Harvest Heat

On the sweaty summer day that Ari arrived back on campus for his senior year of college, he sat on the dorm room bed and decided that he was not going to make any friends. In fact, had he not been in the Honors Program, he might have made a valiant attempt at not having any kind of conversation whatsoever. He dreamt of that for a while: No coordination, no meetings. No seminars over lunch. No sitting next to strangers. No bonding through mutual strangeness, no awkward smiles that turned to stolen glances. No feelings, no friends, no lovers. 

He could not avoid all of it, but he could curl into himself as he had so many times before and he could stay that way, like a clenched fist, if it meant making it to graduation unscathed by attachment. 

In that moment, as he laid back on the bed and watched the blades of his dull white ceiling fan blur into gray, everything sounded so doable. While he might not have been able to control everything, he could at least control himself. 

Little did he know that in the coming hours, somewhere between midnight and the blurry time before first light, the dorm room lock would click and the door would swing open, and suddenly he would be face to face with the very man that would make all of those easy things so much harder. Someone who had never known the kind of doubt or fear that Ari had known. Not especially tall, not especially attractive in the conventional sense–rather, someone who was messy. The kind of messy that was comfortable and confident, the kind that bled through the skin like a cracked glowstick and attracted bugs. Gil Atterbury.