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I stare at my reflection in the dented brass doorknob. I can feel my paw pads itch. I want to open that door and get this all over with. This burning, looming threat of confrontations that I've worked so hard to avoid. I know I have to do it. I've been wanting to have this conversation for years, I knew it would happen sooner or later. It's time, I have to open my mouth and ruin everything I've built.

And yet...

I want to run.

I've put off this conversation for so long for a reason. There's a reason I've never confronted Miles before. There's a reason I've taken every comment, every barb, every poor joke.

I'm a coward.

I'm a coward who can't even stick up for himself because I'm too afraid of what will happen.

I grab the handle and squeeze.

Then I pull back and grab my antlers, grunting in frustration and pace the hall outside of our apartment.

What the hell am I doing?

I knew I was bi when I was still just a kid.

I found myself drawn to the heroes in the movies and TV shows that I was supposed to ascribe to be like. I didn't want to be the heroes, I wanted to be with them. I wanted to be looked at in that way that the heroines were looked at, to be seen with a mix of desire and care. It just felt right when I imagined being held like that, it was hard to explain. I'd act out fake little romantic stories in my head with fictional characters, male and female, sometimes both at once! I just knew that I wanted to be in love since I was a kid. I always wanted that.

And then I remember learning what a faggot was.

I remember my older brother saying it so casually like it was nothing. Dropping it all the time. It seemed so funny at first. Here was a new word that got a response out of people! It was a word that had power! Our parents tried to stop it, but it didn't do much to stop him from screaming it all the time when someone had a bad play in football, or when he got killed playing a video game. It didn't stop that word from being ingrained in my head. I didn't even know the concept of being gay, but I knew connotations of being a faggot.

As I got older, I didn't find myself particularly attracted to men, but I could find myself seeing someone who was attractive and just appreciating that. It didn't really feel like anything to think someone was good-looking or not, it just felt like that's what we would all think collectively.

As I got older, I managed to get a few dates now and then, real kids stuff, but I was so ready to be in love. My heart ached for it. I just wanted to be loved by someone and feel accepted by someone. School was rough and it always felt like everyone else had some_one._ Whether it be a partner or a best friend, it felt like they had someone they could just be themselves with and I never had that.

It was a couple years later when I was around 15 that I realized I liked guys. His name was Danny. He was this cute Dalmatian with amazing hair and I swooned... kind of. I would see him playing with his hair and just stare. We started talking slowly, starting with helping each other out in Trigonometry and continuing with us spending time together outside of school. It wasn't long before I realized I had feelings for him.

The first time we kissed, I just remember how good it felt. It was a puzzle piece I never knew could fit. From then on, we spent a lot of time together. We kissed a lot, and, well two horny boys spending all their time together, it was inevitable we got caught. His parents were understanding and okay with it. Mine?

It was rocky.

It was very rocky.

We ended up breaking up before college and I ended up having a fling that summer with this pretty vixen I met at the pool. I enjoyed it but it felt... off. At the time, I didn't even consider that I may not be one for hookups. I rationalized my experience as just being gay, that was why I was feeling weird afterwards.

Going into college, I called myself gay. I had a pride pin on my backpack, I went to GSA meetings, I called myself gay when it would come up and that was who I was. It's who I allowed myself to grow into as I got more comfortable expressing myself. And it felt great! It felt amazing to have other queer people around. I was suddenly free to have these conversations that I'd held inside of myself for ages. I could date and feel out this personality and I felt safe. It was the freedom to explore and see who I was.

Then I met Miles.

The wolf was kind of an ass at first. He'd say things that were true, or felt true enough, but always with a bit of an edge to it. I remember it seemed like he was just trying to shoot for effect a lot of the times. I'd done my best to avoid him. I wanted nothing to do with him, but we had a lot of mutual friends so we ended up at the same meetings and parties together.

Slowly, we started to get to know each other as we spent more time together. But I could also see the part of him that others didn't seem to. There was a real vulnerability he had about him. He desperately wanted to be liked, and took rejection personally when people weren't able to hang out with him like they said they could.

We started to date a few months before summer break.

"How did you know you were gay?" was the question I've been coming back to over and over since then.

Of all the times to be honest with him, that was it. Or any of the dozens of times I could have come clean then, but I didn't.

I told him my story, but I sanitized it for him. I hid my attraction for women. I hid the hookup before coming to school from him. It felt cleaner to lie to him than explain that I said I was gay, but still felt desire towards women. It was never really gone, but it was so infrequent, it just felt easier to call myself gay than trying to call myself bi when I so rarely felt interested in women. Gay still felt too limiting for me.

But it was easier for me to lie than try to explain the truth.

