Page 2 of Let's Talk About Love

When it came to accepting that she was asexual, it was about aneighty-twenty split. That twenty part encompassed the fact that Alice could not call herself asexual in front of another person. So instead of telling the whole, hard truth, she danced with the definition.

Alice sat on her bed, finally allowing her body to fold in on itself. The time had come to hold that in, to feel that pain and keep it close to her heart. Brand it, press it down deep, right next to her old nickname,The Corpse. She stared at Margot’s baby-pink ballet flats with the tiny rhinestones near the toes. Alice had bought those for her.

“I don’t see the point,” Alice said. “I don’t need it. I don’t think about it.”

“Sex?” Margot laughed—a tiny giggle, as if Alice had told a mildly funny joke. “But you’re Black.”

“Oh Jesus, save me.” Alice covered her mouth with her hands and stared at Margot.

“What? I can tell jokes, too.” She looked confused for a moment before shame made her face turn red. “That was racist wasn’t it? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I swear it was a joke.”

(The perks of having a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend from middle-of-nowhere Iowa were endless.)

“But I’m not joking. I meant exactly what I said. I don’t care about sex. You’re right. I did it because you wanted to do it.”

Margot lowered herself down next to Alice, slowly, as if she were dealing with a scared animal. “Have you gone to a doctor?” she asked. She traced her delicate fingers over Alice’s shoulder, curving toward her spine. It tickled, but Alice didn’t show it.

“I don’t need to.”Number one, she thought.

“Were you abused? Is that it?”

“No.”Number two.

“Are you saving yourself for marriage?”

“I hope that’s a joke.”

“It was,” Margot admitted. Her sad smile burned in the corner ofAlice’s eyes. “Then what? Tell me. People don’t just not like sex without a reason. It’s kind of not natural, don’t you think?”

To that, she hadabsolutelynothing to say.

After a few minutes (Margot had never been into begging), she left Alice’s side.

“I can’t be with someone who can’t talk to me,” she said.

The finality of the moment punched her in her stomach. “Margot—”

“And I can’t be with someone who doesn’t desire me. You could never love me as much as I would love you. You understand that, don’t you?”

CHAPTER

2

Margot had been gone exactly seventeen hours. After five days of awkwardly inching around each other in their room, she had told Alice she wanted a “clean break” right before she finished moving out. Didn’t even want to be friends anymore because asexuality wasunnatural.

(Okay, so maybe Margot didn’tsaythat exactly, but that’s how it felt.)

(Like her identity was contagious and had the ability to make Margot’s above-average libido disappear.)

“Here you go,” Moschoula said, setting down Alice’s third cup of coffee on the table. Moschoula had tanned skin, the kind of color that implied she was most likely mixed rather than white, with kinky, natural burnt-orange hair pulled up into a bun on the top of her head.

Cutie Code: Yellow, no question about it.

An intense obsession with aesthetics had taken Alice by surprise in high school and she had begun to code her reactions. She had created Alice’s Cutie Code™, complete with a color wheel for easy categorizations—from Green to Red, with all the colors in between.

“And a bear claw on the house,” Moschoula said. “Try to have a better day?”

Even nestled in the back of Salty Sea Coffee & Co with its chalkboard walls, glorious wood paneling, and dimly lit ambience to spare during peak morning hours where no one should have been paying attention to her, sorrow radiated around Alice like a mushroom cloud. She had gone there to discourage herself from wallowing alone in her now half-empty dorm room. And also from crying.