Release(29)

Linus liked the same horror movies Adam and Angela did, almost exclusively read three-inch thick fantasies with sexy elves on the covers, while also somehow being a competitive ballroom dancer. Seriously. He danced with an Italian girl called Marta and they sometimes even won things. It also meant that under the vintage blazers and tailored trousers, he had an absolutely extraordinary butt. Just extraordinary. Adam frequently marvelled at it when he held it in his hands.

Like now.

“I thought we were going to eat first,” Linus said, as they lay on his bed.

“I had bulgogi. Your butt is extraordinary.”

“If you don’t got core strength, you ain’t a ballroom dancer.”

“You have more muscles than I do. Like, by a lot.”

“It’s always a surprise to the boys in PE. But you can run sixteen miles at a stretch if you have to.”

“Which has given me thighs but no butt.”

“Your thighs could snap one of my arms off, though.”

“They should add that to ballroom competitions. Thigh clamping.”

“I have no idea where this train of thought is heading, Adam,” Linus said, but he was smiling.

Linus, to Adam’s astonishment, had made the first move. Like damn near everyone else in Frome, they’d known each other at least distantly since about the second grade, but they’d hung out with different crowds. If you could call Angela a “crowd”. Defying stereotype, Linus was in chess club but not drama club, though he did have about a zillion girl best friends. He also had a name that people over forty seemed to find amusing but that other teenagers took in their stride. You had to, in a world of Briannas and Jaydens, but also because of how Linus wore it. If anyone was going to carry off the name Linus in a small town, it was Linus.

Linus never even had to come out. As a sophomore, he took a boy – from another school, but a boy nonetheless – to the Junior Prom (having charmed his way into a ticket) and the only person at Frome High who even batted an eyelid was FHS’s very Christian front office secretary, who wrote a note to Linus’s parents, who in turn wrote a note back explaining in great detail how she and the school district would be sued if she ever tried to discriminate against their son again.

This was a world, an intoxicating and possible world, which Adam saw as if through a veil, unreachable. Desperately close, but impossibly far… Because the Junior Prom had caused a (very) minor furore among the evangelical preachers of Frome, of which there were a fair number. It was Big Brian Thorn, though – eyeing as ever the crowds at The Ark of Life – who saw an opening in staking out a position extreme enough to get people’s attention. For ninety minutes Adam sat through a sermon that could only have been directed at him, though no one in the entire building, not least his father, would admit it. “I would sit outside that dance in sackcloth and cover myself in manure if that were my child.” He really said that. Which probably shouldn’t have made Adam think that, in order to sit outside in protest, his father would have had to let him go to the dance with a boy in the first place. Still, the car ride home had been particularly silent.

It was also the main reason (of many) Adam’s parents didn’t know how Linus existed in Adam’s life. Fortunately, they’d never quite caught Linus’s name, and God bless Angela for months of cover stories.

Linus had found Adam alone in a Red Robin, where Angela was coming to meet him from the farm. It was only a few weeks after Enzo had declared an annulment of their relationship. Which was an especially difficult way to be broken up with, as now Adam was in the position of mourning something that had allegedly never been.

“You all right?” Linus had asked out of nowhere. Adam hadn’t even seen him come in. He’d sat facing away from the restaurant with a raspberry lemonade, in a kind of limbo of non-movement until Linus was suddenly across the table from him. “You look a little upset. Lost, kind of.”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Adam had said, a little taken aback that a boy was speaking to him like this, when they were only ever phrases he heard from girls or himself. “Waiting for someone.”

“Angela Darlington?”

Adam was surprised, as he always was, when someone knew even a minor fact about him. “Yeah,” he said.

“Anything you want to talk about before she gets here?” Linus said, kindly. “You really don’t look very happy.”

“We don’t even know each other, Linus.”

Linus hesitated, but Adam saw him decide to push ahead. “I think maybe we do. Don’t you?”

Adam wondered at the depth of this, how far down into the still pond this stone had been meant to fall. Linus gave him a moment and glanced around the restaurant, at the brass rails, the brown shiny leather of the booths slick with the accumulated grease of a thousand nights of burgers and fries, checking that they couldn’t be overheard. He leaned closer to Adam, his face concerned, his voice gentle. “I know why you’re sad. I know why you’re afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Liar,” he said, still gentle. “I’m afraid. Every day. And if it’s that hard for me–”

“Then how hard must it be for pathetic Adam Thorn?” Adam’s voice had some heat in it.

“Well,” Linus said, “yes. Except the pathetic part. We don’t pick our families. Or the sermons they preach.”