Page 3 of Show Me 1

“Did you smack him in the side of the face with it?” Blondie added. “Also a good use of it.”

I sighed again. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

“It’s never too late.” The impassioned words came accompanied by such an emphatic sword fighting gesture that I cracked a tiny smile in spite of myself.

Through the haze of my humiliation and sadness, I couldalmostappreciate the sincerity I detected in the furrow of the guy’s brow. He was cute. The kind of cute I’d thought Reid was, too. The kind of cute that would disappoint you by cheating on you or being straight in the first place. God, I was truly spiraling now. “Thank you both for trying to make me feel better, but could you maybe just go?”

“You sure?”

I nodded, and apparently Nate read the deep plea in my eyes and took pity on me. “C’mon, bro,” he said to Blondie as he hitched his backpack on his shoulder.

“Side of the face,” Blondie reiterated with another gesture. “It’d leave a mark for sure.”

Nate groaned. “You’re making it worse.”

“I have that habit. Sorry your boyfriend is an idiot,” Blondie said to me, then fist-bumped Nate. “Catch you after Chem.” He bolted from the room like his ass was on fire. Who could blame him?

Nate lingered in the doorway. He was a great roommate, and considering some of the stories I’d heard from my other friends, I’d gotten lucky. He was considerate and easy to talk to and not judgy at all, especially for a preppy guy rushing one of the bigger frats on campus.

But I hated the pitying expression he’d aimed at me.

“Unless you’re about to offer to make out with me, please stop looking at me like that,” I joked half-heartedly.

“Shit. Sorry. I’m not always good at knowing what to say. That dude is an asshole for real, though. Fuck him.”

“I’ll be fine.” I nodded woodenly. “Who’s the blonde?”

“Sam. Pledge brother. He means well, he’s just a dope sometimes.”

Actually, I’d preferred his cluelessness to Nate’s pity. I forced a wan smile. “It’s cool.”

“A bunch of us are gonna go to this keg party at Kappa tonight. Why don’t you come?”

“Meh.” I wrinkled my nose. “Maybe.”

But I did.

I went and got absolutely blitzed at that party, made out with some rando whose name and face I never, in three years, ever recovered, aside from a vague impression of soft lips. But what Ididvaguely remember, through the haze of tequila shots, was stumbling into Reid’s dorm at three in the morning and duct-taping the dildo to his door, along with a strongly worded message that Chet told me later consisted primarily of gibberish and the word “fuck” written over and over.

What could I say? It’d been satisfying at the time.

1

Jesse

“Whoa…” I froze in the doorway of the kitchen in the off-campus house I shared with three other guys, gaze bouncing between my roommate Mark and my semi-sorta friend Chet while I tried to mentally assemble the extremely confounding variables of this equation. Math wasn’t my strong suit to begin with unless we were talking cups, quarts, and teaspoons, but I registered the bare chests and how Chet was glued to Mark’s side. “What the fuck? Chet?” This could not be the correct answer. What kind of math was this? Was it too late to drop the class?

Chet lifted a hand in my direction with a droll smile that was only the slightest bit sheepish. “Hi.”

Oh my god, they weretogether.Wait.Werethey together? How could that be?

I whirled in Mark’s direction. “But you…I thought…Fuck me fucking sideways,”I spluttered. When Mark had come to me a month ago asking me vague questions about a guy potentially asking him out, I’d thought he’d meant someone at his summer internship. Not Chet-fucking-Pynchon who, yes, I’d had a teeny tiny rebound crush on since breaking up with Reid freshman year. Just like I’d had a minuscule, momentary crush on my former roommate Eric before he fell head over fucking balls for Nate. There’d also been the nanosecond crush I’d had on Nate after he brought me chicken soup once when I was sick, even if it’d been an awful store-bought brand.

“It’s just…I don’t understand why all the hot ones keep picking these baby bi’s.” I really didn’t. It happened that I was prone to crushes the way some people were prone to heartburn after eating onions. It was also true that my crush-to-sexual-partner ratio was weighted on the side of crushes by…plenty lately, but there was nothing wrong with me. I was a little neurotic, but I was also an out-and-proud ginger who could actually tan rather than burn. That factor alone should’ve conferred unicorn status upon me.

I nudged Chet aside and opened the fridge with a huff. “You friend-zoned me in, like, two seconds flat. True or untrue?”

“True,” Chet replied with a grin. “But that’s only because—”