[fiction]

 

EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LOVED about anyone races through my mind, a torrent of emotion I can barely contain. I’m enveloped within my tight-knit group of friends, their bodies moving in sync with the music, their arms shooting high, reaching for heaven itself. My eyes flit between them, and with each glance, I’m overcome by the weight of the memories we’ve built, the kind that anchor you in a way nothing else can. I see the quirks that make them irreplaceable, the small gestures they make that radiate warmth like sunlight breaking through a cold morning. And then, there’s the way they look at me, a gaze so full of wonder and connection it feels like a force greater than myself, as if in that fleeting moment, I’m seeing the best parts of the world reflected back at me.

I need to say it to one of them, tell them how much I love them, but when I go to speak to Julia, she points to her ears, plugged with silicone pieces that shield her eardrums from the pounding beat certain to damage the rest of us. She mouths something to me, but I quickly give up on her and oscillate elsewhere. My eyes catch Alicia. 

Her wavy black hair descends just to the middle crease of her neck, curtains to her round soft face. A “fuck-ass bob,” she calls it. Her eyes are wide with curiosity, deep brown beauties that survey this warehouse biosphere as if she’s new to this planet and it’s the first place she’s entered upon landing. Other-wordly, that’s what she is, an other-wordly beauty—this is a compliment, right? Before I can think about it any further, I feel the words begin to excavate from deep within me like an afternoon’s lunch after a night of drinking. She sees me, seconds away from implosion.

“I think you’re my soulmate!” I yell. 

She beams. Electrified. The words enliven her and her face shines like a spotlight on a stage. It’s everything I’ve ever loved about anyone striking them with the impact of a thousand stars scorching the earth. I watch the weight of the words pass her by and after a few seconds, she laughs, a sweet, knowing laugh that brushes off the absurdity of what I just said but still holds onto its affection.

“I wish you weren’t gay!” she shouts over.

Right, I’m gay. This life-long truth about myself escapes me whenever this happens. I feel free from it, unbridled by the experiences it has unwillingly created for me. My life outside of here beats on a premise of loneliness, a characteristic I whine to my straight friends is largely a result of me being gay. I tell them that as they move through the world, it offers them chance encounters, at bars, at coffee shops, at this party, to serendipitously meet lovers, while I’m left wondering if a stranger’s glance on the subway means he’s drawn to me romantically or if my flamboyance makes him want to hate-crime me. Now, I look at the friends in this circle with envy. Couples, they kiss. Gay and single at the straight nightclub, I dance. 

“Oh. 

My. 

God,” I hear. 

The sound is coming from behind me and for a moment, I think the voice is fake. I usually don’t hear imaginary voices when this is happening, but it’s not impossible, right? I whip around, my head swiveling in sharp, jerky movements as I scan the room. My vision snags onto unfamiliar faces until I see him.

“Nico?” I say. “Nico!”

It’s a man I’ve only ever known to live in the likes of my Instagram stories, silently signaling some ambiguity between friendship, lust, or maybe just an acknowledgement of mere coexistence. He is bathed in green light, Gatsby at his dock, taller than me, his unbuttoned black shirt revealing a single line of hair trailing from his navel to the faint bursts on his chest. The biggest smile I’ve seen tonight stretches across his face, and I feel it begin to spill out of me: everything I’ve ever loved about anyone.

In my head, I hear myself tell him how I’ve spent late nights on my phone, fixated on the way his coiffed black hair caught the light in a picture he posted, how butterflies have stirred at the sight of his name in notifications—although it was just maybe two or three likes across six months of quiet following—and how, in this moment, seeing him feels like the best thing to happen to me in longer than I’d like to admit.

But none of it can escape my mouth. He is mostly a stranger, and every word feels like it would be the drugs speaking for me. He grabs my shoulders, his touch grounding and electric, and says something I can’t decipher, words that sound more like an orchestral symphony than human speech. I’m lost in his wide, dilated pupils as they grip me with an intensity that makes my chest tighten. God, he’s fucking beautiful.

“I’m rolling!” I shout out at him. 

Like Alicia, he beams, and I see it in his face that he’s about to tell me something that will change my life forever, or at least the next few hours, which in this moment, feels more permanent than forever ever could.

“Me too!” he yells.

In a frenzy, our separate worlds coalesce. I barely notice he has a pack of his own straight friends surrounding him and although I introduce him to Alicia and each of the rest of mine, I know he catches none of the details about any of them. He is now the lead of this odyssey and everyone else fades slowly into the margins, having finished creating the context for these two main characters to meet. 

