Page 17 of The One Decent Thing

If I saw the wordleptonever again in my life, I was going to scream. Which meant I was guaranteed to scream, and soon, because my quantum mechanics midterm was coming up and my life between now and then was going to be nothing but studying for it. It was sure to be overpopulated with leptons, bosons, and on and on, not to mention all the math that went with them. I mean, I liked math.

Strike that, Ilovedmath. The problem was, I’d been more than a little distracted since I’d made up my mind to pick Aidan up when he was released, and it had only gotten worse since I’d actually done it. And Aidan wasn’t the kind of problem that lent itself to a neat equation.

If Aidan were an equation, it would have had at least two irrational numbers, an imaginary number, a couple of variables that couldn’t be solved with the given information, and a cube root.

None of that made any sense mathematically, but then, one of the things I loved so much about math was that it didn’t work well as a metaphor. It was literal, if not always simple. Aidan…was confusing. He’d hardly spoken to me after our ill-fated shopping trip — not because he was being rude, or avoiding me, or giving me the silent treatment. He was just quiet. I’d tiptoed around him the night before, and I’d been relieved to jet out of my house first thing in the morning to head to class.

After dinner, which had been another pizza eaten in silence, I’d asked him if he needed to do anything related to his release, like check in with a probation officer. He’d politely informed me that after serving time it would be a parole officer, and that no, he’d served his entire sentence and didn’t have to do that.

That was it. And then he left the room to go out on the back patio, which seemed like it had already become his unofficial refuge.

It stung a little bit that he wanted a refuge from me, no matter how nice he was about using it.

Actually, it stung a lot. But it wasn’t like I could blame him. I’d shut him out, and he probably didn’t feel like getting smacked again for trying to talk to me.

Before I left for the morning, I put my old laptop on the coffee table with a note letting him know he could use it as much as he wanted. I had no idea what he was going to do with it — look for work? Make a new Facebook profile? He didn’t have a phone. What the hell was he going to do while I was out of the house? Damn, damn, dammit, I hadn’t told him where the spare key was. Oh God, what waswrongwith me?

Not to mention. What was he going to eat? He had to eat more than I did, and I didn’t have the house stocked much. Or at all. Aidan was huge. He could eatmefor breakfast. And I was not, not, not going to go down that road, but he needed to eat something, and I hadn’t grocery shopped in a while.

Screw this. I slammed my textbook shut, earning a glare from the harried-looking girl at the next table. The lower floor of the university library had a big open area with tables and power outlets and relatively comfortable chairs, and I’d claimed a corner after my early morning class, unable to stand the thought of going home and awkwardly, distantly sharing space with Aidan until my next class in the afternoon.

I had to get out of there. Instead of feeling uncomfortable at home, I was feeling uncomfortable in the library, and it wasn’t any better. Running into — I winced and shuddered — Brody had been horrible. Like, the most embarrassing, wish-the-floor-would-swallow-me humiliating thing that could have happened. That conversation with Aidan wasn’t any better. He’d said all the right things, but obviously he pitied me and was disgusted. Who wouldn’t feel that way? Brody was a douchebag. And I’d let him thrust his tongue in my mouth and grope my ass.

More than grope. He’d stuck a finger inside me before I could shake him off. Thinking about it made me want to gag. I mean, who did that before they’d even gotten to second base, with all our clothes on and everything, just stick a hand down the back of a guy’s pants and…and I hadn’t even told Aidan that part, because it was so gross I couldn’t admit it.

And then I’d yelled at Aidan anyway, even though I hadn’t told him everythingandhe’d taken my side without hesitation.

Gritting my teeth against the nausea, I shoved my laptop and books into my backpack and staggered to my feet, legs twinging with pins and needles. The chair tipped and fell back to upright with a thump, and the girl at the next table glared again and muttered something that sounded scathing.

Damn it, damn it, I couldn’t do anything right. Face hot and limbs weak, I strode out of the library as quickly as I could without running and headed straight for my car in the lot down the hill.

Driving in my state of mind wasn’t the greatest idea, but I started the car and headed out anyway. I had to get home. I’d been avoiding it, and Aidan, and now seeing him and sorting out whatever our problem was had turned into a compulsion as strong as getting away had been.

He was in the living room when I opened the front door, sitting on the couch with his knees sprawled wide and the coffee table pulled up in front of him so he could use the laptop. I dropped my backpack on the floor and took a deep breath. I was going to talk to him, dammit, even though my chest was freezing up at the thought.

“Hey, Sebastian,” Aidan said quietly. “I thought you had class. Sorry, I’ll get out of your way. You probably need to study.”

And before I could respond, he’d picked up the laptop and booked it out of the room. I stared after him. Seriously? A faint thump and then a rattle echoed through the house as first the back door and then the screen shut behind him.

Time for me to grow some balls. I followed him, psyching myself up for a speech about how I didn’t know what his problem was exactly — no, strike that, I needed to apologize for being a dick. Like a grown-up would do.

I sucked in as much air as I could and stepped out the back door, and everything I was going to say flew right out of my head.

The day before, the patio had been a plain concrete slab, with a view mainly of the empty pots stacked up by the shed. Now the empty pots were gone, or rather, they were filled with bright flowers and arranged all the way around the concrete. There was blue, and yellow, and red...it was a rainbow, starting from a plant I recognized as a red geranium. It went through orange and yellow flowers on long trailing stems, with some kind of green spiky thing in the middle — rosemary? I was pretty sure that was rosemary — with two of the same kind of little flower, blue in one pot and purple in the next, at the end.

“What…what the hell? Where did these…I mean…what? Do we have elves?” Today was Thursday, but the landscapers had come the week before. They hadn’t been here this morning. Had they? Why would they plant a rainbow? “Like, gay elves?”

I glanced away from the mystery flowers to Aidan, sitting still as a statue on his chair, laptop perched on his knees and a lit cigarette between his fingers. His lips quirked in a half smile, and his amber eyes flicked up to me. My breath caught at the look in them. When was the last time a guy had looked at me like that, like I made himfeelsomething, like I mattered? I wasn’t sure what it was, but there was emotion there. Was it pity? I really hoped not.

“Aren’t they all, though?” he asked, a thread of amusement in his low rumble. “I mean, I don’t think it was there in the books, but in the movies Legolas and Gimli were totally boning.”

I blinked at him. “Well, yeah, obviously. They were — Aidan, that is so not the point. Don’t distract me with gay nerd stuff! Like, I love gay nerd stuff, and you know that, and anyone who’s ever spent five minutes with me knows that, but Legolas didn’t get potted plants for my patio while I was in class this morning, okay?”

Aidan grinned, wide and mischievous. “Was he too busy finding a position that worked with the height difference there? Because I wasn’t sure how that would work…” Aidan was still talking, and I heard sounds, but my brain had shorted out too much to process them into English. Aidan was sitting there, talking aboutgay sex positions with a height difference, okay, and all I could think about was that he was five or six inches taller than me. Not that our discrepancy was anywhere near Gimli and Legolas’s, and yes, I’d had trouble picturing that too, not to mention I wasn’t sure who topped. Did they switch?

“Sebastian? Hey, Earth to Sebastian!” I tuned back in with a start. “Are you okay?”

That grin had turned into a frown, and the light in his eyes had dimmed. I went cold all over. I’d had a five-second window of opportunity to respond to him being friendly, to be a normal person, and I’d blown it.

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