The bid came on a Sunday, which felt like God showing off, making the temptation easier and easier.

I’d told myself I wasn’t getting one. That was the safe thing to tell yourself, the version that couldn’t turn around and hurt you later: Always expect the worst, that way when it happens, you’re prepared.

I’d gone to the rush events, three of them, and stood at the edge holding whatever they put in my hand, waiting for somebody to figure out I didn’t belong in a house full of guys who were that easy in their own skin. Nobody figured it out. Or they did, and it just wasn’t the disqualifier I’d spent years being promised it had to be.

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A simple envelope slid under our door. Jasper grabbed the paper and grinned and showed me. And then he did that slieght of hand that I swear was of the Devil and there was another piece of paper with it. My name. With the words “ΔΚΣ Pledge” on it. I sunk into my chair and just looked at it, and Jasper took my hand and put the paper in it. He didn’t make fun of me, which I was learning was its own kind of love, but he clearly wanted me to realize this wasn’t a dream. A group had accepted me, not because of my upbringing, not because of my parents, and not because of some façade that I forced myself to wear.

“Told you,” was all he said. Then, “Wear a shirt that isn’t tucked in. We’re going over.”

Bid Day at the house was loud, the kind of loud that told of excitement by everyone involved, or at least those who were making the noise.

Darius got up on the third stair; he was the tall one in the cardigan I’d watched stop a freshman from doing something dumb at the first party. Turns out, he was the frat president. That the bid wasn’t a deposit on anything. That nobody in this house owed anybody else a thing for being let in, not a favor, not a secret, not their body, and if anyone ever made you feel like you did, you came to him, directly, and it got handled. He said it the flat way you’d read a fire exit, no big speech, which is exactly how I knew he meant it.

Then he said welcome, and the room came apart into noise and a bad playlist and a guy doing a worm across the sticky floor. Did they make pledges clean the floor with their tongues? Was that kind of hazing still a thing?

Part of me believed Darius. The braining part, the part that I was at college to improve. Another part of me – deep, dark, and that had been put into me by other people – didn’t. I’d been raised on belonging with strings. Belong, and here’s the list of who to be, and the list was the rent you paid. This was the first room I’d ever stood in that handed over the belonging and skipped the list, and I really wanted to believe them. But a part of me I hated stood there in all that noise not trusting it, and missing the strings. Missing knowing what I owed, because knowing means knowing, and saying there’s nothing owed means when you find out there is, it’s so much worse.

Then they did the Bigs.

It worked like this: each new guy got matched with an older one who’d look out for him through the semester, show him how the house worked, be the person you could call at 4am. Nik – the pledge master – ran it off a clipboard. Nik was clearly the one who took things seriously in a house that mostly didn’t. He was sharp, never cruel and never loose either, a guy who’d been the responsible one so long it had set into a personality, and it was probably just obvious that he’d run the pledges.

I saw Levi across the room while Nik read names. The flannel, the overgrown hair, the “takes one to know one.” He was somebody’s Big too, it turned out, crouched down talking low to his own new guy with that same stillness he’d had at the party. He caught my eye over the kid’s head and lifted his chin at me, a recognition and acknowledgement, and went back to it.

I was a little busy having a religious experience about somebody else: Nik said my name, and then a name I already knew.

“Renner. You’re with Tav.”

The big one. The one from the first party I’d had to force myself to look away from to stop watching, who Levi had said he knew I was watching. He came across the room with that unhurried way he had, like the floor would wait for him, or the guys just parted for his awesomeness, the characteristic smile arriving before he did. He put out a hand and I shook it, and I worked on keeping my face a normal face.

“Tavita,” he said. “Tav. You’re Josiah?”

“Si. Either’s fine.”

“Si.” He had a voice you felt more than heard, low, rumbling, and up close he was just more, more shoulders, more chest, a guy built on a bigger draft than the rest of us. He didn’t use it to crowd you, though. That was the thing I noticed even then, through the noise of the frat house playing across my ears and eyes and nose. He held all that size still and careful, the way you’d hold a door so it wouldn’t slam. “You good? You look a little stunned, man. It’s a lot, the first day.”

I’d learn it was just a thing he said, the “You good?” That first time it went through me like warm water.

“I’m good,” I said. I was not good. I was many other things.

Ken, the wiry guy next to him who turned out to be Tav’s roommate, looked at me, then at Tav, then back at me, and made a face like he’d run some quick math and the answer was funny. “Oh, this’ll be fine,” he said, to no one, to the ceiling. “This’ll be totally fine.” Tav elbowed him without looking. I didn’t get it.

Nik did the rules talk after, in the back room, all the new guys on folding chairs. Most of it was logistics. The calendar, the study hours, the GPA minimum everyone must maintain that he clearly took personally. And then he got to the one he actually cared about, and his voice went even flatter, even more careful.

