Free The Worst Best Luck by Brad Vance Page A

it again in the following month.  Peter stopped asking her how she felt, too, because every day was a shit sandwich now.  Then one night Peter fell asleep on the bed next to her, and woke up in the morning just knowing that Mom was dead, the sudden absence of heat coming from the body next to him. 
    And he didn’t cry.  Made the calls, signed the papers, called Millie to help him get rid of all the medical shit around the house they no longer needed.  It was okay, he told himself, because he’d seen the pain ramping up, the pain she wouldn’t medicate as much as she should have, so that they could have this time together, watching TV, storing up memories, just…being a family for the last time. 
    And under that, though he wasn’t old enough to understand it or process it, was the relief, the awful half-compassionate, half-guilty relief of the “survived by,” when the long painful process is over.  Or you think it is, anyway.
     
    Grief’s a blur.  He moved into the little studio over Millie’s garage, graduated from high school, worked the landscape job through the summer, read a million books, had dinner with Millie and her family three times a week, and turned eighteen. 
    He had no idea how lonely it was to live alone when you never had before.  It wasn’t in his nature to want it, or to like it.  He didn’t even think twice about hugging the pillow tight every night as he went to sleep, to hold something, anything, that resembled a body.
    The community college had a decent theater program, even had a real theater, not a “multipurpose room.”  He made friends, but that was it.  There were all kinds of young gay men in school with him, expressing their gayness about as expressively as they could, but none of them appealed to him. 
    College was across the Iron Curtain from high school, another world beyond the oppressive idiocracy of K-12.  The gay boys had left behind their worst tormentors, the most lunkheaded lunks, none of whom were going to be doin’ more schoolin’ than the law could make them do. 
    But it wasn’t the great sexual awakening for Peter that it was for them – he kept a low profile, kept his head down, had coffee with his new friends and went to their parties and went to movies with them. 
    Then one night in late September, a Tuesday around eight, he was walking outside the student union and saw a young man standing there, smoking a cigarette near a group of adults much older than himself. 
    A guy who made Jordan look like a humpback whale.  Dark hair cut in the latest style, buzzed on the sides and longer on top, crisply folded with gel to hang just so over his forehead.  Huge eyes, deep and dark, a strong nose, but flattened like a boxer’s, brutally sensuous lips, a body, oh shit, a body in a tight white t-shirt that was clad in muscle, but so lean, so athletic. 
    Peter had to walk past the guy to get to the door and meet his study group, and he stared at the young god, couldn’t stop staring. 
    Like an animal the guy sensed it, looked up, locked his eyes on Peter.  And it was like the eagle’s eyes on the rabbit’s, hypnotizing it, the rabbit barely able to make a little squeak of terror as the predator swept down and grabbed him in his talons.
    Peter looked away because he had to, a lifetime of fear of being “caught looking” breaking the hold.  Not the old fashioned fear that he’d be caught being gay, so much as fear that…what?  That he’ll laugh at you, you miserable little prick, for daring to even think that…
    “Hey,” he said as Peter passed, forcing him to stop, look again.  The street lamp outside showed his features to best effect, his sharp right cheekbone casting a faint shadow on the smooth perfect skin of his cheek, the angle of his jawline just off balance above the long graceful cords in his neck.  “You gotta light?”
    Peter had to laugh at the absurdity.  “You’ve got a lit cigarette.”
    He shrugged, eyes down, eyebrow