CHAPTER ONE

 

Mac

Things were happening. Well, possibly happening. Mac put the probability at 25 percent happening for the moment.

Mac had never flirted with a guy before. Even when his gaydar went off, he ignored it. He preferred to observe, as if everyone around him were subjects in a grand experiment. Things were safer that way. After escaping his small town, quite literally, and then moving to Pittsburgh in eleventh grade, which wasn’t all that different, his best survival tactic was to assume the world around him was straight and let the world assume the same about him. It had led to avoiding eye contact, unintentional celibacy, and ample masturbation. But he managed to graduate unscathed. One of his reasons for choosing to attend Browerton was because it was a liberal campus, i.e. he could be openly gay, and flirt with other openly gay guys.

Like Gideon.

Just saying Gideon’s name in his head made Mac’s insides do flips that would make an Olympic gymnast jealous.

They stood next to each other at the refreshments table of a Welcome to Browerton party. It was his first night of college, and he was already loving undergraduate life.

Gideon smiled at him. Smiling was a good sign, right? Mac hitched his percentage up to 30 percent. To calm himself down, Mac imagined this as a social experiment, one of many he hoped to devise as an undergrad. Hypothesis: Flirting is part of human instinct. Even if somebody has never flirted before in his life, he can rely on intuition to guide him to victory.

“You can’t underestimate the quality of Sprite. It has the lemon-lime taste that puts it in a class all by itself.” Gideon shook out the last drops of sugary goodness into his cup. His lanky body stretched up like a beanstalk. Mac was six feet even, and he still had to crane his head back for their conversation. Gideon had dirty blond hair that dashed around the top of his head, yet still managed to make sense, and his thick-framed hipster glasses displayed large green eyes that were always exploring.

Gideon was unlike anyone he’d known back home. Not just because he was a New Yorker, which made him a little exotic in Mac’s eyes. It was in his attitude and directness and volume, the way he carried himself through the world like a knife effortlessly slicing through cake.

“You’ve put way too much thought into pop,” Mac said.

“You mean soda.” Gideon arched an eyebrow that sent a spark straight to Mac’s home entertainment center.

“No. It’s called pop.”

“Nobody calls it pop. It’s soda.” He said it in such a matter-of-fact way that should’ve offended Mac, but it just made him smile harder.

“Nobody calls it soda. In Pittsburgh, it’s pop.”

“I’ve never met anyone from Pittsburgh.”

“Well,” Mac put a hand on Gideon’s forearm. Light touching. Eye contact. Smiling. Instinct was taking over. “I assure you that we follow the laws of the Constitution in my neck of the woods.”

“Except that you say pop.” Gideon didn’t retract his arm right away. They remained touching for a good three seconds. Mac could hear bleachers full of people in his head cheering him on.

40 percent. Vegas would be very optimistic about these odds.

“Is it true that New Yorkers think that New York is the center of the universe?”

“It’s not a thought. It’s an empirical fact.” Gideon flashed Mac a teasing smile. Mac liked the teasing. From all the times he had to watch straight friends flirt, he knew that teasing was good.

43 percent.

Gideon took back his arm. “Do you want a refill on your…soda?”

42 percent.

“Sure.”

Mac could feel the past slipping away with each second he enjoyed at Browerton. It was a new start, much like Pittsburgh had been, only with more possibility. His Aunt Rita had said he would love college. He lived with her in Pittsburgh, and she was more of a parent to him than his mom or dad had been.

Gideon poured him another cup of Coke. “It’s interesting, though, because I could swear you have a little bit of a Southern accent.”

Mac walked to an empty spot against the wall. “I do? I don’t know.”

“Yeah. It’s there. Hiding in the background. Twangy.” Gideon followed behind him and leaned only a few meager inches away on the very same wall. That had to bring him up to a 45 percent. Mac listened extra hard over the noise of the party and his heart pounding the hell out of his ears.

He looked down at his shoes. “I’m from West Virginia, originally.”

“That’s it!”

“But that was years ago.” He would not let this conversation get awkward. Now was not the time to bring up his past. Sob stories had no place in flirting. Even a newbie knew that.

“Still makes you a Southerner at heart,” Gideon said.

“It’s not the South!”

“Same difference.” Another teasing smile. It was a visual Mac never wanted to leave his head.

“It only comes out when I’m having fun,” Mac said. Gideon’s New York accent seemed to be with him nonstop. Mac wasn’t complaining. It was a hot accent, all hard edges and brute force. “Say, what color is your cup?”

“Ahrange.”

“You mean awrenge.”

“Awrenge?” Gideon overemphasized, and it was adorable as hell. “Who says awrenge? ‘Look at me. I’m eating an awrenge.’”

Mac shoved him away, which allowed a brief touch of his chest. Gideon might’ve flexed for him on contact, but that was inconclusive.

“It’s pronounced ahrange.” Gideon pressed a pointy finger against Mac’s chest, and Mac flexed briefly, just to let him know that he visited a weightroom regularly.

48 percent.

They continued talking about classes and dorms and the soul-sucking retail jobs they worked over the summer. The words didn’t matter. It was all a front for the looks and smiles and surreptitious touching. Flirting became kinda effortless. Instinctual. Mac wasn’t really trying anymore. He just enjoyed Gideon’s company, and the feeling seemed mutual. But the problem with talking was that it wasn’t moving the percentage needle.

Gideon illuminated Mac about what matzo balls were. “It’s like dough, almost like a wanton, but it’s made of matzo meal, which is like bread without yeast, so it’s unleavened and…it’s a ball of goodness. That’s all you need to know.”

