There Ain’t A Wrong Way To Have A Body
Doing a series of poems for @yoiprideweek featuring bisexual Mila Babicheva as she learns a bit more about herself, and her friends.
(first person pov; mila’s a sassy teenager. you can also read this on ao3 here.)
Day 6: Voices
There Ain’t A Wrong Way To Have A Body
It’s something that JJ told me once, putting on a show,
faking one of those American-cowboy accents –
Mila Babicheva, he said, There Ain’t A Wrong Way To Have A Body.
JJ who always runs around like he’s compensating for something,
so much that I’ve made a bet with Beka, who’s known him the longest,
that he and Isabella are going to wind up swingers.
I made the mistake of telling Vitya about it, once,
and he got all sly and superior and smirky:
thinking about taking them up on it later?
– Well, yeah, okay. Maybe. Except Yura’s right about them, too:
JJ won’t ever learn how to shut his trap for thirty minutes,
and a girl has to have her standards.
Gosha is as straight as they come,
waiting on his one world-shattering, life-changing love,
and having at least three of them a year in the interim.
It doesn’t stop him from seeing, clear-eyed,
that Yuuri and Victor have the thing that he wants,
and he’s learning, watching Victor, to look for a love
that maybe this time will nourish and sustain.
Yura acts like he knows everything there is to know about sex already,
which is the surest way to be certain that the boy knows nothing.
The problem – the question – is that Sara likes girls.
Sara likes their soft skin, and their curls, and me;
even though I’m knees and elbows still,
full of foul words and bad temper.
Sometimes I like Sara, which somehow only Christophe knows;
Christophe Giacometti, the gayest fairy godfather any of us could have,
the man who groped Yuuri Katsuki’s ass in front of Vitya, in public,
and must have receipts enough, or know where the bodies are buried,
because he still lives to tell the tale.
Sara is older than me, more serious, sometimes;
like Christophe’s distinguished-looking, steady partner,
the one who is somehow surprisingly fine with a relationship
that seems to exist, to us outsiders, without bounds or borders
Yeah, but how does he put up with it,
I want to know, because I’m not ready yet,
for Serious, and definitely not Yes,
and maybe not even for someone like Sara,
Which is exactly when Christophe grins his wolf-grin at me, all-knowing, and says:
Mila Babicheva, Ain’t A Wrong Way To Have A Body.
This has been a story about all of them,
but mostly I had to tell it
to explain to Yuuri Katsuki
why I chased his gossiping fiancee,
howling, around the rink
for a solid and unforgiving
thirteen laps.