The green light on the dancefloor fades, and suddenly, it is pitch black. A song, one I could easily recite the words to on any other night, plays thunderously, and without meaning to, we, the dancers of the night, surrender to the great escape it offers. It feels like sanctuary, free from the thoughts and emotions that consumed me when bright lights were showing me the faces of people I know, and for the first time in what feels like ages, I can breathe again, released from the tumult of the last few minutes—or maybe it was an hour? 

Time has a coy way of offending me when I’m in this place. Every second is an expansive gift of the highest form of life and every hour moves fast like nighttime’s sleep on a bashful summer day. It is four AM, the gay self whispers the night is still young, while my straight friends look at each other with faces ready to go home. 

Given the DJs fall within the latter camp, they too begin to close the night, blasting a finale song, complete with spotlights of different colors darting from pockets of kissing ravers to friends saying farewells to two party eager gay boys, dancing a platonic three or four feet apart. As the last song radiates its final beat, bright lights encompass the warehouse and I see Nico again. Our eyes lock unnervingly, both looking at each other with huge black pupils hiding the eye colors we’d list on our drivers licenses.

“Wanna keep going?” he says with a grin. 

Giddy as a young girl called pretty by her school crush, I smile back, “duh.”

We give passionate adieus to our straight friends, parting soliloquies to the characters that are no longer in this play, and begin the voyage each of us anticipated when we first saw each other that night. 

“I’m game for anything gay,” I tell Nico.

He revels in my zealous disposition and pulls out his phone to begin plotting what gay circuit party we would find to call home for the next few hours, or however long it would take for the rest of the drugs to wear off. 

After we leave the party, we walk judiciously, following gravel sidewalks in dark streets. I trust Nico to guide us to wherever he’s determined is the next destination. His decisiveness calms me and I don’t feel a need to be clued into the plan he’s quickly crafted. 

I can’t see the entirety of his face, but he glimmers in surprise moments, when we pass the crimson glow of a neon business sign or a late night driver’s headlight catches the top shadow of his cheekbone.

His handsomeness is deeply his own. Even after looking closely, you wouldn’t be able to compare it to some notable celebrity’s. Instead, it catches you off guard, singular and precise, like the soft crumble of a perfectly baked cookie or the overwhelming awe of seeing the Grand Canyon. But the splendor doesn’t sting. It doesn’t spark envy, or insecurity, nor does it ignite a tormenting lust that would leave me aching if I couldn’t have him. Unmistakably magnetic, he carries a forcefield that shields those in its orbit, never drawing them in against their will, protective instead.

Nico shows me his chosen destination, a warehouse party, not so different from the one we just left, but this one would be packed with gay men. Neither of us had much interest in the kind of music we learned they’d be playing there, but that felt trivial compared to the abundance of the gay energy we knew we could be within.  

We walk with the swiftness of commuting New Yorkers, but chat like old lady friends connecting after years of separation. Small talk doesn’t suit us and so, we share personal stories about exes, and tirades about the monotony of office life, and even our fears about relying on drugs for a good time—ironic—we laugh.

Opposite our path, a solitary middle-aged woman stands still. Her shoulder-length gray hair is uneven, splotchy, and a too-big backpack is strapped to her like it’s carrying the weight of the world. She’s lost, frozen on the desolate 4:30 AM Brooklyn streets, no phone in hand, her cheeks swollen from a cry that’s barely fading. As we begin to pass her, she stops us.

“Excuse me,” she says in a French accent, “Mayb– maybe you can help me?”

Our fervent march halts and Nico’s once unshared attention diverts to this woman. She asks Nico for directions to the Moore Hotel, anxiously confessing that her phone is dead and she’s been searching aimlessly for well over half an hour. Nico pulls out his phone and to the alarm of the three of us, discovers the hotel is just under a mile away, opposite the direction she’d been walking. 

She begins to cry, crinkling her face like a child, hopeless, as if she had fallen on the playground and there’s no one around to comfort her. We know these streets scare her and had either of us been alone, they’d likely scare us too. 

“We’ll walk you there!” Nico declares. 

I am taken a bit by surprise. The three of us are standing in the sparkle of a street light directly above our heads and unlike before, I can now catch the complete picture of Nico’s face. I look at him for what can’t be more than two seconds. He looks back at me quickly, assessing if I’m opposed to this journey and mutely, without hesitation, I agree to it. 

At this point, I’ve neared four years of living in New York City and in my time, I’ve leaned into a tendency to act standoffish when approached by strangers in need. It’s a behavior I’m not proud to have adapted. It’s something my dad would be disappointed to see in me. 

My childhood is laced with memories of him pulling to the side of the road while on the way to classmates’ birthday parties, jump-starting cars of distressed strangers or handing twenty dollar bills to homeless moms with signs asking for something to eat. He hammered this philosophy into me and as I grew older, I shirked from it. I would increase the volume on the music in my headphones when approached by people asking for money on the train. “It's a scam,” I’d always tell myself.

