A/N: so this is technically a companion piece to one of my other trez stories, Pancakes and Pronouns. however I think I made things clear enough that it's not required reading. the only other thing I change is that i use my hc that Dez is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns


So, forgive Trish if she was wrong, but she had been under the impression that being a couple meant, y'know, being a couple.

Her relationship with Dez was new, she knew that. They'd really only figured out who they were to each other about two weeks ago (she only knew the exact date because Dez had retroactively marked it on the calendar with a heart) but still. They'd known each other since they were fourteen and had been living together for nearly two years. Even if they'd only been dating for a couple weeks, the familiarity they had with each other went back far longer. They were well within their rights to be the obnoxiously in love couple that she used to make fun of as a teenager.

But, that wasn't the case. Now, it would be a damn lie to say that Dez was distant. She was sure that it was physically impossible for Dez to be any kind of cold and/or aloof. Sure, sometimes they withdrew a little when they were stressed or upset (like their recent bout of moodiness over trying to figure out why being referred to as a man just felt viscerally wrong) but that was really only a matter of smacking a little sense into them. They weren't like her, utterly afraid of any kind of vulnerability, even with people she'd known for years. Dez never pushed people away on purpose.

And to be fair, that wasn't exactly what was happening. Dez was an attentive partner – very, very attentive. Like, to the point where Trish kind of understood why teenage Austin's head had been so big if his only basis for friendship was this constant outpouring of devotion and adoration. Dez was always giving her little kisses and compliments and pet names. They acted like she had personally hung all the stars in the sky and were sweet to the point of rotting her teeth. And though she had never been the biggest romantic, she wasn't going to deny that the novelty of their relationship made her a little more mushy than usual too.

But then Dez would just get…weird. Like weird-for-Dez weird. They would break off kisses the second they got heated and withdrew from any kind of cuddling like her skin had been replaced with molten lava. It was just weird – over-affectionate and ever-present Dez pulling away. From her, nonetheless. Their girlfriend. And it wasn't just a one-off thing either; it was a recurring pattern.

And though she was aware of it, it was still a bit of a surprise when it happened.

"Hey," a voice whispered, accompanied by a gentle nudging of her ribs.

Her eyes slid open like they were trapped in molasses as the blurry world came into focus. She was lying down with something under her head, but it didn't feel like a pillow. It was too lumpy for that, and the fabric was all wrong. It shifted under her and she let her eyes open a little wider and found herself looking at Dez, who grinned down at her. She was curled next to them, her head nestled against their collarbone.

It took her another minute to remember why, exactly, the two of them were in this position. The answer came in the form of two simple words: movie night. The two of them had always bonded over movies, even before they would admit they were friends, so it came to no surprise that they remained important through the years and into their romantic relationship. And while it was never like, a formal agreement, they always made time to watch a movie or two (or thirteen, if they were in the mood for a Zaliens marathon) together about every week.

But, their TV had been on the fritz lately, so rather than dealing with that headache, she and Dez simply opted to watch something on Dez's laptop, typically in one of their beds, since they were more comfortable than the couch.

"You're starting to doze off," Dez said, still whispering for some reason, like the volume of their voice would make her any less awake. "So I'm just gonna go back to my bed."

Dez pressed a kiss against her lips, which immediately broke off the second she started to return it. They scooped up their laptop and disappeared in a flash of splatter-painted pajamas, the door slamming shut behind them. They had never quite learned to close doors quietly. She could hear them rustling around in the other room, followed by a dull clatter and muffled swearing. A few more minutes of vague Dez sounds and then finally, silence.

Now fully awake, Trish rolled over one way, then the other. She flipped her pillow over, trying to discern which side was cooler. She moved her hair out from where it had gotten caught under her shirt. And yet, despite her restless movements and adjustments, she still felt discomfort wrap around her like an itchy, unwanted blanket.

For the first time ever, Trish De la Rosa was having trouble falling asleep.

She rolled over once again and found herself staring at Dez's empty side of the bed. It felt kind of dumb referring to it as theirs considering that, as Dez had reminded her, they had a perfectly fine bed of their own, but still. This sort of impromptu bed-sharing had become somewhat commonplace and Dez had this weird thing about sleeping with their back to the closet, so the left side of her bed had become kind of unofficially theirs, just like the right side of Dez's bed was kind of unofficially hers. She'd gotten used to Dez being there, curled up next to her and hogging her blankets. To their annoying snores and unintelligible sleep-talking. To the way they would absentmindedly play with her hair when they couldn't fall asleep and the deceptively soothing cadence of their voice as they rambled on about anything and everything while Trish started to drift off. Their presence was something she had come to expect and now all she could think about was the fact that it was gone.

