AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Micah could feel the intensity of that gaze as if it were reaching inside him and rearranging the very molecules that made up his body. He could feel Jake in the air as he breathed in and knew exactly how Jake would taste even though he’d never even kissed another guy, let alone touch one in that way. It was as if Micah knew Jake in a way he’d never known anyone else, and they hadn’t even spoken yet.
The stare seemed to go on forever, seeming to exist in an infinite warp of time and space, but in truth, it was over quickly. Jake was coming into the room, moving to his desk, and picking up a notebook without even looking for it. Like it was exactly where he needed it to be. Like it might have moved itself just to be where he could find it.
For a crazy second, Micah wanted to be that notebook. To be one of Jake’s precisely placed items. To always be where Jake could find him.
And then Jake was leaving, crossing the threshold of the room, and Micah wanted him to stop, wait, say something.
As if hearing Micah’s thoughts, Jake paused and looked back, looked right at Micah, held his gaze again. “Nice to meet you, Micah. Have fun this weekend.”
Then he was gone, and the rest of the world became obvious again: the bass line pumping from someone’s music, voices down the hall, the smell of pizza and stale beer, and Alex laughing. Of course, Alex was laughing. Micah had pretty much been drooling.
Jake was gorgeous. Six-two? Three? With wavy dark-brown hair, a clean-cut strong jaw covered in just the right amount of scruff, athletic build from playing some sport—Micah was going to have to find out which one—and the most intense eyes Micah had ever seen. They were…light brown. Hazel? But seemed almost golden. It was a color he’d never seen before, and he hoped he’d get the chance to figure it out before the weekend was over.
And, he thought as he stripped out of his sweater and replaced it with the T-shirt, he’d been right about the button-ups. Not a wrinkle in sight.
Jake
Micah was hot. So hot. So incredibly fucking hot, Jake couldn’t concentrate on his stats homework. Which he needed to finish so he could go out, get wasted, then find a willing body to fuck until they both passed out from exhaustion. Solo pleasure was not what he had in mind this evening. Not at all. And yet, finding an anonymous someone was becoming less appealing by the minute as he thought up excuses to go back to his room in case Micah was still there.
Fuck. He didn’t even know if Micah was gay. He had to be, though. No guy checked another out like that if he wasn’t. And Micah had definitely been checking him out.
A pen sailed across his field of vision.
“Dude, chill. You’re making me nuts over here. You need to go jerk off or something?”
“Just hoping your sorry ass will hurry up with these equations.” Jake picked up the pen from the floor and chucked it back at his study partner.
Fifteen minutes later, Jake’s attention wasn’t any better, so he called it a night. An image of bright blue eyes and golden hair filled his head as he left the dorm’s study lounge and made his way back upstairs. He was staying a couple of doors down, had already moved his stuff in for the weekend, but he could have forgotten something, right? That was believable.
Jake didn’t know whether to be amused with himself or disgusted. He’d never been this way over a guy before, especially one he didn’t even know, had barely said hello to. And he’d been with plenty of guys.
He’d been partying in the Castro since he was sixteen. Being over six feet tall, as well as a rugby player and swimmer, had helped him look more mature than he was. Add in a fake ID and guys willing to get a good-looking kid into places if he pretended to be their boyfriend for the night, and he was golden. By the time he’d started at Stanford, his dance card had been filled a dozen times over and, more often than not, he was the one doing the filling.
He liked guys. He liked sex. He wasn’t interested in relationships and had never understood the appeal. Even as a kindergartner having to buy those cheap Valentine’s Day cards that made the girls giggle and the boys gag, he didn’t get it. The hearts, the crushes, the feelings that made people giddy and stupid, all that made his skin crawl.
As he’d gotten older and realized he was gay, he recognized that relationships didn’t do it for him either. He’d tried having a boyfriend once, but he hadn’t seen the point. The world was vast, with too many options for him to want just one flavor, and there were enough guys out there who felt the same way that Jake never lacked for partners.
“Forever” wasn’t in his vocabulary. Any idea about that had taken a fucking leap before he even knew what the word meant. When he was five, his mother had taken off one night, leaving him behind with his older brother, his father, and his father’s drinking problem. By the time he was sixteen and finally decided to come out to the old man, his father was almost constantly drunk and couldn’t figure out what Jake had been trying to tell him. To this day, Jake still wasn’t sure his father knew he was gay.
In his first week at Stanford, Jake had hooked up with one of the TAs for his Psych 101 class. The guy had asked to see Jake again, and, when he refused, tried to convince him that those familial experiences had turned him off of relationships. Jake dropped the class and picked up stats instead, vowing to be done with psych majors as well as talking about his family. Hookups weren’t entitled to know the details of his life, especially when those details had no bearing on his preferences.
None of that explained why he was disappointed to find his dorm room empty, nor why, when he and his friends headed out for the evening, he kept looking for brilliant blue eyes and waves of golden hair.
* * * * *
Jake and his friends walked into the Patio just before midnight, and as soon as he was inside, he knew Micah was there.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he did, just like he’d known Micah wasn’t in any of the previous half dozen bars he and his friends had patronized that evening. It was a feeling, like when he was twelve and watched a storm come ashore from the Pacific Ocean, the lightning striking so close to the beach, Jake’s skin had tingled with electricity. He felt that again as he crossed the threshold of the bar and zeroed right in on Micah at a table in the back.
He sat next to Alex, who was busy talking to a girl with big tits and more makeup than Jake had seen on most drag queens, while Micah looked bored. It was karaoke night, and Micah was watching the current victim onstage. When the guy hit a particularly sour note, Micah winced.
Instead of heading over and saying hi, Jake followed his friends to the bar for a round of beers. The guys he was with tonight were from his rugby team. They were all big and tan and made heads turn wherever they went. Most of the guys were juniors or seniors, but Jake’s fake ID was good enough that he didn’t need any of them to buy his drinks.
They took over an empty table on the opposite side of the room from Alex and Micah, and Jake made sure to take a seat facing him. He wanted to see the moment Micah saw him—it wasn’t even a question in his mind that Micah would—and he wanted to see Micah’s reaction.
Sure enough, before Jake had taken a sip of his beer, Micah turned as if Jake had called his name and looked right at him. As soon as their gazes connected, Jake felt the same jolt of recognition he’d felt earlier, standing in the doorway to his room, struck dumb by the most brilliant blue eyes he’d ever seen and the feeling that he’d found something he hadn’t known was missing.
It wasn’t just attraction to a sexier-than-fuck guy. Jake had been attracted to dozens of guys before this, a few who might even have been more beautiful than Micah, and he’d never reacted to them this way. Did he want to fuck Micah? Hell, yeah. The guy was a walking wet dream with those eyes and spun-gold hair. Who wouldn’t want to fuck him? What confused Jake, and kept him from stalking across the room to make that dream a reality, was this connection he’d never felt before. The feeling that Micah could have been someone else, could have been a woman, and Jake would still have felt the same way. And that terrified him. Which was why, instead of going to Micah, Jake drained his beer and left.
