Izzy and the Right Answer Read online

  Izzy and the Right Answer

  R. Cooper

  Copyright 2019 R. Cooper

  All rights reserved

  Cover art by Lynn Forester

  Acknowledgements

  Izzy loves poems and books, and uses a lot of quotations and references to the words he loves. Quotations are from I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman, The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Expéry, The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

  Ronnie, who insists he isn’t poetic, quotes Florante at Laura by Francisco Balagtas.

  Content tags

  Internalized acephobia

  alcohol use

  marijuana use

  anxiety, self-loathing

  talk about sex/relationships

  polyamory

  Izzy and the Right Answer

  Chapter One

  Iz pressed his hand to his chest, palm flat over his heart and the inexplicable way the spot felt warmer to the touch. That was fantasy. His mind was filled with too much poetry and numbers in place of sense.

  Nonetheless, the happy beat of his heart took some of the chill from his fingers. Feelings were physical, after all, the brain affecting the rest of the body. His emotions were warm, so he was warm. It was a nice thought.

  He sighed, not unhappily, and came to a decision.

  “I like Rocco,” he said, largely to hear it aloud, but also to inform Patricio.

  Patricio continued to frown at his sketchpad without drawing or sketching anything. He had been doing that for the past forty-five minutes. The struggles of an Art major. He’d probably be up all night trying to finish whatever wasn’t working for him right now.

  “Hmm?” Patricio hummed an inquiry after a moment, then jerked his head up. “What?” he asked sharply, much more aware.

  “I like Rocco,” Iz repeated, enjoying the sound of it, and tore his gaze from his best friend to stare across the quad.

  He didn’t understand where the student-athletes got so much energy. Most of them were up before dawn, if not every day, then every other day, to work out or train or travel somewhere. Then they went to class. A considerable portion of them also had jobs on campus. And yet the group of them currently on the grass some distance away were kicking a soccer ball back and forth and holding an enthusiastic conversation not quite loud enough for Iz to hear, but close.

  Iz sighed again. It was a strange feeling, liking someone. He’d had crushes in grade school, or intense friendships, but nothing close to this. He was fine right now, but at any moment, he might become flushed or sad or lonely in a way that defied explanation, especially since he was not alone.

  He ducked his head to stare at the problem set in front of him, noted the exceptionally lazy approach this student had taken, and closed his laptop. Iz was not majoring in Computer Science, but he sometimes helped the CS majors with programming issues in exchange for favors or a small fee. It wasn’t his work, so it was easier for him to spot the mistakes.

  “I’m sorry.” Patricio interrupted Iz mentally composing an email to the student who wanted help. “Did you say you like Rocco?” He smoothed a hand over his recently shaved head and straightened up from where he’d been slouching against the trunk of the maple offering them a bare sort of shelter. His lack of hair drew more attention to his large, dark eyes and the wide mouth with the subtle curve that always hinted at a smile. “As in, like-like?”

  Iz pulled his scarf higher to cover his chin and part of his mouth. He puffed into fluffy lavender and indigo wool. It didn’t snow there, but it was still cold enough to see his breath. The blanket under his butt wasn’t nearly warm enough, but it wasn’t raining and they hadn’t felt like going inside. No one had. It had been a long, wet December.

  “I’m pretty sure,” he answered at last, because Patricio was asking that for a good reason. Patricio had known Iz for two and a half years now, and in that time, Iz had never like-liked anyone. Iz was ace, of course, with gray, complicated feelings about sex and desire in general, but he had begun to wonder if he was aro too. He hadn’t thought so, considering his crushes and everything else. But it had certainly been possible.

  His therapist—his old one—one of the old ones—used to tell Iz that he felt emotions even when he didn’t think he did, he just felt them differently. Thinking too much, Dr. O’Brien had claimed. The therapist before him, who had used the word neuroatypical a lot, had been more interested in Iz’s anxiety and hadn’t seemed to care if Iz fell for someone or not as long as Iz wasn’t worried about it.

