with him.
He’d asked about being asexual once when he was younger, but Owen had just laughed at him and told him that only kids who were traumatized from being touched against their will were asexual, and the rest of it was a conspiracy to desexualize gay men to make homosexuality safe. It sounded like a load of bullshit, but Dmitri was uneducated and never really trusted his own logic.
Asexual fit, though—sometimes. And sometimes it didn’t make sense at all. He liked the idea of sex, but not the practice of it. And god, more than anything in the world, he wanted someone to love him. But he wasn’t quite sure where it all fit together, and it made him feel cracked in places, with large pieces missing that would always prevent him from being a whole.
Asexual just felt like another burden. He was already Sisyphus with his fucking boulder of expectations that would never reach the top of the hill, and he didn’t want to add another layer. He was exhausted.
Dmitri realized that he’d been silent almost the entire drive, so he cleared his throat as he noticed the sign for his turn off coming up in five miles. “Do uh…you go to school?”
Felix grinned at him. “Yes. I’m going into my junior year at UCLA. My dad wants me to apply to Stanford after I graduate, but I want to take a gap year.”
“Law school?” Dmitri asked, because he was small town, but not ignorant.
Felix chuckled. “Yeah. Family business and all that. My parents run a firm together, but my mom doesn’t do much anymore.”
Dmitri wasn’t sure if Felix was trying to get him to ask why, but he didn’t want to know. He had too much of his own life occupying his own head, and it’s not like Felix was staying. “What do you want to do?”
Felix blew out a puff of air. “Spend time somewhere that’s not a stuffy lecture hall. Vacation somewhere that’s not some little town in the middle of nowhere that…” He stopped, and Dmitri knew why, but he wasn’t going to call him out on it. “You live here, don’t you?”
Dmitri shrugged. “Yes.”
“I’m a dick.”
It was probably true, but he wasn’t qualified to make that judgment just yet. “My uncle owns the salon in Hopewell manor. I thought about going to work for him, but I’m not good at any of the beauty stuff, and his secretary will probably be there forever, so I have to find something else.”
He could feel Felix staring at him. “So, no college?”
He could probably get a scholarship if he wanted to—something that would give him cash for being a minority, or for being adopted, or for having parents that had gone to prison. But it felt wrong because he didn’t have the merits to earn a place at a University. He had barely passed with low Cs and he didn’t have big shoes to fill like a family law firm. He didn’t even have small ones.
“It’s not really on the agenda.”
The car went silent again, and he was partly glad for it. He wondered if Felix regretted this trip and wanted to bail, but he stuck close to Dmitri’s side as he popped into the Lotus Garden and snatched the to-go menu from the stand. They were ushered up to the cash register, and he felt Felix press up against his back, peering over his shoulder at the printed words.
“Do they have shu-mai?”
Dmitri couldn’t find his words, so he just tapped his finger on the appetizers.
“Two orders, and some char siu bao. And shrimp fried rice.” He chuckled right against the back of Dmitri’s ear. “I’m a growing boy.”
Dmitri knew there was a double entendre in there, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to read into it. He waited for Felix to step back, then he offered up a wad of his birthday money to pay, and it stung a little that Felix just let him even though he probably had a savings account bigger than the Gazette’s yearly budget. But his birthday money was for him to spend however he wanted—Sonia had insisted as she clasped his hand and looked at him through her thick glasses that made her eyes look twice as large as they normally were.
“Just find a way to be kind to yourself.”
Sonia had too much on her plate to really take care of him, and he’d understood that when she had driven him to Jayden’s with his pathetically small suitcase after his