But then there had been Matty. Matty’s unruly wave of blond hair. Eyes like gemstones—a clarity of color that was sapphire or amethyst when the light shifted. There was—not that Shaw could have admitted it, not that the thought even quite reached the surface—the fact that Matty could have been North’s younger brother, albeit without all the muscles and with slightly more refined features. There was the way Matty had clutched Shaw’s hand, and that familiar rumble of fire in Shaw’s gut. And of course, there was the fact that North didn’t like Matty, which made perfect sense in this universe.

But if Shaw were honest, most of that stupid decision had been about the pretty boy with the cuffed sleeves on his tee and the low-cut white sneakers and the bare ankles. It had been about the way he had leaned across the bar, just a fraction of a degree, toward North and the way he had shifted the towel over his shoulder when North smiled at him, a nervous, totally unselfconscious gesture that only made Shaw hate the kid more because it was so transparently honest. And there had been the moment North called the kid beautiful.

Shaw groaned; his fingers scraped blindly at the floor. “I think I’m—”

“Bucket’s right here.” North’s hand lifted the rat’s nest of hair and refolded the cold cloth. “But try to breathe through it first.”

North was right, as he so often was, and the need to barf passed. North’s hand hadn’t left Shaw’s neck. His fingers coiled Shaw’s long hair. Every once in a while, just accidents of chance, his thumb would scrape the side of Shaw’s neck. It was so wonderful that it was much, much scarier than barfing into the popcorn bucket again.

“What I wanted to talk about—” North began.

And here it was. This was the moment when they had to confront the truth they’d both danced around since freshman year. They’d never talked about it—thank God, Shaw thought with a bubble of clarity through the pain, thank God I didn’t open my mouth five minutes earlier when we were out on the Sigma Sigma roof; thank God I was a coward and I got to hear what he really thought. But now North was going to say something about how he was worried Shaw had feelings for him, and that was ridiculous of course, that was totally impossible, Shaw had moved on, Shaw had gone out with a lot of guys since then, Shaw had basically forgotten, almost totally forgotten what it had felt like to see North for the first time at the end of the dorm hall. But North wouldn’t believe him; North was going to make a big deal out of nothing.

But all North said was, “—is that I think you’ve got a drinking problem.”

Relief went through Shaw like a hailstorm, cold and pinging all over him, almost painful with how hard it hit. He flattened his face in the pillow and laughed, and he didn’t even feel like he needed to puke. Not yet, anyway.