That white roar of the shower filled North’s head again. They weren’t in the living room. They weren’t holding a beer and a knock-off Louis XIV teacup. They weren’t doing any of it the way North had seen through that keyhole glimmer, but all of the sudden, he knew he was going to tell Shaw. He was going to lay it all out. And fuck it all, North might even cry. His eyes felt hot. His whole body felt hot and stinging like he’d rolled in fire ants. Especially his mouth. Especially his tongue, fat and prickling.

“Shaw—” North began.

The hiss of the shower shut off. Wet footsteps slapped against tile.

The shock of it went through North, paralyzing him. He couldn’t even turn. He could only glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, a hand running a towel through a mess of blond hair, the twinkie-cream body, the hint of a tattoo low on his waist

“I hope you don’t mind,” Matty Fennmore was saying, “but I just grabbed your towel. After last night, I absolutely had to have a shower, and I didn’t see—oh.”

The sensation that followed Matty’s voice inside North didn’t really have an equivalent. The closest thing he could conceive of, some way of making sense of what he was feeling, was fuses: three long fuses already sizzling toward a detonation.

The first fuse was Matty Fennmore, naked and fucking perfect, in Shaw’s shower.

The second fuse was Matty Fennmore saying, I just grabbed your towel.

The third fuse was the shortest and burning the fastest: After last night.

For a moment, neither North nor Shaw spoke. Shaw scooted backward until he was sitting up against the headboard, and he pulled the sheet across his chest. There was something strangely wild in Shaw’s face—a challenge. And North didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand it at all. All he could do was just sit there, staring, aware that his jaw had dropped and he was being a complete and total mouth breather, while inside him those fuses burned. The shortest one, the one that was burning fastest, detonated first. After last night. And then North couldn’t hide from it, couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.

North had come out when he was fifteen, and in the working-class streets of Lindenwood Park, his former friends had really only had one option: beat the shit out of the faggot. And thus had begun what North now remembered as the Red Week: seven days of fights and scrapes and surprise attacks that had culminated in Cal Crigler, Eddie McClear, and Gene Hartley cornering North in the alley behind Mom’s Deli. It had been a fight, a hell of a fight, and Cal had wet his pants and run home, and Eddie had lost two teeth, and Gene had his ear hanging halfway off his head by the time he got free of North. And North hadn’t gotten away clean either—he still had a jagged scar on his side. His father had refused to get involved in the Red Week; as far as David McKinney was concerned, his fag son could sink or swim on his own. That extended, it turned out, to a complete lack of interest in getting the cut stitched up, and so it had healed slowly into an ugly crease of flesh.