  His mother just thought Iz was exceptional and that he would only feel a pull to someone equally unique.

  His mother was obviously biased, but she meant well

  Anyway, Rocco was exceptional. There was no doubt about that, at least. Look how Ronnie glowed around him.

  “I have all the symptoms,” Iz went on after considering all this yet again. He read poetry. He knew what the rush of infatuation was supposed to feel like—hot cheeks and shaky limbs, distracted daydreams and stomachs full of butterflies.

  Butterflies was a much nicer way of describing something not unlike motion sickness, he had discovered.

  And still, he sighed, on the verge of content for simply knowing someone like Rocco.

  “Oh Lord.” Patricio seemed alarmed. He closed his sketchpad, his long, dark fingers curled protectively over its pages. “’The symptoms,’” he repeated flatly.

  “It’s not as if I don’t get aroused” Iz replied without irritation. “It’s that this is not a vague appreciation for his aesthetics.”

  “His aesthetics.” The weird note in Patricio’s voice made Iz shoot him a glance. Patricio put his hands up innocently. “Just making sure. But Rocco? Really? Not someone else?”

  Iz scratched above his eyebrow so as not to disturb the glittery shadow on his eyelids. Giselle, his roommate, often used him in her makeup tutorials to show how colors looked on lighter skin tones, and even when she didn’t, he liked to keep himself a little glamorous when he could.

  He finally pulled the end of his French braid over his shoulder to fiddle with it. Red-brown strands, shining even under a gray sky, matched his green eyes and freckled skin. His hand was mottled with the cold, the pale skin thin over his bones. He thought he looked like a half-starved leprechaun on his worst days, but other people disagreed.

  His stomach swooped. Not with fluttering, love-struck nerves, but with a trace of anxiety.

  “Is that wrong?” he wondered out loud. “Is it wrong to like him?”

  “No,” Patricio said immediately, with force. “No, of course not. But it is… unexpected.”

  Iz met Patricio’s earnest gaze, then turned to look across the quad again.

  The object of Iz’s affections stood tall and broad, which, in itself, did not set him apart from the other athletes in his circle. He had short, coarse dark hair that frizzed more than it curled, probably because he left it to air dry after his post-work out showers, or maybe washed it too much. Which made sense, since he and the other jock-types got sweatier more often than most people.

  Or maybe his hair had always frizzed, and Rocco Baglietti came from a family of frizzies.

  He had a swarthy skin tone that darkened in the summer and usually had a five o’clock shadow by the end of the day. Thick eyebrows too. He possibly tweezed them to keep a unibrow at bay, but he didn’t shape them. They made his forehead look heavy, made him seem serious even when he was laughing.

  And he did laugh a lot, a wide-open sort of laugh. Enough to show that the top row of his teeth had a small gap and the bottom had two that were slightly crooked.

  His nose had been broken, twice, or so Iz under
stood, although he didn’t know how. He assumed it had been in a bout or a tournament, or whatever martial arts competitions were called. But it might have been in a game, since Rocco liked to play around with Ronnie and the others. Iz didn’t think Rocco’s nose had been broken in an actual brawl, because he had never seen Rocco close to losing his temper, and it didn’t fit with what Iz knew about martial arts disciplines. But of course, Iz didn’t know very much.

  He should correct that.

  “Iz,” Patricio butted into his wandering thoughts. “Izzy. Lord Islington.”

  “I think the little scar on his chin is from saber fencing,” Iz remarked. “He took an interest in that last year, and I remember thinking how extraordinary that was. All the things he does simply because they interest him.” He considered this. “You know, I think I’ve felt this way for a while but I didn’t put it together until recently. I like it when people talk about him. I should have asked them to more often.”

  “Or talked to the man,” Patricio muttered. “That might have resolved this immediately. Crushes tend to fade with closer contact.”