She yanked her covers all the way to her chin and tried to ignore the pit of utter wrongness bubbling in her gut.


Trish had never been the one to seek out physical affection. Not because she disliked it, but because she had never been in a situation where she needed to seek it out. Her family had always been open when it came to physical affection. She had grown up with casual hugs and head pats from her parents and the occasional side-hug from her brother. Her friends had followed in the same suit, with Austin and Ally providing hugs and excited shoulder grabs without her even needing to think about asking.

And of course, there was Dez. Even before the two of them were dating – hell, even before they would admit they were friends - Dez had always been physically affectionate to the point of clinginess. They draped themselves over her when they were upset and pulled her into back-breaking hugs when they were excited and clung onto her like she was the only person left on earth when they were scared. Every emotion seemed to have a matching physical response and over the years she'd grown accustomed to it, had even started to expect it.

But now it was like Dez was scared to touch her and…and she wasn't used to it, okay? It had always been the other way around, with Dez seeking affection and her rejecting them. She had never needed to be the initiator when it came to physical contact and it was weird and worst of all she missed it.

She hadn't known that the touch of another person was something you could actually miss, but it was. It very much was. She was acutely aware of its absence, of the hollow places in her life that it left behind. She wanted it so bad and while Dez didn't push her away, they also didn't try to initiate any kind of affection. It was always her, it was her pulling them in to cuddle, it was her trying to deepen their kisses, it was her asking for shoulder rubs. It felt like she was the only one who wanted there to be any kind of more-than-platonic affection between them at all.

"Am I overreacting?" she asked after venting about the whole situation to Ally. She wished they were having this conversation face-to-face, but considering that Ally was currently in Sweden, a phone call would have to do.

"Well, you two are dating now, so it's normal to want to be physical." A pause. "Okay, that sounded dirty, but you know what I mean. And besides, it's Dez. I'm sure whatever this is will work itself out."

It was meant to be reassuring, Trish knew that, but all it really did was remind that, despite the fact that the two of them always seemed to be operating on the same bizarre wavelength, her best friend and significant other had never exactly been close. It's Dez, Ally said, like that meant this was all just a mountain being made out of a molehill, like Ally couldn't imagine Dez having any kind of problem that was just utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

"And you know, when Austin and I started dating for the first time, we were trying so hard to be perfect that we stopped being ourselves," Ally continued. "But we figured it out, and I'm sure you guys will too."

And there was a small, petty part of Trish that wanted to remind Ally that she'd been fifteen when she and Austin dated for the first time, that the farthest any of them thought about going physically was kissing with a little tongue. But the bigger part of her, the part that actually cared about not sabotaging her relationships, reminded her that Ally was just trying to help. And there might have been some truth in Ally's words; the weird transition from friends to more-than-friends had been why her and Austin's first relationship failed. Who's to say that same kind of awkwardness wasn't what was affecting her relationship with Dez?

(It sounded more reassuring than it felt)


It was funny, the kind of things you ended up being thankful for. The things that, even if they didn't end up changing your life, at least ended up changing your circumstances into something a little more positive. Things like corndogs or Zaliens or goofy filmmakers that used to drive you crazy.

Things like cat vomit.

"I am very disappointed in you, young lady," Dez reprimanded as they stripped down their bed. Sprinkles, being a cat, paid them no mind. "This kind of behavior is unacceptable. "

"You know she's a cat, right?" Trish asked drily from her seat on Dez's desk chair. She'd come in after hearing Dez's disgusted outcry, laughed at their misfortune for a couple minutes (after all, it wasn't her bed that ended up covered in the partially-digested remains of Sprinkles' dinner), and was now idly watching Dez sternly lecture their cat.

"And that makes her above consequences?" Dez asked rhetorically as they dropped their ruined sheets on the floor to do that disappointed hands-on-hips thing they did.

"Kind of," she said with a cocked eyebrow. "But whatever, both of us have been up since seven giving lessons at the Music Factory, you can just sleep with me tonight," she shrugged with deliberate nonchalance.

"Oh, yeah. Or I could just…sleep on the couch?" Dez offered uncertainly.

"Why? You've never cared about sleeping in my bed before," she said, trying to ignore the recent memories of waking up alone most mornings.

Dez anxiously rubbed the back of their neck, absently tugging at the sparse hair there. "Well, I don't want you to feel like you have to do that…"

"I'm not. Come on ," she groaned, grabbing Dez's wrist and pulling them into her room. Thankfully, they followed without resistance.

She collapsed onto her bed, expecting to feel Dez's weight settle beside her and for some semblance of normal to come back into their relationship. That didn't happen. She turned her head and found Dez sitting neatly on the edge of the bed, a good six inches away from her feet.