“Last thing. Bigs and Littles.” He looked each of us in the eyes. “This is not officially a gay frat. Most guys here happen to be in the LGBTQ+ community. We accept everyone , we don’t care who you are, what you are, who you love, who you lust, who you fuck. Except: You do not touch your Big. Your Big does not touch you. Nothing. All semester, through initiation. I don’t care what you both want. The instant there’s a thing between a Big and his Little, the power’s crooked, and this house does not run crooked. We run very, very straight. At least for that. And if you want somebody, there’s a whole campus out there. But not him. Not while he’s responsible for you.”

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He looked around the room again. “Break that rule, you’re both out. Not a talking-to. There is no redemption, there is no second chance. Out. I’ve done it before, Darius has done it before. We’ll do it again.”

I sat very still on my folding chair and did the thing I was best at, which was keeping my face a normal face with a 👍 in my eyes while the floor dropped out from under it. Of course. Of course it was him. I had spent my entire life learning to want the thing I was told I couldn’t have, getting so good at it that the wanting and the can’t-have had melted into one single feeling, and the universe had looked down at all that practice and signed me up for the advanced course. The one guy in the building. Assigned to me. Walled off by a rule with my name written on the same line as his.

God was testing me. This had to be a test. And I would overcome. I had to, because if I could pass this test, then I would prove that I could still be a good person even though people told me I wasn’t.

Tav came and found me when Nik was done, because that was the job now. He was mine to look out for, I was his to look after, and he steered me around the room introducing me to guys whose names I lost on contact, one hand hovering near my shoulder to guide me through a doorway, pulling back at the last inch like he’d remembered the stove was hot.

He did it three times that night, the almost and the catch, and every time it lit up the exact spot the touch would have gone, which I understood, dimly, was worse than if he’d just clapped me on the back like he did with everybody else.

Temptation. He was tempted. And he wasn’t giving in. But he wanted me in a way that I hadn’t been wanted before.

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Was that me now? A temptation for another man? And him a temptation for me to overcome?

We were going to spend a whole semester being careful in a way nobody else in the house had to be, and the carefulness itself was its own kind of touching. I hadn’t known you could be that aware of a person you weren’t allowed to lay a finger on.

It got to be dinner, and he got me a plate. He asked what I was studying and actually listened to the undeclared non-answer. He told me about his own Bid Day, two years back, how he’d thrown up in the bushes out front from nerves before he even got his envelope, and the easy way he told it, unbothered, at his own expense, was clearly meant to make me feel like less of an outlier for sitting in the corner looking like I’d seen the Holy Ghost. It worked ... a little. That was the worst part. If he’d been a jerk I could have wanted him the clean way, the way you want a poster on a wall. He kept being kind instead, which turned the wanting into a thing with a person attached to it, and I had no way to cope with this.

“You’re allowed to have fun, you know,” he said at one point, leaning in to be heard over the music, close enough I could smell whatever he wore. “This is the fun part. The rest is just rules.” Then he caught himself on the word, and something flickered across his face, and he straightened back up to a legal distance. “Most of the rules,” he added. “But look, no pressure. You got a bid because the guys thought you could add something to the house, but you also got a bid because we thought we could help you. I can’t say who, but one guy advocated real big for you, that we need you as much as you need us. But if you’re not ready to relax into the party, that’s fine, move at your own pace.”

Later, Tav found me on the porch, in the cold and the pine smell, while I was pretending to look at my phone. He didn’t say anything dumb about it. He just leaned on the rail a careful distance away and looked out at the dark.

“Look, the rules thing that Nik did, that last one?” he started.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a good rule.” He said it like he believed it, which somehow made it worse. “Seen it go real bad without it.” A pause, then the smile, smaller this time. “Rule’s the rule, dude. I saw you at that first party, and the answer’s not ‘no.’ But it has to be ‘no’ for now. So, ask me again in December.”

And then he knocked his shoulder, gentle, against the porch post instead of against me, like even that he had to be careful with, and went back inside. Left me out there in the cold with the whole rest of the semester laid out in front of me like a road I could see every mile of.

December. He’d said it like a kindness. Like a door with a date painted on it.

My phone buzzed. My mom, because of course. She had this sixth sense, always the worst time, always when I was thinking things I shouldn’t. I stood on the porch with the cross going cold against my chest and thought: I have found the one place on earth that will hand me everything I was told I could never have, and then set the single thing I want most behind a rule I actually believe in.

Because rules kept us safe. Rules kept us from straying from the path. Rules told us what we had to do and what would happen when we did and what would happen if we didn’t.

