PROLOGUE
I had never done anything gay before. Well, at least not any more than any other guy growing up had. I mean everyone had that weird moment in the locker room when the guy across from you looked amazing, or that time you popped a boner when wrestling with your best friend, or even that time when a guy who you had never thought about that way looked at you and something about his face just made you want to…you know. But those things had never really gone very far. This though…now, this was different. I was twenty-five, and in law school. I was an adult who knew what he wanted out of life. Right? And these were two very adult men sitting next to me. We were friends—three friends sitting in a bar.
And that’s where it started. Or maybe it started a lot earlier, like the day I met them. I don’t know. I just know that some things, no matter how hard you try to get away from them, come at you full force, like a beautiful summer storm that appears out of nowhere over the ocean, the kind where no matter how much you tell yourself you should get out of the water, you just can’t bring yourself to do it. Or a whale bursting up from the great depths and sending ripples so strong and so fierce that everything for miles moves with those ripples. Or a school of porpoises swimming in procession against the sunset, and drawing a gasp of breath from everyone on the beach.
It was like that. Magical. Beautiful. Frightening. Fast. Fierce. It was the sort of thing that those of us who live near the water learn to expect.
And whatever happened, happened. This is our story.