It's not like she's never thought about it, okay?
Like, it's come up before.
Renee was the kind of liberal that was very supportive but had never really met anyone that was very different from her. So when Bella was fifteen and awkward and still hadn't had a boyfriend or a crush or even a whisper of interest in much at all, she sat Bella down in the kitchen for one of her talks. One of her talks that employed all she'd learned from re-runs of Will and Grace and watching the Ellen show.
Renee's talks had been clumsy and rarely enlightening over the years, and this one was just the same. There was the period talk where Renee had tried to extol the virtues of using sea sponges instead of tampons during an eco-warrior phase and the sex talk that had come when Renee was in the middle of a pregnancy scare and was more about reassuring her than educating Bella.
Renee's talk about girls was just as unfocused and had veered off course so quickly that Bella had never actually had to give an answer or do much soul searching.
Her mom had said something about 'whenever you're ready' but that was paired with something about plaid shirts that Bella wouldn't exactly call enlightened. After that Bella guessed that Renee had probably never met a real lesbian before, but she was awfully certain about the two women she'd seen at Hobby Lobby, and apparently those two women at Hobby Lobby dressed an awful lot like Bella.
She'd thought about it for a while, long after Renee had forgotten about it and gone back to talking about her new boyfriend Phil and the boys in Bella's classes. Pretty soon Bella had forgotten about it too.
She was fifteen, and she wasn't interested in anyone. She couldn't remember a boy or a girl that made her blush or her heart flutter, hell she couldn't even imagine a boy or a girl tempting enough for that. She didn't know what she wanted. That was easy to deal with in Phoenix. She was one in a thousand, easy to ignore, and because of that, it was easy to ignore everyone else. She had been busier then as well, more wrapped up in caring for Renee and Renee's house and Renee's problems. When was there time to date? When was there time to even think about dating? Then Forks had happened and it had become very, very clear what she didn't want. Mike, Tyler and Eric to name a few. Then He had happened, and she figured he was the thing she did want. By those odds, what she wanted was 100% guys. Or maybe, by those odds, she was just 100% interested in vampires.
Gah, this was hard.
Particularly because percentage was starting to feel a little skewed; with Leah's arm thrown around her hips and her chin on Bella's shoulder. She's so warm. She's so warm and heavy and she can see the fine hairs on the back of her arm, lit in the gentle dawn creeping through the open window and following the path of delicate muscle beneath her skin. It doesn't feel like it used to - waking up beside someone already awake and still as a stone - not at all. But there are certain… familiarities in the way it feels to be so wrapped around someone. And Bella can't think of any other reason for her heart to be in her throat. Her arm is asleep, and Leah's head is heavy, lolling on her chest as it was but Bella barely wants to breathe and risk waking her. If Leah was awake she might move away. If Leah was awake Bella might say something stupid. If Bella says something stupid it might all disappear.
Her foot twitches involuntarily and Leah snorts gently in her sleep. God, it's like being hit by a train of unadulterated affection. How did people sleep like this? How did people sleep with someone beside them that was so… warm. And soft. Someone so alive and gentle and unguarded in unconscious. Their breath so slow and rhythmic that it feels like a meditation. Since she woke, she's barely breathed, scared of waking her. She didn't even dream, or if she did it was entirely indistinguishable from reality. She woke to a fuzzy, warm world and a room lightening from black to grey to white.
Leah groans in her sleep, rolling over loudly enough that Bella can't pretend to sleep anymore. Leah's arm falls away and she misses it like her own limb.
"Morning," Leah mutters, her throat thick with sleep. Slowly, awkwardly, Bella peels her arm away from where it's curled around Leah's shoulder, even though the others girls eyes are still shut.
"I should go," she whispers, voice barely louder than a whisper. It wavers like she's afraid, even though she isn't. Part of her hopes Leah will go back to sleep so she can keep lying here and not have to say anything or do anything.
Leah doesn't say anything in reply, just grunts idly and burrows deeper into the comforter, pulling it up to cover them both a little more, her eyes falling shut to stave off having to wake up so early. But Bella has no chance of going back to sleep.
"Leah. I should go - Charlie's probably worried."
Leah grumbles loudly, probably about five seconds away from telling her to quiet down and let her sleep, but Bella slips out of the bed before she can complete the thought. Her clothes have dried well enough overnight, and she turns away from Leah and the bed, pulling off the warm sweats and replacing them with her own stale clothes, changing with her back to the other girl.
