Page 8 of Men in Shorts

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

Duncan looked at him, startled. “Am I?”

“We’re not exactly pals.”

“Aren’t we?””

“Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Turning everything I say into a question, like I’ve lost my grip on reality.”

“Haven’t you?”

Brodie laughed, which made his head feel like it would shatter. He put a hand to it. “Ow. This is the worst.”

“I know, mate. Feels like your skull’s stuffed with cotton, right? People who’ve never gotten mono love to have a banter about it, hahaha, kissing disease and all. They think it’s like a bad cold.” Duncan opened the bottle of ibuprofen on the desk and shook out a pair of brown pills. “A cold won’t drop you to the floor a month later. A cold won’t cripple your liver and spleen so you can’t play contact sports for eight weeks, or have two drinks in one night without boaking. The only consolation is once you’ve had glandular fever, you’ll never get it again.” He wheeled the desk chair over and handed Brodie the pills, fingertips brushing his palm. “If I gave you this virus, I’m really sorry.”

So that’s why Duncan was being so nice to him—out of guilt. “It’s not like you did it on purpose.” As Brodie swallowed the ibuprofen, he realized the two of them were skating perilously close to the subject of kissing. “You couldn’t play football for eight weeks?”

“Luckily this was during my gap year in San Francisco, so I wasn’t in a league at the time anyway.” Duncan leaned back in the chair, resting the toes of his Nikes on the frame of Brodie’s bed. “It took forever to rebuild my stamina. But our captain, Evan—ourformercaptain—he promised before I left Scotland that when I came back to Glasgow I’d have a trial with the Warriors. So it gave me something to work for.”

Duncan’s face turned sad at as he spoke of his team. He stared at his feet for a moment, rocking them against the frame, then pushed back and swiveled his chair to face the desk. “Talking of things to work for. Exams.”

Brodie managed to stand and totter a single step to reach the shelf atop his desk. As he retrieved the heavy statistics textbook, he swayed a bit, but a warm hand on his ribs steadied him—physically, at least. Inside, he felt more wobbly than ever.

Duncan let go without looking up from his notes. Of course he was unaffected by a mere touch. Their disastrous hookup had been but a joke to him, even as it had mortified Brodie. They were miles apart.

Brodie returned to bed, determined to focus on standard deviations and probabilities. But his room had never felt so small. The desk sat three feet from his bed, so he’d barely need to lean forward to touch Duncan’s hair. The ends of the short strands, a shade lighter than Brodie’s own chestnut brown, glimmered in the light from the desk lamp. Brodie’s fingertips tingled as he remembered caressing the fuzz at Duncan’s nape, which now looked freshly shaven. If Brodie did reach out and stroke it, he wondered, would it be perfectly smooth, or would he feel a faint stubble?

A wave of fatigue swept over him, making his lids heavy. It felt like the virus had poked a hole in some hidden corner of his body so that it might drain his life force, drop by drop.

Was Duncan the source of this illness? He wasn’t the only lad Brodie had kissed in the last…well, hmm, what was the incubation period? A week? Two weeks?

A month before Duncan, Brodie and his mate John had had a wee, what-the-hell snogging session. John was a brilliant kisser, but the chemistry wasn’t there, so they’d abandoned the effort before moving further.

Kissing Duncan was the opposite. They’d both been so blootered, their lips barely functioned. Yet every cell in Brodie’s body had burned, wanting to melt into liquid so they could soak into Duncan’s skin.

He found his phone and typedglandular fever incubation periodinto the search bar. The results came up instantly:

Symptoms of glandular fever take around one to two months to develop after infection with the Epstein-Barr virus.

So Duncan couldn’t have given him the virus, as Brodie had taken ill only a week after they’d kissed. It wasn’t fair to let him feel guilty for nothing. Brodie had to tell him the truth. Hewouldtell him the truth.

And then Duncan would leave forever.

Chapter3

Duncan turnedup his study playlist’s volume to mask the sound of Brodie’s snores and impenetrable sleep-talking. But even the electronic beats of Calvin Harris couldn’t cover the sound. Eventually the two noises blended, creating a strangely soothing effect.

He certainly needed soothing. Evan’s abandonment and the Warriors’ disintegration had birthed an angry beast within Duncan. Caring for Brodie was the first thing that seemed to tame that beast. Playing nurse didn’t come naturally, but it was keeping him sane.

Later, returning from a mid-morning coffee break, Duncan found Brodie sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. His mop of dark hair was flattened on both sides, forming an off-center fauxhawk.

“I dreamed the Desk-Hog Police were real,” Brodie said, punctuating his sentence with a yawn. “Two of them were here in my room interrogating me. ‘Is this bed available?’ they’d say, over and over. Every time I said no, they sat on my feet and whinged about calculus exams.”

“Was I in the dream, sitting at the desk like in real life?”

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