The bare wooden dock beneath Jack’s back held the warmth of the setting sun. Nick padded over and dropped down beside him, still dripping cold water from the lake.

Jack squinted.

Nick was little more than a wide black shape with the light of the sun behind him — impossible to look at without hurting Jack’s eyes.

Nick was tough to look at anyway. He’d always seemed bright and cold as a distant star. Even so, Jack’s cock twitched as he lay there, helplessly pinned by Nick’s knowing blue gaze.

“Are you still going to love me when we get back home?” Nick criss-crossed his legs, surreptitiously watching as his tanned adolescent body ripple with new muscle. Nick had power he was barely learning to wield and grace he entirely was unaware of. His feral smile promised dark adventure as he lowered his voice to a bare whisper. “Are you still going to be my boy, Jackie?”

“Y-yes.” Jack’s mouth went dry. “I’ll always–”

“Hey Nick. Heads up!”

Somebody lobbed a football their way. Nick leapt up after it, catching it effortlessly before it could fall to the dock and wobble off into the water.

“Heads up yourself, asshole.” He rifled the ball back to the shore and turned back to Jack.

“Nick.” Nick’s friend shouted. “You coming or what?”

“Be there in a second.”

“Aw.” Someone else called. “Why you gotta babysit your little girlfriend all the time, man? We’re waiting.”

Laughing, Nick flipped him off. “You can fucking wait longer, then.”

Jack turned away. “Why do you let them talk to you like that?”

“You mean why do I let them talk about you like that, don’t you?”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

Nick froze. “The hell it is.”

Jack felt Nick’s footsteps vibrate through the boards beneath his body as Nick pounded away after his friends.

I was looking for change.

Specifically, I needed six quarters for the dryer, only  at 2:00 a.m. there was never anyone around to ask and the weather outside was foul.

When the elevator stopped at the lobby level, my heart gave an unaccustomed lurch of hope, but then the doors parted to reveal 3C dude, my neighbor, the mystery man.

He got in and the doors closed. I snuck a glance at him while pretending to not-stare in agonizing silence.

Snow frosted the shoulders of his techno-parka — one of those high tech gear things, engineered to keep him warm on the ice ball formerly known as planet Pluto. When he tipped his head in greeting it fell off his Indiana Jones hat and melted instantly on the elevator’s already moldy carpet.

It hadn’t melted on his head. That’s how cool he is.

“Hello.” He eyed me in a way that said he’d probably climbed rock walls more interesting than me. Maybe that was my imagination.

I screwed my courage to the sticking place, because lit professors may not always advertise our cool from the outside, but we have a lot going on inside.  Really. We do. “I need uh…six quarters. Do you — by any chance — have any?”

3C dude’s lips compressed into a thin line as he glanced down at his hands, which were full of luggage, apparently.

Oh…right. “You just came in from out of town?”

Again with the down-looking. Okay, yes. A pilot case, a camera bag, a backpack and– 

“I guess you did, huh?” I winced. “Uh…Can I help you with any of that?”

“If you carry this–” He handed over his smallest case and I nearly had to let it fall to the floor, it was so fucking heavy. Now I had hold of it, the thing was clearly loop-it-over-your-shoulder-good-and-quick-or-it’s-going-to-crash-to-the-floor, heavy. “You can come with me. I have a change jar at my place.”

“Oh, thank you.” I staggered. “Lots of equipment, huh.”

“I guess.” His voice was like old-time elevator gears — slow grinding cogs and wheels pulling steel cables taut, hoisting sound from deep within his amazing body. “Maybe you should push the up button now — unless of course you want to stay on the ground floor all night…?”

Oh my god. I positively smacked the button for the third floor. Unlike the elevator in my imagination, it rose smoothly, with little more than a whoosh of sound.

“You’re 3A, right?” he asked.

He knows where I live? I nodded too enthusiastically. Wait–he knows I’m alive! “That’s me. Tripple A. I even have a card.” How corny…

“I’m 3C”

“I know.” I’d known from the moment he moved in. He was 3C: cool, competent, and cosmopolitan. He was all the good c’s, except maybe the one I was most interested in: curious about me.

The doors slid open and I followed him to his place, bowing under the weight of his equipment, and not in a good way, goddamnit. He opened the door and motioned to a console table in the entry where I could put his bag. “Let me just drop these in the bedroom.”