We kept dating throughout college, and even roomed together junior year. That was when I started to notice some of the issues with his behavior. Things that I didn't notice when I had a chance to spend time away from him.

"What an asshole," my friend Sarah said. Miles had just told some joke about trans men. I don't even remember what it was, but it was the kind of jokes he would do often enough back then.

"He really tries too hard," I said.

"Honestly, those kinds of jokes just aren't okay. Like, he's running to be an officer for the GSA and he's saying shit like that?"

"He's not gonna get it," I told Sarah.

"Yeah, I just wish someone would tell him off," she griped, clutching her plastic cup and making sizeable dents with her feline claws.

I wanted to do something. I was his boyfriend; he would listen to me! He had to listen to me. But instead, I just sat there, feeling the pit twist in my stomach, making me feel sicker and sicker each time he'd make another joke and I said nothing.

Or there was that time we were hanging out by the pond on a fall afternoon and he was reading something on his phone.

"What a fucking bitch!" Miles yelled, his head in my lap.

"Who?" I asked, looking up from my textbook.

"Aubrey Plaza! She's trying to say that she's into women now."

I blinked, not quite following. "What do you mean?"

"I mean she's saying that she 'falls in love with girls and guys. She can't help it.'" Miles stared at me, eyes burning to demand I understand his point.

"I don't see what the big deal is, Miles." I said.

"She's just trying to clout chase. She wants to be queer because it's trendy now, but she's leaving the door open so she can still date guys. She needs to stop pretending and just make up her mind!"

When Miles was in that mood, there was no sense trying to argue with him, that was one of the first things I learned about him when we began dating. Instead, I just shut down and went back to studying.

As time went on, I saw more and more of that side of him. But it became harder for me to even mount any kind of defense. I'd been with him for so long. I just sort of accepted it. I didn't have the energy to try and fight him when he was behaving like that.

"What's wrong with the Pride flag?" He said during the first GSA officers' meeting of our Senior year.

"The culture fair is to welcome new students, we need to show them that their part of the queer community is accepted here too." Sarah said. Her eyes narrowed, golden light shining out from the dark of the panther's fur.

"Yeah!" Ryan said, a raccoon with rainbow ear gauges. "We could have like a little UN setup with little flags from every corner of the queer space. Trans, Ace, Pan! That could really be cute."

"Again, what's wrong with the Pride flag?" Miles griped. His hackles were raised as he looked around for support.

Ryan frowned. "It's not always been the most inclusive. Hell, that's why some gay men have even started to adopt the MLM flag instead to try and clarify what kind of pride they mean."

"That's just ridiculous! Why do people think they need to make a new flag. The Pride flag is accepting of everyone," Miles said.

Ryan and Sarah shared an uneasy look at each other.

"Not everyone sees it that way," Sarah said, her eyes boring into his. "Being trans or being lesbian is different than being gay. And the Pride flag doesn't encompass that. Gay men during the AIDs crisis were taken care of by Lesbians, Miles. Before that, they weren't exactly the most welcomed in spaces for Gay people. So the Pride flag doesn't exactly make me feel all the welcomed."

"If you want your own space, Sarah, than you can have it. You don't have to be here. This is our space, and if you're not welcome, you don't have to be here."

Sarah stood up and walked away. She stopped at the door and looked at me, pausing for a moment before storming back out. Ryan sat there, his ears drooped. He seemed like he wanted to go too, but something kept him from acting up. I don't know what drove him to do it, but he didn't stick up for Sarah. Maybe it was because he was just now an officer, and Miles had been one for years. Miles shot the raccoon a look, as if waiting for him to say anything else. But he just sat there, not even looking at Miles.

"Whatever," Miles said, rolling his eyes. "Back to business."

It was wrong. What he'd just done, kicking an officer out of the club, for standing her ground on the point she was making? I made some excuse when the meeting ended and went to be alone for a while.

This didn't feel right. It didn't feel like this was who I started dating. This was a version of him that felt wrong. The comments never felt fully vile, just careless, and mean-spirited. I didn't know what to do, but he seemed to be trying to decide who and what being queer was. But the way he described it, it didn't leave room for anyone to argue.

And the way he acted the rest of the time was never in question. I loved him. I had spent 2 years loving him. I couldn't just turn my back on him like that. But as we started to talk about plans after college, it became more and more clear that he and I would be heading to different places. I began to doubt that it would work out for us. I had planned on telling him that we should start thinking about the future we could have together so far apart, when he told me he was looking at places near me too.

And honestly? It was more comfortable for me to consider that as a good solution than for me to consider breaking up.

