And that brought him back to “Am I gay or what?” Which was not where he wanted to be. He wasn’t Tinuviel. He couldn’t just be straight for nineteen years and then decide that everything was an arbitrary social construct so he might as well date dudes. It would have been different if he’d met a guy and been into him. Well, it would still have been pretty confusing, but at least it would’ve been clear-cut.
Except wasn’t that exactly what had happened? He had, in fact, met a guy. And he was, in fact, into him. And, okay, he’d thought the guy was a girl, but he’d also known he might not be. And charged . . . or stumbled . . . ahead regardless. Which either meant he’d been wildly optimistic, or some part of him (even if it wasn’t something he’d ever noticed or admitted) hadn’t minded.
So maybe he was—as Sanee would surely put it—a gay.
Or at any rate: a bi. Since he was pretty sure he was still into girls.
Although maybe he wasn’t. Because he hadn’t had that many relationships and part of the reason Tinuviel hung out with him and Sanee was that they were basically the only men on the course who hadn’t tried to get into her pants. So maybe he’d just been pretending all this time. Maybe getting a girlfriend had been kind of like getting your A levels—just sort of something you were expected to do in your late teens.
He gave a little whimper and stuck his head back under the covers. Right now, he had no idea who he was or what he was or where he was going or what he was doing or what he wanted. Tinuviel would probably tell him placidly that This is all very fluid and complicated, Andrew, and that labels were meaningless.
But, honestly, this felt like a time in Drew’s life when a label would be really comforting. It was one of the things he enjoyed about trad MMOs. Everybody had a role and name and you knew what you were supposed to be doing and how you were supposed to be doing it.
He hid for a bit longer. He really needed to talk to someone. Someone who wasn’t going to laugh or express their bewilderment at the way he clung to bourgeois conventions of blah blah blah.
Basically he needed to talk to Solace. And not just because there was no one else, but because he was starting to realise that the only thing he wasn’t confused about was that he really missed her. Um. Him.
Drew crawled out of bed, booted up his PC, and signed into the game. He was greeted by a stream of cheery hellos in the guild, but Solace wasn’t online.
He stared blankly at the screen. He had nothing in particular to do in-game, but logging in and then logging straight out again would look kind of pissy and odd. Also, having spent the best part of a day thinking in circles to get to this point, it was really frustrating not being able to see it through.
Sod it. He was bloody well going to start that World Explorer achievement.
Whipping out El’ir Reborn, he took to the skies.
He started by filling in the blanks around the City of the Stars and Arandiel’s Vale. He wasn’t quite up to doing it on