  “Is it a crush?” Iz stared at Rocco’s shoulders and the shape of his calves and thighs in his jeans, the slight paunch and the thick fingers. He was quick, despite his size, and very strong, but without a glamour muscle in sight. Core strength, or whatever it was the athletes envied, but not washboard abs. A Michelangelo body. Not a Grindr one.

  “Is it more than a crush?” Patricio pressed, his voice rising again as if he was trying not to say something else.

  Iz took his lower lip between his teeth to muse on that. Rocco laughed at something, his hand on Ronnie’s shoulder. Ronnie was all dimples and white teeth. Iz released his lip. “Yes,” he answered firmly. “I will commit to saying I like him. A lot.”

  “Okay then.” Patricio’s mild response felt suspicious, maybe because he’d hesitated before.

  Iz finally turned back toward him. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

  “No,” Patricio said, carefully level. “He’s great. You know we all love him. He works hard and he’s not a dick, even when he’s tired. He’s at your level, academically. Or whatever your level is. And he doesn’t brag, but I think he’s been going to more tournaments or championships or whatever. He’s a catch in a lot of ways.”

  The hot curl of pride in Iz’s chest was new, or at least, easier to identify now. Maybe this was love, or something approaching it. But that was something to explore later. For now, Iz was adjusting to knowing the cause of his swooping stomach and overheated face.

  “He does very well, doesn’t he?” Iz murmured with pleasure that probably would have made him pink up if he hadn’t been flushed with cold already. Rocco was here partly on scholarship and that as well work would have been enough for Iz. Iz was lucky, very lucky, that he didn’t have to do that, and he knew it. He had tried to get a retail job once, for the experience, and it had not been a good fit. Rocco did all that and went to class, and kept his grades up, and won things, and kept learning new skills.

  “You’re smiling to yourself,” Patricio noticed out loud. “You’re really smitten!” He waited for a second, then gestured impatiently. “Well?”

  “Well?” Iz repeated and realized he was watching Rocco again. Rocco had the sense not to wear basketball shorts in the winter. But then, he wasn’t straight, so he had less to prove.

  “And?” Patricio went on with more energy. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Iz faced him in astonishment. “You mean ask him out?”

  “What the hell else would I mean?” Patricio arched an eyebrow before slumping back against the tree. “You’re hardly going to jump him at the next party.”

  “Ah.” Iz had started to consider that. Jumping him, so to speak. Though it was all vague because Iz knew images and sounds from porn but very little else. He thought that it would feel nice to push Rocco down and lie on top of him. The imagined press of their bodies made him warm. He wondered about the taste of cock, and if he would enjoy kissing Rocco’s mouth and not tolerate it the way he did with most kisses. The idea made his blood start to pound, so he suspected he might.

  But those were just thoughts and would likely stay just thoughts.

  “No,” Iz said succinctly and pushed out another sigh. A sad one, this time. “No, I’m not going to do anything.”

  He loved his best friend so, so much. Patricio looked between Iz and the spot in the distance where Rocco was having fun. His lips pulled down in a frown as he understood. “Oh. He doesn’t like you back.”

  Another visceral reaction. A pang around Iz’s heart. Fascinating, and not too painful, all things considered. But Iz had felt it before when he had also realized this. He might be getting used to it.

  He shook his head. “Rocco likes me, I guess. As a person. A friend in a group of them who he has been drunk around once or twice, or been nearby while we watched a movie or something. But we don’t talk the way he does with others. He never seeks me out when we’re all together.” Iz hadn’t expected Rocco to have similar feelings toward him, but examining the situation was important. Iz had needed to know exactly where he stood, even if it was nowhere near the person he had unexpectedly cast his eye upon. And he had one final piece of evidence for his case. The most damning, as far as he could tell. “And I never have awkward moments with him like I have with people who are trying to hit on me.”

