by Jason June
“Here.” Damon grabbed the pile of neon green. “Sorry.”
“No problem.” I snatched the fabric from Damon so I could get out of there fast.
“Seriously,” Damon said, “I’m not one to randomly slap guys’ asses, except for the team. We have standing ass-slap permission. That will never happen again. Your butt is totally for you and whoever you give permission to slap it. Like a boyfriend.”
That’s when it clicked.
A boyfriend.
Number four on the Gay Agenda.
That would be the explanation Lu understood. How many times had she told me she wasn’t available over the summer because she had to spend time with Chip, her boyfriend? To her, boyfriend time trumped friend time.
“Damon, you’re a genius!”
“I am?”
“Yes! You actually slapped some sense into me.”
There’s this thing in statistics called regression analysis. Essentially it tries to come up with the likelihood of something happening to two different groups of people with all things the same except for one big difference. Like, are people who are guys and six feet tall and two hundred pounds more likely to get married if they’re left-handed or right-handed? So here was my regression analysis: I had two equally hot guys—Albert and Tony—and I was spending time with both of them this weekend. Whoever I had a better time with could be the guy I pursued as my first-ever boyfriend, giving me an understandable out for the hoedown.
Let the Boyfriend Bonanza begin.
14.
Make Out with a Scorching-Hot Snowman
TGIF: Thank Gawd It’s Frenching! was on repeat in my head all day that Friday. I kept checking Instagram to look at Tony’s profile and imagine what making out with him would be like. I felt a smidge guilty when Albert and I sold homecoming tickets again and he said how excited he was for our date the following day. I told him I was, too, which was 100 percent the truth. I just left out the part about going to a party where I’d be seeing an equally hot guy who might want to suck my face off.
I had come up with a list of what I thought were some real doozies to fit the Fire & Ice theme.
FIRE & ICE COSTUME IDEAS
1.A chimney with Santa coming down it.
2.Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, and a White Walker from Game of Thrones.
3.A Sno-Cone and the devil.
While I was pretty pleased with myself, Max put the kibosh on all of them. A chimney would be too cumbersome in a crowded fraternity house, he’d never watched a second of GoT, and there wasn’t a Sno-Cone’s chance in hell he’d let either of us wear those “tacky devil headbands.” So instead we picked clothes out of Max’s closet that could work for fire and ice sprite outfits. There was nothing clever about it, but Max wanted to be fashionable and show off his makeup skills. I didn’t want to disappoint the person who had introduced me to the guy who might or might not be making out with me later that night, so I went along with it.
“Hold still!” Max yelled. The eye pencil in his hand was once again about to skewer my cornea. “I hope you have an eye patch. If you keep fidgeting, you’re going to have to go to this party as a pirate.”
“It tickles!” I squealed.
“But I’m an expert, so quit. Moving.”
“You being an expert doesn’t stop me from hating it when people touch my face.”
Max had picked me up from my place a couple hours earlier. I told Dad I was going to stay the night, so he didn’t have to wait up for me. I felt a little bad leaving Dad all alone on a Friday while Mom was away district-managing some Fresh Savings stores in Eugene, Oregon, but he was keeping himself busy. He’d decided to take up being an Uber driver to explore our new city while getting paid to haul people around. So I decided not to worry about it, and honestly, the possibility of getting to make out with somebody overruled feeling bad for Dad. A guy’s gotta get kissed at some point, right?
Max and I were crammed in his extremely tight bathroom, with me perched on the rim of the bathtub while Max sat on the toilet. He’d already decked his face out in red, orange, and yellow flames, and he was doing mine in white, blue, and silver.
“Okay, all done.” Max pulled me up so I could look at myself in the mirror.
“Wow,” I breathed. Max had somehow put the silver in all the right places so that it reflected in my hazel eyes. The white highlighted my cheekbones, and the blue expertly covered every little blemish on my face. I was ice, but I felt on fire. “You made me look so good.”
“Thanks,” Max said. “But I just accented the features that were already there. This”—he waved his hand over my face—“is all you. Tony’s gonna go crazy.”
