The bid came on a Sunday, which felt like God showing off, making the temptation easier and easier.
I’d told myself I wasn’t getting one. That was the safe thing to tell yourself, the version that couldn’t turn around and hurt you later: Always expect the worst, that way when it happens, you’re prepared.
I’d gone to the rush events, three of them, and stood at the edge holding whatever they put in my hand, waiting for somebody to figure out I didn’t belong in a house full of guys who were that easy in their own skin. Nobody figured it out. Or they did, and it just wasn’t the disqualifier I’d spent years being promised it had to be.
A simple envelope slid under our door. Jasper grabbed the paper and grinned and showed me. And then he did that slieght of hand that I swear was of the Devil and there was another piece of paper with it. My name. With the words “ΔΚΣ Pledge” on it. I sunk into my chair and just looked at it, and Jasper took my hand and put the paper in it. He didn’t make fun of me, which I was learning was its own kind of love, but he clearly wanted me to realize this wasn’t a dream. A group had accepted me, not because of my upbringing, not because of my parents, and not because of some façade that I forced myself to wear.
“Told you,” was all he said. Then, “Wear a shirt that isn’t tucked in. We’re going over.”
Bid Day at the house was loud, the kind of loud that told of excitement by everyone involved, or at least those who were making the noise.
Darius got up on the third stair; he was the tall one in the cardigan I’d watched stop a freshman from doing something dumb at the first party. Turns out, he was the frat president. That the bid wasn’t a deposit on anything. That nobody in this house owed anybody else a thing for being let in, not a favor, not a secret, not their body, and if anyone ever made you feel like you did, you came to him, directly, and it got handled. He said it the flat way you’d read a fire exit, no big speech, which is exactly how I knew he meant it.
Then he said welcome, and the room came apart into noise and a bad playlist and a guy doing a worm across the sticky floor. Did they make pledges clean the floor with their tongues? Was that kind of hazing still a thing?
Part of me believed Darius. The braining part, the part that I was at college to improve. Another part of me – deep, dark, and that had been put into me by other people – didn’t. I’d been raised on belonging with strings. Belong, and here’s the list of who to be, and the list was the rent you paid. This was the first room I’d ever stood in that handed over the belonging and skipped the list, and I really wanted to believe them. But a part of me I hated stood there in all that noise not trusting it, and missing the strings. Missing knowing what I owed, because knowing means knowing, and saying there’s nothing owed means when you find out there is, it’s so much worse.
Then they did the Bigs.
It worked like this: each new guy got matched with an older one who’d look out for him through the semester, show him how the house worked, be the person you could call at 4am. Nik – the pledge master – ran it off a clipboard. Nik was clearly the one who took things seriously in a house that mostly didn’t. He was sharp, never cruel and never loose either, a guy who’d been the responsible one so long it had set into a personality, and it was probably just obvious that he’d run the pledges.
I saw Levi across the room while Nik read names. The flannel, the overgrown hair, the “takes one to know one.” He was somebody’s Big too, it turned out, crouched down talking low to his own new guy with that same stillness he’d had at the party. He caught my eye over the kid’s head and lifted his chin at me, a recognition and acknowledgement, and went back to it.
I was a little busy having a religious experience about somebody else: Nik said my name, and then a name I already knew.
“Renner. You’re with Tav.”
The big one. The one from the first party I’d had to force myself to look away from to stop watching, who Levi had said he knew I was watching. He came across the room with that unhurried way he had, like the floor would wait for him, or the guys just parted for his awesomeness, the characteristic smile arriving before he did. He put out a hand and I shook it, and I worked on keeping my face a normal face.
“Tavita,” he said. “Tav. You’re Josiah?”
“Si. Either’s fine.”
“Si.” He had a voice you felt more than heard, low, rumbling, and up close he was just more, more shoulders, more chest, a guy built on a bigger draft than the rest of us. He didn’t use it to crowd you, though. That was the thing I noticed even then, through the noise of the frat house playing across my ears and eyes and nose. He held all that size still and careful, the way you’d hold a door so it wouldn’t slam. “You good? You look a little stunned, man. It’s a lot, the first day.”
I’d learn it was just a thing he said, the “You good?” That first time it went through me like warm water.
“I’m good,” I said. I was not good. I was many other things.
Ken, the wiry guy next to him who turned out to be Tav’s roommate, looked at me, then at Tav, then back at me, and made a face like he’d run some quick math and the answer was funny. “Oh, this’ll be fine,” he said, to no one, to the ceiling. “This’ll be totally fine.” Tav elbowed him without looking. I didn’t get it.
Nik did the rules talk after, in the back room, all the new guys on folding chairs. Most of it was logistics. The calendar, the study hours, the GPA minimum everyone must maintain that he clearly took personally. And then he got to the one he actually cared about, and his voice went even flatter, even more careful.
