His lips find my temple, and for a second, I just breathe. Let myself be held in public by my boyfriend while wearing a ratty hoodie my mother would hate and sitting in a frat house my father would find 'common.' Small rebellions, but they're mine.
"So yeah," I murmur against James's shoulder. "That's how I knew. When the thought of playing straight for the rest of my life felt like a death sentence in Italian leather shoes."
"Caleb..." James's voice is rough, and when I pull back to look at him, his eyes are suspiciously bright.
"Don't you dare get weepy on me, Hunter."
"Shut up, I'm not—" But he is, a little, and it makes my heart do complicated things I'm still not used to.
His thumb brushes away what might be a tear from my cheek.When did that happen?And then we're kissing. Soft at first, careful, like he's trying to kiss away every harsh word my father ever said.
My hands find his face, holding him close, and somewhere between one breath and the next, careful becomes desperate. I don't know how, but suddenly I'm straddling James as we try to crawl inside each other, like proximity could heal old wounds.
"Love you," he murmurs against my mouth, and I swallow the words, tuck them safe behind my ribs where my father can't touch them.
"Sap," I whisper back, but I'm kissing him again, can't seem to stop, his hands in my hair now, messing up the styling I spent too long on?—
We're so caught up in our own bubble of confession and comfort that it takes a second to realize…
"Where's Gavin?"
The spot beside us is empty. How does someone that large disappear without…
CRASH!
The sound is loud enough to wake the dead. Or at least stop a frat party, which is basically the same thing. We're on our feet before my brain fully grasps what's happening. James doesn't let go of my hand as we run toward the front of the house.
"What the fuck?—"
The front lawn looks like a scene from an action movie. A car, one of those obnoxious lifted trucks the Epsilon Beta Mu asshats drive, is embedded in our decorative wall, headlights pointing at the sky like drunken searchlights.
The driver's door hangs open, and someone's crawling out, stumbling and clearly wasted.
"Is that Chad?" James squints at the figure.
Of course it is, because this night wasn't surreal enough already.
Campus security arrives in record time, probably because someone crashing into Greek Row is their worst nightmare. Then the real cops show up because Chad, in his infinite drunken wisdom, decides to shove the security guard.
"I didn'— I didn' do anything wrong! 's all... 's bullshit!" Chad slurs, right before Officer Cooke introduces his face to our lawn.
"Sir, please stop resisting." "My dad will sue?—"
It's kind of perfect, watching Chad eat grass while the guard sits on him like he's a particularly unruly beanbag chair. Someone's definitely filming this for TikTok. The Epsilon Beta Mu brothers hover nearby, torn between loyalty to their president and self-preservation.
"Ten bucks says he cries," James murmurs in my ear.
"Twenty says he asks for his lawyer first."
We don't get to find out because that's when Chad starts vomiting, and everyone scrambles back with a collective "Ewwww."
By the time they've hauled Chad away and the tow truck has extracted his I'm-not-compensating-for-anything truck from our wall, the party has shifted into a weird post-crash energy.
There's music playing, but it's quieter. People are still drinking, but mostly just processing what they witnessed.
"Where the hell did Gavin go?" James scans the room, frowning. "One minute he's having an existential crisis on our couch, the next—poof."
"Maybe he needed to process." The words sound right even though I'm still worried. "Finding out you might be gay at twenty-three can't be easy."