Gawd, I sure hoped so. I was coming up on two weeks in Seattle with all kinds of gays around me, but no gay action. I had waited practically eighteen years for this, but in the presence of so many guys who like guys, patience was no longer a virtue of mine. It was like when you go through half a romantic comedy and nobody has kissed yet. The audience in my mind was screaming, GET TO THE KISSING ALREADY! If things went as planned, I might be kissing two eligible bachelors in a twenty-four-hour time span. First Tony, then Albert.
Thinking of Albert got me picturing his excited look at the ticket table that afternoon. Twinges of guilt flashed in my stomach. “Should I feel bad that I hope Tony makes out with me even though I’m going on a date with Albert tomorrow?”
“Absolutely not,” Max said. He even stamped his foot for emphasis. “In the immortal words of Queen Bey, if he liked it, then he shoulda put a ring on it. You’re fair game until someone gives you the DTR.”
“Please tell me that’s not some STD I don’t know about,” I said.
“DTR,” Max repeated. “Define. The. Relationship. Until someone specifically asks you to be exclusive, you’re not. For all you know, Albert’s running around right now with somebody else too. And if he is, you can’t be mad. You’re both fair game.”
Maybe that’s where the saying All’s fair in love and war came from: people over the centuries doing their own boyfriend regression analyses until they got to the final DTR.
“Okay, let’s move,” Max said, doing one last mirror inspection. “Hmmm. It’s missing something.”
Max pressed on the mirror so that it popped forward. He snagged a small package out of the medicine cabinet, touched his face a couple times, then leaned back. “Lord and Taylor, that’s perfect!”
Max turned toward me. He’d put on a pair of huge false eyelashes with red tips.
“Love it!”
“I am fire, after all.” Max’s floor-length red skirt flicked from side to side as he sashayed out of the bathroom. “I’ve got to look hot.”
I’d only ever been to one “party” before. And I didn’t even go to it, technically. I’d picked Lu up in Mom’s car because everyone was too tipsy off Pabst Blue Ribbon to drive, and Aunt Carol was having a girls’ weekend in Idaho. Lu had texted me to come get her ASAO, which I assumed meant ASAP. When I’d pulled up, there were nine people huddled around a barrel fire in the middle of the Steiner farm, and country music blared through the speakers of Aaron Shepherd’s pickup. I wouldn’t exactly call it the most exciting party of the year.
The party at Lambda Chi Alpha, however, was nothing like that. The house was on Fraternity Row, a street packed with cars and lined with gigantic brick mansions with imposing pillars stuffing their porches. Purple and yellow UW flags hung in practically every window, and people swarmed the Lambda Chi yard. They had gone all out. There were people dressed as firemen and fire extinguishers, as dragons and snowmen, as Tabasco sauce and ice cream.
“I love everyone here,” I said to Max as we pushed our way through the crowd of college kids. “Nobody held back!”
The fraternity was crammed wall-to-wall with people. They were packed on the stairs, dancing in the living room just off the foyer, and streaming into the dining room toward a loaded table of drinks. A massive bowl steamed with dry ice right next to a mountain
of red Solo cups and an ice luge in the shape of a polar bear. Somebody dressed as Olaf from Frozen was pouring vodka into the polar bear’s mouth, while a girl in a volcano costume took the shot out of the ice bear’s butt hole. Ten other people were lined up to take their turn at the icy bear butt.
More than 50 percent of Americans get cold sores. I’d bet anything that ice luges were the leading source of infection.
“TONY!” Max screamed.
The guy dressed as Olaf looked up. It was Tony. Sexy, scruffy, green-eyed Tony. He might have been a snowman, but he was the hottest thing in the room.
“Max! Jay!” Tony handed the bottle of vodka to a girl next to him and yelled, “Man the asshole.”
Tony ran over, and when our eyes met, a jolt barreled through my body. It was like those scenes on the CW where the whole world goes into slow motion as two lovers’ eyes meet, the electric energy passing between them bringing everything else to a halt. I could see with laser focus every millimeter of Tony’s mouth as it moved into that sexy smirk. Any worries about what may or may not be transferred through lips went out the window. I just wanted his lips on mine.