When she turns, Leah's eyes are half-open, looking at the floor. Her arm is stretched out across the empty place in the mattress Bella has left behind, like she's looking for her. There's a frown on her lips, but she looks more awake.
"Breakfast?" She asks, and the question seems to confuse her more than anything as if she wasn't the one offering. She wants to say yes. She wants to crawl back into bed and sleep another hour or two, then sit in Leah's kitchen and eat the same thing Leah eats for breakfast.
"Go back to sleep," Bella says, bowing her head to press her lips to the crown of Leah's hair as if that's something they've ever done before. As if that's not a liberty Bella's taking. Bella jolts back, swallowing down the embarrassment for doing that when she's so confused. For taking advantage of her when she's half asleep and Bella hasn't yet decided what it means. Leah looks up at her with a dry, puzzled expression, eyeing the distance between them.
It's still early enough that the house is quiet as she tiptoes her way through, maybe Harry and Sue aren't awake yet and for stupid, selfish teenager reasons she doesn't want to deal with Leah's parents right now. She has too much to think about. The road home is empty, shining with yesterdays storm but Bella can hardly see it.
When her truck finally thunders back into her driveway, she heads for the computer in her bedroom before she even shrugs off her coat, booting the old thing up with a single-mindedness she recognises only from English essays, spending time with Leah and Him. When it finally chokes to life she opens up google and finds herself staring at the search bar, fingertips awkwardly poised over the keyboard. It feels like if she types it, that might make it real.
Renee hadn't been the first one to ask, okay?
When she'd been invited to join the Gay/Straight Alliance in Phoenix she'd brushed it off easily enough, figuring they were scouting everyone for members. It happened every September: the clubs and societies started handing out flyers and having bake sales and they were easy to ignore. That was normal, except she'd been asked to join twice, and the girl inviting her had said something that Renee would echo a year later, something about 'whenever you're ready', and 'if you need to talk, we're here'.
That was a pretty big coincidence, she figured, but it was enough of one to set her fingers tapping 'lesbian' into the search engine and hitting enter too hard. While she waits for the results her feet tap the ground like a drum, or like a thudding heartbeat.
The results take so long to load on Charlie's crappy dial-up that she stands, nearly knocking over her desk chair in her hurry to pace the wooden floor. When they eventually load she shouts 'Finally!' to no one, mutters about dial-up and clicks the first selection, hammering down on the mouse.
After forty-five minutes of slowly loading web pages, she's pretty sure she's not a lesbian.
What she does know now, is that she has a child block on her computer, and honestly she's glad for it, because she's not ready for whatever is behind the grey and red wall that had popped up on the screen.
While things with Him were sexless by necessity, that didn't mean she didn't want to have sex with him. It was awkward to think about because she doesn't like to think about Him, even if she can do it without having a panic attack now, but also because she doesn't like to think about sex in general. Thinking about sex with Him isn't quite enough to send her spiralling, but it gets close enough that she has to take a cereal break, her stomach growling in protest over that breakfast with Leah she refused.
On her cereal break, in between bites of frosted flakes, she changes tack and tries to reason if she's attracted to men in general, or to that one specific man.
When she gets back she has another avenue of research that leads her to new words that don't seem wrong but don't seem right either, because they say yes: you can be attracted to men and women and other genders in between, but if she could do that then why had it happened so rarely? Why in eighteen years had one, maybe two people ever captured her like that? And how could it feel so different?
'The potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree."
She leans back in her chair and lets out a long, deep breath and asks herself, Is she attracted to Leah the way she was attracted to Him?
The answer is no. Leah makes her feel different. Leah makes her feel strong and brave and freer than she'd ever felt. Leah made her feel like an adult, but not the kind of adult that was born forty; the kind of adult that was free to explore, not weighed down by responsibility. And Leah makes her feel wanted as well, and it's weird because Leah has said plenty of times that she wants Bella to go away and find someone else to bother, but when Leah says it she laughs, or wraps an arm around her, or throws a blanket over their legs or talks about college. And Bella knows that Leah wants her around.
Some people who have the capacity to be attracted to people of any gender choose other words to describe their sexual orientation, such as bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, fluid, or queer.
The names are overwhelming, and send her down a fresh few rabbits holes to find out their differences and intricacies, trying to apply each one to Him and Leah in turn like finding the right pair of jeans. Her chin is resting on the desk, eyes heavy with the strain of the bright screen in her dark bedroom when the phone trills, the noise making her jump and she sits unmoving for so long she has to run to catch it when she remembers she's alone in the house.
"Hello?"
