Purple, grey, black and white [✔️]

fourth

"Bloody hell," Leo groans as his character dies for the umpteenth time. "I thought Dynamite was meant to be a good character," he says frustrated.

"Yeah, but not up against Whirlpool," Mark laughs, punching the air in triumph at his victory. Leo chucked the remote down in front of him.

"This time I get to be Whirlpool," he says, reaching for Mark's controller.

"Nuh uh cry baby," Mark laughs.

"I'm not a cry baby," Leo frowns, slumping into his beanbag.

"Sure you are, they say gay boys are more in tune with their emotions."

"Mark, I'm not gay," Leo glares at him.

"Sure you are, name one girl you have had the slightest interest in," Mark folds his arms and smiles smugly. He did have a point though. Leo could not think of a single girl he ever wanted relationship with.

"But I have never liked any guy either," Leo protests.

"Honestly, I'm hurt you don't trust me enough to confide in me," Mark ignores him.

"Mark, if I was gay I would have definitely told you," Leo sighs, getting sick of this conversation.

"Come on, if you aren't into girls, and you aren't into boys you must be bi then,"

"That's not how it works, bi means you like both girls and boys," Leo groans at his ignorance.

"Oh," Mark is lost at what to argue next.

"Come on, another round but I'm picking a different character," Leo changes the topic quickly.

"Yeah, like that's gonna change a thing," Mark laughs.

* * *

Leo plunges his hands into the hot soapy water fumbling around for the dishwashing brush. 

"Thanks Leo, I'm just too tired to do the chores tonight," Mrs Briggs sighs, ruffling her only son's hair.

"It's alright, don't want you falling apart on us," He laughs. He grabs the first dinner plate and starts scrubbing in a circular motion, staring into the distance out the kitchen window in front of him. It isn't quite dark yet and he can just see the sun setting through the trees at the far end of the paddock. His mind wanders back to the conversation with Mark. He didn't like girls, he didn't like guys so what if he was broken.

Every other boy in the year had been in at least one relationship or have been crushing on someone. Leo always felt out of the circle when the boys would discuss these things. He never got any of the dirty jokes they told and they would laugh at him and treat him like a baby. He shook it off though, laughed and pretended to know what they were talking about. It got tiring.

He finishes the dishes rather quickly and heads to his room. He sits at his desk and opens his bruised and battered hand-me-down laptop. He hot-spots his phone to it to access the internet as the house was too isolated for wifi and heads to Facebook. He only goes on to chat to his friends, his wall only has posts people have tagged him in rather than his own.

"That's weird," he mumbles to himself. No one was online, well, of his friends anyway. For a second he considered talking to Matt who was online but decided against it, he was a little too cheery for his melancholy mood he had gotten himself in. He opened another tab and sat there, staring at the search engine, the cursor blinking at him impatiently.

He knew it was dumb, nothing would come of it, but he found his fingers reaching for the keyboard.

Why have I never had a crush?

He sits there for a while longer, contemplating pressing the enter key. His need for answers takes over him and he reaches for the button.

A page of web-page links pop up and just as he is about to click on the first one with the same name as his query the third one down catches his eye. He moves his mouse toward the blue link.

I have never had a crush - Questions about Asexuality

He clicks it slowly. The new word reminded him of familiar ones like Heterosexuality or Homosexuality so they must be related but what other word exists then Bisexuality? The page loads and he is greeted by a forum with a purple, grey, black and white background.

The purple header leaves Leo thinking about what the hell it means.

The Asexual visibility & Education Network

He reads the forum thread quickly and discovers who closely he relates to it. Someone had told the chat about their experiences not wanting a boyfriend or girlfriend or having a crush. They found both genders relatively attractive like Leo does but has never had feeling more than a friend for someone and they were repulsed by the thought of any sexual interaction which Leo also felt.

Leo realises that he hadn't really thought about it but now that he is, the thought of sex was kind of gross and something that didn't seem at all pleasurable like the media an everyone around him seemed to think.

 He clicks the button at the top of the page named 'Front Page' as he suggests to himself that would be a better place to start looking into this.

He discovers that the network, more commonly known as AVEN is about promoting visibility for the Asexual community, an asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction. There are also people who are Aromantic, which is the similar but they don't experience romantic attraction. and the last group is Agender which isn't identifying as any gender which Leo didn't even know was a thing, identifying as something other than what your genitals say.

He scrolls through all the pages, clicking between them and searching though every page like they were water for his parched throat.

He ignores the buzzings of his phone and the darkening outside and stays on the site long into the night he doesn't have school tomorrow so it really didn't matter how long he stayed awake.

this chapter was a bit info heavy soz.

AVEN website -http://www.asexuality.org/home/