Chapter Text
It was the fourth away game of the semester.
First semester, Spot hadn’t ever followed the other freshmen out on their tradition. He thought it was stupid.
There was a reason the coaches wanted them to stay in the hotel the night after the first game. They had stuff to do on Saturdays. Early practice time, the second game that night, it was just stupid to go out and exhaust yourself the night before.
Even if it was tradition.
Spot had spent the Saturday morning of every away game listening to the two freshmen who did sneak out brag about finding a girl to sleep with and a party to crash and a bar to sneak into. Every time. Usually, all three in the same night, as if every upperclassman wasn’t rolling their eyes at the exaggerated stories.
The two that snuck out were idiots in general, though. Nice enough, for sure, and easily two of Spot’s closest friends considering he didn’t really have many (any) friends outside of the hockey team, but just stupid as hell when it came to common sense.
So.
For his first semester of freshman year, Spot didn’t sneak out during away games. He stayed in his room with Moose, the last of four freshmen and the other sensible one. They watched a movie if they were riding an energy high from a good game and couldn’t go to sleep. Listened to Rex and Enzo giggle their way down the hallway when they decided it was time to sneak out.
But second semester…
Well, it started near the end of first semester. One of the students in his nineteenth-century lit class had invited him to a party, and it had been a night when he didn’t have late practice or a game. And in a moment of some kind of belated teenage rebellion, instead of thinking, "that sounds awful and I would hate it and I don’t want to stay out late," he’d thought, "my parents would murder me if they knew I went to a party," and it had felt exciting, not terrifying.
So he’d said yes. He’d shown up at Appletree Apartments, apparently a Hearst University freshman party staple, and sat down on a green couch in the corner of somebody’s very loud, very crowded living room with a bottle of something orange, fizzy, and absolutely disgusting.
He’d never had alcohol before but if it could make an orange soda taste so bitter he could barely make himself take a second sip he didn’t like it at all.
The guy who’d invited him (Don? Dom? Something like that.) had found him and sat next to him and they’d talked for a long time, much longer than Spot had had a one-on-one conversation with anyone from class. Eventually, the guy had pulled Spot into a different apartment on the same floor, much quieter and emptier, and they’d talked some more. And then into an empty bedroom, and they’d talked some more, and then suddenly…
Well.
He couldn’t exactly show up at team breakfast and start talking about kissing a boy, about letting a boy straddle his hips and press him into a mattress, about how bad he wanted it and the way he could still feel every touch and every kiss hours later after he’d showered and brushed his teeth and fought the urge to pray about it the way he had when he was twelve and had that kind of thought for the first time.
He didn’t believe in God anymore, but that didn’t stop the instinct from rising up in him every time he did something wrong.
But he’d liked it, was the thing. He’d spent so long trying to convince himself that he didn’t actually like any of that, but then he did like it. And he wanted more of it. Even the horrible burning shame that settled deep in his chest and stomach every time he thought about it, every time the rest of the team was joking around about the girls they’d pulled and the hookups they were having every other night, it didn’t make him want it less. Like now that he’d had a taste of it, literally, he wanted more.
And for the first time in his short, pretty miserable life, he’d let himself have what he wanted just because he wanted it. Not that wanting it made it feel right, really, but it did feel good, so he’d let himself want and he’d gone to another party and let another guy kiss him into somebody else’s bed.
And now, second semester, he was sneaking out at an away game like Rex and Enzo, making Moose promise to cover for him if the coaches came to do room checks.
It was stupid. It was so stupid, it could backfire so spectacularly, and they were at Pulitzer, so if there was a night where room checks were likely, it was this one. Things always went wrong at Pulitzer games, like somebody getting into a fight off the ice, or choosing the wrong girl to hit on, and suddenly the student section at game two was less "friendly but intense sports rivalry" and more "bordering on grabbing the pitchforks and torches to chase them out of town." The coaches were way more vigilant during weekends at Pulitzer.
That was part of why this was the weekend he’d decided to do it. The coaches knew him well enough to not even start to think he’d be one of the ones sneaking out, and Pulitzer was the perfect place to hook up with somebody random because nobody here would be talking to anyone from Hearst on a regular basis. Such was the nature of college sports rivalry.
So, it was the fourth away game of the spring semester and he was at Hearst University, and Spot was pulling a hood over his head and sneaking out a side door of the hotel and heading towards fraternity row.