“And you eat it all the time?”

“You’re just supposed to eat it at a Passover Seder, but my mom makes it for most holidays.”

Mac pretended to know what Gideon was talking about, which Gideon was not buying.

“Passover’s like the less fun cousin of Easter. You can’t eat bread, and we celebrate getting to wander the desert for forty years. Jesus’s last supper was a Seder.”

“Really?”

“I’m ninety-seven percent sure.” Gideon fixed his glasses on his ears, a nervous tic that only added to his cuteness. “How’d we get to talking about religion? What’s next on the list of taboo topics? Politics?”

A silence passed between them, this one Mac felt deep within him and made him grip his cup tighter. He didn’t know what to say next, but he was thinking of something fast.

“Should we try to be social?” Mac nudged his chin at the packed room. He had talked to some kids tonight, but once he saw Gideon across the room chatting away, his attention focused on getting to know the cute, tall guy. When Gideon wound up at the drinks table alone, Mac zoomed over to casually bump into him.

Gideon shrugged his apathy. He pulled out his phone. “I’m going to show you what a matzo ball looks like.”

48.4 percent.

Mac proceeded to yank out his phone. “And I’ll show you a map so you can see that West Virginia is firmly not in the South.”

“We’ve only been at Browerton for twenty-four hours, and already we’re expanding our horizons.”

Or at least they tried to. Mac’s phone was taking forever to load the image search. He refreshed, which set him back to zero. He gestured to his phone to pick up the pace, but no dice. He glanced up at Gideon, who was having similar problems.

“Everyone at the party is probably draining the Wi-Fi,” Gideon said.

And that’s when an idea caught fire in Mac’s mind. He realized that flirting only took him so far. He was circling his opponent in the boxing ring. At some point, he had to connect with a right hook. He put his hand in his pocket and clutched his four-leaf clover keychain for some good luck.

“My dorm is across the street.” Mac gulped back every last nerve. “We can just go on my computer.”

Gideon looked behind Mac at the party. Mac waited like a defendant watching the jury foreman stand, ready to read his verdict.

“Great idea!”

100 percent.

Φ

Mac had to wipe his sweaty palm on his shirt in order to open the door to his floor. The layout reminded him of a submarine: long and narrow. The halls were empty. Everyone was at the mixer, or elsewhere. Mac’s heart beat faster at the silence around them. His keys shook in his trembling hand. He jiggled it in the lock a few times before it opened.

Mac sat at his desk and turned on his computer. He took calming breaths in through his nose, and out his mouth. “You can sit on the bed. No need for you to hunch over me like that.”

“Cool.” Gideon did as instructed.

Mac willed his fingers to stop shaking on the computer keys. He was an astronaut touching down on a new planet. Planet Gay. I can’t believe I am here, in my room, with a guy, who’s ON MY BED, and things are 100 percent about to happen.

Gideon’s back slumped against the wall. “So what do you want to study here?”

“Patterns.” Mac spun around his chair to face Gideon. The computer was in his lap.

“Patterns?”

“Sociology is the study of patterns and trends. Our lives and our society are a system of patterns that we’ve honed over time, and I want to study them. What does what we do everyday say about us? They’re all patterns that humans have been refining for centuries.”

“You don’t think people can break patterns?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“You really thought this over. My mom said that economics would be a good major for me, and I have some friends who work on Wall Street.”

Mac handed over his laptop, and their fingers touched in the process. He now wished the laptop had remained on his lap.

Gideon scoured the web for just the right picture of a matzo ball. He was on a serious mission. He found his winning picture within the depths of Pinterest. A thick, large ball being raised out of a piping hot bowl of soup.

“Feast your eyes on this beauty.”

Mac sat next to him on the bed. He felt every spring move underneath him. Gideon might’ve said something else about the matzo ball, but Mac couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of his pulse in his ears. They were still circling each other. No punches thrown yet.

“Okay, so it might not look like much. You really need to taste one.”

Mac took the computer from Gideon and moved it to the desk chair. Before Gideon could say anything else, Mac kissed him.

Mac could hear Gideon’s breathing and his own heart rate dueling in his ears. I am feeling Gideon’s nose against my nose! I am feeling his lips with my lips! But just as fast as the kiss happened, it was over.

Gideon scooted back. “I’m straight.”

His words were the real right hook here. He stood up faster than the speed of light.

“Oh.” Mac didn’t know what else to say in this situation. He looked to Gideon, who didn’t seem to have malice in his green eyes—just shock, and a dose of fear—which seemed to be a good start.

“I’m sorry.” Mac felt his cheeks heating up faster than a stove. “I thought…I guess we got our signals mixed.”

People used that expression too lightly. Mac thought about trains, and how if they got their signals mixed, they would crash and kill hundreds of people.

Gideon opened the door. He couldn’t even look Mac in the eye. “I’ll see you around.”

The smiling, the flirting, the light touches. He thought he was on a street of green lights. How did I get it so wrong?

Mac ran into the hall and found Gideon hauling open the stairwell door. “Gideon.”

He stopped midway down the flight. He adjusted his glasses, and it still made Mac swoon.

“Let’s forget that happened.” Mac waved behind him, to his room, to that fuckload of awkwardness. “Can we be friends?”

Gideon’s eyes bulged open as if Mac suggested they go on a killing spree or something. “Friends? Are you out of your mind?”

Ouch. Mac wasn’t expecting that. Even Gideon seemed surprised by what came out of his mouth. It looked like he was going to say something else, but he turned and continued down the stairs and out of sight.

Things had happened on Mac’s first night at college, and unfortunately, he would never forget them.