"Bella?" It's Leah, her voice clear and awake, not the peaceful, sleepy tones she'd left over an hour ago "I was just checking you got home, you left really early."
"Yeah," Bella croaks, her voice still thick from a lack of speech this morning. "Yeah, I'm home. Sorry - I just had some stuff to do today."
"Oh okay. Is everything - I mean is everything okay?"
"Totally." It's too early, too soon to explain. Too soon to make Leah understand what's going on with her right now. There are risks to weigh, and in the place saying something, saying the wrong thing, she can't say anything. Her voice is stilted, and there's a long silence because of course, Leah wants more of an answer than 'totally'.
"Bell, are you - I mean did I - we… Bella, what the fuck's wrong?" Leah stammers for a moment but her final question comes out with a heated snap that Bella knows well.
"Leah," She breaths, her heart catching in her throat. Don't say anything. Don't say anything that might freak her out. Not until you're sure. "Really, everything is fine I just have some stuff I need to do today. I'll call you back later, okay?"
Leah lets out a quiet, huffy 'whatever' and hangs up. It's not how she wants to end it, but she can't think of anything to say if she calls back and tries to make it better. Stretching her sore back, spine popping from sitting too long hunched over, she walks back to her computer. Her eyes skate across one of the lines near the bottom of the webpage.
Some people prefer to avoid any label at all.
Sitting back in her uncomfortable chair, the light grey because she didn't bother to snap on the overhead light she wonders… Does it really matter what she calls herself?
Does it really matter how she loves Leah when it matters so much more that she does love Leah?
Because she does. There's no avoiding that now. Not when they've talked more about a concrete future than she could envision with her family, with her friends, with Him. Not when the whole world is painted with where they'll go together and what they'll do together and it all seems so bright.
She calls Charlie at the station to tell him she got home safe, that they'll talk about Seattle at dinner, and that she's making pasta.
Then she calls Jess.
Jess fits her bedroom very well. It's a whirlwind of band posters, twinkle lights and lines of crystals and fairy statuettes, bright and blatant in personality, portraying the whole story of a girl that feels very, very far away from Bella's own interpretation of her. The girl herself is bopping her foot along to the radio turned down low as Bella peers around the room, taking in all the little details of a person she's known for nearly six months and never hung out with (or even called) for the sole purpose of 'talking'.
Or in Jessica's words 'girl chatting'.
She thought about calling Angela, but a nagging part of her knows that while Angela is a very accepting person, but also the daughter of a pastor and very prone to awkwardness. Jessica has an impressive way of kicking through discomfort like tissue paper, a way that almost reminds her of Leah's intimidating confidence.
She kind of needs to be kicked right now.
"If this is because you have a thing for Mike, I'm sorry Bella but I really don't want to know about it." Jessica's voice eventually cuts through her thoughts, and she startles, turning towards the girl where she's sat propped up on her bed. She can't help the bark of a laugh that sentence shocks out of her.
"So not the issue I'm having."
"Well you said you wanted to talk about crushes, there aren't a lot of other options in Forks. Except maybe Tyler, who I am considering now that Mike's out of the picture again. So if it's not about Mike, and I'm guessing it's not about Tyler -" Jessica pauses, one brow raised until Bella shakes her head, firmly denying Tyler as a candidate. "Then spill"
"I have this… friend. And I think I'm having all these… feelings. I just - I thought you might be able to help me figure out what the difference between being someone's friend and wanting something more than that."
"This is why being friends with boys is such a nightmare," Jessica rolls her eyes dramatically, falling back on her bed, and Bella is so not ready to correct her line of thinking. "But I think I can help you." She pats the bed beside her, and hesitantly Bella sits down beside her feet. Her hands firmly balled on her thighs. "What made you think you were having feelings?"
"We - we were out to dinner. And we were sharing our food and had a really good time. Then I just - I just suddenly realised what it looked like from the outside." The words start to come quicker, spilling out as she stares intently at the shaggy purple run on Jessica's floor. "We looked like a couple, and we were acting like one, and anyone that saw us would have thought that's what we were."
She feels the stir of the mattress as Jessica sits up again, and the others girl voice is slow: "People thinking you're a couple doesn't make you a couple."
"I know that." Her brows furrow, trying to figure out how to explain it properly. This is why she needed someone to talk to that was… not involved. Someone, she could bounce her thoughts off until they came out right. "But when I realised that's what they thought it made me think about why I was acting like that. Why we were holding hands. Why we were going to dinner together. What we were talking about. And suddenly it just didn't feel like the stuff you do with your friends."
"Well, what were you talking about?"