He realized, when he got to the end of the row of frat houses to the one that was lit up the brightest, that he hadn’t really thought this through. There were at least four couples, four heterosexual couples, making out on the porch. What were his chances of even finding a guy who was into him?
But he pushed open the door, anyway. Stepped into a party already in full swing, a huge room that somehow still had too many people in it. The smell of sweaty people and alcohol dominating.
It was exactly the kind of chaotic overwhelming that made Spot feel safe to disappear into a party in the first place, and he was ready to do that as soon as he stepped inside.
Except he didn’t.
Except he froze.
Except the first thing he saw was a guy in the middle of the room. One of many guys in the middle of the room, actually, guys and girls in the big group on the makeshift dance floor, all talking and laughing and dancing to the loud pop music blaring from speakers he couldn’t see.
It was a normal scene. A totally normal college party just like the ones he’d been to before, only bigger and louder.
Except…
It wasn’t a coherent thought in his head, but there was some kind of feeling settling very deep and hot in his chest. Not the usual shame, guilt, residual religious trauma, whatever it was that left him feeling off for days after every hookup no matter how much he’d enjoyed it because he knew it was wrong. Or whatever. But it wasn’t that. It was something…
The guy in the middle of the room. Spot couldn’t look away. He wasn’t even doing anything, he was just in the big group in the middle of the room, right at the center of them so Spot was more getting glimpses of him through a crowd than able to focus on just him.
He was tall. Probably close to six feet, with a beautiful mop of golden brown curls falling into his face every time he turned his head. He was laughing, tilting his head back and squinting his eyes, talking with his hands, swaying to the beat of the music. And…
Spot couldn’t stop staring, and he also couldn’t move. He didn’t want to stop staring. He didn’t want to move.
The guy was wearing a crop top that barely counted as a shirt, black and mesh and see-through, sparkling with glitter in the fabric. He had makeup on, too, glitter on his cheekbones and eyeliner and maybe something on his eyelids and lips, the colorful lights made it hard to tell but Spot liked it. A lot. He couldn’t look away and he didn’t want to, he wanted to keep getting glimpses of long legs every time the group around him moved just right and trying to hear the laugh he could see from across the room.
There was something about it, something…
It was like…
He’d seen people and known they were gay before. Even when he was younger, he would have been able to tell that the guy he was watching was gay. And since he’d gotten to school, since he’d finally escaped the bubble of sameness of his parents’ church, he’d gotten a lot more comfortable with it. It was…whatever. People could do what they wanted. There were people in his classes who wore pins with pronouns on them or had colorful flags on their backpacks or jackets or whatever.
And he’d seen pride parades, usually in the context of his parents or a pastor or somebody like that explaining just how perverted and wrong everything about the pictures was, and he knew there was such a thing as a gay bar. He’d never even thought about going to a place like that because it was one thing to indulge in a guilty pleasure once in a while and something else entirely to seek it out on purpose like that.
This guy looked like he belonged there.
But he wasn’t there. He was here. Just…here.
That was the root of it, Spot realized after staring for at least a solid minute. The fact that this wasn’t one of the spaces where he would blend in perfectly. This was a frat party, the guy was surrounded by straight couples dry humping on the dance floor, and he was completely unashamed of being different from them. Completely comfortable just…being.
He was just…existing as he was, completely unbothered, completely free, completely relaxed, dancing and laughing and talking in a space that wasn’t designed for him or set aside for people like him.
After another thirty seconds, Spot finally identified the hot, tight feeling threatening to take his entire body over. It was coming from the same exact place as all the guilt and shame. That horrible knot of anger and resentment and pain and grief and loss that most of his negative emotions came from, that lovely cocktail known as "growing up fundamentalist Christian and having horrible parents, to boot," but it was completely different.
He wasn’t fighting back the welling nausea and disgust at himself he’d felt ever since the first time he’d looked at a boy and thought, "maybe that’s what I want." It wasn’t directed at himself. He was mad. Angrier than he’d almost ever been.
He thought, for a second, that he was mad at the guy he couldn’t stop staring at. Mad that he thought this was his space, maybe, the way he’d been taught to be mad his whole childhood. Mad at the other, angry that they took up space and couldn’t be avoided.
