On Tuesday morning, a full ten minutes before the alarm clock was set to go off, a sound startled Thom awake from a dead sleep. He was also ninety-nine percent sure he knew who was causing the jangle-rattle-clang of a metal trash can, as there was only one person on the entire block who didn’t have the standard green plastic kind. That’s what startled him more than the sound itself, because the second his brain identified, processed, and provided a mental image of Justin—even doing something as mundane as taking out trash—his heart began to race and the pace of his breathing intensified. It was a different feeling than usual, though. The breathlessness, the race of blood, none of it was panic—it was excitement.
Justin was not the first crush in Thom’s life by any means, and he knew that t