"Seriously?" she muttered to the ceiling.

Dez's head whipped toward her. "Seriously what?"

She felt blood rush to her cheeks as she realized that they had heard her. It had been a quiet moment of frustration, not an invitation to discuss their relationship and her hang-ups about it recently.

"Nothing. Never mind," she said.

"No, really. Is everything okay?" Dez asked with that oh-so-earnest expression she had trouble denying.

She sighed heavily and sat up, closing the distance between them as she did. "I mean, we've lived together for two years. You have literally never cared about the two of us sharing a bed or giving me a back rub when I need it, but now that we're dating, it's like you don't even want to be near me."

"Oh God, that's not it at all, I swear," Dez said, utterly distraught. "I was just…trying to give you space because…well, never mind." They dropped their gaze to their lap.

"Dez," she said forcefully. They qualified under her stare but didn't say anything else. "Just talk to me."

"I just…" Dez fumbled for words, absently tearing at their cuticles with mindless, frantic energy. It was only the knowledge that trying to finish their sentences for them would make them more flustered that kept her mouth shut. "I'm not super good at reading people, or knowing what their boundaries are," they said, finding the right words at last. "And I didn't want to mess things up and make you uncomfortable or push you to do things you don't want and I know you've been in bad relationships before and I didn't want to remind you of those and I know I'm too much for a lot of people, especially you, so I thought it would be better if you just took the lead, especially since you like being in control, even if you won't admit it, but you kept not saying anything about it so I thought I should just give you space and-"

Their words were coming at a rapid-fire pace, the edges of them melding together and each clause slipping endlessly into the next as Dez worked themself into a panicked spiral that Trish had to interrupt by grabbing their shoulders and shouting their name. Dez startled like they had briefly forgotten who they were talking to in the first place. After it was clear that Dez's attention was on her and not on their frantic rambling, she released their shoulders and went quiet for a minute, trying to sort out her thoughts, how to properly articulate them and-

"Trish?" Dez asked, fidgeting slightly again, their fingers interlacing and then breaking apart, their body brimming with nervous energy. "Were you going to say something or-"

"You said like, five hundred things, gimme a minute to respond," she snapped back. Dez went silent as she started to speak again. "Okay, first of all, please get it through your meatloaf brain that I'm dating you because I…" Love you dangled dangerously close to the tip of her tongue but she couldn't say it, now right now, not so soon. "like you." She grabbed Dez's hand and looked them straight in the eye. "Trust me, you're not too much, and I'm not going to leave you just because I've had some shitty exes. And second, I don't know who you think you're dating, but you would never get away with doing something that made me uncomfortable."

There was something very soft in Dez's expression, something that made her stomach do flips as they whispered a quiet, "I know."

Her little speech probably should have made her feel emboldened, its momentum carrying her through the rest of this conversation. Instead, it made her collapse against Dez, feeling tired for reasons she couldn't quite explain. "So forget about the whole 'giving me space' thing." She went quiet for a moment longer as Dez started to take out their remaining anxious energy by playing with her hair. "And…I just wish you would've talked to me about this. I felt like you…I don't know, were withdrawing from me." Her throat felt scratchy and tear-stained and she was suddenly glad that their new position meant she didn't have to look Dez in the eyes. "It felt like you didn't want to actually be with me the way I wanted to be with you. I got used to you being there and then you weren't and it just…it sucked."

"Oh," Dez said softly. "I…wish you had talked to me about this too. We really need to work on communication."

She laughed, if only because the casualness of their tone felt absurd in contrast to the rest of their conversation. "We really do. But for now: ground rules. Like I said, I'll tell you if anything you do makes me uncomfortable. But literally anything we did before we started dating is fine. I'm not gonna bite you if we cuddle in bed. And you need to do the same."

Dez's brows knitted together. "I wasn't planning on biting you-"

"Doof," she interrupted with an eye roll. "I meant, tell me if I go too far or something, so we can avoid this kind of mess again."

Dez's eyes went wide with understanding. "Ohhh. Gotcha." They twisted around so they could look Trish in the eye. "But you have to tell if you want to, y'know. do stuff. I'm not a mind reader." They looked contemplative for a second. "Probably."

A huff of exasperated amusement made its way past her lips. "Right now, all I want to do is this."

Her fingers curled around Dez's face and she pulled them closer without resistance. Their lips connected and everything went wonderfully warm and soft. Dez's hands fluttered around uncertainly, first settling on her shoulders, then her back, and then finally tangling back into her hair as their kiss deepened.

It seemed like they were finally on the same page.