Could this French woman be scamming us? Maybe it was the molly or something inside of me desperate to prove a feigned kindness to strangers to Nico, but I felt pulled to agree to take this French woman, who we would soon learn was named Jeannie, to her hotel. Secretly, I knew I was doing this to increase the chances of Nico’s attraction to me, inevitably, inching closer to my newly realized goal of sleeping with him.

“Let’s go!” I said.

Nico quickly offered to carry Jeannie’s backpack and in some odd form of gay man’s competition, I offered to hold the small water bottle she had in her hand.

“I can handle this,” she said to me with a slight smile.

As we walked, Jeannie shared the unlucky events that had led her here. By way of Paris, she was a travelling artist who was in America for the first time ever. She had been in Atlanta and Pittsburgh prior to this point, but the apex of her travels were here, in Brooklyn: the soon-to-be home of some small art exhibit she was to show next week. When I asked her about what type of art she was showcasing, she noticeably dodged the question.  

Nico, once only the skillful navigator, now also the skillful orator, maintained an enriching ebb and flow of the conversation, necessarily stepping back to let Jeannie air grievances, but also peppering in quiet, alluring details about his own life. Were these to impress me? He off-handedly mentioned a story about a 100-mile bike ride he did recently and his one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. He’s subconsciously telling me we could go back to his after this, right? 

I felt a bit manic inside my mind. Off-shoot thoughts about my own past were competing with theories of attraction and any time I’d begin to open my mouth, the words wouldn’t match what statements I had just rehearsed in my head. Instead, it always felt like something I was saying was clearly motivated to pull Nico’s interest away from Jeannie and back onto me.

Nico showed no resistance to my quest to pull him in. I felt him relish it. We exchanged smiles across Jeannie, sharing a silent glory in the adventure we had found ourselves in tonight. It didn’t matter so much that we were the rescuers in Jeannie’s nighttime tragedy, who might be some renowned artist, a Matisse or Seurat, wowing the wealthy across continents with her illustrious artwork, unknown to us. Instead, I reveled in the shared experience with Nico, feeling like husbands who instinctively help a stranded traveler, knowing the other would want to without asking.

I had been looking over at Nico for so long in this game of monkey-in-the-middle that I didn’t even realize the two of them were now speaking French. "Tu trouves qu’on fait un beau duo?” I caught Nico saying.

Jeannie laughed, “I don’t think I understand.” Pantomiming fingers that bounced between me and Nico, “Do you think we look cute together?” he said.

I felt myself turn red. His suave had effectively captured me and the seal was officially broken. Once two gay men who happened to unite in shared identity at a straight party, we were now in the throes of a romance. Everything from here on out was foreplay. 

“Ah! Vous êtes gays !” Jeannie said. 

Nico and I laughed in unison, this felt like the most obvious truth of the night, but we let the discovery delight her. She soon asked about our ages, our jobs, our lives in the city, bypassing any queries into our romantic lives, likely assuming we were together. We learned she was forty-five.

“But I have a thing for younger men,” she said as if that was her obvious truth we needed to know. “Twenty six was actually the age of my last lover.”

The same age Nico and I shared. I saw vivid images of Jeannie in Paris, basking in the summer sun of her Le Marais chalet turned studio, painting the vision of a nude twenty something scruffy haired beau ahead of her. I romanticized this glorious life she had abroad and the uber rich French aristocrats she’d sulk with at her next dinner, detailing the two gay American boys she met on drugs who escorted her to her hotel. The guests would look on in wonder, fantasizing about our handsomeness that Jeannie would describe at length and then laugh at the juxtaposition between our jittery party demeanor and her chic French attitude.

“I have something to tell you,” Jeannie abruptly said, jolting me back to reality.

“What’s that?” Nico said without looking at her.

“I don’t have a place to stay at the Moore Hotel tonight,” she said. A tense moment of silence followed.

“I have a reservation at the hotel for tomorrow night. Before I met the two of you, my plan was to go to the hotel and ask if they had a room for me to stay there tonight. But, maybe there’s a chance either of you have a bed for me? I can sleep on your couch, on the floor, I’ll be no problem!” she said. 

This is a scam. Jeannie had confessed this to us anxiously, but her tone made it abundantly clear that she had been waiting to say this to us from the moment she met us. I didn’t jump to respond. I knew Nico would be the first to speak, and whatever he said would reveal another side of him, showing me how far his trust extended and where his generosity stopped in the face of fear.

“I’m sorry Jeannie, we don’t,” Nico said.

