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A summer of texts, road trips, and melodrama
He messaged me sometime in December. I was back home for break, scrolling Facebook.
Hey
I think we’ve met in Austin
I knew we hadn’t but I couldn’t believe someone so stupidly cute was messaging me. I drafted five or six replies before sending back a very smooth
hey
I don’t think we have.
We talked into the night. We flirted and made bad jokes. We sent each other links to videos and music, and then, the days were passing by. I told him about my friends in the suburbs, and we talked about our majors and how uncertain we were about getting jobs. I laughed about his violent typos, and he called me out on mine. For the record, he was right. I was being a total hypocrite about typos.
The weekend he finally came to town, my break was long over and I was back in school. We’d been talking for weeks, but the mounting pressure of meeting in person had me melting at the seams. The plan was to meet at Kiss & Fly, once the most popular gay bar in Austin. It was big enough to slip away if it didn’t go well and small enough to feel like a full party.
I got there first and waited in the back, frantically scrolling through my phone with the foolproof guise of…
