On another of those icy winter days in his home town, the lake ice-rimmed, the streets slick with a veneer of black ice, the snow crusted over with its own melted and refrozen self, icicles hanging from the power lines and the eaves and the edges of the windows; ice from the edges of everything, ice from his mother’s heart; for once Barry Holmes felt warm as toast.

He was someplace else.

When anyone asked what Math he was taking, unless they were math majors Barry just said “Algebra,” or “college Algebra,” or “the course is called Topics in Algebra.” And everyone figured it was simpleton algebra for those who were unable to handle the real thing, instead of a third-year course for Math majors.

Everything he said was true. Not only did Barry not want to stand out, he didn’t want others to feel bad, lessened by comparison with him in any way.

Math had always been important to him, he had always been so bored in math classes because he instantly understood how things worked, rarely needed an explanation and then would sit for forty-nine more minutes, and often for two more classes while the slowest of the slowest were carefully dragged along so they wouldn’t get lost.

His were all Junior or Senior level courses for Math majors. He expected to finish his degree in less than three years. He had raced through the lower division courses when he was in High School, when his mathematics potential was identified and he was shunted into a special school, and a program of self-study, finishing the high school curriculum in twelve weeks and then they signed him up to the college math classes and he had access because University High was at a university, right there on campus.

Math was important for many reasons, not least because it was a tool he had used for protecting himself since his youngest days. Even from his earliest days he was handling the pain of his life fractionally, dividing it up into smaller packets, canceling the numerators of pain with the denominators of his tiny reservoir of happy memories.

Now he was working human calculus, though he hadn’t called it that until recently, plumbing the limits and boundaries of people and the precise measurements of the area available for the containment of pain; fine tuning his knowledge of the variations and differentials of behavior.

Here at this University he felt for the first time - even though he had gone to an advanced high school a year early and finished in two years, and been surrounded by many other smart kids and befriended by one or two of the very best - he felt that here his classmates for the first time were not a threat to him, and he could allow himself to show his intelligence, to raise his hand, to ask questions, to offer the answers that popped unbidden into his agile mind. He didn’t have to hide his test grades, and there were hardly any who thought him strange for being smart.

In high school being small and young and probably queer was a real problem and he had to work at protective coloration, he learned to wear large and shapeless colorless sweaters which he picked up at Goodwill, and to show the jocks - for even University High had some - and even the run of the mill nerds who were older and bolder and bigger than him, the appropriate deference. He had become an expert at balancing carefully, stepping carefully, avoiding all possible attention and he had succeeded in hiding there.

At sixteen he looked fourteen, and it was more difficult to hide on a college campus with students four, five, ten years older than he. It took a bit for him to realize that even here were some those jealous of his abilities.

Still, the consequences and difficulties of functioning here were so different! He had professors who invited him to see them during office hours, he was doing independent studies and got some work-study money by working on research projects with the astronomy grad students, who were far more geeky than he! It was so heady, some days he reeled with the intensity of all the changes, all the goodness that was flowing around him.

The Table was in the Student Union, in Lonnie’s Lower Level Café and Grill, the hamburger joint in the basement. Everyone just called it “The Table.”

The present incarnation of Lonnie’s - it had been moved and remodeled many times in sixty years -was dark, with dim, low hanging Tiffany lamps over the center of the warm dark wooden tables, the walls lined with fake dark red brick. The floors were deep mahogany wooden strips, the booths along the walls were booths of the same dark wood. The only real brightness to the place was from the cafeteria-style serving area off to one side and the occasional flare of smoke and flash of flame from the grill.

The Table was at the far end of the room, stuffed in a corner of an alcove. So the whole place was a series of dim lights in a dark sea, passing ships in the vast reaches of a lonely dark ocean. To enter this place was to be pulled to the lights, to the ships, to safety, to the warmth of The Table.