“Last thing. Bigs and Littles.” He looked each of us in the eyes. “This is not officially a gay frat. Most guys here happen to be in the LGBTQ+ community. We accept everyone , we don’t care who you are, what you are, who you love, who you lust, who you fuck. Except: You do not touch your Big. Your Big does not touch you. Nothing. All semester, through initiation. I don’t care what you both want. The instant there’s a thing between a Big and his Little, the power’s crooked, and this house does not run crooked. We run very, very straight. At least for that. And if you want somebody, there’s a whole campus out there. But not him. Not while he’s responsible for you.”
He looked around the room again. “Break that rule, you’re both out. Not a talking-to. There is no redemption, there is no second chance. Out. I’ve done it before, Darius has done it before. We’ll do it again.”
I sat very still on my folding chair and did the thing I was best at, which was keeping my face a normal face with a 👍 in my eyes while the floor dropped out from under it. Of course. Of course it was him. I had spent my entire life learning to want the thing I was told I couldn’t have, getting so good at it that the wanting and the can’t-have had melted into one single feeling, and the universe had looked down at all that practice and signed me up for the advanced course. The one guy in the building. Assigned to me. Walled off by a rule with my name written on the same line as his.
God was testing me. This had to be a test. And I would overcome. I had to, because if I could pass this test, then I would prove that I could still be a good person even though people told me I wasn’t.
Tav came and found me when Nik was done, because that was the job now. He was mine to look out for, I was his to look after, and he steered me around the room introducing me to guys whose names I lost on contact, one hand hovering near my shoulder to guide me through a doorway, pulling back at the last inch like he’d remembered the stove was hot.
He did it three times that night, the almost and the catch, and every time it lit up the exact spot the touch would have gone, which I understood, dimly, was worse than if he’d just clapped me on the back like he did with everybody else.
Temptation. He was tempted. And he wasn’t giving in. But he wanted me in a way that I hadn’t been wanted before.
Was that me now? A temptation for another man? And him a temptation for me to overcome?
We were going to spend a whole semester being careful in a way nobody else in the house had to be, and the carefulness itself was its own kind of touching. I hadn’t known you could be that aware of a person you weren’t allowed to lay a finger on.
It got to be dinner, and he got me a plate. He asked what I was studying and actually listened to the undeclared non-answer. He told me about his own Bid Day, two years back, how he’d thrown up in the bushes out front from nerves before he even got his envelope, and the easy way he told it, unbothered, at his own expense, was clearly meant to make me feel like less of an outlier for sitting in the corner looking like I’d seen the Holy Ghost. It worked ... a little. That was the worst part. If he’d been a jerk I could have wanted him the clean way, the way you want a poster on a wall. He kept being kind instead, which turned the wanting into a thing with a person attached to it, and I had no way to cope with this.
“You’re allowed to have fun, you know,” he said at one point, leaning in to be heard over the music, close enough I could smell whatever he wore. “This is the fun part. The rest is just rules.” Then he caught himself on the word, and something flickered across his face, and he straightened back up to a legal distance. “Most of the rules,” he added. “But look, no pressure. You got a bid because the guys thought you could add something to the house, but you also got a bid because we thought we could help you. I can’t say who, but one guy advocated real big for you, that we need you as much as you need us. But if you’re not ready to relax into the party, that’s fine, move at your own pace.”
Later, Tav found me on the porch, in the cold and the pine smell, while I was pretending to look at my phone. He didn’t say anything dumb about it. He just leaned on the rail a careful distance away and looked out at the dark.
“Look, the rules thing that Nik did, that last one?” he started.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a good rule.” He said it like he believed it, which somehow made it worse. “Seen it go real bad without it.” A pause, then the smile, smaller this time. “Rule’s the rule, dude. I saw you at that first party, and the answer’s not ‘no.’ But it has to be ‘no’ for now. So, ask me again in December.”
And then he knocked his shoulder, gentle, against the porch post instead of against me, like even that he had to be careful with, and went back inside. Left me out there in the cold with the whole rest of the semester laid out in front of me like a road I could see every mile of.
December. He’d said it like a kindness. Like a door with a date painted on it.
My phone buzzed. My mom, because of course. She had this sixth sense, always the worst time, always when I was thinking things I shouldn’t. I stood on the porch with the cross going cold against my chest and thought: I have found the one place on earth that will hand me everything I was told I could never have, and then set the single thing I want most behind a rule I actually believe in.
Because rules kept us safe. Rules kept us from straying from the path. Rules told us what we had to do and what would happen when we did and what would happen if we didn’t.
But that was the only rule here that had consequence, and everything else about maybe being in this frat was starting to weigh on those rules that had built my life around me, and those older rules were starting to crack under the weight. The cold cross on my chest kept them pinned.
For now.
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