Chapter 78
Dad—to Eli’s mild surprise—actually shut up.
“It’s not an exchange, Dad. Rob loves me. I know you find that really hard to believe, but he does. He loves me, and when you love people, you want to support them. That’s all it is. There’s not some sordid sex slavery shit going on, or whatever you think.”
“Eli, for God’s sake—”
“No,” Eli interrupted again. “I’m moving out. I am moving in with Rob. End of story. He’s going to come pick me up this evening and we’ll get my stuff up to the flat.”
“As if I’m going to allow it!”
“And you’re going to stop me how exactly?” Eli demanded. “It would be illegal for you to even try—I’m twenty-one, and—”
“And you are walking into exactly the same scenario as Jenny did with Greg!”
“Rob is nothing like Greg.”
“Rob is exactly like Greg, Eli. I know he’s turned your head so you can’t see it, but—”
“No. He’s not.” Eli abandoned the box and rose to his feet, folding his arms over his chest, finally turning to look his father in the eye. He pushed back the instinctive anger, and unlocked the one thing he’d never bothered to tell his vaguely transphobic father. “I know he’s not, because Rob is gay.”
“I’m sorry? Eli, you can’t possibly think because a man’s gay he’s incapable of—”
“Let! Me! Finish!” Eli shouted.
His father’s jaw clicked shut, a startled expression washing over his features.
“Thank you,” Eli said in a clipped voice. “Rob is gay. Rob is one hundred percent gay. He has never been remotely interested in women. Ever. He’s never had a crush on a woman, he’s never experimented with girls even when he was a teenager, he’s so gay he’s actually incapable of telling you if a woman is pretty. It’s actually a bit funny, it’s like asking anyone else if…if, I don’t know, a twig is pretty. It’s a nonsense question to him. He’s gay.”
“Which doesn’t mean—”
“Which means,”Eli said loudly, “that I put off telling him I was transgender until about the third time he dropped a hint about wanting to have sex with me. I just blurted it out in the middle of a pub, the middle of our date, no planning, no prepared speech, and you’ve seen Rob. I expected it, too, I expected him to at best just walk right out on me, and at worst beat me up. I knew he was gay, he’d told me so, I knew he wouldn’t want to be with someone who even used to be a woman.”
“Where are you going with—”
“He looked at me, and said this wasn’t the kind of conversation people had in the pub, and asked if I wanted to go and grab a takeaway and find a quiet park and talk about it in private but neutral ground.” Not in so many words, but that had been the gist of it. “And he drove us right down to Endcliffe Park from Parson Cross because he knew it’s my favourite one, and we sat by one of the little waterfalls and I told him everything. And he listened. And when I was done, he said that he really liked me, it wasn’t just about whether I had a dick or not, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do when it came to the bedroom with a transgender guy but it couldn’t be that different to figuring out what a new partner likes in bed anyway.”
Eli paused, and his father, frowning, said nothing.
“He’s—I get it, Dad, I do, Rob can be utterly pig-ignorant and he drinks too much and he can fix anyone’s car from scratch but can’t operate online banking without locking himself out or accidentally getting new credit cards, but he’s a good. Guy. Underneath it, he really is, he’s been amazing for me, amazing with me, and maybe you are never going to get it, but can you please respect my decision in this? I’m not moving into a Jenny-and-Greg situation, I’m moving in with a man who doesn’t know the first thing about the gender binary but was willing to hear me out and try having this relationship anyway.”
And that was the crux of it, for Eli—because nobody had ever done that before. He’d tried dating in school, going to a few youth LGBT events in Sheffield, but had been firmly turned away by any of the gay guys there. He’d tried online dating as he got a little older, and found that messages promptly stopped the moment he mentioned it. Nobody had ever even talked about it with him, much less decided to try going out with him regardless.