But that was the only rule here that had consequence, and everything else about maybe being in this frat was starting to weigh on those rules that had built my life around me, and those older rules were starting to crack under the weight. The cold cross on my chest kept them pinned.

For now.

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Classes started on a Thursday, which felt like a typo but the admin staff were too embarrassed to fix it. You wait your whole life to leave home, and then they ease you in on a Thursday, like the calendar was embarrassed for you.e

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I was good at the part where you go to class. I’d always been good at the parts with rules, it’s how I was raised.

You sit, you take notes, you turn it in early, you make the kind of eye contact that says you’ve done the reading and you can call on me; but they never called on me, because these hundred-people classes were a lecture and the professor just wanted to hear their own voice. The trouble was the rest of the day. The long, unscheduled hours where nobody was watching me, telling me what to do or where to be ... it turned out I had no idea what to do with those. 18 years of being watched, and I’d mistaken the watching for having a personality. Take away the eyes, and there was a guy in a dorm room who didn’t know if he liked coffee, because liking coffee had never been up to him. I knew my roommate liked cream, though, so that was something.

The way to my 9am class went past the houses. You know which houses I mean.

Past ΣΤΥΔ, ΑΛΦΑ, ΤΝΚ. Past ΔΚΣ with its sagging porch, quiet in the daylight, a couple of guys eating cereal on the steps like bears who’d come out of the den, watching the uninitiated pass them by. The Flatirons doing their thing behind it. The whole walk smelled like pine and woodsmoke and the cooler air coming down off the mountains, a smell I didn’t have a memory for, which meant it didn’t belong to anybody yet, which meant it could be mine. Every morning it reminded me a little that this was a different place.

My body kept running the old routines even in the new place.

That was the thing nobody warns you about either. I’d reach for grace over dorm pasta, my chin dipping before I caught it. I’d say “sorry” to a door. That random person who passed by I swore was someone I knew from high school, or that person over there. I’d fold my hands in a quiet classroom out of pure habit and then have to pretend I was cracking my knuckles. I’d tuck the cross back under my collar fast when it slipped out, like I’d been caught, though no one here would have known what they were looking at, or cared. 18 years of choreography ... nobody had told my hands the show had ended, closed up for the night, to reopen ... TBD, or ΤΟΠ?

Because those guys seemed different, the frats. Like they knew there was something else and you could break out of your routine and move on and away from where you had been.

The evenings were the strangest part. At home there had always been somewhere to be by 7 sharp, a thing with a name, a study or a group or a service, the week built like a fence with me inside it. Here, I’d sit at my desk at 8 with no assignment due and no test coming up and nobody expecting me anywhere, and I’d feel the absence of the fence like a missing tooth, my tongue going back to the gap. Jasper would be out, or up on his bunk with headphones. One night I reorganized my half of the closet. Another I read three weeks ahead in a textbook, because the syllabus was the only thing left in my life still telling me where to be.

I almost texted Cole back one of those nights. I had it typed. “Hey, sorry, this week was” and then nothing, because the sentence didn’t have an honest end and I wasn’t going to start the new life with a lie to the one person who’d been kind to me in it. So I deleted it. And a part of me wondered if he even knew my name. If he’d remembered. Because what had we actually shared other than a brief sin of the flesh. If he remembered me, did that mean it meant something? If he didn’t, how would that make me feel, and would it mean that Pastor Dale was right? The one time I tried to bring it up with the youth pastor ...

The cursor blinked.

Outside, a skateboard went by, that long grinding roll and then the pop at the curb, a sound I’d come to think of as Boulder at night. Somebody going somewhere for no particular reason. Just because they could. Their fence was down, and maybe it was never up.

That’s the thing: I could too. I just couldn’t really figure out how to make my body agree.

I hadn’t done anything since the party.

It was a Tuesday now. Over cereal that Jasper ate out of a mug because neither of us had bought bowls yet, he told me we’re rushing.

“You wrote your real email on their sheet,” he said, pointing the spoon at me. “I watched you do it. You hesitated and then you did it anyway. You want to.”

“I was being polite.”

“You’re never being polite. You’re being scared. Look, I’m being straight with you ... so to speak ... which looks the same from the outside, but it isn’t.” He shoved another spoonful of Frooty-Os in his mouth while I ate my granola. “Come to the rush thing. One time. If you hate it you bail, nobody chases you, nobody calls your mom. Half those guys are the chillest people I’ve ever met, and the other half are idiots, but they’re nice idiots, and not one of them is going to care about the thing you’re so sure they’re all going to care about, and most of them will be super-happy about it. Look, we’re gonna rush dicks and both be happy with it. Trust me.”

I didn’t ask what “thing” he meant that they wouldn’t care about or be happy with. He didn’t say. We left it there, the both of us, in the polite blank space where the “thing” lived.

