Chapter 2: Study group
The fluorescent lights in the classroom buzzed like angry insects. Xairo kept his head down, tracing the grain of the fake wood desk with a fingernail. Four days. It had been four days since the party, since the hallway, since he’d run into the night feeling like his skin was on fire. He’d avoided every common area, skipped the cafeteria, and arrived to classes exactly on time to slip into the back. He felt raw, like a live wire stripped of its insulation.
“Alright, listen up,” Professor Garza’s voice cut through the murmurs. “Midterm project. Groups of two. Analyzing the economic impact of a local industry. You’ll find your partner on the sheet being passed around. No swaps.”
A groan rippled through the room. Xairo’s heart did a sickening lurch. He didn’t believe in signs, but he believed in shitty luck.
The paper landed on his desk. He looked down.
Ara, Xairo – Mae, Kayden.
The letters swam. He closed his eyes for a second, willing it to change. When he opened them, it was still there, a death sentence in Times New Roman.
A chair scraped beside him. He didn’t need to look. He could feel him. That same clean, sharp scent cutting through the classroom’s smell of dust and whiteboard markers.
“Guess we’re stuck with each other,” Kayden said. His voice was flat, devoid of its usual easy charm.
Xairo finally glanced over. Kayden looked tired. There were faint shadows under his eyes, and he was staring straight ahead at the professor, his jaw set. He looked like a stranger, and that was somehow worse.
“Guess so,” Xairo muttered.
They didn’t speak again for the rest of the hour. The silence between them was a physical wall, dense and suffocating.
The library was supposed to be neutral ground. Quiet, academic, safe. It wasn’t.
They’d chosen a table in a secluded corner, surrounded by towering shelves of outdated law journals. The only sound was the distant shuffle of feet and the relentless hum of the air conditioner. Xairo had his notebook open, a pen clutched so tight his knuckles were white. Kayden was scrolling through his phone, the glow illuminating his face.
“We should pick the industry,” Xairo said, because the silence was killing him. “Cannabis. It’s got clear tax revenue streams, job growth metrics.”
“Fine.” Kayden didn’t look up.
“I can pull the state fiscal reports. You could handle the interviews with dispensary owners or something.”
“Or something.” Kayden put his phone down. He leaned back, the chair groaning. He looked at Xairo then, really looked at him, and his eyes were hard. “You gonna be able to work on this? Or you gonna bolt again if I reach for a pencil?”
The words were a slap. Xairo felt the heat rise up his neck. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Barely. You’ve been vibrating like a tuning fork since I sat down.” Kayden leaned forward, lowering his voice. It wasn’t flirtatious. It was angry. “What was that, Xairo? At the party. You kiss me like you’re trying to start a fight, then you look at me like I’m a monster and run. You want to explain that?”
“There’s nothing to explain,” Xairo hissed, glancing around to ensure they were alone. “It was a mistake. I was drunk.”
“You weren’t that drunk.” Kayden’s laugh was short, humorless. “I was there. I remember.”
“Yeah, well, you seemed pretty busy with other people that night,” Xairo snapped, the image of the blonde in the bathroom flashing behind his eyes. The jealousy was ugly and instant, and he wielded it like a weapon. “Wouldn’t want to interfere with your… roster. Must be hard keeping track of all of them. How do you manage, Mae? A spreadsheet?”
He saw the hurt flicker across Kayden’s face, fast and then buried under a cold mask. It should have felt like a victory. It felt like ash in his mouth.
“Fuck you,” Kayden said, quiet and precise.
“Just stating facts. You’ve got a reputation.”
“You don’t know shit about my reputation,” Kayden shot back, his voice still low but intense. “You see what I let you see. You think I wanted to be in that bathroom?”
The question hung there, shocking in its honesty. Xairo had no answer. He just stared.
A loud, grating buzz echoed through the library, followed by a voice on the PA. “The library will close in fifteen minutes. Please bring all materials to the circulation desk.”
They both blinked, the spell of their anger broken. They’d gotten nothing done. No plan, no roles, nothing.
“Great,” Xairo muttered, slamming his notebook shut.
Kayden ran a hand over his face, the anger seeming to drain out of him, replaced by a weary frustration. “We need a place to finish this. My house. My cousins are there with my tía and tío. It’s… public. Safe.” He loaded the last word with a bitter edge. “You can’t run from a project, Ara. Your scholarship depends on grades, right?”
It was a low blow, referencing the thing Xairo was most anxious about. It was also effective. Xairo nodded, a tight, jerky motion. “Fine. Text me the address.”
