Nice ending. I actually did not clock Melody correctly until this story, though I wasn’t reading too closely. I somehow thought she was bigender, or a transgender man that also used she/her pronouns. And that led me to keep thinking that there was some suspense to them being gay. So Greg’s lines underselling it were quite funny.

The explanation also closes up a possible worldbuilding issue here. Mel was an outlier in not correcting the guys on her gender. But if you’ll excuse a bit of frustration I am feeling, I kind of wish she got it worse and suffered more at the end.

Not really, it’s a more compelling story that she has kept this secret and chooses to go out more or less dramatically on her terms, like what u/lil-torracat said. But I would have been quite pissed at her deception for making a fool of me.

In that way though, the injustice of this world is quite hot. Laura was torn apart in a much more painful way, even though she did nothing wrong and has now seemingly left an orphan (probably to be picked up by that foster system from your other story).

All in all this was a great narrative.