The alarm went off at 6:40 and Kota wanted to die.
He fumbled for the phone on the nightstand, knocked over a half empty glass of water, and finally jabbed the screen until the noise stopped.
He lay there staring at the ceiling for a minute, trying to remember what day it was, and then he remembered and groaned out loud.
School.
Actual school.
Normal, boring, everyone-sitting-in-their-desks school, for the first time in what felt like a month.
He dragged himself upright and into the shower.
He looked tired.
He looked like a man who had spent an entire holiday doing one thing and one thing only, and every muscle in his body had been keeping score, the bath did not do shit it seems.
He wrapped a towel around his waist, dropped onto the edge of the bed, and called Theo.
Theo picked up on the second ring, which was its own small form of adorable.
“Good morning, darling,” Theo said, and his voice was so bright it practically sparkled in Kota’s ear.
“You’re up early.
I’m proud of you.
I was genuinely starting to think I’d have to come up there and drag you out by the ankles.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“I would absolutely try.”
Kota laughed, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“Where are you?”
“Ten minutes out.
I’m on my way.
I’ll be in your lot, far corner, where the light doesn’t hit, so nobody calls the police about the glowing sports car parked outside a working class apartment building at seven in the morning.”
“You could just buy a normal car.”
“I could also wear a burlap sack and eat plain toast for the rest of my life, but we’ve discussed this and we don’t do that sort of thing.”
“Thank you,” Kota said, and meant it more than the words carried.
“For the ride.
Every morning.
You don’t have to.”
“I do have to.
It’s the rules.
Boyfriend privilege.
I drive, you sit there looking handsome and distracting, Sebastian makes those little noises when you touch his knee.
It’s the best part of my day and I refuse to give it up.”
“Goodbye, Theo.”
“Wait, wait.
Tell me you dreamed about me.”
“I slept like a corpse.”
“That’s fine, I dreamed about you twice.
It was very involved.
I’ll tell you in the car.
Sebastian’s already in the front seat and he keeps reorganizing my center console because he’s nervous about something, so hurry up.”
Kota hung up grinning.
He scrolled his messages while he sat there with the towel loose around his hips.
Top of the list was Riley, because it was always Riley.
Nine new photos, every one of them blurred, every one of them sent at three in the morning.
Kota squinted at the previews for a second, then tapped the first one open, because he was a glutton for punishment.
Oh brother.
Riley was shirtless on his bed.
He was posed.
One leg bent up, back arched deep, phone held high overhead, the sheets shoved down to his thighs like someone had told him to leave exactly that much for the censors.
The third was from the back.
The fourth was a close up of his own mouth doing something illegal with the tip of his thumb, and Kota scrolled through them trying to to hide his boner.
Except something was off, and it took him a second to place it.
The tan lines were gone.
Kota frowned and zoomed in.
Nothing.
No pale strips cupping those cheeks, no bright bands where a tiny thong had stood guard all summer.
Just smooth, pale fair skin.
He pressed a voice, because apparently he hated himself.
“Kotaaaa,” Riley’s voice came through, low and thick and already breathing like he’d just finished jogging somewhere.
“Good morning.
It’s like three AM.
I couldn’t sleep.
I kept thinking about how it’s the first day back, and how I’m gonna have to sit in third period for a whole hour knowing the sexiest man in Texas is somewhere in this building and I can’t do a single thing about it, and it was killing me, so I made you something.
Did you see the pictures?
I did my hair.
I did my angles.
I did about forty takes.
I hope you looked at all nine.
It’s only polite to look at all nine.”
A pause.
A rustle of sheets.
“Anyway.
I just wanted to say I can’t wait to see my favorite stud in class.
I can take the whole thing now, no hands, no warmup, straight down like I was built for it.
So when you see me in the hallway and I give you that look, you know the look, don’t pretend you don’t, I want you to remember that I would drop to my knees in the middle of the science wing if you so much as raised an eyebrow at me.
I mean that.
Have a good first day, lil step bro.
Tell Theo I’m still mad he hogged you all Valentine’s.
Bye.”
The message ended.
Kota set the phone down, stared at the wall for a second, and decided that he was going to have a completely normal day and not think about any of that again for at least six hours..
