Jake’s had gay thoughts before.
Everyone has. It's normal to have some gay thoughts sometimes.
He's had gay thoughts about Amir before, too. That's a little harder for Jake to rationalize to himself.
He sees Amir every day. They basically live together, even though they don't. Amir spends more time at Jake's apartment than he does his own, and as much as Jake protests, he would spend every night alone otherwise. Amir is always around, the only constant in Jake's unpredictable and constantly shifting life.
Which means, yeah, okay, sometimes Jake has dreams about him or whatever. The Amir dreams tend to be extremely horny, which, once again, is probably fine and normal. Amir is just on his mind all day, so by the time he goes to sleep, his subconscious has to work through all the Amir Bullshit from the day and sometimes it does that through wild kinky sex dreams.
So he dreams about sex with Amir, which bleeds into thinking about sex with Amir, and, because Jake is a fucking romantic, that twists into thinking about doing other things with Amir. Candlelight dinners, buying a house, lazy mornings in bed with the sun warming them through the window. A big white wedding, with matching suits and vows that make him cry and his family there to watch and cheer as he stomps the glass and kisses him under the archway. Love.
The sex stuff is almost easier.
It's not like any of this is new. It's been bubbling under the surface for the last eight years, and it's never occured to Jake to give it much thought beyond vague annoyance and trying to ignore it. He'd never really even considered that it could be— that he could be— what, gay? Is that what this makes him? Or bi? He's slept with girls before, like, a lot (at least three times, maybe even five, if you stretch your definition of 'slept with'), and he's liked it. At least, he thinks he did. Now he's overthinking and can't remember if he liked it or just did it. Would he have kept doing it if he didn't like it? Fuck, now he can't even remember how it felt.
Maybe he'd like sleeping with a man. Maybe they could be, like, in love, or whatever.
Jake doesn't know for sure if he's ever been in love.
He loved Sarah, probably. He at the very least had a crush on her, almost definitely. He dated Hallie, who was— fine. She was fine. He could have loved her. His short lived engagement to Neko was pretty good, until she ended up moving back to Japan and they immediately failed at making long distance work.
Then there was Lerona.
He loved Lerona, without a doubt. He still does, deeply and fiercely in a way no amount of time or distance can undo. Nowadays, so many years later, it feels different than it did back then; he loves her, sure, but he's not in love with her, at least not anymore. She's still special to him, but he's long past holding out hope that they'll end up together. Mostly.
When he pictures the future, and who he's there with, he can't imagine it being anyone other than Amir.
Huh. Well, fuck.