Free How to Be a Normal Person by TJ Klune

off to the left, at the front window of the shop, wiping against the glass with a paper towel, a bottle of Windex at his feet. His hair was pulled back again, artfully messy, but it was what he was wearing that caused Gus’s throat to constrict involuntarily. Deep red skinny jeans that clung to his hips. A thin white tank top, leaving his arms exposed. And he was stretching up, standing on the tips of his toes to wipe down the top of the glass, and there was more skin , a thin strip of tanned skin above the waist of his jeans. There was hair on his navel, trailing down, growing darker as it disappeared into his pants.
    And Gus.
    Well.
    Gus just stood there.
    Staring.
    Because for some reason, he couldn’t not .
    Casey finally looked over at him, a slightly glazed smile on his face. He said, “Hey, Gus. Glad you finally stopped glaring at the store and came in.”
    Gus did what he did best when called out on the truthfulness of his actions.
    He sputtered.
    “What? I never —it wasn’t like that and—I just was standing there to—don’t even try to—I don’t glare I—”
    When Gus got a good sputter going on, when he was really embarrassed, it could last upward of a minute.
    This was a good sputter.
    A very good sputter.
    Casey, for what it was worth, just smiled at him and waited, eyes half-lidded and slightly bloodshot because it was wake and bake and he helped . He leaned against the freshly cleaned window, arms crossed over his chest, and Gus did everything he could to avoid looking at the chest hair that peeked out over the tank top because he was not emotionally equipped to deal with it at the present time.
    Eventually, Gus stopped sputtering.
    It just sort of… trailed off.
    “Hey, man,” Casey said when he fell silent. “Ain’t no skin off my back. Do you not like the architecture or something?”
    Gus didn’t really know what to do with that. “The architecture ?” He sounded slightly aghast.
    “The shape,” Casey said, fluttering a single hand around to indicate the shop. “The design . I thought you were glaring at the building because you didn’t like the way it looked. I don’t blame you. It’s so… square. Like. Square .”
    “It’s a building ,” Gus said, wondering how he had so quickly lost control of this conversation when all he wanted was coffee. “It’s supposed to be square.”
    “Nah,” Casey said. “Not all buildings are square. There are the pyramids and that opera house in Australia and the Eiffel Tower and those houses in hills they have in New Zealand that you can go into on Hobbit tours. Those are circles . Or spheres.” He paused, face scrunching briefly. “Or domes.”
    “What is even happening right now?” Gus asked.
    “I don’t know,” Casey said, fingers scratching at his beard unfairly . “I was just happy to see you stopped being mad about the building and came over.”
    “I wasn’t mad about—wait. Were you watching me?”
    Casey shrugged. “S’washing windows, man, and there you were. Gustavo Tiberius, ready to go to battle against the building. You had your grr face going.”
    “My what now?” Gus asked, sure his eyebrows were almost at his hairline.
    “Your grr face,” Casey said. “You know. Grr .” He bared his teeth in what Gus assumed was supposed to be an approximation of his scowl.
    And Gus was offended .
    “I don’t have a grr face,” Gus retorted. “I don’t have any kind of face.” He tried not to think how petulant that sounded, but it wasn’t his fault. Casey was wearing a tank top .
    “You have a nice face,” Casey said.
    “ What ?” Gus squeaked.
    Now, Gus wasn’t normally an anxious person, not really. He had a perfectly ordered world where everything had its place and everything was part of his routine. He did not deviate from said routine because that way lay madness.
    The last few days, though, had been a strange sort of amalgam of events that did not occur to one such as him. He was flip phones and