Falling Falling Stars

16 - Isabelle

I have no author's notes I just have 6k of pure Arden and Efnisien content and a lot of love for the folks who are giving so much love to this story! Also Arden is...a lot. He's just a lot, all the time.

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On Saturday morning, Efnisien nervously tried not to chew at the end of his mangled thumb, waiting on the curb of his street in front of his apartment building. Arden's scarf was folded and washed in his hands in case Arden wanted it back. Efnisien waited, and he'd been waiting for ten minutes, and Arden wasn't late, it was just that Efnisien was going crazy pacing the cramped space of his own fucking apartment.

It'd all come about because Arden had texted:

'Hey, Ef, I've been thinking about stuff we can do that doesn't involve going outside as much but also isn't hanging out in Cosy. Want to come over to my place on Saturday morning and hang out?'

And Efnisien said yes, because what the hell, right? Arden texted his address, Efnisien searched public transport options and realised it was like three buses, and tried to find a polite way to say that he might get there a bit late. Arden promptly insisted he was planning on picking Efnisien up anyway.

So Efnisien waited on the curb, clutching the underside of the scarf, his palms sweating all over it.

He'd been in a weird mood since his session with Dr Gary and Mika. But he didn't think it was a bad mood. He'd just been...thinking of a lot of things he didn't normally think about. Admitting his financial situation to Dr Gary had been awful at the time, and awful afterwards, and then the next day he'd dutifully sent bank account screenshots to Dr Gary, and Dr Gary had replied only two hours later with a fee that was literally a sixth of what Efnisien had been paying.

Efnisien wanted to protest, but Dr Gary's firm words at the end of their session about how it wasn't Efnisien's place or responsibility to negotiate his fees rattled around in his head. But fuck. Fuck. He had...

He had money. More money. Just like that. Efnisien could've choked on the feeling of knowing he wouldn't have to stare at prices in the shops, thinking there was a lot of stuff he couldn't afford, trying to remind himself that it was normal not to be able to afford a lot of things. He wasn't poor. Poor people didn't get to have a home and they didn't get to have food. Right?

Not only that, but Dr Gary had forwarded Mika's material on asexuality and sex aversion and some other stuff, and Efnisien had read it all at once. Some of it was on a website called AVEN, some of it was brochure-style plain language stuff that Efnisien would've once dismissed as bullshit, were it not for the fact that he felt a little breathless reading the words and finding them relatable.

He always thought asexuality meant like, never having any sexual feelings about anyone. And Efnisien jerked off, so he couldn't be asexual.

But apparently it wasn't like that at all.

And he didn't know if he was asexual, because all the stuff on trauma-based sex aversion seemed to hit the nail on the head too, even though he'd never been sexually assaulted. No matter what Dr Gary said.

Henton, his mind usefully supplied.

'Fuck. Off,' Efnisien muttered to himself as he'd read the articles.

So he was maybe somewhere in the ballpark of asexuality. Maybe. Or at least adjacent to it. Possibly. And probably gay-ish. Somewhere around the gay-ish arena, at least based on that assessment he'd done. It didn't feel wrong anyway. Every time Lludd had called Gwyn a faggot and Efnisien had been around to hear it, he felt the jolt in his own gut, like Lludd was getting a two-for-one hate deal.