That initial jolt was nothing compared to what I felt when Tony pulled me in for a hug. It was like a bolt of lightning slammed into my crotch and instantly made me hard. I had a feeling number six would be off the Gay Agenda in no time. Maybe even number seven.
Tony motioned to the steaming bowl of punch behind him. “Can I get you guys some Polar Potion?” he asked, never breaking eye contact. That smirk was still on his lips and it was mind-numbingly distracting.
“Sure,” Max said, while I could only nod. All my blood was in the lower hemisphere of my body, leaving not a single drop in my brain to help me find words.
Tony grabbed three Solo cups and ladled them full of the neon-blue juice. “We didn’t get to talk much the other day. Tell me about yourself, Jay.”
He held a cup out for me, and I moved to take it. Just before my hand made contact, Tony adjusted his hand so that when I grabbed the cup, my fingers completely wrapped around his. He smirked again and caught my eye. He’d totally done that on purpose.
“Oh, um.” I had to shake my head to clear my thoughts. “I just moved here from Riverton.”
Tony scrunched his forehead, his thick, dark eyebrows coming together like super-hot commas. I didn’t know that punctuation marks could be so sexy. “Where’s that?”
“B. F. N!” Max shouted, pausing between each letter for dramatic effect.
Tony laughed, but I had no idea what Max meant. “What’s that stand for?”
“Butt-Fucking Nowhere!” Max screamed, then took a big gulp of Polar Potion.
Just like that, I was thinking about butt-fucking in front of a VSB who I would not at all mind being naked with.
“It’s not quite as far as that makes it sound, but yeah,” I said, trying to get my thoughts away from Tony’s dick. “Riverton is in the middle of nowhere.”
I took a drink and OM-fracking-G it was the worst thing I had ever tasted. It was like battery acid in blue raspberry Kool-Aid. But I had to keep it together and not spit the juice out.
“Welcome to Seattle.” Tony clicked his cup against mine. Even though I wasn’t an experienced partier, the rules of cheersing meant I had to take another drink of the horrible potion. I took a gulp and swallowed it down fast, but it wasn’t fast enough to stop myself from cringing.
Tony pointed to my cup and pat my back, creating more VSB contact tingles. “You get used to it after enough parties.”
I giggled.
Two boys made it official: I was a giggler when I had a crush on someone. Thank gawd the music was loud so Tony couldn’t hear me sound like a sixth grader playing spin the bottle.
“Speaking of parties,” Max yelled, “we need to do research on sticking to a theme with gusto.” He threw his arm over my shoulders. “Jay and I are leading the homecoming committee this year and need some inspiration.”
Tony set his cup on the luge table, where an ice-cream cone was taking an inadvisable amount of shots. “Yeah, I can help with that. Let me, uh . . .” Tony bit his bottom lip. “Show you around.” Even though there were loads of volcanos in my vicinity, that lip bite made me the one on the verge of an eruption.
Tony reached down and locked his fingers in mine, a jolt going through me once more. The hairs on my arms literally stood on end. “In this crowd,” he said with a wink, “we’ll get separated if we don’t hold on to each other.”
I looked back at Max with wide eyes. He batted his false eyelashes and gave me two big thumbs-up. Best Gay Guide ever, he mouthed. He then fluttered his fingers goodbye, backed away, and got lost in the crowd.
I was alone and holding hands with a VSB. Well, as alone as you can be when you’re smooshed between hundreds of people dressed like dragons and iced lattes. I was no longer impressed by all their costume creativity. They were preventing me and Tony from finding a nice secluded place to make out.
“So, inside is where we’ve got the Ice portion covered,” Tony said, making a sweeping motion with his hand. There were papier-mâché ice caves complete with stalactites, the ground was covered in fake confetti snow, and then there was the polar bear ice luge and bright blue Polar Potion.
“Pretty impressive,” I said. I had to remember that functioning human beings actually had conversations. They didn’t only think about what it was like to lock lips with seductive snowmen.