I felt a deep, silent relief. Sure, I could accompany a stranger to their destination, definitely with Nico, maybe alone, but there was no way I was inviting her into my house. The way Nico responded to her, exactly how I would have, sincerity first, but safety paramount, shifted my attraction to him. It wasn’t just lust anymore. There was compatibility. We didn’t just look cute together; we were undeniably a good pair, a team—look at us, traversing Brooklyn with a self-proclaimed cougar, balancing hospitality, thrill, and personal welfare. In that moment,my fantasies expanded beyond just the physical. Now, I imagined dates, boyfriends, rotating days of when we’d pick up our shared child from school.

“I understand,” Jeannie said somberly.

This diluted the playful rhythm of our triad confab. Jeannie was now possessed with a frustrating irreverence for our hospitality, spouting uncharacteristic lines about us leaving her to sleep on the streets of New York City. 

My image of her in Paris changed. Maybe it wasn’t even Paris. Maybe she wasn’t even an artist. I looked over at Nico, still shouldering her enormous backpack and I wondered what could be inside of it. Was she a city-to-city nomad? Walking from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, creating her own American Camino of couch stays with overly kind strangers. Maybe this backpack was full of items she’d stolen from house to house, expensive jewelry gone missing and warm clothes snatched from kind people’s closets. Could she be on the run from her last big heist?

I felt a flash of embarrassment at these thoughts. Elitist, I too quickly reimagined Jeannie as a villain. What would my dad think? I couldn’t let Nico see this side of me, the untrusting, classist part of me, making judgments about someone in need. It would shatter the cool, agreeable persona I’d carefully developed to entice him to sleep with me tonight. 

It was a bit past 5 AM when the three of us finally walked into the Moore, shockingly brightly lit and well-staffed for the hour. Jeannie approached the man working the front desk. He looked overworked, likely in his thirties, and clearly desperate to be anywhere else but there. Nico and I stood behind Jeannie, a safe one to two feet away while she explained the events of the night. 

To my slight surprise, the man at the front desk did find a reservation under Jeannie’s name for tomorrow night, but to her defeat, there were absolutely no rooms available for her tonight. She sulked backwards to her homosexual heroines. 

Nico and I looked at each other and in a few words, decided we’d call nearby hotels, find one available and send her away in a car. New plan. We retreated to separate corners of the lobby, dialed the numbers of at least five hotels between the two of us, but call after call after call, we were rejected over and over again, unable to find any hotel within the area that had an open room for the night. Nico shoved his phone in his pocket and approached the front desk.

“Hey man,” he said in a believable straight voice I had yet to hear tonight. “She’s got absolutely nowhere to stay. If it’s not here, it’s the streets of New York City. She’s a foreigner and is here for her artistic work.

“She doesn’t know anyone. Her phone is dead. Is there any chance that she can just sit on the couch in this lobby for the next few hours? She won’t bother anyone and will leave to go to a coffee shop once one opens, can you please help us out?”

Nico’s words were charged with passion, charisma, and a touch of desperation. He was the sexiest I’d seen him tonight, vulnerable, yet using his suave to help someone in need. It wasn’t just confidence; it was a deep understanding of his own power, and how to wield it when he needed to most. After Nico spoke, all three of us looked at the receptionist, analyzing what the blank stare on his face would mean for Jeannie tonight. 

“Okay, alright,” he said. “But she can’t fall asleep, can’t lay down, do anything like that. She can sit and charge her phone for a few hours.”

We rejoiced, connected in some delirium that we each reveled in for our own separate reasons. Jeannie hugged both Nico and I. The affection prolonged for many moments with intense sincerity, defying her cold French nature.

Nico, noticeably kind and hospitable to her again, excessively apologized for our failure to find her a bed to stay in tonight. She righteously rejected his apologies and continued to thank him for all he and I did. Nico reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty dollar bill to hand to her. “Just in case,” he said. Immediately, Jeannie began to wave her hands to answer, signaling no, no, no. “I don’t need money!” she said, “Keep this! Please! I’m okay!”

Suddenly I saw her again at the bureaucrats’ dinner table, proclaiming, “and then they tried to give me money!” the entire table around her bursting into laughter as if this was the most ludicrous thing that could have happened to her at this moment. 

Like a ship away from shore, she retreated into couches furthest away from us in the lobby. It was half an hour until 6 AM. I wouldn’t say I was still rolling, but I also wouldn’t say I wasn’t either. It was the transient twilight before complete sobriety. Maybe I suggest we just go back to my place, only a train stop away, banter about all that happened while laying horizontally in my bed. 

“Should we go to the circuit party?” Nico said, having already pulled up the directions on his phone. Conveniently, a mere ten minute walk away.

“Yeah! I think I’m still rolling,” I said. It wasn’t the full truth, but I figured Nico wanted to dance and I wasn’t ready to leave his side. 

