“No, not that.” Mina shakes her head. “I know you’re bi.”
“You do?”
“Sure. The first week I worked here you stared at my tits for seven seconds during a brand brainstorming meeting when I made the mistake of wearing a shirt missing a button.”
“I did?” I gasp sounding very much like the gay mascot everyone else at the company believes me to be.
“That and I never make assumptions about people’s sexualities until they declare them themselves to me. Instead, I just do the normal thing and assume that everyone is bi or pan or somewhere on the multisexual spectrum.”
“That’s thenormalthing to do?”
“Sure it is. Don’t tell me you disagree?”
I muse on this for a few moments, chewing my bottom lip as I do. “I mean, it does make the most sense to me personally.”
“Exactly. It’s just a much better starting point than the boring old default of heterosexuality. It makes sense to opt out of multisexuality rather than opting into a completely different sexuality from being straight, which as I’m sure you’ll agree, is the orientation that makes the least sense of all.”
I find myself smiling at this theory, laughing a little too. I also can’t deny how seen I feel, how validated. So rarely do I think about my bisexuality making sense when it seems to go against what everyone else assumes me to be, but the last few minutes of conversation with Mina has me feeling seen, affirmed, validated, and I like it. I like feeling this way a lot. That is until I remember what she said. “I couldn’t agree more. But also, I’m so very sorry for staring at your tits. I actually don’t do that very much.”
“I know you don’t. Haven’t noticed you do it since, by the way. Not that I could blame you. I do have excellent boobs.”
“So, will you let me be your plus one for that party? And if you want, you can be mine?” I ask, suddenly eager to talk about something else, anything other than Mina’s breasts.
“You didn’t let me explain what I meant earlier,” Mina says. “I meant it would be inconsistent and a little odd if you showed up with me because, well, bisexual or not, I doubt I’m close to being your type.”
How do I tell her that that’s exactly why I want her to be my date. “Well, I suspect that goes both ways, am I right?” I cock my hand on my hip, just to camp it up a little and make my point.
Mina nods. “I haven’t dated a boy since I was doing my A-Levels, and even then, it was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“He was my Dutch pen pal and his name was Jan, spelt J-A-N, so for the first five months of exchanging letters, which got very intimate, very quickly, I assumed he was a she. It was a huge shock when he walked off the bus at six feet two with patchy stubble.” Mina’s eyes and thoughts seem to drift away a little. “I always did think it was strange when he said how hard I made him, but I just assumed it was lost in translation.”
“Poor Jan,” I say, bringing my bottle to my lips, surprised I have to tip it back quite far as I’ve nearly finished it while talking with Mina.
“Hardly. I gave him several hand jobs and a tit wank over the five days he was visiting.”
I cough and choke as my shock makes the beer go the wrong way.
“Yeah, you’re definitely not gay if that ruffled your feathers,” Mina says with an amused smile as she reaches for her bag and gets up to stand.
“Wait, so are we doing this?” I ask, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand. “Come on, I actually think it could be fun.”
Mina stops placing things in her bag to consider this with a look on her face that could just as easily be a thoughtful smile as a slightly repulsed grimace.
“You’ll really come to my sister’s engagement?”
I bow slightly. “It would be my pleasure.”
Mina assesses me once more, her expression still unreadable, but her eyes narrow, which I feel somewhat sad about because it means I can’t look at the warm mahogany swirl of her irises again. Without saying anything she picks up a pen and starts writing on the pad of Post-it notes on her desk. Once finished, she pulls the top pink note off and then slaps it against my chest, sticking it there.
“One condition. Nobody at work knows about it,” she says in a low voice as her eyes pin mine.
“Deal,” I say, because it will benefit me too, after all.
“Text me where to be and when. You can also let me know about a dress code, but I’ll almost certainly ignore it,” she says as I stare down at the note she left, its fluorescent pink colour clashing brilliantly with the blue of my T-shirt. I should wear pink and blue together more often, I think to myself.
When I look up, Mina is already walking away.