“Yeah, the pledges did a good job setting it up. But I’d rather go somewhere”—Tony raised one of those sexy commas on his forehead—“with more heat.” He licked his upper lip in the most tempting way possible. The tip of his tongue caressed his full, pink lip, his mouth opening in the most graceful yet animalistic way.
“I’d like that,” I squeaked, unable to take my eyes off Tony’s mouth. It took everything in me not to go all Animal Planet myself and pounce on him right then and there.
Tony pulled me through the house until we made it to a set of sliding glass doors. They led out into the backyard, but people clogged the opening. Firemen and ice princesses tried to push outside while others tried to get back in the house.
“Outside is Fire,” Tony explained. Through the glass doors I could see tiki torches, a makeshift volcano slide, and tables packed with red and orange Jell-O shots. “But I know a place that’s even hotter.”
How could one person say so few words but pack them with so much sexiness? Was there some sort of hot magic class where all the spells instantly turn people on? Abraca-boner! It had to be a thing, and Tony had to have aced it. He was a wizard when it came to giving me a hard-on with the shortest of sentences.
I tried licking my lips like Tony, but it didn’t pan out. I had to dodge the corner of a human-sized box of Hot Tamales, so I ended up just running my tongue over my teeth. I would definitely fail the sexy magic class.
I cleared my throat. Maybe I could at least come across as mysterious and suave with my words if not my tongue. “Maybe there’s somewhere we could . . .” Jeezus, Jay, think! “Make. The heat. Ourselves?”
I would have face-palmed if my hand wasn’t in Tony’s. What the hell was that?
“Great minds.” Tony ran a finger up my arm, electric shocks cascading over my skin. He was so smooth and effortless despite the fact we were constantly being jostled by costumed college kids. “I know just the place. Ready?”
Frack yes, I was ready.
“We’ll have to push through the crowd. Hold tight.”
Tony squeezed my fingers and surged forward. We burst onto the deck outside. His grip was so tight that I followed along right behind, but I couldn’t stop myself from tripping over someone’s shoe and falling forward. “Frack!” I was going to fall flat on my face. Visions of my nose slamming into the ground and bursting with blood were flashing through my head when, suddenly, Tony’s free hand found my flailing arm. He yanked me out of the crowd, but pulled with such force that my chest rammed into his. We were face-to-
face, the cool, misty outside air doing nothing to lower my temperature. Our mouths were so close that I was breathing in his Polar Potion–scented breaths.
Tony’s lips parted, and something came over me. Whether it was a magic spell from Tony’s sexy sorcerer skills, or some romantically aware part of my brain that knew this was the perfect moment, it didn’t matter. I closed the distance and pressed my mouth hard against Tony’s.
Everything around us faded away. No music. No chatter. No fire hydrant careening down the volcano slide. I could only focus on the feel of Tony’s lips against mine.
I was kissing a boy. I WAS KISSING A BOY. Sure, it wasn’t while slow dancing to Shawn Mendes, but oh fracking well.
Tony opened his mouth. He did it in such an assertive, deliberate way that mine followed suit. In the blink of an eye, his tongue was against mine.
My mind blared again with Thank Gawd It’s Frenching! His tongue was wet, confident, bonkers-making perfection. He even had the lightest layer of stubble. The scratch of his whiskers against my face made my nerves go wild.
There went item number six:
JAY’S GAY AGENDA
1.Meet another gay kid. Somewhere, anywhere . . . please! in Seattle in, like, days!
1.5.Get checked out by a very VSB!
2.Go on any Digimals date with Albert a boy at the Space Needle.
2.5.Hold hands within the first ninety minutes. a VSB after being pulled into my first-ever drag show by a queen named after a fish.
3.Go to a dDance with a boy and have my first kiss slow dancing to Shawn Mendes while getting caught in a surprise Seattle downpour.
4.Have a boyfriend, one who likes to wrap me up in his arms and let me be little spoon, and maybe smells like coffee from all the cafés he goes to.
5.Fall in love with a boy, but wait for him to say it first so I don’t seem too desperate, and maybe he says it for the first time at Pike Place Market or in the first Starbucks.
