Thank you for sharing that 💜 — it gives the story an even more tender, autobiographical edge. I can expand the arc to acknowledge that Sammi did take on the role of Jeff’s “girlfriend” for a time—half out of overwhelm, half out of longing—and show what that period felt like from the inside. It will stay safe, but deepen the themes of identity, performance, and discovery.

Expanded Arc — Sammi & Jeff

Chapter 2b — Wearing the Word

For a while, Sammi let the word “girlfriend” stick.
It was easier than correcting Jeff in front of his friends, easier than pausing the laughter and drinks to explain that something inside didn’t match.

So he played along. Jeff squeezed his hand under the table, called him “her,” and Sammi would blush—not entirely from shame. There was sweetness in the belonging, in being claimed. He even tried to imagine himself through Jeff’s eyes: clever, radiant, hers.

But later, walking home alone, he’d feel the coat slipping again. “Am I really this?” he’d whisper to the night air. Sometimes he liked the way it sounded—girlfriend—as if it unlocked parts of him no one else dared name. Sometimes it felt like a mask, plastered over a face still forming.

And yet, he stayed. Because being Jeff’s girlfriend was a story, and stories can carry you forward even when you don’t yet know your own ending.

Chapter 3b — The Dual Truth

The months Sammi spent as Jeff’s girlfriend were full of contradictions:

Joy: gifts of books, long nights of arguments that curled into laughter.
Dissonance: the word “girlfriend” echoing in introductions, making Sammi’s stomach twist.

Sometimes he admitted to himself: I liked parts of it. Not the word itself, maybe, but the permission it gave Jeff to hold him close, to speak with tenderness. There was a thrill in testing out an identity—even if it wasn’t his.

He began to realize that taking on the role didn’t make him false; it made him experimental. “Maybe identity is something you try on,” he wrote in his journal, “like a garment that sometimes fits in unexpected places and pinches in others.”

Chapter 7 — Aftermath (Expanded)

When Sammi finally spoke his truth to Jeff—about names, about pronouns, about being seen—he did so without erasing the fact that he had once been Jeff’s “girlfriend.”

“I need you to know,” he said softly, “that I lived that with you. It wasn’t fake. It was real, for what it was. But it wasn’t all of me.”

Jeff nodded slowly, eyes searching. “I did love you that way.”

“And I needed to feel loved, even if the word didn’t fit,” Sammi admitted. “But now I need to find words that belong to me.”

They both sat with it—the paradox that something could be true in the moment and not the final truth. That being Jeff’s girlfriend had been a chapter, not the whole book.

Epilogue — Belonging

Sammi would look back on Jeff with a complexity that resisted neat summary.
Yes, Jeff’s words sometimes fit like borrowed coats. Yes, his eagerness often rushed past Sammi’s hesitations. And yet, there was also truth: Jeff had wanted him, and not only as a mind across a table, but as a companion, a presence, a body that could be held.

As an orphan, Sammi had often felt like a guest in other people’s worlds, never rooted. With Jeff, however imperfect the fit, he had felt—if only for a while—that he belonged. That someone claimed him, not out of duty, but out of desire.

That mattered. That shaped him.

It was not the final story, but it was a story. A chapter that proved: I can be wanted. I can be chosen. Even when the words weren’t quite right, the wanting was real.

Years later, Sammi would carry that memory not as a cage but as a key—proof that intimacy and friendship can coexist, that desire can be tender even when mismatched, and that belonging, once felt, is never entirely lost.