The Table had been there for over a generation, an enduring tradition passed down through the years until it had become such an accepted feature it seemed unlikely it would ever disappear despite it’s completely unofficial status. It was truly a remarkable place, one of those places that will never be documented in the annals of Gay History or Gay Culture, or even the University, though it deserved it.

It was a gay community center. A regular bunch of members, guys, lesbians, the dedicated activists of GSA and those who just liked The Table would be there every day. From about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Tuesday nights, it was host to an ever-changing cast of friendly queers, as class times and work schedules and the press of the day moved one out and another in. It thrived too through the longer cycles of semesters and summer sessions, graduations and matriculations, as these events moved entire cadre in and out.

It had started as the only place for gay students to gather back in the seventies, when successive administrations fought tooth and nail to prevent the formation of GSA or any other support for the queer and out. And a generation of straight students had learned the tradition, you don’t sit at that table, it’s for the queers. Society having moved on, nowadays to a second generation the same words conveyed a much more accepting attitude, “that’s their place, leave it alone.” Still, there was a certain stigma.

The present crew didn’t know all of it’s illustrious long history, the founders had been lost in time, but they knew it was a venerable tradition.

It had its moments of drama and gossip and spite and pettiness, yet it was a fun, friendly place, one of those spontaneous institutions that amplified the positive sweetness, gentility, love of its denizens, and inculcated its values into those who happened upon it - if sweetness and acceptance and gentle love were what they sought. A seat at The Table was, after all, a process of self-selection. New people came, met others, stayed, or left. Everyone could sit but only those who found fulfillment around its ring would return.

It became a refuge, a home, a School of its own, tucked away in the bowels of this big, impersonal, Southern university, tolerant nowadays to be sure, but not especially welcoming.

Through it all The Table never changed, it merely tilted a little one way or another, for all the rotation of its visitors.

Barry liked when things were even and balanced and made sense.

And things like The Table, round things, were mathematically very interesting, especially when you tried to find starting and ending points. His mind these days followed the circumference of The Table, somehow endlessly surprised when, as he knew he would, he found himself back where he had started, nowhere remarkable, yet a unique point, the same point, on The Table, time and again.

And of course rotating circles were the genesis of the trigonometric functions, triangles were interesting too. This place seemed to touch, tangentially, everything in Barry’s life.

It was beyond doubt the nicest place Barry had ever been.

It was nicer than Tom Bates’ house. His father had been a doctor when Barry was in Junior High and he’d slept over there once or twice, it was all full of beautiful things that Barry had hardly ever imagined a home could have; and Barry understood he didn’t belong there.

It was nicer even than Dave Thompson’s house, full of secret tears and fears and shared confidences and silent acceptances and food. If Dave could come to The Table that would be even better, but that was impossible, Dave wasn’t even gay and was a thousand miles away, though Barry knew there’d be a seat at The Table if he wanted one. As Dave had cared for Barry without caring that he was gay, The Table would not care if Dave was gay. The Table was that kind of place.

Barry missed Dave very much.

It didn’t have Dave but it was even better than Dave’s safe house, and the food was somehow just as good as the tuna salad on toast that Dave had used to nurture Barry’s tortured soul and body through high school; the kind of food that nurtured his heart.

Barry’s life was complex. Not so many sixteens are in college, even fewer are living in a dorm, on their own at that age. In fact, he was the only one on the whole campus as far as he knew.

Of course, his age sparked a lot of curiosity and this he didn’t know how to handle. Especially in classes like Freshman English and Introductory Sociology. He learned to hide in those classes, to not look smart, he quickly balanced out the joy of his math courses with the drudgery and camouflage he needed for his freshman life. It was hard, he didn’t look like he belonged but he was making it work somehow.

The hardest had been getting his mother to agree to let him leave town. She had not been happy, had not reveled in his success.

He could remember those moments of dread, when he had to tell her, not of his failures but of his successes and bear her sarcasm and anger and disdain, her accusations. He thought so much of himself, he was better than his family, better than his brothers and sisters, better than her, was he? He couldn’t be satisfied with a good, decent Catholic upbringing? He had to go to a heathen school, a school for smart kids, anything else, what she had had, what his brothers and sisters had had, that was beneath him, was it?