“It’s a fraternity,” I said instead.

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“It’s a frat. It’s a house where your whole deal is just the weather.” He shrugged, scraping the mug. “You walk in, it’s already raining, nobody announces it. That’s all it ever was for me. Somewhere I didn’t have to do the announcement first.” He looked at me then, quick, and looked away, which for Jasper was practically a soliloquy. “Figured you might could use a place like that.” He pointed his spoon at me again, “I’m trying to help you dude. Trust me.”

I had never once in my life walked into a room where the thing about me was already the weather. At home it was the forecast. The emergency. The one that a sharpie crossed out and moved aside. The thing the whole day got organized around without anyone once saying its name out loud.

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

Jasper nodded, like he’d known, and went back to his cereal, and that was that. The biggest decisions of my life kept getting made in the time it took other people to chew.

My mom called that night. Because, of course. Like, she knew, that the cross on the wall in my room had flipped upside-down and she knew.

She called on Sundays, as a rule, so a Wednesday meant something. I felt it before I picked up, the old reflex, the fast inventory of everything I might have done that could have traveled the hundred miles down I-25 ahead of me. I answered on the second ring. Not answering was its own kind of evidence. I’d learned that early.

“There he is.” Warm. I could hear my dad’s TV behind her. “We missed you Sunday. Did you find a church up there yet? A good one? Your aunt says Boulder’s got some real ones, if you know where to look, none of that reformed stuff.”

“There’s a group,” I said. “On campus. I went to a thing.” It was a sentence built entirely out of true words, every single one of them, arranged to tell the truth that I needed to tell, which right now was still fully real.

“Oh, good.” The relief in her voice was real. “What are they called, honey?”

I didn’t even pause.

“It’s a campus fellowship kind of thing.” Smooth. Easy. The lie came out fully formed, a stone that’s been in a river a long, long time. “A bunch of guys. We get together Thursday nights, and some of it is in the original Greek.”

That part was also true. The rush event was Thursday. I’d just left out the letters, and the porch, and the marker arrow that said “yes, the Dicks,” and the part where I’d written my email that she didn’t have access to on their sheet before I’d decided to.

“That sounds just wonderful, sweetheart.” She believed me all the way down. I was a good kid. Everyone said so. The whole church said so. It was practically my name. “Your dad and I pray for you every night. You know that. By name.”

“I know,” I said. “Thanks, Mom. Tell Dad hi.”

I hung up and sat down on the floor between the beds, my back against my bunk, the phone face-down on the carpet beside me, and I waited for the weight. The cold drop. The thing I’d been promised, from a pulpit and a kitchen table both, would come every single time I lied to her like that.

It didn’t come.

That was the part that scared me. Not the lie, but how easy it had been. How smooth. The river had been running a long time, and I was pulling out the results.

And I realized, I’d been telling her some version of that lie my whole life, sitting there on the carpet with the parkinglot light on the wall. Every Sunday I sat in the pew and meant it with my face. Every time I said “I’m fine.” Every fake, lying yellow thumb.

The frat wasn’t the start of the lying. I’d just never before had the letters to leave out.

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The house had a porch that sagged on one end and a row of guys on it holding cups, and the bass hit me in the chest before we made the steps. The bass from so many houses before we’d even approached made me wonder if I’d made a mistake even coming here, but Jasper’s hand on my arm was firm ... not so firm that I couldn’t get away, but firm as if saying, “I know this isn’t your comfort zone, but that’s what college is for.”

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Jasper went up like he’d done it a hundred times. Maybe he had. “You don’t have to drink anything,” he said over his shoulder, reading me before I’d opened my mouth. “Just hold a cup so nobody hands you one. That’s the whole trick. People only push if your hands are empty.”

So I held a cup. A pink can, actually, grapefruit-flavored carbonated water, a whole sleeve of it left by the door like somebody’s apology to the night. It was sealed when I got it, and I held my drink in a house full of men and worked on looking like a person who belonged in it, which is its own kind of lie – the body kind – and I was good at those, too, like the thumbs-up.

It was warmer inside than I expected. Not the temperature, but the other thing. Nobody was performing. In the kitchen, two guys argued about a movie with their whole bodies, and a third translated for a fourth in Spanish, and somebody’s playlist was bad in a way everyone seemed to enjoy on purpose. A banner over the stairs read ΔΚΣ, and under it, in marker, somebody had written (yes, the Dicks) with an arrow, and under that, in different marker, (we contain multitudes). I’d been bracing all week for ... something. For the thing my whole life had promised me was behind doors like this one. It was just a house. Loud, a little gross by the recycling, and it smelled like guys. A house.

I stood at the edge of the room the way you stand at the edge of a pool you’ve been told is too cold.