Kayden’s house was a small, cluttered stucco box in a neighborhood of identical stucco boxes, but it glowed with warm light. The smell hit Xairo first—simmering beans, fried onions, the sweet tang of Coca-Cola. It was a smell from his own childhood, comforting and somehow accusatory.
Music floated from inside—not party music, but the complex, soulful strains of a Banda song, all brass and accordion.
“They practice on Thursdays,” Kayden said shortly, unlocking the front door. He didn’t meet Xairo’s eyes.
The living room was a comforting chaos. Soccer trophies lined a shelf. A worn Virgin de Guadalupe candle flickered on the TV stand. On the sofa, an older couple—Kayden’s aunt and uncle—watched a telenovela, nodding politely as the boys walked in.
In the center of the room, two guys were tangled in cables and instruments. One was crouched by an amplifier, his back to them, tools scattered around him. He had kind eyes when he glanced up and smiled. That must be Ricardo, the mechanic.
The other was standing, holding an accordion. He was taller, with a sharper face and a permanent sneer that seemed etched into his features. Hector. His eyes landed on Xairo, and the sneer deepened.
“Éste, who’s the guest?” Hector said, his voice loud over the fading notes from his accordion.
“Group project,” Kayden said, his tone leaving no room for discussion. “We’re using the kitchen table.”
“Hope you’re not the brains of the operation,” Hector called after them, a mean chuckle in his voice. “Kayden’s about as smart as a bag of rocks.”
Ricardo shook his head, offering Xairo an apologetic half-smile. “Ignore him. He’s in a mood ‘cause his girlfriend’s mad at him. Hi, I’m Ricardo.”
“Xairo,” he managed, feeling profoundly out of place.
The kitchen was warmer, brighter. Papers were spread across a laminate table covered with a plastic floral tablecloth. They got to work, or pretended to. The earlier fight had left a minefield between them, and every conversation was a careful step.
“So, the tax revenue from the first quarter…” Xairo started.
From the living room, Hector’s voice rose, complaining to Ricardo about the song arrangement. “—sounds like fucking dog shit, bro. You’re playing it like a pussy.”
“Play it your way, then,” Ricardo’s calm reply.
“My way is the right way. Your way is what happens when you get soft. University girl sucking your brain out through your—”
“¡Hector! Language!” their tía snapped from the couch.
Hector lowered his voice, but it still carried. “Whatever. This is why the group’s going nowhere. No balls.”
Kayden was staring at his laptop screen, but his posture was rigid. Xairo could see the muscle working in his jaw. He was embarrassed. This was his family, this loud, messy, cruel normalcy.
“Your cousins are… something,” Xairo said before he could stop himself.
Kayden finally looked at him. The mask was back, that charming, unflappable shield. But Xairo had seen behind it now, in the hallway, in the library. He knew it was just plywood and glue.
“They’re family,” Kayden said, a simple, unarguable statement. He held Xairo’s gaze for a beat too long, and in that moment, the noise of the house, the music, Hector’s grating voice, all of it faded. There was just the memory of the hallway, the taste of tequila and desperation, and the silent, screaming question that hung between them in the brightly lit kitchen.
Then Hector’s accordion wheezed to life again, a loud, discordant blast, and the moment shattered.
“Let’s just get this done,” Kayden said, turning back to his screen, his voice hollow.
Xairo looked down at his notes, the words blurring. He was in Kayden’s house, surrounded by the sounds and smells of his life, and he felt further away from him than ever. And Hector’s mocking laughter from the other room felt like a warning he couldn’t quite decipher.
And Hector’s mocking laughter from the other room felt like a warning he couldn’t quite decipher.
Xairo tried to focus on the spreadsheet glowing on his laptop. Municipal tax codes blurred into grey nonsense. He became aware of another instrument layering under the accordion’s whine and Ricardo’s soft vocal warm-ups. A deep, resonant thrum of bass notes, foundational and steady. It was coming from the corner near the sofa.
He glanced up.
Kayden’s uncle had shifted on the couch, revealing the instrument propped against the wall. A sunburst Fender bass guitar. Then Ricardo said, “Your turn, primo. Nail the riff or I’m giving your solo to Hector.”
Kayden didn’t look up from his laptop. “In a minute,” he said, his voice tight.
Xairo stared at him. The pieces clicked into place with an almost audible snap. The Thursday practices. The bass line. Kayden, who moved with a musician’s easy rhythm, was part of it. He was in the banda. The realization was strangely intimate, like discovering a secret room in a house you thought you knew.
“You play,” Xairo said. It wasn’t a question.
Kayden finally met his eyes, a defiant glint in them. “Yeah. So?”