He knew better than to protest. He did not understand the frustrated ambition of her own that his choices represented. Barry wasn’t the only bright one in his family, not the only one who had wanted to escape. His mother was a coal miner’s daughter, literally, and had found the tiny, sharp, narrow, poverty stricken valley of the rare land where anthracite abounds to be a more effective prison than bars. Why should Barry be free if she could not be?

His sister Kate had helped, she had been a subtle intercessor, blocking the assaults, keeping them from getting out of control, helping him hide the successes, diminish the attacks. She had played on mother’s vanity, pointed out that there would be newspaper articles in which she would be praised for raising such a bright boy.

He had suffered her resentments, waited her out, thwarted her desire that he go to the university or the Catholic College in the city, but the last thing Barry wanted to do was stay in that cold, old, dead place.

Barry had been amazed, but he had offers from a dozen colleges, all of them wanted him and all had been willing to pay all of his expenses. Harvard, Princeton, name schools had offered.

He didn’t care for them, he needed someplace warm, and he knew one, he knew the South was his place, and it worked there because of Jack. And he had Jack, his beloved Jack to protect him if he needed. Jack had graduated the University the year before, was working in town, had no room for Barry in his tiny shared apartment - for just now the money to Mom had to be kept up - but would shoehorn him in during inter-session when the dorms were closed. Barry wouldn’t mind sleeping on the couch. It was clean and better and less crowded than a lot of places he’d slept.

The decision to take the scholarship here was more and more a good one.

And Jack had helped when Jack was in the Army and then in college and Mom always doted on him, he continued to send her money, a lever that could be used with care, to persuade her. Jack was at this University, told her he would stay after graduation in this town, get a job next year, make sure Barry was supervised properly, and above all would keep the money, Jack’s money, flowing to her.

Barry understood at some level that when he left it would be a matter of weeks before Kate finally set herself free and mother would be alone, and that was at least half the problem, his leaving was the end, all eight children would be gone even if Kate kept her plans a secret Mom would anticipate them, could see the end. And Barry in turn had done everything he could to turn mother away from her attacks on his sister, to mediate and round the sharp edges and divert her attention.

Her insanity might take over.

He would have to reckon with that. It would be his fault. She might not be able to be alone, but he could not bear to be with her, to be the only one there in that apartment, to suffer her insanity, so if she did go crazy it would be his fault but he would have to live with those consequences, he was clear he could not live with the alternative: exchanging his sanity for hers.

He had a clear plan, he was going to escape, he had escaped, it had less to do with academics and prominence than it did with distance and living. He wanted the new, the uncharted, and most of all the far from his home town. And ever more far from his Mother. And he wasn’t going back, ever.

Time and again he congratulated himself on the wisdom of leaving home, coming to the South where things were warm and his mother was far, far away. And he knew, he was ready to change other things too.

Here and now he was gay and proud, well, he probably was gay, and he saw the announcement about the meetings in the school paper, then the first week of classes he walked through the Student Union and saw all the organizations that were recruiting students, and he didn’t even hesitate, he just breathed a deep breath and walked up to the one with the GSA banner and got information about the meetings and the guy there told him about Lonnie’s and The Table and to just go down and introduce himself.

Well, that was a bit much for him to do, he wasn’t that brave, but he went to the first GSA meeting and did his best to blend in, as he always did, tried to be a shade of beige and merge with the walls so he wouldn’t draw attention - attention, his experience had shown, was a very dangerous thing - but suddenly three or four guys crowded around him asked him to go for something to eat afterwards and they ended up at The Table because he didn’t know how to say no, and thought he might hide better in the crowd.