"Just what we're gonna do in college."
"Like, what you're gonna study?"
"No, what we're gonna do together while we're both in college. In the same city."
"Oh!" Understanding seems to have dawned on Jessica like a stack of bricks, and her blue eyes are wide and her mouth is a perfect O. "So you were discussing your future together."
She can't think of anything to say to make it sound any less or any more romantic than that. She doesn't know what she even wants to make it sound like.
Jessica doesn't give her long to mull it over, "Well that is awfully Angela and Ben of you, but plenty of friends go to college together I guess."
"I guess," she echoes, but it feels like something in her chest, something like the expansive fronds of a fern dry out, curl up and retract inside her. Like Jessica's summation isn't what she wants to hear.
"Although - not usually holding hands at dinner together." Bella falls back, bouncing as her back hits the mattress, parallel to Jess but lying top and tail like kids at a sleepover.
"Definitely not something friends do a lot of," Jessica snorts, and Bella almost joins in. "If you're not dating, then why are you holding hands?"
"It just feels nice. Before - with - you know, everything was so intense." Her breath hitches and the words are full of falters as she tries to push them out. It's easier, looking up at the popcorn patterned ceiling and the swatches of fabric pinned up that make it feel like a fortune tellers tent. "Everything was so explicitly romantic, like a novel." She picks at Jessica's comforter, trying not to remember the touches of icy skin and proclamations of love and affection and forever. "This is different, it's casual and it's easy and it makes me feel good and I don't want to stop doing it. But is that just… having a really good friend?"
Jessica is quiet for so long Bella has to peek at her, and when she does she can see Jessica staring up at the same ceiling, twisting a curl of hair between her fingers.
"That sounds like a really nice relationship to have with someone. Romantic or not." Jess's voice is surprisingly soft, and Bella arches her neck to get a glimpse of her face. "When I was with Mike I was trying really hard to do all these romantic things, like a movie, you know? But I didn't actually like spending time with him, or talking to him that much." At that admission, Bella props herself up on her elbows and see Jessica's face properly, and finds it full of resignation and
"But you were so upset when you broke up,"
"Yeah, but not really about him."
"Oh," Bella understands, very suddenly, the commonality between them. "You didn't want to be alone."
Jessica hums, admitting nothing aloud.
Bella stays a little longer, talking about Jess's first crush (Harry Wilson in sixth grade) and how she realised that pushing him over at recess was actually a cry for attention, but it isn't all that helpful. what's helpful is remembering the curling, dry disappointment that came when Jessica so briefly declared them 'just friends'. It might have even been a surge of protectiveness over what she and Leah have, that it was common or basic or that it could be so easily dismissed or understood.
"Leah called while you were out," Charlie calls from the den as she gets in, the sound muffled by the game.
"I'll call her back later!" She replies, dropping her keys in the dish by the door and heading for the kitchen. She's getting there, but she still doesn't know what to say if Leah asks what the hell went in this morning and last night. And after her chat with Jessica, which so quickly veered away from talking about Leah, she still feels a little raw. Chopping and stirring, repetitive, mindless tasks, give her time to mull on her thoughts quietly, and most importantly, to mull over exactly what she's going to say to Leah when she calls her back.
She makes a puttanesca, nothing fancy or skilful, but Charlie's smile is wide when he sits down for dinner, cracking open a fresh beer that can't possibly suit the meal.
"So, tell me everything, Kiddo!" He starts, and his face is so warm and open it takes only a second to realise his smile isn't about the food. He missed her.
"Seattle was so great! You know I like the city but the campus is so pretty and if I take a journalism major I can apply for an internship at one of the huge newspapers in the city!"
"That's amazing! But aren't you still thinking about teaching? Did you look at the courses around there?"
"Yeah - so if I wanna teach high school I should major in English first -"
They talk about Seattle and colleges courses long beyond dinner, and until it's late enough to turn in and too late to call Leah back. The cowardly part inside her relishes another day to get her head together.
With school the next morning, there isn't time to pick up the phone before she's out the door, and calling Leah back has to wait until she gets home. By then, it's been almost two whole days since they spoke, and she misses her more than she can worry about what to say. She doesn't even take off her coat before she's dialling and the phone is ringing
"Leah?" She asks, her voice surprisingly breathless. But it's not Leah on the line.
"I'm sorry, Bella. Leah's not feeling well. Mono."
* bisexual quotes taken from this GLAAD. website and honestly I'm trying to be as realistic as possible but how the fuck am I supposed to know what the gay internet looked like in 2006?