Page 36

LEX

Proving It

“He folded your underwear,” said Jason.

I was sitting on a cot in Room 118, in a room that smelled of feet and Axe body spray, watching my best friend unpack my duffel with the stunned expression of a man defusing an emotional bomb. It was two in the afternoon. I had been awake for eight hours and thought about the same thing for seven of them.

“What?”

“He folded them. Your underwear. He handed me the bag at the door, and I looked inside, and it’s all folded. Every shirt. Every sock. There’s a little roll of your belts.” Jason held up a pair of black boxer briefs, creased into a perfect square, and turned it over in his fingers like an artifact. “Lex, they’ve got corners. “

“He’s a clean freak.”

“He’s a clean freak who asked me if you had eaten.”

I stopped moving.

“What?”

“Right there in the doorway. Didn’t say hello. Said, ‘Has Lex had breakfast?’ And I said, ‘I dunno, man, he was asleep,’ and he said, ‘Please make sure that he does.’” Jason set the boxers down. “That’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard him say. It’s also a little terrifying.”

“He’s not terrifying.”

“He’s seven feet tall and looks at me like I’m a sandwich.”

“He’s six-four.”

“He’s a sandwich-looker, Lex.”

I put my face in my hands. I could hear my own heartbeat.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks,” I said, through my fingers, “to not say another word about him for the rest of the day.”

“Deal,” said Jason, and mimed zipping his lips. Then he unzipped them. “But I’m going to remember this. In fifteen years, when I give the speech at your wedding.”

“ Jason. “

“Zipped.” He zipped them again, and went to find a hanger.

Here’s how I thought about it.

I was a guy who liked girls. I had always been a guy who liked girls. There was a long, well-documented history: Marisol the bartender, Heather from the charity gala, the twins in Miami, a nice woman named Dr. Patel who had once diagnosed my knee at a party and given me her card. I had never, not once in twenty-six years, looked at a man and thought about what it would be like to kiss him.

Except once. Or twice. Or every single minute since Tuesday.

Shut up.

So there were two possible explanations. Explanation A: I was a straight man having a very strange week, with a stressful roommate and a jetlag-adjacent hormone situation and a bad reaction to Jägermeister. Explanation B: I was not.

I was not going to think about Explanation B.

To prove Explanation A, I needed data. I needed, specifically, to go out with a woman, be attracted to her, and have a perfectly nice, perfectly normal time. This is called an experiment. I have watched a lot of documentaries.

I opened Snapchat and scrolled down until I found her.

Vanessa

She’d been sending me photos on and off since October. A twenty-seven-year-old grad student in linguistics at the university across the river, with a wicked sense of humor and a habit of sending me pictures of her cat wearing ridiculous hats. We’d met at a charity auction, where I’d been the guy who was supposed to smile and had instead insulted the auctioneer’s tie. She’d laughed so hard she’d spilled her champagne. We’d been trading photos ever since.