That first time Barry knew he was going to like this place, the casual feeling of it, the dark warmth, the smoky grill and greasy hamburgers and the redolence of steamy pots of soup and sandwiches and fresh bread, the muted clash of pots and pans and forks and plates and conversation, none of it angry or accusing or mean; it all soaked into his bones, his long deprived, cold self was coming awake in this warm place and time, the hard little rocks of pain he had carefully secreted away, pearl coated with the exudate of his few good memories, as an oyster would smooth the irritation of jagged edges, melted here.

This Table of warmth and light and love finally felt like home to him. Once he was at The Table, he had to come back, he knew from the first it was for him.

So every day between classes or after he was done for the day or when he wanted to study, he would by instinct, without thought, find his feet leading him there, drawing him to the warmth of The Table like a prehistoric boy to huddle with his family around a firepit for safety. Back in any event to his starting point, to his spot on the wheel, his set of ordered coordinates on the edge.

He was a smart kid, he knew he wouldn’t be here forever, he knew he was waiting for The Table to impart some rotational magic on him, to move him from his static state, to whirl him along with the gayness of its component parts; or perhaps he would hold on tightly, waiting for the energy to build and the centrifugal force would finally spin him off, onto his own, unique trajectory into the unknown, as he thought it had for many before him. When he let go, when he was ready; or when the force outward over-balanced the force of his grip, the coefficient of friction of his life and he could hold on no longer. Not now, though now, he would cling, grip tightly, and ride the wheel until he was up to speed. It was all a matter of mathematics, of human calculus.

For he was maybe gay and kind of proud and a little bit out and he was pretty sure he was a virgin.

Auntie Abe was one of the regulars at the table, really to many he was the leader, of The Table.

Abe would not have called himself Mexican, he was Spanish, of a long and noble line, settled in what was now America, but his family had been there a long time, three hundred years. Abe was the man who knew himself responsible for justice in his community, for saying what was proper, for keeping things in balance.

If Barry saw the table being righted through the power of mathematical defined forces, Abe was one of the forces. And Abe, had they discussed it, would have seen the situation differently - Abe would have seen himself as the one who kept the table balanced, he thought it was his job.

Abe was naturally inclined to take Barry under wing; Abe did that with all the cute young boys and Barry was cuter and younger than most. But Barry kept his distance. Barry was leery of anyone who seemed too interested in him, and Abe was too interested. Barry liked to hide.

Abe, like the others saw Barry through lenses Barry himself didn’t possess. Barry was not going to blend in, be his beige, camouflaged self here, even if he didn’t realize it … he had no idea being sixteen and small and slim and having nearly flawless pale soft skin and deep, wide clear brown eyes and rounded buns and hips that wriggled a little when he walked could be attractive; he saw all those things as disadvantages, to the extent that he saw them at all. But he would not hide in this place, any more than he could in his classes, could not hide his differences.

Abe at first he labeled him “hands off”- at first everyone had assumed the boy was pretending to be a student, was really a gay high school boy like the others that occasionally turned up and who were always carefully shielded by this little group whether they wanted to be or not, before being sent on their way. But he kept coming every day and he had books and was doing homework and eventually they verified he had a meal card and a dorm room; then that he was really sixteen as he said.

Abe could see depth. He expected pain, all the gay kids had pain, but there was more here, and he could read it in the eyes, read it in the shapeless drab clothes, the air of poverty and deprivation and neediness and hunger that hung about the boy.

But he could also see much more. Despite the naiveté you didn’t get into college at that age without a lot of brains. The sense of exhilaration the boy carried and the rare peeks of power and presence that seemed so out of line with that naivete and fragility and poverty and pain - he was a walking contradiction. Bit by bit he teased bits of his story out then called a like minded friend over in Administration who did what he should not do, looked into the boy’s records and told Abe the rest. At least, what was on file.

Abe was impressed. Smart didn’t cover this boy, he had done a pretty job of hiding his brilliance so far, at The Table. But he saw a little of the pain in that file, too. Abe knew that Barry had a lot to learn and do and some of it was bound to hurt. Learning always hurts.