But that wasn’t right, he realized as soon as the guy laughed again and Spot’s brain, newly flooded with poetic imagery from the poetry class he had to take this semester, wouldn’t stop supplying him with stupid metaphors about light and air and the feeling of candy making his lips and teeth sticky for some reason. He wasn’t mad at the guy. He wanted the guy, he wanted to be in that group of people laughing and talking right along with them. No, he wasn’t mad at him, but something about the way this whole scene was set up was what was making him mad.
He stepped a little further into the party when the door behind him opened again and a few more people spilled in. He just couldn’t stop looking, stop watching. He wanted it. All of it. When the song changed, the guy laughed the biggest laugh yet, tilted his head back and laughed and ran his fingers through his hair and Spot caught a flash of color, bright green paint on his nails and he wanted it even though he’d never wanted anything like that before. The light caught the glitter on his face and in his see-through crop top and Spot wanted that, too, he wanted…
He wanted to feel like that. To feel happy and free and like he belonged, actually belonged. To not be constantly checking himself to see if he lined up with what he thought other people would think was normal. He wanted to paint his nails, he wanted to even think about painting his nails without feeling panic rise in his throat like it did when he thought about doing anything, anything at all, that would mark him as other when other was a synonym for wrong.
Why didn’t he get to be like that?
That was what he was mad about. It clicked when he watched another guy, a shorter guy in khaki shorts and a short-sleeve button-up with a dumb pattern on it, a guy who looked just like every other frat guy in the house, slide up next to the guy he’d been watching and put his arm around his shoulders, say something into his ear and then they burst out laughing together before the other guy disappeared into the crowd again. So…casual. Like everything was normal. Like the guy wasn’t doing anything radical, he wasn’t different at all.
It was that thought that snapped something in Spot’s chest that had been pulled taught like a rubber band for so long that he hadn’t even noticed it until all of the sudden whatever it had been holding back was welling up inside him with so much force he was practically vibrating with it.
Why didn’t he get to be like that? Why did he feel so different, so terrible about himself, like there was something wrong with him? There was an answer to that, and it wasn’t "because I am, because there is."
It was, "because they said so, but they were wrong."
Because there wasn’t anything wrong with the guy having a good time with his friends on a Friday night. Why shouldn’t he be able to be whoever, however he wanted to be? And if that was true for him, why shouldn’t that be true for Spot?
It was like a switch flipped, and suddenly every bit of shame and guilt and self-loathing he’d experienced over the last seven years was suddenly anger at the people who’d made him feel that way.
He didn’t mean to, but when he started walking into the crowd in the middle of the room, ducking under flailing arms and weaving between people until he was only a few people away from the guy he still couldn’t look away from.
He wanted to feel that same kind of freedom he was watching.
He also really wanted to kiss him. Really, really wanted to kiss him. Maybe see what color his own hands looked slid up under that see-through crop top, dusted with that glitter on his cheekbones.
For the first time ever, he didn’t try to change anything about those wants.
He stepped closer, on purpose this time, into the smaller circle of people right up close, and he saw him laugh close enough to hear it this time, and in a bolder move than he’d ever made in his life, he just…went for what he wanted, instead of waiting for it to happen to him.
"You’re hot," he said, going up on his tiptoes to reach the guy’s ear.
"Thanks," the guy said, turning to face him. Spot felt his breath catch in his throat.
Oh, he wanted to kiss this guy so bad.
"Wanna dance?" The guy asked, tilting his head and grinning.
(So bad. Maybe he’d suffocate if he wasn’t kissing him in ten minutes.)
"Yeah," Spot said, leaning into the way the red-hot feeling in his stomach was shifting into another brand new feeling, something exciting and fun that he wanted to chase.
He’d never really danced before. He’d been to a middle school dance, and a few church youth group things that were sort of dances, but all of the above were the kind of dances that really meant standing in the corner eating Doritos and drinking Sprite and maybe awkwardly holding a girl’s waist and swaying back and forth during the slow songs they played in-between pop radio hits.
He’d never actually danced with somebody before, the way people danced at parties. Less actual dancing, and more using the music to give a rhythm to feeling each other up, pressing against each other and having to practically press their heads together if they wanted to hear a single word the other was saying.
