He was exhausted, running on empty. Hadn’t showered or eaten breakfast. Wore day old underwear and the least-smelly socks he’d been able to rummage from his laundry hamper.
All that remained was to deliver a Christmas present to Debbie, mail one to Adam, then head home for the holidays. He dreaded the heading home part.
He thought about Adam and sighed.
His and Adam’s paths at MCU had been eerily in tandem from the beginning, like entangled particles. Both were freshmen, closeted gays, and had been fast-tracked for membership in the GM.
In the normal course of events, they each would have joined the GM and worked their way around to a handshake. Whether that would have been the beginning of a love story like Nicholas’s and Bradley’s, fifteen years and counting, anyone’s guess.
Maybe that handshake would just have been the thread that linked them in friendship, weaving their story into the tapestry that incorporated the rest of the GM, all of them connected by silky filaments of semen into a sort of mystical blood brotherhood—like the bond between Achilles and Patroclus in theThe Iliad.
Colton’s treachery had altered the trajectory of events, like throwing a rock into a pond and watching the expanding ripples, each, in a way, caused by its predecessor—all resulting, proximately, from the rock and the malicious hand that threw it.
Colton’s reporting Adam to the dean had been the rock. Everything after that had been a ripple. Adam’s expulsion. His near suicide. Gay Chapel. Colton’s smug SGA resolution congratulating the administration on having bagged another fag. Matt’s passioned rebuttal calling for a caring response. Matt’s road trip to deliver condolences to Adam. The heart-stopping moment Adam had entered the room.
And now, finally, after months of correspondence, the two of them would usher in the New Year with a first kiss. Two weeks and four days were all that remained on the countdown clock in Matt’s head.
The muzak switched to a new song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”
The bathroom door creaked open.
Someone stepped to the urinal to Matt’s right, fumbled a zipper, then loosed a drippy, drizzly stream.
“What’s up, Buttercup?”
Matt bristled. Only one person used that word—Buttercup: Colton Langley, MCU’s version of Seuss’s green gremlin.
Matt acknowledged Colton with a curt nod.
Colton finished pissing, shook himself, zipped, and went to the sink.
“Since it’s the Christmas season, I’m here to offer you a gift,” he said.
Matt hurried to tuck his dick back in his jeans, then make a hasty exit. Even in its current fog, his brain flashed the warning: Beware of Coltons bearing gifts.
“Keep your dick out and stay facing the wall,” Colton barked. “I don’t want you sucker punching me again.”
Matt sighed. Decided to play along—for now. “What’s the gift? And what’s the catch?”
“The gift is that I’ll leave your little friend alone, as opposed to getting her kicked to the curb, which is what I should do. There is no catch, except that it’s polite for you to give me a gift in return. I think you know what I want.”
Matt stood there, facing the urinal, his dick dangling like a misplaced participle. He calculated whether he could whirl around and catch Colton before he escaped into the hall outside. Pummel him like a Posadas pinata. The odds weren’t good. The door was near the sink where Colton stood.
“What ‘little friend?’” Matt asked.
Colton sneered. “Don’t play coy. I’ve seen you with her in the cafeteria several times. Everyone has.”
Ava? Matt thought of his fake girlfriend, Ava, aka his beard, for whom he was also a beard, her being lesbian and all. Lesbian girlfriend, in fact, of Molly. Matt and Ava dined together once or twice a week.
“You’d better not hurt her,” Matt hissed.
Colton dried his hands with paper towels. “That’s up to you—whether she gets hurt or not. Now listen up. I’m sure you remember that little box of letters William had, the ones he claimed were from me. I want them. All of them. The box, too. The whole ‘kicking your friend to the curb’ business is already in motion. Bring me the box in the next thirty minutes, and I’ll put a stop to it.”
ShitFuckDamn!
Matt balled his fists in anger, felt his face getting hot. Colton Langley was not your average, run-of-the-mill bully. He was someone for whom life was just a giantWhack-a-Molegame, and he wielded the mallet.
Matt had worried something like this would happen when William had brandished that little box full of fake love letters from Colton.