Barry didn’t have money, but he didn’t think he needed it. He was richer than he had ever been. The scholarships covered everything essential like food - as much food as he wanted, as much as he could eat, day after day after day, for the first time ever! - and his dorm room and tuition and supplies but beyond that he had hardly any money. To Barry, though, to have all those things felt already like being rich, he didn’t need a lot more. A huge library, a beautiful warm campus, bountiful food on a reliable schedule, a clean bed, and his beloved oldest brother Jack just seven miles away, these were a fair definition of heaven. Money wasn’t important.

He still served Mass, religiously. He went to the Newman Center just off campus, served Sunday masses there when needed, and sometimes he attended other events; he didn’t make a point of maybe being gay there, but he didn’t actually hide it either. He was religious in his religiosity, but knew there was a problem with his maybe being gay and maybe being Catholic.

He might go to hell, he still had to deal with that piece of being gay and being Barry, but for the moment at least he had the freedom,, for the first time ever, to be Barry. How good could it be?

He thought with a giggle that he lived in a Barycentric construct; wondered if he could apply some mathematical rigor to it all.

Few his age are thousands of miles from home with only the smallest shoestring budget. But he didn’t need much, his dorm room was paid, his books, tuition, and supplies were paid, his meal ticket was paid. He only had to find enough to cover his clothes from the Salvation Army store a few blocks off campus, the rare food he ate outside the cafeteria, and incidentals. Transportation was his bike; shipped a week before he flew down and Jack had fixed it up with new tires and to his delight had repainted it.

He had promised himself that he would not be a burden on Jack, would have his own life and had, amazingly, been able to convince Jack that he needed to strike his own friendships and life on campus. Jack was his guardian. Jack would protect him.

Even good things can be overwhelming. And there were the little drawbacks, the little ways he had to hide himself still.

He saw his brother on the occasional weekend, he had not yet figured out how to tell Jack he was gay, well, probably gay, so he had not attempted it, and thus he did have to keep his new found social life compartmented. He declined Jack’s invitation to have lunch at Lonnie’s one Saturday with some apprehension, and they settled for an off-campus lunch. But he knew that this would become an issue some time.

So in some ways he was sad, he could not really share his wide-eyed wonder with his beloved brother, he realized he had to keep his shell around to slip over his head like that cassock and surplice he wore as an altar boy, when Jack was around, and that was the first little chill he felt, he could not love his brother as freely as he wanted to. And that was painful, he had so looked forward to having Jack in his life, but it was to be on a limited, careful basis, the opposite of what he wanted.

No way he could risk losing Jack, he wouldn’t take that chance. He still had plenty of balancing to do. He had to save up good things, because he knew one day there would be bad things, there was always hell to pay, even if you had had a taste of heaven. So he stored it up, against the day he would need it to cancel out in some part whatever hell he was led to.

But for now it was warm warm warm, and hell seemed far away and perhaps not so bad after all.

Was it any wonder that Barry felt hell was irrelevant when he was in the lower levels of heaven?

Barry wasn’t sure why, but he had a new friend; well not a friend like Dave had been, more like an acquaintance. Actually Barry had so little experience with relationships that he didn’t know exactly what friends were other than Dave and maybe Bonnie, Dave’s girlfriend.

Michael kept paying attention to Barry and Barry could not figure out why.

Barry was sure it wasn’t a sexual interest.

Well, actually Barry was never sure about sexual interests, being sixteen and without any experience he tended to feel a sexual interest an awful lot of the time and was never sure if it meant anything real or just reflected being horny. But he didn’t think Michael was interested that way.

Michael was like Barry, small and full of youthful beauty, his clear gray-blue eyes were particularly notable, and if you put him into a gay bar or club the flies would buzz around quickly. He was sexy, sexual, eighteen, and he too was a bright boy, though his brainpower didn’t approach that of Barry, was of a different quality, he had little of Barry’s ability to channel it, and he was, sad to say, quite a bit less stable.