He left me to look around, so I inched my way farther inside. The whole hallway was a gallery of framed photographs, and these were the real deal too. Photojournalism stuff. Human suffering in all it’s naked glory — faces, in close up against the backdrop of every imaginable human misery.

Most of the images were of places I’d never been and couldn’t name, but I recognized Kashmir in a couple of pictures. I recognized Bangladesh. His work was…amazing. Poverty and despair and war and death. Beautiful and brilliant and terrible, all at once.

“Would you like a drink, 3C?”

He’d returned wearing a Green Day T-shirt and sleep pants. How had he gotten close enough for me to feel his breath in my hair without me noticing?

I wrenched my gaze from one of his more spectacular images, a joyous, colorful scene of the Hindu festival, Holi and offered my hand. “I’m Rami.”

“Rami? Scott.” 3C held my hand a second too long before dropping it. “How about that drink?”

“I…uh.” I glanced back toward the hall. “Can I get my laundry sorted and then come back? The machine ate my money and then I had to move my clothes. I don’t want to just…”

“Ah, that’s right.” He left me standing there alone again for a second, but came back with a  jar of quarters. He counted six of them into my damp palm. “You were looking for change.” 

I nodded, breathless from just the touch of his fingers.

“Funny thing.” He let his gaze sweep over me. “Me too.”

Jed just happened to be looking out the window of the bus at the precise moment the best looking man he’d ever seen glanced up.

Gray eyes. Had Jed ever met anyone with eyes that color before? Eyes like smoke and aerated water. Eyes whose pupils started out like inky pinpoints but blew wide as if their owner saw something that dumped a load of adrenaline into his veins…

Jed stood, and pressed his face to the glass to keep eye contact. When the bus swerved around a corner, the ache of loss felt like a hammer-blow. Without looking away from the sidewalk, he tangled his fingers in the plastic line overhead, yanking hard to signal his was the next stop — even though he was still over a mile from home.

When the man with the extraordinary gray eyes rounded the corner at a run, Jed let out a shuddering sigh of happiness. Maybe…

Maybe…

Jed’s heart thundered as he kept watch out the window. The girl beside him had her music turned up too loud. He heard the plaintive notes of a familiar song through her earbuds — he could almost hear the words.

One step closer…

Gray-eyes ran toward the bus stop, dodging dog walkers and twisting around women pulling wire shopping carts. So much steam billowed from a hot dog vendor’s cart that for a minute, Jed could no longer see him. A flood of sorrow washed over him, too tangible, too bitter to be the result of losing sight of a man he’d seen for a matter of seconds.

The bus came to a groaning, juddering stop and Jed stepped off. He stood waiting for a minute, hands anxiously repositioning his messenger bag at his side.

The girl with the earbuds got off after him. She bumped into him, dropping a stack books.  He couldn’t stop himself from helping her pick them up, even though it meant taking his eyes off the sidewalk. He glanced awkwardly the way they’d come…peering around her to see…nothing.

He could still her her music, even on the busy street, even as the bus roared off. He almost warned her to turn it down — almost told her listening to it loud like that could contribute to hearing loss, but once she had her books she’d marched off down the street.

He imagined he could hear the song, long after she left. 

One step closer…

Jed tried not to be obvious but his gaze swept the street again, past the hot dog cart, past the bodega where he’d probably get some ramen before returning home alone.

Again.

After a minute, common sense prevailed. Jed made up his mind to skip the store and simply retreat into the mute chill of his empty walk-up — into framed black and white photographs cut from magazines and brick-and-board book cases full of mystery novels and the futon from college.

He turned and ran smack into a solid wall of muscle with gray eyes.

“Hey.” A smile like the brightness of a thousands suns lit up the area around them. “I saw you on the bus, looking at me. Do we know each other?”

“I don’t think so.” Jed shook his head, couldn’t stop shaking it. No, no, no. This doesn’t happen to me.

“Shouldn’t we?” Teeth clamped on the man’s full, soft lower lip, suddenly doubtful, when their owner had chased a bus over half a mile because of a single glance. “Do you think we should get to know each other before you look at me like that?”

Jed’s head bobbed, yes. Kept bobbing. “I think so. Yes.”

A thousand tiny bubbles tickled Jed’s heart with a sensation so old and unfamiliar, it took him a while to realize what it was…

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all — Emily Dickinson