Free Food for Thought by Amy Lane Page A

something broke your heart.”
    Emmett sighed and wished this road had more curves, but it was pretty much a straight shot, the whole two-hour drive. It helped that the highway was pretty busy, but, well, scenery there was not.
    “Jordyn was my college roommate,” he said after a minute. “Freshman and sophomore year. We… we clicked. Played Frisbee, played football, saw movies. For our first year, we just… got really, really close. I… I sort of knew I was gay by then. I mean, I’d recovered from my crush on Vinnie, which, yeah, once you meet him you’ll know—you sort of have to have a crush on Vinnie, it’s a requirement—but Jordyn was my first crush that really… you know. Seemed like it was going somewhere. So, one night—”
    “After a few beers…,” Keegan quipped.
    Emmett pursed his mouth and shook his head.
    “No. We were both stone cold sober. But I was reading some… well, fan fiction, really—”
    “ Avengers ?”
    “Spork—it was before Avengers came out and after the new Star Trek . But it was really dirty, and I was getting hard, and suddenly, well, Jordyn was there with his hand down my pants, and….” There was no forgetting your first time. Jordyn’s gray eyes intent on Emmett’s, the almost aggressive way he’d stroked Emmett off, and the fear and the need that had driven him to move his lean mouth closer and closer….
    They’d kissed as Emmett came, and they’d spent the rest of their night not talking, just doing as many of the things Emmett had read about as possible.
    And the next night they’d done more.
    “By the end of the year, we were….” Emmett shook his head. “We were inseparable. We were necking in every corner of the campus, we’d both looked into joining the GSA during rush the next year, we held hands across the quad—I mean we were—”
    “Married!” Keegan said in horror.
    Emmett shrugged. “Yeah. Married. And he was going to go home and tell his parents, and text me, and I was going to tell my dad.”
    “And….”
    Emmett glanced at Keegan, feet propped up against the dashboard, seat tilted back so his face was out of the sun. Keegan, who seemed to enjoy being gay, and who put up with the family disapproval and who was absolutely square with Emmett every day of the year.
    “And the text never came. So I texted him. And he said, ‘Just forget it. I’ll see you in September.’”
    Keegan straightened up and clicked his seat forward. “Just forget it? Just forget it ? You were going to come out and be together and just forget it ?”
    Emmett shrugged. “That’s not really the worst part.”
    Keegan whooshed out a breath. “God. I need to get ice cream. I need some motherfucking ice cream for this. Can we stop and get ice cream? Cookies? Raw processed sugar. I need to hit something.”
    Emmett reached out and grabbed his hand. “There’s a Wendy’s at the next stop. We can get a Frosty.”
    “Fair enough,” Keegan sulked. “What’s the worst part?”
    “The worst part was that when I got back to school, Jordyn had changed our room assignment so we both had different roommates and—”
    “Just like that ?”
    Emmett laughed a little. It was vindicating, somehow, to hear Keegan getting so angry at what Emmett had tried to convince himself was all just natural, the course of things.
    “Just like that,” he confirmed, keeping his voice as light as he could. “And he accidentally took some of my books. So I tracked him down and knocked on his door.”
    “And?” Keegan asked.
    Emmett realized that the hand holding Keegan’s had grown clammy.
    “And he was alone. He let me in, and started telling me how it was okay to fool around when you’re kids, but we were both going to graduate in two years and we needed to grow up. And the thing was, he was crying—just out and out crying when he said it. It was like he was reciting someone else’s words. So I hugged him, and he fell apart on me, but he just kept talking. And I guess he