After Jason announces that he is gay, he is convinced that Matt, the school’s star athlete, is out to get him. He confronts Matt and the situation goes from bad to worse. Then, he gets caught watching Matt in the school shower room and things spiral completely out of control. Is Matt a dangerous thug, or has Jason misread the whole situation?
I think if I’d been a sissy the guys wouldn’t have cared so much. That they could have understood. What they couldn’t seem to get their heads around was the fact that a guy who could out-run, out-lift, out-wrestle and out-smart them was gay. That freaked lots of guys, especially guys like my nemesis, Matt Carson. Of course, the truth was I probably couldn’t have bested him in any endeavor, athletic or academic. I winked at my reflection in the mirror and headed up to the area on the gymnasium balcony reserved for weightlifting and gymnastics.
I warmed up and stretched, then started in on a series of floor exercises. I wanted to major in theater arts in college with an emphasis on performance. I wanted to sing and dance and act. I wanted it all and I was determined to have it. The gymnastics really enhanced my strength and balance which would prove to be invaluable for the type of athletic dancing they were doing in Broadway shows these days. As a bonus, the regimen had given me killer thighs and calves. It hadn’t done my upper body any harm, either. Besides, there was more likelihood of getting scholarship money for athletic prowess than for knowing all the roles in A Chorus Line by heart.
I began by executing a maneuver where I raised my body like I was doing a push-up, then shifted my balance, raised my legs and moved on into a handstand. I was over halfway there when I got a glimpse of Matt Carson out of the corner of my eye. He wore a pair of ass-hugging shorts and a faded T-shirt with the arms hacked off. He’d also ripped the sides open to the hem so that the shirt revealed far more of his sculpted torso than it concealed. He stared right at me and I collapsed in a heap.
While I scrambled self-consciously to my feet, Matt grabbed a couple of forty-five pound dumbbells and started doing curls. As he pumped out the reps, his gaze never left me. I, of course, couldn’t stop looking at him. Every time he brought the weights up to his shoulders, his biceps bulged and the veins that snaked across them swelled like overtaxed cables. While I watched, a bead of sweat ran down his tautly muscled side, glittering like a tiny diamond. .
The anger I felt at the ruin of my bike tires and the pump I’d been getting from my exercises must have conspired to shut down my brain, because next thing I knew, I was standing no more than three feet from Matt, my fists clenched.
“Why, Matt? I’ve never purposely done anything to piss you off, unless me trying to stay out of your way in the gym irritates you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He set the weights down on the floor with a crash and rose to his feet. He pulled his shirt up to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The move exposed his perfectly sculpted torso. A patch of fine silky hairs nestled in the valley between his pecs. A pencil-thin line of chestnut down trailed from his navel to points south. I looked up and immediately saw that he had caught me checking him out—again.
“I’m talking about my slashed bike tires.”
“What?” He stood there looking at me, his face blank, his eyes burning holes through me.
“My tires got slashed again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Are you, Matt? Are you sorry?”
“What the hell are you getting at? You think I slashed your tires? What gives you the right to say that?” He was so damned intimidating. He was a good head taller than I and about thirty pounds heavier, all of it muscle. His body glistened with sweat. I took a step back and was stopped by a weight rack.
“I…I just…” I faltered to a stop. I really didn’t have any proof that he was guilty. It was just that Matt Carson was the perfect stereotype of the testosterone-pumped straight jock who would enjoy a good queer bashing once in a while.
“Look, Jason, I didn’t have anything to do with wrecking your bike and I really don’t appreciate being accused of vandalism.” He glared at me angrily and a blush suffused his cheeks. When he spoke, his voice was a low, threatening growl. “Now why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
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