When he got back out to the weight room, Marian was tapping the end of a dry-erase marker against her chin and considering the spring flowers that were now doodled all over their white-board class schedule.

"Got bored trying to fix the equipment?" He asked.

"We're gonna replace it next month anyway." She put the marker down and picked up her coffee.

"Coffee?" Nate asked, "At this hour? It's after twelve. I thought you were trying not to drink so much caffeine after noon?"

"Well, Marian took another aggressive gulp. "I needed something to wake me up because I must be dreaming. Was that just Bailey Alexander?"

Nate's eyes drifted toward the door. It was a sunny day outside. Normally, he was happy to spend a lot of his time inside here at the gym, but for some reason, he felt a pang of longing to be out there enjoying the day. He shook his head. It was probably god-awfully hot and muggy anyway.

"Yeah, it was," he told Marian.

"With whom you were having a friendly spar?" she asked, voice still flat.

"Yep."

"Until you started kissing."

Nate recoiled a step, nearly tripping over the piece of equipment right behind him. His shoulder smacked into the weights, which wobbled and clanged against the support bars. He just had a lot of confident thoughts about how he did not care at this point if people found out about him and Bailey, but facing that reality still made him skittish. Despite how badly his face suddenly burned, he forced himself to meet Marian's eyes.

"Yeah," he said weakly, "You...uh...uh...I guess, you saw?"

Both of her eyebrows lifted. Of course, she saw. How else would she know about it? Nate's gaze flicked toward the back of the gym, where his mother was still holed away in her office in meetings. Marian followed his line of sight, then rolled her eyes.

"You didn't even talk him into a membership, did you?" she scoffed.

"What?"

"Don't worry, kid." Marian patted him on the shoulder. "Your secret is safe with me, but I think you should tell her. She worries about you, you know."

He figured that was every parent's prerogative. But when his mom worried about things, she tended to get hands-on, like trying to set him up on dates with every available girl. He mostly managed to get out of most of them and had gone on a few that weren't so bad, but still, he would rather his mother...not. Telling her about Bailey might make her stop worrying that because he was single at the ripe old age of twenty-one and on track to die a lonely spinster, but it would open a whole new can of worms.

Then again, he did hate hiding shit like this. Thus far, his parents didn't know he was Bi because it had never really come up, and limiting the dating pool for his mother to pick from when she set up the blind dates always seemed to work in his favor. But if he was going to be hanging around—they weren't dating, he reminded himself—with someone like Bailey, who would randomly come up at the dinner table sometimes and was going to start showing up at the gym, he should probably say something.

"I'm going to see if it's okay with her to put Bailey on the house list." He turned toward the back.

"Sure about that?" Marian asked.

He really was not, but he figured that now, just after he decided it was probably a good idea to come out, was the best time to go for it. Before he talked himself out of it.

"Yeah, man." Nate smiled at Marian and then marched toward his mother's office.

His mom was one of the most disorganized organized people to ever live. Heaps of paperwork, samples, and whatever else lay heaped upon every horizontal surface, save one chair that she made a point of leaving clear for guests to sit in. Yet she knew exactly where every single business card anyone had ever given her went.

Nate's dad, who was the one to keep their house tidy, never knew where anything was.

"Hey, Mom," he knocked and poked his head through the door. "You still in a meeting?"

"No, I'm between meetings right now. What's up kid?" She called almost everyone kid, including Nate.

"I wanted to talk to you about something real quick," he sidled into the room and parked his butt on the lone available chair. Paperwork teetered in the other guest chair, unbalanced by some kind of gift with candy and business cards in a little tin bucket that a solicitor had left her the other day. She pulled her glasses off her nose and set them aside to give him her full attention.

He began to sweat.

What to say first? 'Hey mom, I'm actually into guys too,' or 'Guess what? I've been hanging out with Bailey Alexander.' The chicken and the egg. Just saying he was hanging out with Bailey and not delving into his sexuality felt like kind of a cop-out. Plus, there was no way on Earth that his mom would not ask what changed to make it so they were no longer at each other's throats anymore.

"So," he folded his hands in his lap and stared at the pink Himalayan salt lamp his mom was using as a paperweight on her desk. "So, I've been, you know, experimenting with my sexuality lately."

Thank the lord, his mom was easy to talk to. She arched one brow and said, "As kids your age seem to do. Come to any conclusions?"

"Well, I do think I like both guys and girls," he admitted.

His mom smiled at him. He could see the calculations behind her eyes, either because she and Dad had a running bet about their kids' sexuality, which was incredibly likely, or from adjusting the available pool of candidates to pull from for setting him up. In case it was the latter, he blurted out the rest.

"And I've been hanging out with Bailey Alexander, like, in a friendly way."

"Oh?" his mom's other brow shot up. Then she chuckled. "Hanging out as friends?"

The way she emphasized 'friends' made his face hot.

"Christ, Mom," he groaned.

"Well, you come in here and tell me you are interested in other boys sexually and also that now—all of a sudden—you and Bailey are on good terms." She pressed her lips together and shrugged.

"Yeah, but you don't have to make me say it, Jesus."

"Well, I won't then," She leaned back in her seat to check the time on her computer monitor, then picked up her glasses. "Thanks for telling me. And I am so glad that you and Bailey got over your little disagreement."

A minor disagreement that lasted the better part of a decade and put them in the local newspaper twice in that time.

"Are you going to tell your Dad, or do you want me to?"

"I'll tell him when he gets home tonight," Nate said. His mom wiggled her mouse even though the screen was already up, then started scrolling through her emails for the link for her next meeting. Nate opened his mouth, closed it, and inhaled a big breath. "Bailey and I aren't together or anything, though. Just want to be clear about that."

"That's fine, kid. You're just experimenting." She waved a hand and glanced back over at him to smile. It was the kind of smile that he usually found reassuring, but he still felt a little uneasy, like once she and his dad settled their current bet about his sexuality, they would start a new one about when he and Bailey were going to get married. "We can talk more about it tonight after dinner if you'd like?"

"No, I think that was all I had to say," he smiled back. "Just wanted to let you know."

"Thanks, see you at home then."

He closed the door behind himself, then leaned against it for a minute. The gym was slow today; Marian could handle it, and he needed a second to bring his heart rate and temperature back to equilibrium. He knew his mom would be cool about everything, if not excited for him. Her reaction had been muted in comparison to what he expected, to be honest. Telling her at work while she was between back-to-back meetings had been a tactical success on his part. But he couldn't help but feel a little squirm of anxiety as he pushed away from the door and returned to the gym floor. 

A/N: A little short this update because this chapter split awkwardly. Hopefully this works kind of well to showcase his mom's frank nature <3