  “It’s only awkward because you never realize they’re into you until later, so they are having a very different conversation with you than you think they are,” Patricio teased him, but fondly. Iz must have made a sour face, because Patricio stretched his leg to nudge Iz’s knee with his foot. “So that’s it? You like someone for the first time ever, and it’s already over?”

  “Not ‘over’,” Iz answered softly into his scarf. “There’s nothing to be done. But it still goes on. They say—I thought it was worth mentioning. To you. They say you’re supposed to talk about these things.”

  “They do say that,” Patricio agreed. “I suspect it’s a crock of shit because every time I try to talk about my ex, I turn into a weepy mess. But. If you want to. I’m here.” He gave Iz’s knee another nudge, then pulled back without seeming to expect an immediate response.

  After a while, Patricio picked up his sketchpad again, still without sketching in it. He was used to Iz taking a while to gather his thoughts, even when it took days. Iz wasn’t sure he would have survived college without Patricio and was extremely grateful they had been freshman roommates. Patricio was patient and even-tempered unless he was in a creative mood, and he knew things about people and friendship and relationships. Iz wasn’t sure how he knew them, since Patricio had only had the one serious ex, but he supposed it was his sensitive nature and how he observed people.

  Iz darted another look across the way, not at all surprised to see the athletes had calmed down at last, picking up their bags and heading toward the library. Asking Rocco out did not seem like a practical suggestion, but it might if Iz considered it a while.

  He watched the jocks leave, Rocco deep in conversation with Ronnie, who was an inch or so shorter than him and veered toward slender rather than broad. Their heads were almost level as they shared some joke or something that made Rocco smile again.

  Iz felt a hollowness in his chest that was not unfamiliar, although now, at least, he knew it was related to these longing feelings, so he didn’t have to mention them to Patricio.

  When Rocco and Ronnie were finally out of sight, Iz opened his laptop again with relief, pleased to have a mess he could pick apart until he found the solution.

  Friday night, Iz was curled up next to Rahim on one of the couches in Eric’s apartment. Eric, another Art major, shared the place with two other people officially, and with one more unofficially. The second couch, arranged across from them and turned toward the TV, was also Damien’s bed a few nights of the week. Something to do with Damien’s awful roommates and the cost of rent around the uni
versity.

  The two couches had both been found at the side of the road. Iz usually tried not to think about that when sitting on one of them. Anyway, whatever the couches had smelled like before had been replaced by weed, cologne, spilled alcohol, and the general scent that indicated an apartment full of men.

  Rahim jostled Iz occasionally as he swiped through profiles on his phone. Iz’s eyes were closed, his thoughts drifting without any direction. Rahim smelled nicer than the couch. Like bodywash and aftershave. But he was looking for a hookup, so that made sense.

  If he didn’t find anyone, he would probably go out with the others. Iz was enjoying being lazy and warm and had no plans to go out. If Ronnie didn’t want to stay in with him, Iz would probably sleep here for a while or go home.

  It had occurred to him that this was probably boring to most people, but his friends didn’t seem to mind that he didn’t go to many parties with them. He made exceptions for birthdays and special occasions and the nights he actually felt like dealing with noise and commotion.

  He patted Rahim’s arm. “No assholes tonight.” Iz was supposed to remind him of that.

  “No assholes tonight,” Rahim agreed absently. He was probably staring at an asshole’s picture right at that moment. He did like a jock.

  Iz patted him again, feeling pleased and silly about this moment of solidarity. “If it says no femmes, you keep swiping.” He slid further down against Rahim’s side, and received a teasing, “Yes, Mom,” and Rahim’s hand in his hair, scratching his scalp.

  “Tell me someone is getting a picture of that,” one of the others cooed, and Iz frowned without bothering to open his eyes. But Rahim kept petting him, so he relaxed again.

  “To be with those I like is enough,” Iz mumble-quoted. “Rahim is comfy and pure of heart.”

  “Did you guys get him high?” Rocco asked, deep voice lifting slightly at the end of the sentence, as if he couldn’t believe it, or was possibly worried.