As we walked out of the hotel, the nighttime streets swallowed us in their mystique. We laughed and shouted and loudly recalled small details of the past hour that had just consumed us.

“And when she asked to sleep on one of our couches, I was like ‘oh, she wants to rob us,’” Nico said, like he didn’t know I had the exact same thought at that moment.

“I kind of suspected she was curious about a threesome when she told us her last boyfriend was our age,” I said back.

“Thank you for being so cool through all of this,” he said. “It means a lot that you helped out and were down to help bring her there. I just couldn’t live with the thought of her being alone on these streets. Ya know, if it was me or my mom, I’d really want someone to do the same thing.”

It almost felt like I could hear the praise my dad would’ve given me through Nico’s words. When I looked at him again, his big molly eyes blanketed me and I felt cozy in his atmosphere. I couldn’t help it; I didn’t just want to have sex with him, I wanted to date him, be his boyfriend, and accompany countless more lost foreigners to surprising places in Saturday moonlight. I said something back that told him I wouldn’t have left him alone with her. 

“You’re so cool,” Nico said. He paused, briefly looked up, clearly thinking carefully about what he wanted to say next. 

“I really want to just, like, grab a meal and hear everything about your life. You’ve got such a good job and you also do drugs and go to raves and are down to go on crazy ass journeys at five in the morning. Like, I just want to know everything about you.”

Glee intrinsically rose within me and had no chance of dissipating. With every word he said, I felt ecstasy, unclear if it was just because I was on it, but it boiled from within me, boundless, ebullient joy.

“A, aa– As a friend, of course,” Nico quickly added on.

It wasn’t just a casual remark. It hit me with the force of a suckerpunch, jarring and sudden, leaving me reeling. Everything that had felt so certain between us now hung in the air with an unbearable ambiguity. The way his eyes assessed me before making a decision, how we had moved through the night together with ease, with chemistry so palpable I could almost taste it—how could he just slap a label on it like that? As a friend, he said. The words fell into the space between us like bricks, heavy and final.

Had I missed something? The confusion morphed into something deeper. Hurt, maybe. And the worst part was how quickly it turned inward, the wave of inadequacy crashing over me as I wondered if I was even worthy of the attention I’d been so desperate to claim. He doesn't know I like him, I thought. I had been reticent towards his advances and didn’t even acknowledge his comment about looking cute together to Jeannie. He must be playing defense, or at least I hoped. 

Trying to piece together the scattered pieces of my own thoughts, “I’d love that,” I said back.

The time it took to get to the gay party from the hotel felt like milliseconds compared to the journey with Jeannie. We quickly arrived at the address that Nico was leading us to. It was a drabby building, erect with dirty concrete walls browning into oblivion. It was the kind of building you’d pick up pace when you walked by it on a different day, ominous, foreboding some kidnapper that would jump out from behind and pin an unsuspecting passerby to the ground.

But tonight, it was the emerald city. The uns-uns-uns bellowing into the streets were the harmonies sung at paradise’s opening golden gates. The rabbles of shirtless beefy men exiting beamed with transcendence, contrary to the clusters of who they likely were on daytime Wall Street, sterile and unexpressive. We approached the bouncer at the door.

"Party’s over in an hour, no one else in tonight,” he said. Suckerpunch number two. It’s over, I thought.

“How’s your night been?” Nico said as if this was the first piece of the conversation rather than what the bouncer had just said.

Their rapport boomed quickly and within minutes, the two were speaking rapid-fire Spanish—Spanish and French? How did he know so many languages?-–laughing through shared expressions I couldn’t translate. 

Nico reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, the same one he had offered Jeannie nearly fifteen minutes ago. He handed the crisp green to the bouncer and he opened the door for us. The effect Nico’s charm had on other people reminded me of the businessmen I’d seen depicted in 1950s America, mastering the game of life with their slick tongue and expressive eyebrows. As we walked in, Nico winked at me, the still open sly eye telling me he knew I would never have to accept defeat if I was by his side. 

Friends have sex, right?

Inside, the warehouse swelled with shirtless bodies, bare chests gleaming under the fractured light, every sinew and muscle glistening with the residue of hours past. Some of the men bounced side to side, like a plastic solar-powered Betty Boop figurine on the front dash of a car. Others convulsed, propelled by a drug of choice coursing through their veins, their arms waving high, piercing the humid air with their toned bulging biceps. I could only concentrate on all the writhing limbs. 

If I looked at their eyes, I saw a terrifying gulf: a disconnect between the raw reality of the 6 AM Bushwick warehouse and the drug fueled delusion they escaped into, where the music was the only thing holding together their dissolving sense of self.