Michael wasn’t really a regular at the table, not in the sense that The Table and its people drew him, not the way others like Barry were. The previous year, after he met Abe at one of the two gay bars in town, he started coming, but he didn’t like being there, he didn’t need the table. He wasn’t even a student. He needed Abe and once he had Abe he didn’t want to go. He came only rarely and when he knew Abe would be there, and Abe found it difficult when Michael was there because he made it so difficult for Abe to do his important work, fulfill his duties at The Table. Michael really didn’t want Abe at the table, to be honest.

Suddenly Michael started to come when Abe wasn’t there, and he would sit next to Barry, too close for comfort, really.

Barry was not an astute observer, or he would have known that Michael was mated with Abe, not merely sharing his bed. Michael was in love with Abe and he was not at all the sort to share. Michael was not going to put up with competition for Abe and had decided to take matters into his own hands.

Barry was no threat to Michael, but Michael assumed every boy would be after his man. Michael didn’t run on logic, Michael ran on intuition and a frenetic energy and a rootless, vacant sense of self. And he was not going to share Abe with anyone.

Sometimes the problem with calculus is the mistakes the humans make when they do the calculations. You get a quite different set of solutions when you start from the wrong premises.

One afternoon Michael was talking to Barry, and Barry really was trying to be nice and all, and listen to him, but he couldn’t figure out what Michael wanted. Finally he understood that Michael wanted him to go out to a bar that night; and after he explained three times that he was too young to even get into a bar - come to think of it, so was Michael - Barry just gave in, because Michael kept saying it didn’t matter, and Barry figured that they would just get turned away at the door. And he just wanted the conversation to end. He was a little tired of Michael.

Michael was not always a clear communicator, but he had this way of making things end up the way he wanted them to.

Miriam was one of the lesbians, a CCU nurse at University hospital but she showed up an hour or two before her shifts at the table and often came in after she got off; it was only three blocks walk to the hospital, and she liked the table, she liked the gentle atmosphere and the young people and the intelligent conversation she encountered there. After Michael left, Miriam, who Barry thought was the mother of the table because she was older and so very nice, looked at Barry and shook her head.

“Stay away from that one, hon. He’s up to no good. And he’s spoken for.”

Barry didn’t know what to make of that, he didn’t think Michael was trouble, or mean, he thought he was weird. And in Barry’s calculation it took a lot to be more weird than Barry thought himself.

But a part of Barry thought he should have a friend close to his own age. In fact, Michael was exactly Dave’s age and that wasn’t too old for him; though to be honest he was nothing at all like Dave. Well, they both were pretty, but in such a different way. Dave was tall and powerful and square jawed, and dark and athletic and solid, Michael was short and sinuous, built like a dancer, with a soft, feminine face, and flighty.

Evening came and Michael showed up at the dorm, and stood aghast at Barry’s clothes. Old jeans, a sweater with holes in that was two or three sizes too big, shoes that looked like they came from a garbage bin. This would not do, he began to rummage through Barry’s closet and was amazed he could not find anything he could work with. Finally he got Barry into the car and took him over to Abe’s - who fortunately was not home - and rummaged through Michael’s party clothes to find something this kid could wear that wouldn’t make him look like a refugee from a war zone.

Barry felt ridiculous wearing such tight pants and the clinging silk shirt, he had never even seen people dressed like this, he felt like it was a Halloween costume. But as he stood before the full length mirror, he felt a shock.

He didn’t look bad, he looked good.

He turned a little and was amazed that his ass looked, well, he didn’t have words for it but he liked the way it looked, with the pastel yellow polished cotton pants, with no back pockets, outlined it and clung tightly, showing its roundness, God, you could even see the line of the crack!

It sort of made his hands itch, he actually thought it would be fun to run his hands across his ass. And then he realized that was the same way Michael’s ass looked. Like a couple of grapefruits in yellow shrink wrap.