He took the stairs instead of the elevator, because the elevator still made him think about Corey, and he didn’t have the energy for Corey this early.
On the last landing there was a window facing the lot, grimy and streaked, and through it he caught the low white shape of the McLaren tucked into the far corner, exactly where Theo said it would be.
Kota leaned in, cupped a hand against the glass, and blew a kiss down through the smudge toward the car, just in case Theo happened to be looking up.
Then he took the last steps two at a time, pushed out the front doors, and skipped across the asphalt, because he was in a good mood and there was nobody out here to judge him for it.
He pulled the back door open and slid in.
Sebastian was already turning around.
“Kota!” he said, all in one breath, and then he was climbing over the center console, elbows and knees and far too many gangly limbs, his sweater catching on the gearshift, until he tumbled into the back seat beside Kota with a grunt.
His round glasses sat crooked on his nose.
“I’m sorry.
That was not graceful.
I have never once been graceful in my life and I don’t intend to start now.
Hello.
Good morning.
I missed you.”
“Yes, and it was a very long night.”
Kota reached over and straightened his glasses with one finger, then leaned in and kissed him.
Sebastian made a small startled sound against his mouth and then melted into it, one hand coming up to grip the front of Kota’s hoodie like the car might pull away without him.
He tasted like mint and tea and the faint sweetness of whatever he’d put on his lips, and he kissed the way he did everything, with total focus, like Kota was a paragraph he intended to read twice.
From the driver’s seat, Theo made an outraged noise.
“Excuse me.
Excuse me.
There is a very handsome, very lonely principal in the front seat of this vehicle who has received zero kisses this morning, and I have to say, I’m beginning to take it personally.”
Sebastian pulled back, flushed to the ears, and whispered, “He’s been like this since I got in.”
“He has a point,” Kota said, and leaned over the console.
Theo turned his head and met him halfway, and the kiss was slow and soft and tasted like the mint he chewed every morning to stop himself from drinking coffee before eight.
His hand found Kota’s jaw and stayed there.
When they broke apart he kept his eyes closed for a beat, the way he always did, like he was filing it away somewhere safe.
“There,” Theo said.
“Now I can be a professional.”
Sebastian had already folded himself against Kota’s side, one leg tucked up on the seat, his cheek resting on Kota’s shoulder like he planned to stay there for the entire drive.
Kota let an arm settle around him and felt him go boneless almost instantly.
“You’re both going to make me late,” Theo announced, and started the engine, and the McLaren pulled out of the lot so smooth it barely felt like moving at all.
Three floors up, in the unfinished wing that nobody else in the building ever walked through, Sam sat hunched over his tablet.
On the tablet, an advert was playing.
It was for the new gym that had opened up right next door.
The advert was very excited about itself.
Classes for everything.
Cardio, weights, spin, and one called glute sculpting that ran on a loop of before and after photos, a whole parade of soft round asses that had clearly been photographed in the same room with the same lighting and the same slightly unfair angle.
Sam watched a femboy with an enormous ass do a slow squat and felt something complicated turn over in his chest.
Here was the part he kept coming back to.
The doctors on the forum talked about it all the time.
The whole lower half of a man got rewired after the Vanishing to store what it stored, and most of them came out of it with something worth looking at, something that turned heads on the sidewalk.
But it wasn’t a gift and it wasn’t free.
Nobody had ever once looked at him.
He was fine with that.
He was.
He had a system and the system worked and it kept him invisible, and invisible was safe.
But he had been doing the math all week, and the math kept coming back the same way.
If he could get a fatter one.
If he could get something heavy and soft and worth grabbing, something that made a man stop mid-step and stare and forget what he was saying, then maybe.
Just maybe.
Maybe Kota would look at him.
Maybe Kota would say something to him, one whole sentence, in that deep voice of his.
Maybe Kota would stick that big fat hog rod in his- no.
No.
“No,” Sam said out loud, to the empty room.
He was getting ahead of himself.
He meant friends.
He wanted Kota to be his friend.
That was the entire thing.
That was all of it.
Just a friend, a tall strong friend who smelled good and had a voice like a bassline and hands that could probably wrap all the way around his whole stupid skinny waist.
Yea, yea.
That reason.