The uns-uns-uns once heard outside now came up through the soles of my feet, invigorating the molly in my veins I hadn’t realized was still lingering inside me, and then I too stripped my layers, baring myself to the sweat soaked air and the electric press of the other bodies around me. I closed my eyes and the euphoria rushed up inside of me and my tongue began to beg my mouth to open, everything I’ve ever loved about anyone on the precipice of escaping my lips. But, the only person I knew here was Nico. Nico! 

My eyes snapped open, panic seizing me for a moment—had I lost him? But no, there he was, standing right in front of me. He was also now shirtless and his beauty was so striking that it seemed to pull the room’s light toward him, his presence commanding the space in a way I couldn’t ignore. His damp skin shimmered like waves under a moonlit sky. 

A big toothy smile broke across his face when he realized I was looking directly at him, just like the one I first saw at the straight party. It enveloped me, a simple, pure thing that made me feel more alive than I thought possible, like the world had suddenly turned a little bit kinder.

“You good?” he shouted into my ear.

“Yeah! Just rolling!” I said back.

“Meeee tooooo,” he said over many seconds.

My mind was once again manic. As a friend. What was friendly about anything that had happened tonight? Hell, he asked a stranger if we’d make a cute couple—and in French nonetheless! Maybe this moment didn’t come from Nico, but instead from the spellbound molly self of him who flirted without intention and escorted nomads through dark streets. I looked up at the corners of this room, fearful that if I looked at him directly again, I’d become weak in the knees and collapse to the floor. The drab ceiling did nothing to quell the booming entropy of my uncontrollable thoughts and then, succumbing to the chaotic pull I had no power to resist, I looked at Nico again. 

I had it written all over my face—my sudden panic, the battle I was fighting internally, and he had none of it, calm as the eye of the storm. 

Without a word, he moved closer, his hand finding my waist with an unexpected gentleness, like he knew this was all I needed to settle my nerves. His body pressed against mine, and for a heartbeat, everything else disappeared. There was only the weight of his touch, firm yet tender, grounding me as our bodies aligned. His nose brushed against mine, a whisper of wind against the hot air, and in that space, time seemed to stretch, the world around us folding away. 

My arms instinctively circled the back of his neck, pulling him closer, our bodies now moving together, fluid and effortless. The chaos of the night, the questions that had moments ago plagued me, the uncertainties that had tangled my mind,they all vanished in the quiet collision of our skin. It was as if the universe had shifted, opening a new dimension, one where we existed alone in perfect sync, untouched by the outside world. Ecstasy.

Nico’s nose nudged mine, tilting his head slightly so our eyes met and as they did, his gaze softened, deftly seeking consent before he decided his next move. Then, gradually, almost hesitantly, he leaned in. The first contact was delicate, a feather-light brush of his bottom lip against mine and as it happened, reality stood still, this touch, the culmination of everything, the run-in at the straight party, the first word heard from Jeannie, the calls to hotels asking for rooms, the bouncer, the sweat, the panic, and then, as if the universe had finally exhaled, his lips fully captured mine and everything I’ve ever loved about anyone poured out of my mouth and into his.

 

***

 

“Yeah, my New Year’s Eve was pretty chill,” I told my co-workers over Zoom the next week. 

The screen of nine rectangulared humans stared back at me, unphased. From the corner of my eyes, I spotted my phone sitting next to my computer. I tapped at the screen and there were no new notifications, as I expected. 

Like any other Tuesday, I sat at my apartment desk, cataloguing the day’s tasks that afforded me my meager tech job. Email, email, email, I had already maybe written about twenty messages to people today which was twenty more than I had to Nico after my night with him. 

The day after was consumed by the overwhelming despair of a molly comedown. Until that night, it had been almost a year since I’d done it and so, the sweeping dread was both unfamiliar and oddly fitting for the emotions that wretched the following days. 

It was New Year’s Day the day after and I couldn’t find it within me to unearth the jolly I hoped I would feel from a new, albeit fleeting, romance. I was riddled with anxiety. Had I done too much? We knew so many of the same people, what was he going to say to them? That I was clearly more into him than he was into me? The shared gays we knew would sit with him, mock how oblivious I was to the fact that it all happened only because we were both on drugs. I couldn’t face the rejection and so, I retreated. I didn’t text him.

He didn’t text me. 

On the second day, I convinced myself that I was in love with him. That there was no greater romance ever written in the history of the world. How beautiful would it be to hear my best man recount the story of letting me leave a straight rave with the only other gay man we ran into that night? A crush. No, a love. A love, I said to myself, starry-eyed and smitten. The sex was fine, but our emotional compatibility? That was otherworldly. I couldn’t go an hour that day without thinking of him. But, I refused to text him. He left my apartment, this clearly meant that the next step in the conversation fell on his plate, right? It’d be far too eager if I texted him. 

