By Alexa
A plastic green plant with small leaves on stems, protruding from a white ceramic pot with a semi-circle in shades of pink and orange.
K laughed and mumbled something to another coworker. I came closer to ask about the joke, with no expectation that it was at my expense. Then, not quite embarrassed but as if she knew it was unkind and didn’t care, she said it was fitting that I brought it in: a fake plant in a lesbian-flag pot brought in by a “fake-lesbian.”
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Before K was hired, my bisexuality rarely came up at work. Sometimes with other queer coworkers, as we got to know each other. We work with young people, so creating a safe space for queer kids in our program is important. My values of supporting and protecting my community are connected to my identity; being bi plays a role in my work simply as a part of who I am.
In K’s cover-letter, she talked about her experience as a lesbian woman raised in a rural area and how it shaped her. When she started, I was glad to have another person representing joyful queer adulthood. For myself, and the queer kid I once was, I felt lucky to work with someone who had 10 years and so much experience on me.
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When I was younger, it wasn’t just my sexuality that I needed validated by other people—it was everything about me.
But by age 22, I was in a better place, and in a three-year monogamous relationship with a really wonderful guy. Working, for the first time, in an office. I felt simultaneously like this job saved me from work I found unsatisfying and also felt the overwhelming sea of a Real Adult Job, threatening to drown me in office-culture rules and email etiquette. Not fully confident in myself, but I’d made huge strides.
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When K started working with us, she seemed to click with everyone. I felt like being myself with her. She was proudly, loudly a lesbian, and I was inspired by her self-expression. As a bisexual woman dating a cis man, I wanted to feel seen in queer friendships.
She invited me to hang out outside of work many times, and I made excuses not to. I wanted to be friends, but I could tell something else was there. Some glances were a little too lingering, the quiet signaling of sapphic flirtation becoming more obvious. I finally agreed to a show one night, and spent the evening trying to enjoy it, but knew it was giving her the idea that I might feel something more. I didn’t know how to act.
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K lived by the value of freedom. The more I listened to her, the more I worried I’d been living my life too cautiously. She appeared to be well-liked by the whole office. A chaotic but welcome distraction. Then a stress-inducing one.
Sitting at my computer each day with the twitchy inattention of someone expecting to be interrupted, I’d look through emails, not getting far before opening the messages she sent from across the room. She loved games, especially “guess what I’m thinking,” giving hints and pressing for more guesses when all I wanted to do was give up and stop thinking about her hints, her suggestions…her.
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K wanted me to write a song with her. She hadn’t made music in a while and I admitted to having no musical abilities, but I could write lyrics. She decided, then insisted, that we write a song together. She sat close as we listened to instrument tracks on GarageBand.
My stomach was as low in my body as could be, boiling in the pit of my gut, walking into work. Knowing that I’d smile and shrug avoidantly when asked about lyrics.
Each day she suggested lines, implying she wanted to write a love song about two women. The butterflies sensation could be compared to what I was feeling. Only, I was her crush, and I felt at all times, in all these scenarios, more like an ant under a magnifying glass getting hotter and hotter.
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Like the adults in the house I grew up in, nothing mattered more to them than appearing to have it all together. Admitting I wasn’t okay was pointless at best. At worst, it could shatter my precariously held-together sense of self.
If I’m grateful for anything that happened between K and me, it’s that her increasingly abusive behavior led me to a breaking point. The glass cracked.
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I wasn’t threatened, but my self-trust disintegrated. I felt controlled by a compulsive urge to do what K wanted. When I thought about not playing along, I dreaded sharing office space and work projects. It was easier to give her small responses she liked, instead of facing her attitude at rejection. I didn’t want to sit in meetings ignoring her burning glare from across the table.
I was vulnerable, but I didn’t make it entirely easy for her either, and she let me know it. K felt that I was lying about my feelings for her. She teased me in light-but-cutting terms, saying I was no fun, boring. Her favorite line was “grow up,” which felt like “Give up. Give in.”
I knew I didn’t feel for K what she felt for me. I thought she was someone I wanted in my life, but her attention made me squirm, leaving me exhausted and stressed. She was fun, but then she would do or say something hurtful, sending a ripple through the ever-blurrier picture I had of her.
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I nodded along with the beats and tried to imagine words in the song. I’d listened to a folklore podcast on Asmodeus, a demon prince, earlier. When she asked what I was thinking of writing about, I said I could see writing a western “cowboy” song about a modern-ish, misunderstood Asmodeus. Her face fell, her eyes rolled. She asked something like “what if you wrote about a woman instead of a man?”
I tried to ignore it. Her disappointment was palpable when I didn’t flirt back, when I didn’t answer how she wanted: an answer that would continue the subtle flirtation, without denying her.
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The Monday at work after we went to the show, she told me she had feelings for me.
I went home anxious, feeling sick, and told my partner everything. That our hangout felt weirdly like a date. I was worried she would say this, my worries were realized, and I didn’t understand what I was feeling.
I told K that I felt so conflicted, and I just wanted to be friends and coworkers. I was happy in my relationship and didn’t want to explore any feelings between us. It was hard because it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but I’d feel rotten with guilt if I let her think I was interested enough to end my relationship. She got upset at first, but then turned playful. It scared me. She said something like, “I’m not gonna give up that easy.”
I told myself that because I had the courage to say it, she had to understand and respect me. She didn’t. She thought that I was in a compulsive heteronormative relationship, shackled to male validation. If I’d let her, she could free me from it.
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I held back, even when I was lost in self-doubt. Even when I excused her behavior, a part of me knew it was wrong.
Through months of this tense dynamic and trying to put distance between us, she took out her frustration on me, often by invalidating my bisexuality in small ways. The summer “Good Luck Babe” by Chappell Roan came out and played everywhere, she would shoot me a look with something in the eyes saying, “This song is gonna be about you.”
I know some of her biphobia was the unprocessed grief and trauma of homophobia she experienced. Maybe that fueled her as much as my rejection, hurt not only from my response but her past. She wanted me to question myself, and whether I felt I could honestly claim queerness.
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Before K suddenly quit, she’d been bad-mouthing me to coworkers, commenting that another young co-worker and I were bad at our jobs, and a whole lot of other cruel stuff that came to light in the wake of her leaving. She had been isolating us and pressuring several of us to stay silent.
Two of my co-workers and I grew close after talking through what happened. I’ve come to know myself more deeply because of these friendships, and through rebuilding my self-trust after this experience.
There isn’t a satisfying ending where I stood up for myself, defending my identity and my relationship in the face of a biphobic, mean person who spent months derailing me because she was in a position where she could. The ending, instead, is gratitude that it’s over, and for the pieces I’ve been picking up since the glass shattered: pride, community, and most importantly, the validation I give myself.
Alexa is a writer and poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the U.S., whose work often centers around the aching opposites of life; the grey areas where conflicting things can be true. Her work has appeared in Blue Mountain Review and Running Wild Anthology, among others. She enjoys listening to bisexual podcasts, co-hosting community art events with her friends, and reading Substack newsletters (hers is inthenudenews.substack.com).