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It is a truth universally acknowledged that, on the first nice day of the year, inhabitants of New York City spend as much time outside as physically possible.
Alex had thought, once he’d finally taken the Bar in February, that some light might seep back into his previously dark life. But the cruel New York winter had dragged on, with seemingly no end to the months-long build up of dirty snow in sight. Nora and June had brought him out to celebrate his birthday, but beyond that he’d spent most of the last month and a half recuperating from the sleep deprivation experiment that was law school and the studying that followed.
Mid-April comes, bringing with it enough rain to melt the last of the slush away and tax season and baseball games WASPy Hunter won’t quit inviting him to, and then finally some fucking sunshine to warm his Texan blood. Unable to start his new job until his test results come in, Alex has nothing better to do than sit in his apartment and wait for a single email to make or break his career.
Even June and Nora have started boycotting him until the test results come.
“No can do, Alejandro,” Nora had said when he’d group facetimed them last night to ask if they wanted to get coffee today. “You’re too high-strung even without the extra caffeine. Call us once you’ve passed.”
“Sorry, little Bit. She’s right. Why don’t you find a Zumba class or something to get rid of some extra energy,” June agreed.
And the worst part is that it’s getting to the point that even he is getting tired of the full body flinches that happen every time his phone vibrates, so Alex decides to go on yet another run despite having just went last night.
He does his normal route once and he’s still on edge—he will be until his results come in, but if maybe if he makes his heels bleed again he’ll be momentarily distracted by the pain—but the weather finally caught word that it’s spring, so he keeps going and starts his loop again. It’s warm and it’s sunny with just the slightest breeze to keep the air from being too stale and Alex can finally wear his favorite shorts with the 5” inseam that he knows show off just how good his ass is without freezing to death. The trees along his route have seemingly started budding overnight and he passes more than one person adding flowers to their windowsills. Beyoncé released an album that is literally made for him that’s blasting in his airpods as he jogs through the streets of Brooklyn.
For the first time in weeks, months, maybe even years, Alex’s mind is almost quiet. He’s almost able to forget that everything he’s been working toward is either about to crumble or he’s going to reach the first peak on a hike toward making partner before thirty. He almost forgets that he’ll get to officially accept the offer for his dream job at Bankston, Srivastava, & Associates, or he’ll have to go back to studying eighteen hours a day and falling down a hyperfocus spiral on Web MD while trying to decide if what he’s experiencing is caffeine poisoning or a panic attack.
Almost. When his phone vibrates, though, he can’t help but immediately reach for it where it’s shoved in his tiny back shorts pocket.
It’s probably Nora complaining about her coworker, or maybe a news push notification, but he has to check just to be one hundred percent sure even if it’s a pain to get out. His false sense of security comes to a skidding halt as Alex sees the email from The New York Board of Bar Examiners. He tries to come to a skidding halt, too, and promptly eats shit at the base of a brownstone he would probably admire if he weren’t too busy scrambling to open the email.
“Fucking mothershitting fuck, open you absolute piece of–” Alex jumps back to his feet as he types in his passcode after face ID fails twice, ignoring the pain on his shin and his palm is now bleeding where he’d attempted to catch himself, and looks around. He has to tell somebody, but there’s nobody in the vicinity, and this is New York City so they’d probably ignore him even if there were anybody, but still . He turns in a full circle and at last sees a Ring doorbell on the door of the brownstone he’s loitering in front of, and Alex proudly tells the owner of the beautiful house, “I just passed the Bar!”
He just passed the Bar.
He passed the motherfucking Bar. And he needs to get home to clean up the blood currently dripping down his wrist, and call June, and email his scary new boss Zahra with his results, so before he can think about how weird it is that he told a complete stranger the best news of his life before his family he nods once and runs off again.
It becomes a bit of a habit. The next time he runs past he doesn’t have any life changing updates, but he can’t help the grin that comes over his face when he passes the place where he learned all his hard work paid off. He slows as he approaches the brownstone and puts on his most charming smile as he pauses.
