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.”