He didn’t think he was very good at it, really. Even with the newfound desire to be just as okay with himself as this guy was, it was hard to stop wondering if other people were looking at him and judging him the way he judged himself. But he made himself force those thoughts away in favor of finding out what his hands looked like slipped under that shirt, what it felt like to have the arms of somebody six inches taller than him wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him in close and tight and moving his hips in time to the pulsing music.
He’d never had anything like this. Nothing even a little bit comparable. This was a headrush, an addicting humming spreading through his whole body and driving him to dance on his tiptoes, making himself tall enough to say some nonsense that he couldn’t even keep track of, trying to tempt his mouth down to Spot’s. And the longer they danced, the longer they were together without anyone saying anything to them, or even seeming to notice them at all, the easier it was to forget that this was anything out of the ordinary for him at all. It was fun.
And when the guy finally, finally kissed him…
Spot could have drowned in it. Poetic fragments ran through his head like a headline scroll at the bottom of a news broadcast, phrases welling up like he was trying and failing to understand the freedom of this. Of dancing in the middle of a crowded room with a guy, of having his hands under a guy's shirt, of making out with a guy like this in front of anyone who wanted to look their way. He felt hot all over, hot and buzzing with it, and like he could do anything right now and not only get away with it, but own it and throw it in somebody’s face and dance with it as freely as he was dancing with this guy.
Whose name he didn’t even know.
He didn’t even know his name, and he had no intention of letting that slow him down.
"I have a room. Upstairs," the guy whispered into Spot’s ear, his own hand sliding up Spot’s back under his sweatshirt, tracing over muscles and sending more sparks up Spot’s spine and more heat into his stomach. "If you want."
"Yes," Spot said back. "Please."
He did have something on his lips, Spot could taste it and feel the stickiness it left behind. He wondered what it would look like kissed onto him, smeared off of where it belonged.
He didn’t have to wait all that long to find out.
"My name is Race, by the way." He kissed the corner of Spot’s mouth gently, pulled him close and tugged a sheet over both of them. "Little late for the introductions part of this, I guess."
"Spot," Spot said, breathless and unwilling to move, another new feeling. Usually, this was when the guilt would settle in and he’d feel like he had to get up and run.
"Nice to meet you." Race grinned. It took over his whole face, and Spot had the bizarre urge to kiss him and catch the smile on his own face. He followed that urge. Letting himself have what he wanted still felt radical and strange, but he liked it. Kind of a lot. "Very nice."
"You, too."
He almost started to fall asleep, wrapped in the arms of somebody who was barely more than a stranger, but a stranger who had managed to shake something loose in him that had been so stuck tight he hadn’t even realized it was there.
Even while the pleasure high faded, the burn in his chest wasn’t what it had been every other time he’d let himself have this. He wasn’t anything other than extremely pissed off that he’d ever been made to feel so horrible about himself by people who assumed it was wrong because it was different.
The bright green nail polish on Race’s fingernails seemed to glow in the dim light, and Spot thought, "beautiful." The glitter on his cheeks had come off on the pillow and been smeared up to his forehead and down to his chin, and Spot thought, "beautiful." There was nothing wrong with him, and there was nothing wrong with Spot, and there was nothing wrong with this. Nothing.
Before he could settle too far into the moment, his phone started going off with the alarm he’d set to remind himself to get back to the hotel before it was too late.
"I have to go," he said, rolling off the twin bed and managing to not make an idiot of himself while doing it.
"So soon, Cinderella?" Race propped himself up on an elbow and watched Spot fumble for his phone to shut the alarm off before pulling his clothes back on. "Why?"
"We have another game tomorrow. The coaches will kill me if I’m exhausted in the morning, and they’ll check to make sure I’m in my room before breakfast."
"You’re on a team? Huh. I didn’t recognize you. What sport?"
"Hockey."
"Hockey…" Spot watched a look of horrified realization spread over Race’s face. "Oh no, I hooked up with a Hearst guy?"
"Maybe."
"Horrible. That’s a betrayal of trust. God. It’s a good thing you’re hot, or I’d be so mad right now." He laughed, though, and stretched out a hand like he was trying to catch Spot and pull him back into bed. Spot took his hand and let himself get tugged into another kiss. "I hope you lose horribly," Race whispered. "I hope it’s embarrassing and you never recover from it. I’ll be watching for you. Look for the O in goats and make sure to do something stupid right in front of me."
Spot was still laughing while he wove his way through the people still partying downstairs.