“Have a good day!”
He loosens his tie, comes to a complete stop in front of the brownstone’s bottom step, and with a deep sigh complains, “Worst date of my fucking life.”
“I swear to god the forecast was clear,” he grumbles two days later, drenched to the bone with curls plastered to his forehead.
He runs by a week later and says, “Start my first big boy job tomorrow! Please send thoughts and prayers.”
…
“My sister is the devil. I’d kill for her.”
…
“I’ll reform gerrymandering laws in Texas before I die—mark my words. Unrelated, I may also have had too much Whiskey tonight.”
…
“This is Nora! Say hi, Nora.” “What is actually wrong with you?”
…
“Hey, sweetheart. If you haven’t watched Succession, started binging it this weekend and highly recommend.”
…
Alex is running a little too fast for how hot it is—he’s only a few minutes into his run and there’s already sweat glistening on every surface of his skin, practically pasting his shirt to his chest—but he has to get to the brownstone to tell his… well, whatever the person who may or may not listen to his rambling is to him, about his terrifying turkey run-in over the 4th of July lake house trip.
Nora and June make fun of his inability to make friends a lot, and more recently also about how weird it is that when he did make one it was a doorbell. And while he’d never admit it to them, Alex is almost is almost afraid he’s getting actually attached to this fucking doorbell and the idea of whoever lives behind it. They’ve never turned on the microphone and told him to stop, at any rate.
He’s unwilling to more deeply inspect what it means that he’s a little bit worried about being too much for a stranger who just happens to own the house that is quickly becoming one of his favorite places in Brooklyn.
When he reaches the stoop, Alex is already starting to talk a mile a minute, saying, “You will never guess what happened this–” when the door opens.
Out walks the most beautiful man he’s ever seen. Alex is mostly straight, but this man is just, like, objectively hot. He tries to bite down on his lip, but before he can conjure up any sort of filter he’s saying, “Oh, you’re hot.”
“Er, pardon?”
“You—I, um. Sorry. Hi.” His brownstone friend is hot and apparently British, and Alex really needs to do something with his hands, so he runs one through his curls while he tangles the other in his t-shirt hem and tries not to think about the pretty blush painting this guy’s cheeks. “I’m Alex, I run by here sometimes and—”
“Sorry, I really need to get out of here,” the man says, locking the door behind him before half-walking and half-jogging down the steps.
Alex is too dumbfounded to say anything else by the time the man is halfway down the block. He’s also weirdly gutted and unable to continue on his run if he doesn’t want to have to pass the pretty Brit in a few seconds, so he turns and walks back to his apartment.
He spends entirely too much time pacing back and forth once he gets inside, trying to pinpoint exactly what’s bothering him. When he can’t, Alex gets in the shower hoping it will distract him. He’s still worked up from both the run and the adrenaline rush and consequential crash from his run-in at the brownstone, so he’s not exactly surprised when his hand trails down his body and takes his already half-hard cock in his hand. He is, however, a little surprised when he nearly loses his balance just a few minutes later from the sheer force of the orgasm brought on by picturing very specific blonde, tousled hair and the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.
After he calms down and finishes washing off, Alex throws on a clean pair of boxers and is calling Nora before he can second guess anything more.
The call connects and before she can even greet him, Alex blurts out, “Numbers on me being into dudes?”
“Seventy-eight percent probability of latent bisexual tendencies,” she says. “One hundred percent probability this is not a hypothetical question.”
“I saw the guy.”
“What guy?”
“The guy from the brownstone.”
Nora is quiet for a long time. For once Alex doesn’t know how to fill the silence.
“Annnnnnd,” she eventually prompts.
“And, he practically ran down the street with his stupid long legs in his stupidly perfect skinny-cut tapered fucking grey chinos to get away from me, so nothing, I guess.”