A guy came through with a trash bag, collecting cans, and another followed him with a dry-erase marker writing names on a whiteboard by the stairs, designated walkers, it turned out, the ones staying sober to get people home on foot. I watched a tall guy in a cardigan stop a freshman from going up the stairs after somebody, one hand flat on his chest, a quiet word, and the freshman nodded and sat down with some water instead. Nobody made it a scene. It was just a thing the house did, the way my house said grace, except this one was about keeping each other from doing something nobody could take back. Responsible, almost something my mom would approve of. But I didn’t have a frame for a place that watched out for you without also watching you. I kept waiting for the catch.

It took Jasper, like, 20 minutes to find someone.

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I watched it from the kitchen doorway, not meaning to, the way you watch a magic trick to figure out where the coin went. The lean-in. The laugh, his and then the other guy’s. A hand at a waist, easy as a handshake. And then the two of them were going up the stairs, and Jasper caught my eye on the way up and gave me a look that meant back in a bit; not guilty, not proud, not anything. The way you’d tell a friend you were going for a refill. The way you’d mention rain.

I stood there with my grapefruit fizz and felt something I couldn’t name cleanly. This was closer to grief, which made no sense, so I set it down by the recycling with everything else and didn’t pick it back up. It would be years, I was sure, before I could do what Jasper just did as if it were nothing. A different life, an accident of birth.

That’s when I saw him.

He was the biggest guy in the room and somehow the quietest. Parked on the arm of a couch with a smaller guy talking fast at his shoulder, and he was just listening, nodding, this slow easy smile with a gap in the front teeth that did something to his whole face. Brown arms, a cord necklace, a fade grown out a little. I watched him reach over without looking and steady a lamp some idiot had knocked with their elbow. It was one big hand, barely a glance, and he set it upright like he was always half-catching the things other people knocked over.

I looked a

t his hands too long, at his legs beyond his shorts, at his neck. I knew I was doing it and did it anyway. He looked up. Caught me. And instead of the thing I braced for, he just lifted his cup an inch, a little hello, friendly, the way you’d nod at someone across a parking lot, and went back to listening.

I looked at the ceiling and counted the lights.

“You’re staring,” somebody said next to me. Friendly.

The guy who’d said it was about my height, brown hair going every direction, a flannel washed into surrender. He wasn’t looking at me like he’d caught me. He was looking at me like he recognized something, which was worse.

“Sorry,” I said, on reflex.

“You’re fine.” He tipped his cup at the big guy. “That’s Tav. Everybody stares. It’s basically why he’s allowed out.” Then, easy, like it was nothing: “You’re a Springs kid.”

It wasn’t a question. My stomach did ... something. “How ...?”

“The ‘sorry.’” He almost smiled. “We all say it like that. Like we broke something just by being in the room because if we don’t then ‘God’ will bring down ‘his’ wrath. It takes one to know one. I get it.” He put out a hand. “Levi.”

I shook it. His hand was warm, and there was a callus along the side of it I didn’t think about. Somebody yelled his name from the next room, a bet about a band that apparently couldn’t be settled without him, and he gave me a small what can you do? shrug and went, and that was it. Under a minute. Another face in the crowd.

A guy named Cole found me on the back steps, where I’d gone to breathe and nurse a second pink can.

He was a sophomore, undeclared, and he had a Coke, the actual red can, sweating in the cold. “I don’t drink,” he said, when he caught me looking it. No defensiveness in it at all. “Makes me feel like I’m wearing a coat indoors. I just come for the company.” He sat a careful arm’s length away on the step, and we talked about nothing. His hometown in Nebraska. The cold coming down off the foothills. Whether the dining hall eggs could legally be called “eggs.” He was easy in a smaller way than Jasper, less of a current and more of a porch light, and somewhere in the nothing I stopped doing the math on if I should be here or not.

At some point the nothing ran out, and he looked at me, and didn’t look away.

“Can I ...?” he said, and didn’t finish, and I knew the end of it anyway.

And I thought to myself, what the fudge? I mean, there was that first night, it was a thing, and Jasper never mentioned it. Maybe he really had just been sleep-masturbating. Was that a thing? And sleep-talking. And I know I’m at college, and I’m supposed to be trying new things. And we’re both sober. I prayed. If God didn’t want me to do anything, give me a sign. Any sign.

I looked around. I listened for a moment. I heard no blaring of trumpets, felt no hellfire, saw no angels moving in to stay my sin.

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I put a hand on his chest first. To be sure my own hand still worked, that it would do a thing I told it to in front of another person. “You’re not, um.” I couldn’t make the sentence go. “You’re okay? Like, you’re good to.”

