Being gay is a curse when the homophobia you grew up with was so bad that you're homophobic yourself. Especially when you're into unavailable guys like your roommate, whose girlfriend is everything you're not (though appearances can be deceiving). S...
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After eating noodles at the bar, I lay awake the entire night, thrashing and turning, and the next morning, I promptly fell asleep on the train ride home. I was exhausted. From thinking. From wondering and worrying all night. I really had a problem. I mean, I already knew I got crushes on guys practically as soon as I met them, but this time? This time...
Shit, this time it was an actual, proper issue.
Because I knew that Carl was not straight.
I'd never asked him about it and he'd never said it himself, sure, but I knew. Billy heavily implied it and the way Carl acted around me—listening to me and shit, for no reason whatsoever... That just fucking confirmed it. And it changed everything. It gave me a false sense of hope. A sense of misplaced excitement.
The worst part? I had barely even thought of Jackson all this time.
Too many bad signs.
I pushed myself up from the train seat and looked at the time on my phone, relieved to see that I hadn't missed my stop. The YouTube app icon was staring at me so daringly, but as much as I wanted to tap on it and type in the username 'CO Lens', I didn't. I put the phone back in my pocket and placed my head in my hands with a sigh as I looked out the window.
I couldn't.
I couldn't because I was on my way to the place I grew up in; the three-story townhouse on the corner of the street that had once somehow housed two parents and five children... My homophobic family. I couldn't do any of this because of them. They could never know about Carl, or Jackson, or Leon in eighth grade with the pretty smile, or Giovanni in tenth grade with the bronze skin and the jawline that could cut through glass, or Alex in eleventh grade with the... well, everything Alex.
No, they couldn't know about any of my crushes.
And they definitely couldn't know about Cole, who'd come to me at the end of senior year and said he wanted me to know—now that school was almost over—that he liked me and somehow convinced me that it was a good idea to kiss him under the bleachers. After that terrible, terrible mistake, I'd blocked his number and avoided him like the plague until graduation.
Every time my brothers joked about me being a sad virgin, I shrugged and avoided the subject, because I could get away with it. I could pretend. All they saw was as a loner and a nerd, and I didn't mind pretending to be more interested in books than girls. I was. I was more interested in anything than girls.
Still, they kept asking.
Literally the moment I walked in, Micah raised his hand for a high-five and called out obnoxiously loudly, "Nathan, my brother! How's college? You still a virgin?"
"You know it," I muttered in reply, before ducking under his arm to sneak into the living room, where Terrence and my father were arm wrestling on the table. My sisters, Daisy and Johanna, were there too, cheering them on. Yeah, I felt right at home...
