The rest of the journey passed easily with as much calm as we could have mastered after the whole debacle. She was sleeping not quite quietly at the backseats with her head propped on her leather purse. And my future husband was driving more securely ever since she dropped off.

       He clenched the steering wheel with a force my wife never tried to show. And his eyebrows – finally not tamed, thank you – were set in deep thinking slash frown place.

       “There were other ways how to tell her,” I tried to be the reasonable one since he didn’t mind passing the title now. And I rushed to continue before he could storm his way into another argument.

       “But that wouldn’t be any easier for you and she wouldn’t have to take it any better.”

       “I know that,” he said. “But it still sucks.”

       I nodded and returned my eyes on the road ahead of us.

       “She is dependent on us, so if she won’t come to terms with it in some time… there is always an elderly home.”

       He looked so sad, so suddenly.

       “I don’t think I would be able to do that. She’s just. She’s just too important.”

       I frowned and tucked my hair back behind my ear.

       “I get that, but if she doesn’t stop calling you her daughter, I’m going to do something drastic.”

       He chuckled. “Like what?”

       “I would cancel her prescribed TV programs and magazines. She would be so bored she would willingly like to be in the elderly home.”

       He laughed this wet sound of his system.

       “I love you.”

       This was the first time he said it after. And I felt relieved.

       We didn’t have any talk about divorce, but the tension between us was still unbearable. He didn’t touch me in months and with everything going I didn’t feel like I could touch him either.

       “So, you’re gay, huh?”

       He looked at me funny. “What?”

       “Well, you know. Are you gay now?”

       And from the casual banter, the seriousness of our relationship emerged.

       “I haven’t thought about it.”

       “Oh.”

       We are married for seven and a half years. We have two kids and no-one in our family had ever been talking about any LGBT issues.

       We are thirty-five years old and we knew each other since we were teenagers. There was no one else for me.

       There was no time for me to question my sexuality and I guess he was the same.

       We just knew we wanted to be together and for my part – the part where he was a -girl- and I was a -boy- was never really important.

       “I mean,” he started but didn’t finish.

       And I was afraid of asking and I begged my fate he was afraid of asking too.

       We were both staring out the front window, silent. Listening to the snores of his transphobic mother.

       “I don’t want you to feel obliged to be with me in whatever way.”

       I didn’t know what to think of it.

       Did he try to let me down easily?

       Short breaths weren’t enough for my heart race. Does he think I don’t love him anymore?

       “Why are you saying that?”

       I tried not to sound hurt. I’m not the one in this scenario with the right to feel hurt.

       And I’m not sure how successful I was.

       I’ve never been this insecure about my love life. My love life is our life because in the time I started to care about some love life        I met him. And we weren’t insecure in the high school. We weren’t supposed to – as we were the types they make stereotypes of.

       He started crying.

       I am quite an emphatic person for a guy and I knew how to calm down a woman. But, hell, I have no idea how to calm down a crying mess of a man.

       “I’m… I’m…” He kept his sentences unfinished. With all these implications filling the interspaces.

       There were so many things he could be. Worried – for one, angry, sorry. But the most terrifying that kept repeating in my mind was the word “straight”.

       And I was quiet. I was petrified.

       I admit that was not the way to deal with a crying person. At least, it was not the way to deal with a person you have loved for the bigger part of your life.

       He eventually calmed down and then he said in his old, high, reasonable voice. “I’m saying that because you didn’t say it back.”

       “What?” My mind is on overdrive and I forget to be afraid. I’m too confused to be. “You feel obliged to be with me?” Now I definitely sound hurt. Dammit.

       “No, I mean… you didn’t say I-love-you back,” he said, his voice deep again and almost fatalistic.

       I must laugh. We are such a bunch of idiots.

       I remember how our daughter thought we were fighting – which was actually our first and the last attempt on sexual roleplay, we are too big of laughing nerds to keep our faces straight – and she believed we are going to get divorced. She was about six years old and she packed her stuff in her suitcase and made a pro/con list for who of us to choose to live with. And the benefits she came up with were so great she was a bit disappointed when she found out that even though Melissa’s parents and Geoffrey’s parents and Nikolas’s parents and Elisa’s parents and almost every kid’s in her kindergarten parents were divorced, her family stayed united like the Mount Rushmore Rock.

       I don’t know why I remembered this particular memory, but I guess it would have to do something with the beliefs we choose to believe according to the indications our senses receive.

       “Laurent,” I say, because that’s what people do when being serious, they use their names. “Laurent, I love you and I didn’t say it back because I was too focused on my jokes.”

       “What jokes?” he did sound confused again, but the relief was transparent in his body language

       “You being a gay question?”

       “And why is that funny?”

       “Because I guess I am gay too now?”

       He snorted. “You are terrible. You realize that doesn’t work like that, right?”

       I smirked. “I am in love with a man. What else is there to say?”

       He smiled and offered a half shrug.

       “You were in love with a woman, you do your homework on the sexuality scale.”

       I rolled my eyes to the sound of the elderly snores. “Whatever”