1987. University of Georgia.
If you know anything about Athens, Georgia in 1987, you already understand the particular kind of magic I'm talking about. The B-52’s came from there. R.E.M. Pylon. Love Tractor. The Barbecue Killers. It was the center of the college rock universe before Nirvana moved everything to Seattle.
I was eighteen years old and I had landed exactly where I wanted to be.
I met him through a mutual friend.
He was quiet. Preppy, in a way that should have put me off — I was very committed to my townie aesthetic at the time. He had a soft voice and a South Georgia drawl. His energy was gentle, but masculine in a way I didn't have language for yet.
I noticed his eyelashes first. Then his hands. His knuckles were knotty in a way I found inexplicably appealing.
He was not at all what I imagined I would want in a boyfriend.
We didn't start out as roommates.
We both lived in separate rooms in a massive, near-Brutalist dorm that reminded me of a Soviet-era apartment building. (No shade to those with wonderful memories of Russell Hall.) At winter break, we both applied to move into Reed — the co-ed dorm with the old architecture, the one that actually looked like a college brochure. We requested to share a room. New friends, with friends in common.
What happened next is harder to explain with a clean timeline.
We started fooling around organically. There wasn't a single moment where I thought, *oh, this is something.* It was more like — we'd come back to the room after a night out, a little buzzed, half-dressed. We'd lie on the bottom bunk together, touching in ways that seemed incidental, then accidental-on-purpose, until finally the sexual tension was overwhelming and we ended up making out.
We didn't acknowledge it to each other.
And I didn't talk to any of my friends about what was going on with him.
I kept him at arm's length emotionally even while everything else was happening — for some of the same reasons Huck does in the book, though in real life it went on considerably longer and got a lot messier.
I moved out of the dorm into an apartment with some guys for the summer. There was no privacy. But he went home, and there were obviously fewer opportunities for us to hook up anyway.
Then the following year I moved in with some girlfriends, and he started coming over. A lot. Regularly.
It became pretty obvious to my housemates what was happening, even without a label.
Then winter break. A whole month apart.
We wrote to each other. Actual handwritten letters, sent through the mail. I wish I still had them. Somewhere in those pages, we started saying the things we hadn't been able to say in person.
We both came back early for New Year's Eve.
We did ecstasy. Lit a ridiculous number of candles. Put on Dead Can Dance. And in the kitchen of the little cottage I shared with the girls, we said *I love you* for the first time.
I want to be clear — I never experimented with substances to disconnect. For me it was the opposite — a way to plug into something bigger, a search for the divine, the magical, the permission to be honest. We were not out of our right minds. We were free of our inhibitions. That's different.
It took us about sixteen months from the night we met to the night we called ourselves a couple. In college, that’s a long time — enough semesters for social circles to shift, for the rhythm of your daily life to change more than once.
The relationship eventually ended while we were still living together, which I'll leave for another story. We loved each other. We had pets. We had a whole life — the kind where, in another timeline, we stay together, maybe even marry. It was complicated and painful and, looking back, completely inevitable that it unraveled the way it did.
But I've always known my first love was a romance novel.
I don't mean it felt like one. I mean it had all the architecture — the slow burn, the mutual pining, the things left unsaid for too long, the moment the dam finally broke. I was aware of it even while it was happening, this sense that I was living something I would someday want to write.
Those Eyes, That Mouth is not a memoir. Nathan and Huck are not us, exactly — in some cases they carry reverse versions of our traits, or similar characteristics in different proportions. I built a world from the trappings of my memories and cast two entirely invented young men to inhabit it.
But the dorm room is real. The scene is real. The music is real. The particular way you can fall for someone while pretending to yourself that you aren't — that's real.
I like to think maybe Huck and Nathan reach the Happily Ever After we were too young and too scared to find in real life — the version of us who made better choices, hurt each other less, and ended up together.
This was the perfect story for the first audiobook I ever narrated.
I'm a gay man writing male/male romance from my lived experience — my real friends, my real loves, the real places we inhabited.
Entirely made up. Essentially true.
Those Eyes, That Mouth — the first novella in the Cool Town series — is available now.