So I decided not to break up. It felt like this was the way things were supposed to be. Even though he would be so callous that sometimes my stomach would twist into knots. I still went on.

Sarah didn't like hearing that I was going to be staying with him. She'd stopped coming to meetings and I ended up stuck between two people who hated each other, both of whom I loved dearly.

"You don't even get to be yourself around him," she told me.

That comment threw me. I felt floored by it, like my chest had been kicked in. We were hanging out in her apartment not too far from the one I shared with Miles. Her roommate was gone for the night and we were watching bad horror movies together when she popped that question.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean you hide around him. You're still in the closet."

I tried to open my mouth, to say something but the words seemed to die on my tongue, trapped between enemy lines in a war between my love of my boyfriend and being who I was.

The few months beforehand, I found myself a little less interested in affection with Miles. I still liked it, but it just felt like it wasn't what I wanted right then. I didn't know how to describe it, but it was an ebb to the flow of my sexuality. When he was gone I found myself sneaking around porn--straight porn. And I knew he'd be upset with me if he said anything. But it still didn't feel...

I don't know, maybe I just felt like I was bored of him in that moment, or I was tired of him rebuffing my advances from stress of school and looking for jobs. I was tired. I was so tired of having to dance my comments carefully so he wouldn't get upset when I'd tell him that I found some woman attractive. I had to clear my browsing history often and be careful about what tabs were left open. It felt tense. But I just attributed that to the stress in our relationship right then not....

Not that.

"You told me you were with a girl before coming to school, right?" Sarah asked.

I nodded my head.

"What was that like? You told me it felt weird, I just want to know what you meant."

I bit my lip and shook my head in frustration. I'd been thinking about this a lot, and finally getting to say something about it was...

"Afterwards, I didn't feel good. I didn't feel... right. I felt empty. I felt like what I wanted, what I felt with my ex wasn't there at all. It just left me feeling sort of gross."

Sarah nodded her head, the panther lacing her fingers through mine and giving a supportive squeeze.

"Did you ever think that maybe you... you didn't like it because it was just a fling? You had that deep connection with your ex, you had that connection with Miles. I'm just wondering, because you've never seemed entirely... happy when Miles calls you gay. You seem like you're holding something back.

"It's not my place to tell you who or what you are, but I've been your friend longer than you've known Miles and I know he's been good for you, but he's also been rude. You smoothed some of the rough edges being around him and he's better... but I guess I just don't want you to have to hide parts of yourself. That's not fair to yourself. It's not fair to him either."

The more Sarah talked, the more I listened. I didn't even try to say anything, to fight her on any of it. I just listened and nodded my head. I took her words in because she was right.

I'd been lying to myself. I'd been lying to Miles, I'd been lying to everyone for so long. Gay felt right when I first entered college. It felt an apt description, but it hadn't felt like an okay description of who I was for a couple years now, but I kept calling myself gay. I'd gotten so far down that road; I didn't want to say anything to contradict myself. I didn't want to say something that could hurt what other queer kids at the school could go through. Especially when I had underclassman in the GSA tell me how much they looked up to me.

But it wasn't me. And I'd been trying to be someone I wasn't for so long to make people happy, to make Miles happy, that I didn't want to do it anymore. I felt hollowed out each time he would critique and call someone a liar for dating men and women, or calling themselves bi, or pan. He belittled them in private and every time he did, every time I didn't say anything to stop it I just felt worse. I'd gone to bed, staring at the ceiling with the source of my frustration so many times, I'd normalized it.

I didn't even realize I was crying until Sarah batted at my cheeks with a tissue. She frowned and pulled me closer to her so she could hug me as I tried to control my tears.

I know we talked about what to do, but I don't remember much of the conversation, only that I felt... emboldened to do what I had to do. Because living like this? It wasn't sustainable, and it wasn't fair to myself.

Which led me to pacing the hall, working up the nerves to start having the conversation with Miles. It's not easy to do something that feels like sabotaging your own happiness, but isn't that what I'd been doing for all those years?

Maybe one day down the road, I can find someone at a coffee shop, and our eyes can meet. I'll be able to say something flirty, regardless of their gender identity, and not feel self-conscious, or worried someone will think I'm anything but gay.

And as we start talking, maybe I'll be able to answer honestly when they ask what my orientation is.

"I'm pan," I'll say.

Even thinking about that, my chest feels lighter, the weight letting up just enough that I know this is the right thing to do.

I reach for the door knob and pull it open, seeing Miles in our shared dorm room, starting to pack up his stuff. He smiles when he sees me but I can't seem to return it. But it's the thought of the future, the future where I can admit to myself and people around me freely, that gives me the courage to say.

"Hey babe, can you sit down? There's something we should talk about."