“No, my nose is too big and, um, I have ears like Dumbo, and I’m really skinny.”

“You’re adorable,” Bill said.

“Does that mean we’re going to your place?”

“I’m not taking advantage of a drunk teenager.”

“I’m not that drunk,” Nick argued.

“You’re shit-faced.”

“No,” Nick said, quietly. “Really, I’m not and… I like you. You’re nice.”

“Not everyone is. Remember that.”

Nick dipped a cold French fry into a pool of ketchup, popped it into his mouth and said, “My dad always told me people are as nice to you as you are to them.”

“Does your dad know where you are tonight?”

Nick’s face fell. “He died when I was fifteen. I miss him every day.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bill said. “What about the rest of your family? Do they know?”

Nick peered at him quizzically. “Know what? That I’m gay?” He giggled. “I told you I used to sleep with my Ken doll. Yeah, they know.”

“And what? They just accept it?”

He picked up the last of his burger from a blob of congealing grease and scarfed it down. “Yeah. Sure. They’re my family.”

“You have brothers?”

“Two,” he said. “And my sister. They’re all older.” He sucked the last of the Coke loudly through the plastic straw. “Where’s your family, Bill?”

“Illinois,” Bill said. “I’m going to drive you to your dorm.”

Nick rubbed his fingers on the back of Bill’s hand. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Bill said, reluctantly. “I’m sure.”

Nick lived in a high-rise dorm at the edge of campus. On the drive there, he had chattered on about school, his family and his friends; a stream of untroubled talk frequently punctuated by a bark of goofy laughter and a hand laid on Bill’s knee for emphasis. A couple of times, Nick’s hand strayed up Bill’s thigh and Bill pushed it away, not wanting Nick to touch his dick, which had been hard almost the entire drive. Unlike the contrived blond guy posing in the swirls of cigarette smoke and the dim light of the Petrified Forest, Nick was almost unbearably sexy. He was undeniably cute, but it was more than his looks that made Bill want to pull the car over and bruise the boy’s lips with hard, deep kisses and slip his hand beneath Nick’s hoodie and T-shirt. Nick’s sexiness was more a matter of his guilelessness, his unaffected physicality and his apparently uncomplicated happiness. But then again, he was only eighteen, a freshman in college, ten years younger than Bill. Ten years might not have mattered had Nick been in his twenties and Bill in his thirties because both would have been men. Nick, however, was a boy who looked and acted like a boy.