By the third day, I started to search on the internet, “how to get over someone who you fall in love with while you’re on molly.” One Reddit thread: “you never do, it’s chemically impossible.” The user confidently explained that the drug rewired your brain, binding those feelings to your very sense of self, all backed by “science,” he claimed. When I clicked his profile, I discovered his main contributions to other threads were to argue that the earth is flat and that birds are government surveillance drones.

Another, “you start dating until you both realize nothing will ever feel as good as it did that night and eventually break up… better to just start hating them from the jump.” 

Also on Reddit, a brief poem,

Monica, your touch, ambrosia. Your lips, cherry wine. Your voice, god’s honey.

Wherever you are now, know our nighttime’s dance will forever live within me.

Her memory will change me forever, 

The night, the night we met molly.

I guess there was nothing a little bad poetry couldn’t fix.

On the fourth day, I found myself at the gym, cycling through clever ways to reach out to Nico that would somehow avoid revealing the weight of my lingering affection, but would also charm him back into seduction. I racked my brain for books we’d mentioned that night, phrases I could casually recycle to spark nostalgia, but everything felt too eager. As I looked out across the pristine upper floor of my members-only gym in Brooklyn, I saw faces of gay men carefully devoid of emotion, avoiding even a glance that might signal vulnerability, and I felt the deep weight of it. The gay man’s fear of eagerness. 

This wasn’t me. Or at least, it hadn’t been before. Back in my hometown, I was unabashed, almost proud of my romantic eagerness. Flirting was my game. I could steer dull conversations into playful banter, turning fleeting interactions into something electric. Friends came to me for help drafting texts to their crushes, trusting in my ability to reignite what felt like ashen sparks. And yet, here I was, refusing to send a text message. A fucking text message! 

As I thought about it even more, I felt exhausted. I could only picture awkwardness on the other side of the decision. What would happen next? We’d go on a date? Have sex? As if we don’t already know what that feels like and how that story ends? What more is there to discover about each other?

But truthfully, I didn’t know all that much about him, at least not on paper. I didn’t know where he was from, how he came to speak so many languages, or even what his job in “finance” actually entailed. But the taste of his lips still lingered in my mind, vivid and absorbing. I knew about the small bald spot hidden on the side of his head and what he looked like in the soft haze of a morning after. The last words he said to me still rang in my head, Have a good one! Typically, you discover these shy, secret parts of a person the other way around. Maybe that’s why the mutual silence between us felt strangely congenial, as if we’d built something out of order and since we wouldn’t be able to find a way to make it stand, why not just let it fall?

Of course I’d respond if he texted me, I didn’t care if he was eager, but the thought of my own eagerness filled me with dread. Five days passed and it was Thursday. I had only seen his name on my phone while looking through people who watched my Instagram stories, him noticeably refraining from a like or reply. We’ll lead parallel lives. I accepted this fate, allowing Jeannie, Molly, and Nico to retreat into the depths of my memory. I would say hi if I saw him out again. Would I? Was that too eager? How embarrassing to say hi to someone after being ghosted. 

And then, there was the voice of my dad, hearing it as I watched memories pass through my mind, the way his social skills brought out the best in people, made distant strangers feel like they found family in him. 

It was the trait I was most proud to inherit. He had a natural gift for making people feel seen with his words and as he got older, his text messages too. He was the kind of person who would make a friend at the grocery store and then call them two days later and ask if they’d want to go golfing together. My mom often reminded me that this is exactly what drew her to him. She’d been working in a salon, and two days fresh off a recent breakup, in the midst of one of the busiest shifts she had ever worked, he walked in. 

She refused to cut his hair, sassy mouthed about how rude it was of him to come in without an appointment, and he, quickly, calmy, made one for the next day. 

The next day, he came in with a bouquet of flowers. “To make up for yesterday,” he said as he handed them to her. After she cut his hair, my dad asked to see her again, “no scissors this time,” with a grin.

When he arrived at her door for every date after that, there it was, always in his right hand, a bouquet of flowers. She told me that he was the first person to really show her that he loved her, she never had to second guess it, never left wondering if the feelings were mutual.

If only he could have seen me escorting Jeannie, he would be filled with pride. He would tell his friends “and I promise you, one day, she’s going to be showing work in a big museum and she’ll be telling people how my son saved her life in Brooklyn!” But, I couldn’t tell him anything about that night, mainly because the story was riddled with drugs, obscenely late night partying, and gay sex, but also because I hadn’t returned his calls in weeks. Silent, like a ghost. 