Barry thought these pants were what the priests used to call ‘an occasion of sin’ and he had only encountered one of those before, being alone in the Sacristy with Father Roy back at St. Mark’s was an occasion of sin, a thing, a place where sin was likely to be found.

You were supposed to avoid occasions of sin.

And then Michael started rubbing gel in his hair.

When they had arrived at Ando’s Barry knew they couldn’t get in, and he was surprised when Michael didn’t try the front door. They went around back, to the little kitchen entrance; the kitchen staff didn’t even look up as Michael, with Barry in tow walked boldly through, out and up the rickety dim back stairway, cordoned off by a line of black curtains and ragged painted over walls, multiple layers of color showing, to the door marked “Employees only” and into the dingy little office where he met Ando.

Ando reminded Barry a little of Abe, he was kind of big and fat and hairy.

Michael had a strange look on his face; for some reason the image flashed into Barry’s mind of a cat dropping a bird at his master’s feet.

And Ando licked his lips when he looked at Barry.

It was more than an occasion of sin, he felt some people actually run their hands across his buns, and it bothered him, he pushed them away and tried to get away, and one guy kept following him through the crowd, touching him again and again even after he pushed the man’s hands away and tried to leave.

When he told Michael the men were touching him, he just giggled and smiled as if it were a good thing.

Ando had not been very happy about having Barry and Michael in the club, but he knew it would be good for business, a little chicken now and then kept the older guys coming in, it would help keep the crowd young and appealing, and it served his interests in other ways.

He pulled a pile of old drivers’ licenses out of his desk drawer and sorted through them and finally handed one to Barry. The picture on it looked a little like Barry and Aldo said “Happy Birthday, Jim, forget where this came from, OK?” And he stuffed it into one of Barry’s front pockets, sliding his hand rather further into the pocket than was strictly necessary.

Then he had told Michael to come back up in an hour, and bring Barry if he wanted.

Barry wasn’t quick on the uptake but as he tried to protect himself from the grasping hands of the crowd some things dawned on him and he knew he wasn’t going to go back upstairs with Michael., though he could not figure out what he was going to do without Michael here in the bar. He’d have left if he had a way home.

Finally, Barry found himself leaning against the cheap paneling of the wall by the pool tables, which was a little better - it was not so crowded, it was much better lighted, and the incessant pounding of the music at the dance floor was much muted. Though if he had been more comfortable Barry would have liked to move with the music.

Until the man who had been following him came into the room and made a beeline for him.

At that point Barry was fairly miserable, and the man was a bit drunk - of course Barry was a bit drunk too - and he stood too close and tried to talk; and Barry was trying to be polite while using his hands to cover all the parts he didn’t want touched, which was impossible because he wanted to cover everything, wanted to melt into these walls, turn a shade of beige here and now and disappear.

Then suddenly someone else was between them, was nudging the man away, staring him down, making him back off from Barry. He protested a bit but took one look at the taught pecs and powerful arms and the sleepy smile and rough jeans and flannel shirt of the intercessor and shrugged and moved off.

“Hope he didn’t bother you too much.”

Barry stared up with gratitude that quickly shifted to - well, he didn’t know, maybe love?

Kevin was tall by Barry’s standards, though five-nine wouldn’t impress most, it was a good four inches taller than the boy, probably outweighed him by ninety pounds; he was blonde, and he had sleepy eyes, half-closed all the time, hazel-brown orbs peeking out below them. And suddenly Barry was relaxed and taught at the same time. The relaxed part was evident in his posture and the taught part just as evident in his pants.

Kevin had the most hideous apartment Barry had ever seen, a totally foreign land. His body was hard, tattooed, buffed, shaved, and totally exotic in every way. It, like the apartment, was nothing Barry had ever imagined.

Barry shuddered and heaved and burned and shook and trembled all night in Kevin’s bed, in the throes of feelings he had never felt, pleasures he had never allowed himself to imagine.

This was so much more than an occasion of sin, it was just sin.