“Stone sober. One Coke and the company.” He waited. He really waited, hands to himself, until I let mine drop, and the waiting was the thing that hit me more than any move could have.

So I let him kiss me.

I’d thought about what it would be like for my whole life; I’d gotten every detail wrong. I’d thought it would feel like falling. It felt like the opposite. Like the first warm in a room after you’ve been cold so long you stopped calling it cold and started calling it normal. His mouth was careful and then less careful. His lips felt warm and sweet and slightly sticky from the soda, and so gentle. My hands didn’t know where to go and then they did, and the not-knowing turning into knowing was its own quiet astonishment, like finding out you can read a language nobody ever taught you.

And I was the hardest I’d been my entire life.

And I told myself that someone had relabeled the drink. Or that it was the atmosphere. Or Jasper’s fault. Or adrenaline or something else and whatever this was was a sin.

But we ended up in his room, his roommate gone for the weekend, the door shut, a desk lamp on because neither of us reached to turn it off. What happened there was soft. I think that’s the best word.

He asked if I was good. He asked again, quieter, later. When he put his mouth on me I made a sound I had never made in my life and pressed the back of my hand against my own teeth out of a reflex I didn’t know I had. The ceiling didn’t open, and no one came up the stairs, and the lamp just kept being a lamp on a desk with a cactus and a calculus book on it, and I couldn’t hear my parents praying through the wall.

And all we did was touch. And if one of those touches was his mouth in a place I’d been told was a sin, that was his and not mine.

After, he got me a glass of water and walked me to the door of his hall like I was an ordinary thing that had happened to him. Because ... I was? That was almost the strangest part. To him this was a nice night. Not a cliff. Not a crossing. A nice night with a quiet guy from the Springs.

I walked back to the dorm under the cold and the pines with my whole skin awake, and I braced. I kept waiting for the floor to come up and meet me. The lie I’d owe, the prayer, the cold drop, the wet-coat certainty. To him this was a nice night, but for me ... I don’t know what this was. My first weekend at school. My escape from home. Wasn’t this what I wanted? I passed a house that had a “69” in its address and I reflexively said a short prayer. A prayer for a number because the number felt more dirty than what I’d just done. Was this my first time? Should it have meant something more?

The Flatirons sat up there in the dark, not caring one way or the other. A sprinkler ticked on somebody’s lawn. The dorm door buzzed me in on the second try. Jasper wasn’t back yet. The world kept turning, not caring about what I’d just done.

Nothing happened. That’s the thing I carried up four flights and lay down with and couldn’t put down. I had done the unforgivable thing, the kissing and the rest of it, twice now in a week, and the sky had stayed exactly where it was, indifferent as a ceiling, and I lay there in a room that was somehow already a little bit mine and could not for the life of me tell whether that was mercy. Or whether it was just the truth, finally getting a word in, after eighteen years of being talked over.

I took off my shorts and put them in my dirty laundry bag. I turned off the light and wrote “sleeping” on the small dry erase board we’d put on the door. I lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at a different ceiling, and the cross around my neck didn’t burn, wasn’t heavy, and at least for now, it was just ... there.

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Mom texted twice before I’d even unpacked the car.

>> Made it?

Not even four minutes later …

>> Praying for you, sweetheart. 🙏

<< 👍🧎🏼‍♂️‍➡️

It felt like a lie – a grave sin – though I couldn’t have told you what the true answer was supposed to be instead, my phone told her where I was. And, I’d gotten good at the thumb. That little yellow thumb did a lot of work in my family. It said fine so I didn’t have to decide whether I was.

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The drive up had taken just under two hours, and I reflexively apologized to everyone when I saw my speedometer at 69. Or above. It was I-25 most of the way, the Springs shrinking in the mirror, Pikes Peak going flat and then gone over the horizon. The den of sin in Denver, then the foothills coming up gold on my left like they were showing off. I kept the radio off. Told myself I wanted to think. Mostly I watched the gas stations slide by and practiced sounding normal, which is a thing you can practice, it turns out, like scales or psalms.

I knew what I was driving away from ... I knew from what I was driving away, that was more proper.

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And that drive away was the part nobody warned you about. You think leaving is going to feel like a door opening. For me, it felt more like the part of a dream where you realize you can move your legs after all, and you don’t trust it, and you keep waiting for the dream to take it back, to rip that tiny bit of freedom you think you have back from you and you’re back to being a non-playable character, going through life because someone else tells you how.

I carried my pared-down life up four flights in three trips. A duffel, two boxes, a milk crate of books my dad had gone through first, the way he went through everything first, with a new Bible on top for good measure. The dorm smelled like floor wax and strangers, the B.O. aired out from last semester and the body spray not yet settled in. On the third trip my arms were shaking, and I stood in the stairwell holding the crate and feeling, for no reason I could name, like crying. I didn’t. There was a kid with a skateboard watching me from the landing, and anyway I’d had a lot of practice not crying.