I saw Nico for the first time since that night nearly two months later. Embarrassingly drunk off just two vodka sodas, I stumbled through the tight crush of men at a divey gay bar in North Brooklyn, mostly in their late 30s, early 40s, faces blurred by dim neon and liquor. A euphoric Kim Petras-Celine Dion remix pulsed through the room as I made my way to the bar for another drink I definitely didn’t need. Once I arrived at the bar, I looked behind me, scanning the crowd for anyone I might recognize and then, I did.

There he was, grinding against a boy smaller than him in frame, his hands resting lightly on the boy’s hips, his eyes fixed on the curve of his neck. They swayed awkwardly to the beat, the music too fast for the slow, uncertain rhythm they’d found between them. The bar lights flickered across his face, highlighting features that once felt magnetic and protective, now almost unfamiliar by how detached I felt from them. Then, as if sensing my stare, his eyes lifted and met mine. 

For a split second, something flickered on his face, alarm, maybe even a tinge of guilt, like he knew he should have texted me but never did. But Nico, always quick on his feet, let it wash away in an instant, slipping back into his effortless charm. He shot me a quick, casual smile, lifted a hand in an easy wave, and then, just as swiftly, his eyes darted away. Without hesitation, he melted back into the boy in front of him, moving to the music, his attention locked elsewhere as if I had never been there at all.

I didn’t feel hurt by it. I actually felt relieved by it. It felt right to give this odyssey the ending so many of my other gay circuit party one-night-stands had also found. I found solace with my allies on Reddit: it was chemically impossible to get over him so why not instead let him vanish. A ghost. Her memory will change me forever. My neural networks will never be the same. 

The city in winter had a way of making solitude feel heavier, so I did what I could to fight it, I lined up dates like armor against the cold. My envied, straight friend, in her three-year relationship, said yes, she’d found partners at coffee shops, bars, and parties, but it was a weekday Hinge date that introduced her to her boyfriend. 

I looked at Tyler blankly. His name felt perverse in my mind now compared to how it did when I was staring at it on the dating app on my phone two weeks ago. This man could not talk about anything other than pop music. He was easy to look at, piercing blue eyes dazzling across a clear skinned tan face, but I couldn’t find any interest in anything that escaped his mouth. I wondered what it would be like if I had met him on a night out instead. I could watch how he interacted with the friends he arrived with and survey how his face would take in the first impression of me. I wonder if he’s ever been on molly. I wonder if he’s ever fallen in love on molly.

I left the date an hour or so after I first arrived at the bar. It was early, about 7 PM. I had kept the night open, just in case I wanted to bring him home with me, but as the waiter brought out the check, nothing moved me that way. After departing the spot in SoHo, I headed to the Brooklyn-bound train, slipping in my headphones and blasting an audiobook at near-deafening, noise-canceling volume. I moved with my usual determined New York City commuter speed, eager to put distance between myself and the evening.

As I walked, a light tap hit my shoulder. I looked up and there was a man with wispy dark hair, holding a phone shut off, dark at the screen. He suspiciously carried no other belongings. His clothes looked loosely tattered, mismatched and there were holes in his shoes. He began to mouth words to me I couldn’t hear over my audiobook. I removed my headphones. 

He explained to me that his phone was dead and he was visiting a friend in New York by way of Mexico City. Now, he just couldn’t remember how to get back to his friend’s apartment. Where was the friend? I asked myself. This is a scam, a brief panic overcame me.

“I think, I think he said he lives on 6th avenue and 13th street,” the man said. I cautiously pulled out my phone and showed him a map of where we were, directing him to go up the street ahead and then make a left when he saw 13th street. “It’s a grid system,” I said.

He now looked more confused than when I first saw him. I looked at him while he tried to process what I just said, his forehead wrinkling and his eyes squinting up at the road signs above us. I pulled the map on my phone closer to his face and he stared at it like it was unsolvable code. I looked at his eyes studying the grid closely. He looked gentle like he had raised kids who he never disciplined, who were worried about their lost father in New York City looking for his old college friend’s apartment with a dead phone.

“I’ll take you there,” I said. He smiled at me and we began to walk uptown. 

 

***

 

Shahamat Uddin is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work explores themes of queerness, intimacy, and South Asian identity. His fiction debut, "How to Get Over Someone Who You Fall in Love with While You're on Molly," was inspired by a line he once heard about fleeting queer connection: that being gay often means experiencing the most romantic night of your life with someone, only to never see them again.

Outside of TAX, Shahamat’s writing has appeared in Vogue Magazine, The Cut, Vulture, Interview Magazine, them, Vogue India, Teen Vogue, PopSugar, The Nation, and more. He is currently editing an anthology of queer and trans South Asian stories, scheduled for international publication in fall 2026

This story originally appeared in print, in TAX Magazine Issue [5].