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The left earbud was in, the right one dangling down my chest like a dead vine. Miles Davis was doing that thing he does, all smoky and blue, but it just made the silence in the room heavier. My hand was moving on autopilot, a cheap number-two pencil digging into the sketchpad. It was always bodies. Never faces. Faces were too… revealing. This one was pecs again. Broad, thick, carved from marble, with that deep, shadowed cleft between them you could lose a finger in. Drew Bullard’s pecs. From memory. From staring across the quad while he played frisbee, shirt off, sweat making his chest gleam under the September sun.

My other hand was down my jeans. Just idly rubbing, a slow, absent-minded grind against the worn denim. God, it’s so fucking small. A pathetic little nub of flesh, half-hard just from thinking about the curve of a fictional nipple. I let my head thunk back against the chair. My room in Martindale Hall was a perfect eight-foot cube of misery. Sunlight cut a sharp, dusty rectangle across the floorboards, highlighting how spotless they were. Not a sock out of place. My three posters—a vintage map of Middle-earth, a diagram of the human musculature, a black-and-white photo of Kafka—were leveled with a ruler. In the wardrobe, my shirts faced left, my pants faced right. My father’s voice was a constant echo in here: Discipline, Edwin. Order. A cluttered room is a cluttered mind. He’d say it while adjusting his tie in the mirror, the one he wore even on Saturdays. The Mayor. The future Senator, if his campaign ads were to be believed. He’d been a skinny, red-haired kid once, too. Got the shit kicked out of him, he loved to tell me. And look at me now, he’d say, puffing out his chest. I used it as fuel.

I just felt burned.

My pencil stopped. I stared at the drawing. It was good. The anatomy was correct, the shading gave it weight. But it was just lines on paper. It wasn’t the heat, the smell, the sheer, dumb power of a guy like Drew. I squeezed myself through the fabric, a little harder. A jolt, weak and thin, traveled up my spine. Pathetic. My own chest was a flat, pale plane, dotted with constellations of old acne scars. My hair was the color of rust …