Page 2 of Shaped to Be Yours

I hunched in my chair, staring at the metal tabletop. I hated remembering that night, but these were the people who decided whether I got to go home or was sent away forever. “Fine. Okay. I was in the woods behind my house…”

THE PREVIOUS SUMMER

“So, um, Ricky, would you maybe wanna grab a burger sometimenotas friends? No, that’s dumb. I gotta lead up to it more.

“Hey, Ricky! This is probably going to totally blindside you, but I, like,like, like you, and I was hoping… urg! There has got to be a way to do this without sounding pathetic!”

My phone buzzed. It was probably my mom, wondering where I’d gone. I wasn’t far from the house—or so I thought. But when I looked around at wherever I’d paced myself deeper into the woods… crap. Did I remember these trees? Every part of the woods was at least a little familiar to me, but I didn’t think I’d seen this particular clearing in years.

“And what were you doing in the woods that night, Mr. Bosco?”

“I, um, needed air, that’s all. I hiked in those woods all the time. Nothing weird.”

“I see. Continue.”

I checked my phone. Yep, Mom, calling me in for dinner. I texted back that I had just gone out for a walk and would be back soon. I certainly wasn’t going to admit over text or in person that I was practicing how to confess my love to my best friend. Who I’d been pining after for three years now. We were about to be college seniors. If I didn’t confess this year, I never would.

I pulled up Facebook, habitually checking for any updates from Ricky. He was home in Nevada with his family. His huge family. He had an older brother, two younger sisters, ridiculously in love parents, and his grandparents lived in the same town. There had been constant photos all summer of cookouts and camping trips and game nights, more family togetherness than I’d ever known.

It had always only been me and my mom. And the family cat, Minnie, who passed away a couple years ago. My dad went missing when I was so young, I barely remembered him. My first strong memories were of finding Mom crying in every room of the house. Most people had figured he ditched because he wasn’t ready to be a father, but she’d always insisted something must have happened to him. He loved her. Loved me.

And all I knew about him was his name.

Bo. Boris Bosco.

“I do find it strange that you would regularly hike through the same woods where your father was last seen over twenty years ago.”

“Why? Gonna try to blame his disappearance on me as a baby?”

“This is serious, Mr. Bosco.”

“And you’re askingnotserious questions. They’re the woods behind my house. I wasn’t going to live in fear of them. I felt… comfortable there. I don’t know. Maybe because it was the last place my father was ever seen, it felt like one of the few places where I was still connected to him.”

“I appreciate your honesty. Go on.”

There was a new picture on Ricky’s wall of him between his father and brother, arms up around their shoulders, all of them laughing. If Ricky aged half as well as his dad, he would be gorgeous for life. His brother was good looking too, but Ricky was just… damn. He made my heart clench even in still life, frozen in a photo. It hadn’t been like that right away. It was halfway through Freshman year before it hit me.

We weren’t roommates but in the same dorm, same hallway, just two doors down from each other. Our actual roommates were friends from high school, so we’d ended up in each other’s rooms all the time. We’d also had Weight Training, Econ, and Chemistry together. Then, during our Chem final that first semester, his hand on mine, stopping me from adding the wrong ingredient to an experiment that easily could have blown up in our faces, I felt a tingle. When I looked at Ricky’s brown eyes behind his goggles, and through his glasses beneath those, the way he smiled and shook his head at me caused another tingle.

“Dude, slow down! We’re not on that step yet. Add this right now, and the reaction might set my curls on fire.”

His coily, floofy curls that would be a fro if he didn’t comb them tight to his head and bind the longer parts in a bun. I’d laughed so hard the first time I saw him with it wild. He’d called me a jackass in that affectionate way only friends can. I’d asked if he’d been hit by lightning recently, and he’d told me I could stick my dick in an outlet if I wanted to test that theory. And that had been it. The moment we became best friends.

But in Chemistry, hearing Ricky laugh, seeing his soft, affectionate smile, curls bound up, and brown eyes dancing in the Bunsen burner light, the real chemistry hit me.

“Shit.”

“Nah, I got you,” Ricky had said.

I’d known immediately then that I was screwed.

“So, despite your mother’s message, you lingered in the woods for a while afterward?”

“Uh, yeah. I was thinking! Preoccupied.”

“With?”

“Life stuff. You know, being a senior, having to face the future, not yet knowing what I wanted to do with my life, and everything that comes with it. It’s a lot. In case you’ve forgotten what it was like to be twenty-two.”

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