“You don’t have to be the best,” he whispered. “You just have to be here.”
The first thing I noticed about Leo wasn’t the choker, the thigh-highs, or the way he’d already rearranged the kitchen spices into a rainbow gradient. It was the ease.
And somehow, that’s enough.
Leo found me there an hour later. He didn’t say “it’s okay” or “you’ll do better next time.” He just sat down, close but not crowding, and started filing his nails. The soft shick-shick of the file filled the silence.
“When I came out to my dad,” he said finally, not looking up, “he asked if I was doing it for attention. He said, ‘Can’t you just be normal?’” Leo smiled, small and sharp. “Took me two years to realize normal was just the word people use when they’re scared of joy.” My-Femboy-Roommate
Three hours later, my left hand was a disaster of smudged midnight blue, and Leo had walked me through the entire plot of a dating sim I’d never admit to enjoying. Somewhere around level four of “convincing the stoic blacksmith to go to the beach festival,” I laughed. A real one. It cracked something open in my chest.
“You want to talk about it,” he said, “or you want to paint your nails and pretend you’re a goth villain for an evening? Both are valid.” “You don’t have to be the best,” he whispered
I never did get the hang of painting my own nails. But every now and then, when life gets heavy, I hear Leo’s voice in my head: You just have to be here.