Page 2 of A Really Gay Book
I didn’t have a car because when I owned one, I never got to drive it. Any time I tried, I’d find someone behind the wheel of it. How did they know I was planning on going somewhere? They didn’t. I had people in my life who would sit inside my car and wait for me to want to go somewhere.
The end result was that I got the dubious honor of having at least one car trail slowly behind me any time I left my apartment. The one I lived in rent-free because my presence ensured the place was always at max capacity.
Could I have gotten used to living a life like this? Maybe. Perhaps after a dozen more years of getting everything I wanted, I would have been able to grow complacent and decide to accept my fate. If it wasn’t for one thing.
If you were paying attention to the beginning of my story, you’ve probably guessed what that one thing is.
I was the unluckiest bastard in the world when it came to love.
Oh, I had plenty of suitors. I couldn’t go a day without having someone come up to me to shoot their shot. My standard operating procedure was a politeno thank you, but on the rare occasion that I dared to accept, within a month of dating, I would inevitably get a dramatic, tearful admission that the person wasn’t good enough for me and that they were doing the world a disservice by trying to monopolize me.
If that isn’t the biggest pile of dogshit you’ve ever heard of, I don’t know what is.
So you can imagine my shock when I ran into a guy on the sidewalk, bounced right off of him, and scraped the fuck out of my hand when I hit the ground.
“What the…?” The man turned around and gave me a death glare to end all death glares. “Watch where you’re fucking going, asshole.”
Never in my life had I been spoken to that way. And never in my life had I gotten injured.
Ow. I wasn’t a fan.
I sat gaping at the blood running down my wrist. Then I looked up at the goliath I’d bumped into towering over me. He could have been called handsome if he wasn’t sporting a livid bruise over one eye. Actually, the vibrant purple and green accentuated his brown eyes in a rather breathtaking fashion, so maybe handsome wasn’t a strong enough word for what he was.
“Hi…” After a long moment of awkward staring, I managed to keep going. “I’m Apple. Did I do that to you?”
The man snorted and said, “I know who you are, and no, not everything on this campus is about you.” Somehow, he managed to turn his glare up to truly astounding levels. “Someone like you isn’t big enough to make a dent. This is from hitting the tree branch earlier.” He touched his temple and winced.
Hewaspretty big. And coming from me, that meant something. I’d spent my life having people tower over me, so if someone stood out from the pack, you know they had to be enormous. I imagined he had a lot of trouble with tree branches in his life.
“I’m not helping you up, hotshot. But if you wait long enough, one of your groupies will probably carry you to the hospital and give you a gold Band-Aid or something.”
Oh right. I was still on the ground, and the scrape on my hand was continuing to pump out blood at an alarming rate.
The asshole I’d rammed into wasn’t wrong. Any second now, I was going to be swarmed by well-wishers, and, most likely, one of them would be a world-renowned doctor who would fall in love with me on sight.
I looked around, cringing in anticipation, but the area around us was empty of people. Even the car that had been tailing me was gone.
I made to get up and swore when I put my hand down to push myself off the ground.
I may have made a little whimpering noise, but we aren’t going to talk about that. I was new to the pain thing, okay?
I poked the wound on my hand. It had gravel in it and was bleeding even harder than before. Ew. Who knew getting gravel inside a wound was even a thing?
I poked it again.
“Stop touching it, dumbass. Even you can get an infection if you aren’t careful.”
Dumbass? No one had ever called me that before. In fact, I don’t think anyone had ever said the word in front of me before.
Fascinating.
“What’s your name?” I asked, ignoring the dig at my intelligence.
“Why do you need to know?”
“Aside from wanting to be on a first-name basis with the person who just rammed their ass into my stomach?”
“I didn’t ram anything into your stomach! You came from out of nowhere.”