Jasper had moved in first.

I knew his name off the housing email and nothing else, and what I learned in the first ten seconds was that he wasn’t using a shirt today, that he’d taken the left bunk and the better desk, and that neither of those were up for discussion. He was stretched out up there with one knee bent and his phone over his face when I knocked. On my own door. Like a guest. Even though the door was open.

“It’s open,” he said, not moving. “It’s your room too, man.”

He had the easy voice of someone who’d never once worried about being overheard. Half-unpacked already: a climbing rope coiled on his desk, a sun sticker on his laptop, a record player he clearly cared about more than anything my family owned except the family Bible with all the names going back and back and back. There was a smell in the room I’d come to know as his own body spray. He sat up to shake my hand, and I took it.

And I noticed the body it was connected to.

The way you notice a loud noise. That’s all it was. A thing my eyes did. And I was good at telling myself that that’s why I wanted things that I was told would damn me.

I held the box of extra-long sheets my mom had folded into perfect thirds the night before, smoothing each crease twice with the flat of her hand, and for the first hour it mostly held.

“Renner, right?” He read it off my duffel tag. “You go by anything?”

“Josiah. Or Si.”

“Si.” He tried it like a flavor. “Boulder kid?”

“Colorado Springs.”

Something crossed his face and then chose not to land. “Cool,” he said, which I’d come to learn was Jasper-speak for I have opinions and I’m not going to bother you with them. He was from right here. A townie. His mom taught in the geology department, his dad ran a bike shop on Pearl, and he said both of those things the way other people said the weather, facts that cost him nothing. He asked what I was studying and I said undeclared and he said good, declare late, it’s a scam, and went back to unpacking like he’d handed me something and didn’t need it back.

I hung my shirts, still flat and pressed. I lined my shoes up by the door. I kept the cross under my collar, and I don’t know why, but leaving it out felt like a flag I wasn’t ready to plant. So it stayed under the cotton, against my chest, where it had always been. Reminding me that I wasn’t what God wanted.

We ate in the dining hall that first night, Jasper and me and two guys from our floor he’d already collected the way he collected everything, easily, without seeming to try. I’d never eaten dinner with people who weren’t family. I didn’t know the rules. There weren’t any, it turned out. You sat, you ate bad pasta, somebody told a story about their high school that made the table laugh, and nobody bowed their head, and nobody noticed that I almost did, my chin dipping before I caught it and turned the motion into reaching for my water.

That would keep happening, that first week and after. My body knew a hundred little routines from a life I was trying to leave, and it ran them without asking me, and I’d catch myself halfway in. Reaching for grace over dorm pasta. Saying sorry to a door, or to other cars you passed, or a speedometer that displayed “69” like it had a choice and was mocking you. Jasper caught it once, the water thing. He didn’t say anything. He just slid the parmesan down to me like that’s what I’d been reaching for all along and kept talking, and I could have kissed him for it, except that thought arrived with such force that I had to look at my tray until it passed.

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That afternoon, before all that, he’d made me go to the thing on the quad. “Everyone goes, it’s like the first freshman experience besides meeting me, dude.”

There was a tent the size of a small church, and under it a couple hundred folding tables, and at every table some club wanting your email. A cappella. Quidditch, which I hadn’t known was real while I read it under the covers because it had condoned witchcraft. A beekeeping club. And three campus ministries, spaced across the tent like they’d agreed on territory, each with a banner and a smiling sophomore, and I steered us wide around all three without quite admitting that’s what I was doing even though I knew my mom would ask which I’d joined. But, I knew those smiles. I’d worn that smile. I could have run that table in my sleep, and that was exactly the problem, the way you cross the street to avoid a house you used to live in.

Then we passed the letters. So many letters, and I knew them all from high school physics and because my dad made me learn them so I could read some of the older biblical texts. ΤΟΠ, ΑΛΦΑ, ΤΝΚ, ΣΤΥΔ, ΒΤΜ, ΣΛΥΤ, ΔΚΣ, and others.

Delta Kappa Sigma. ΔΚΣ. A banner, a folding table, a bowl of those little wrapped candies. And next to it, a bowl of little wrapped condoms. Two guys behind it, neither of them performing the way the white-teeth ministry tables had been. One caught me reading the letters and grinned.

“You know what everyone calls us,” he said. Not a question.

I didn’t.

“The Dicks.” He said it like he was handing me a present. “Delta Kappa Sigma, DKS, Dicks. We’ve made our peace with it. You’d be amazed how fast you make your peace with it. And we work hard, we play hard.” And he winked. And the other guy at the table looked at him and rolled his eyes, and the look was something I’d seen before. From married people. And I noticed it: One of them had a rainbow bracelet. The other had a rainbow flag pin on their shirt.