“Not nothing,” she argues. “I’ve been waiting for a sexuality crisis to hit you over the head for, like, three years at least. That’s not nothing.”
“So you think I’m having a sexuality crisis?”
“I think only you can decide if you are actually—and I quote—” Nora puts on her best fake-Alex voice. “‘into dudes,’ but I can tell you that not very many straight men would be this upset about their meet-cute gone wrong with another man.”
“Right, I gotta go. Thanks, Nora.”
“Alex, wait—”
“Talk to you later,” he says, immediately hanging up.
He spends the rest of the night thinking about his run and his conversation with Nora. When he still can’t sleep after lying in bed for hours, he rolls out of bed and flips on his desk lamp and writes a detailed pro-con list about every possible response to the situation, and then finally crashes. Alex is practically useless the next day at work, but somehow he makes it through without bursting at the seams or alerting Zahra that something is amiss, and as soon as he’s done for the night he walks straight to the brownstone with the plan he’d worked out and a whole lot of hope.
“So, I guess you could say I’m bisexual?” He says once he gets, there taking a deep breath and looking directly into the camera. “No, that’s not right—it’s not a question. I am bisexual. At least if the shower I… nevermind. You don’t need to, uh. Right, so like I said. I’m Alex, and I’m bisexual, and I’ve become weirdly attached to talking to you through this doorbell for the last several months. And I don’t know if you’ve listened to me rambling or if you even like men, but anyway. I just… needed to tell you, even though you were basically, like, the biggest douche of all time yesterday.”
Alex had hoped that if he’d laid all of this out there, the door would open again and the man would walk out and put a natural stop to his soliloquy, but after a moment of nothing he realizes that’s likely not going to happen. He also realizes that he’s behaving a little bit like a stalker.
“Right. Okay, so, I’ll stop loitering on your step now. Have a good day.”
Turning on his foot, Alex starts the walk back to his apartment—dreading the need to find an alternate running route so that he never has to step foot on this portion of the sidewalk again.
“Alex, wait!”
He’d kind of assumed that he’d built up just how beautiful this man is in some sort of retrospective sexual crisis rose-tinted glasses, but nope. No, he’s just as (or maybe more) pretty than he was the day before, jumping down his steps in nothing but a pair of cotton shorts and plain white t-shirt.
As he turns back at the sound of his name, Alex can’t help the grin that slides onto his face.
“Hi,” he says when the man pauses a few feet away. Alex assumed he’d have something to say after running out here, but the man stays quiet long enough that Alex is concerned that maybe what he has to say is of the please-stop-trespassing variety. “Are you–”
“–gay as a maypole!” he interrupts dramatically.
Alex can’t help the snort that escapes his lips.
“I, um, I don’t know what that is.”
A soft smile spreads across his face, and Alex’s eyes can’t help but focus in on his lips. He sounds downright fond as he says, “You bloody Americans. As thick as they get.”
And then he steps forward and kisses Alex within an inch of his life.
Eventually they both pull back from fully making out on the sidewalk when somebody loudly clears their throat as they try to step around them, and they both struggle not to laugh as they try to catch their breath. Alex can’t help but sneak one more quick peck once they do.
The man runs a hand through his still perfectly styled hair—Alex is sure his curls are disheveled from stray hands running through them, but he can’t seem to care—and clears his throat. “Would you, er… like to come in? Maybe tell me about whatever thing I would never guess happened?”
He could be about to be ax-murdered. The beautiful brownstone could have a literal dungeon. Maybe, though he somehow already doubts it, this guy could be the most boring, cookie-cutter prince charming out there. Alex doesn’t really care.
“That sounds great,” Alex says, and then the perfect smile on the man’s face turns even brighter as he turns back toward his house and holds his hand out to Alex. Before he links their fingers he says, “Uh, one more thing, though.”
“Yes, anything at all,” he says seriously.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”