The second guy was quick after the eye roll: “But our frat has the second-highest average GPA of the frats on campus, and so we’re doing something right, and it’s a good justification for the annoying ‘rents.”

Jasper laughed, the real kind, and he took a candy and three condoms. I felt my face go hot and didn’t take anything. The guy didn’t push. He slid the sign-up sheet a half-inch toward me, friendly, like it was already mine, and I wrote my new school email on it before I’d decided to.

The dorm room was different at night.

Smaller. The parking lot light came through the window and lay across the floor in a strip between our beds. I could hear the dorm doing its dorm things, a door somewhere, water moving in the walls, somebody’s bass two floors down coming up through the bed frame like a second pulse. I lay on my back in a room with no parents a door away for the first night of my life, and I could not sleep, and I told myself it was the strange bed.

And then I heard Jasper.

It took me a second to understand it. The shift in my periphery, the change in his breathing, a rhythm to it. He wasn’t being loud. He wasn’t hiding it either. He was just doing it, the way you’d do it if you honestly did not think it was a big deal, and the not-hiding was the part that took the air out of me. At home there had been a whole architecture around this. Locked doors, running water, a list of things to think about after so the wanting wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Here was a guy a few feet away doing it like he was stretching a sore shoulder.

I lay very still. My heart was going. I’d spent years being still and quiet while I wanted things, an expert at silence. So, I was good at it, and I lay there being an expert and listening to my roommate not care whether I knew.

“You can, you know,” Jasper said. Low. Easy. Not even a little embarrassed. “I’m not gonna make it weird. I’d have to be asleep to make it weird, and I’m not.”

I didn’t answer. The little yellow thumb wasn’t going to help me here.

But I did. Under the blanket, careful, telling myself the dark made it not count, telling myself he was probably most of the way asleep even though we both knew he wasn’t, even though he’d just spoken to me in full sentences. Because maybe this is what roommates did in college. And at this point in my day, that made sense, or I told myself it did. My breath went strange and I worked to keep it quiet out of a habit I couldn’t shut off. I’d done this my whole life, but always braced, always listening for a step in the hall, always with a verse running underneath it like a ticker. This was a person in the room. A person who knew. And the world did not end. The bass kept coming up through the frame. Nobody knocked. No one drove two hours.

When it was over I lay there with my heart slowing and the corners of my eyes wet, which embarrassed me more than the rest of it put together, and I waited for the thing I’d always been told would come. The weight. The cold drop of having done it with your parents a wall away, or you just wasted five minutes of hot water. The certainty, settling over you like a wet coat, that you’d traded something you couldn’t get back.

It came, a little. But quieter than I expected, and from much farther off, like weather in another county.

“See,” Jasper said into the dark, like we’d finished a chore together. “Not a big deal.” A pause, the smile in his voice. “It’s a Tuesday, man. Go to sleep.”

“It’s Monday.” Aw, sugar. I just admitted I was awake. I should’ve passed everything off as him dreaming in the morning. Not now.

“Dude. Lighten up.” I heard him shift, and my head turned, and I saw him licking his fingers. Did he ... ? “Look, I don’t know what shit you had to deal with growing up, but this proves you’re cool dude. You have potential, and ... I’ll leave that alone. But stick with me, I’ll help you. It’s Boulder, not the Springs, we got a whole different attitude here.” He licked his fingers again, the loud smack punctuating the casualness, and he laid back down.

I lay awake a long time after his breathing went even. Not because of the guilt, which I knew the shape of and could have drawn blindfolded. Because of the other thing. The part where I’d wanted something out loud, in a room, with the lights off and a witness, and the ceiling had stayed a ceiling.

I didn’t have a word for that yet. I’d been given a lot of words growing up, careful ones, words for exactly this. Struggle. Flesh. Give it over to Jesus. That other word, the one for what it feels like when the punishment doesn’t come and you have to sit in the silence it leaves behind ... that one they’d left out. On purpose, I was starting to think, because that made the guilt worse.

I felt the weight of the necklace against my chest.

And I looked over again at Jasper, and the necklace for the first time didn’t feel quite so heavy.

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Hey all! New story here, and I’m going to give a bit of a warning: There is (clearly) some engrained religious guilt that the main character will be dealing with in this story. It will get better, I’m giving that spoiler.

If religion pisses you off, then this is your kinda story. If you are religious, I’m pretty sure I’ll be still handling it in a way that doesn’t offend you. If you “recovered from” religion, you might find some of your own story here.

I know I can’t please everyone, and this is gay erotica, so … you know where this is going to go already. //Kai