“Nothing. Just… didn’t know.” Xairo looked back at his screen, but the numbers were impossible now. His mind was a riot of contradictions. The ‘ladies man’ who played in a banda with his cousins. The guy who kissed him back in a hallway with a desperate, surrendering sound. Who was he?
The living room noise escalated. Hector was arguing with Ricardo about a chord change, his voice a grating saw. “That’s not how it goes, pendejo! You’re making it sound like a nursery rhyme!”
“It’s called harmony, Hector,” Ricardo shot back, exasperated.
“It’s called being a bitch.”
Kayden let out a sharp breath. He pushed his chair back, the legs scraping loudly on the linoleum. “I can’t think with this.”
He stood up and pulled his gray sweater over his head in one frustrated, fluid motion.
Xairo’s pen stopped moving.
Underneath, Kayden wore a simple white muscle shirt. The thin cotton stretched across the defined plane of his chest and shoulders. His arms were bare, the smooth, dark brown skin carved with lean muscle from the bass, from labor, from living. The two moles on his neck were fully visible now, a dark constellation against his skin.
Xairo’s mouth went dry. The library, the classroom, the entire world narrowed to the line of Kayden’s collarbone, the shift of trapezius muscle as he tossed the sweater onto a chair. He remembered the feel of those arms, the solidness of that chest under his hands. His own skin prickled with a heat that had nothing to do with the warm kitchen.
Kayden sank back into his chair, oblivious to the earthquake he’d just triggered. He ran a hand through his hair. “Let’s just try to power through the methodology section.”
Xairo tried. He genuinely tried to form a sentence about qualitative versus quantitative data. But every thought dissolved before it reached his tongue, scorched away by the sensory memory of their kiss and the overwhelming present of Kayden’s physicality beside him. The quiet tap of Kayden’s fingers on the keyboard was a drumbeat syncing with Xairo’s pulse.
In the living room, Hector launched into the accordion part with aggressive, stomping volume. The television blared a commercial. Someone turned the amplifier up. The noise became a solid wall of sound, vibrating the plates in the kitchen cupboard.
“Jesus Christ,” Kayden muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked at Xairo, a desperate apology in his eyes. “This is useless. We’ll get nothing done here.”
He stood again, gathering his laptop and their scattered papers. “We can go to my room. It’s quieter. If… if that’s okay.”
The offer hung in the air, thick with all the things they weren’t saying. A room. A closed door. The memory of the last time they were alone in a hallway.
Xairo knew he should say no. He should invent an excuse, any excuse. His scholarship. The game. Hector’s sneer. Isaac’s warning about playing with fire.
He looked at Kayden standing there, muscles tense under thin cotton, an island of quiet hope in the storm of his family’s noise. He thought of the bass guitar waiting in the corner, another hidden piece of him.
“Yeah,” Xairo heard himself say, his voice rough. “Okay.”
He followed Kayden down a short, dark hallway, away from the chaos. Kayden shouldered open a door, reaching in to flip on a light. He moved inside, making space.
Xairo stepped over the threshold. The room smelled like Kayden—that cologne, laundry soap, the faint, clean scent of his skin. It was neat, with soccer posters and a simple bed.
Kayden pushed the door closed behind them.
The roar of the banda, the argument, the television—it all muted to a distant rumble. In its place was a ringing, fragile silence. They were alone.
They were alone. The door clicked shut, sealing them in a space that suddenly felt both smaller and vast. Kayden’s room was a snapshot of contradictions—a made bed, a bass guitar in the corner, textbooks stacked neatly beside a cluster of soccer trophies. The noise from the living room was a muffled, distant storm.
“Floor’s better,” Kayden said, his voice quieter now. He slid down the wall to sit on the worn tan carpet, setting his laptop beside him. “More space to spread this mess out.”
Xairo hesitated, then joined him, keeping a careful foot of carpet between them. The fibers were rough under his palms. He opened his notebook, the act feeling absurdly formal. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the scratch of Xairo’s pen, the tap of Kayden’s keys, and the faint thump of music through the wall. Xairo lost himself in the data, the solid logic of numbers a temporary refuge.
Then he felt it. The silence between their focused noises, dense and loaded. He was hyper-aware of Kayden’s bent knee, inches from his own, of the heat radiating from him. The room was warm, stuffy with closed-door air and the residual energy from their history.
A trickle of sweat traced a path down his spine. Without thinking, Xairo grabbed the hem of his hoodie and pulled it over his head. His t-shirt rode up with the motion, exposing a strip of his lower stomach—a flash of brown skin, the lean line of muscle leading down.
Kayden’s typing stopped. Xairo felt the weight of his gaze before he heard the low, teasing chuckle.
“You tryna be slutty or what?” Kayden commented, his voice a rough mix of amusement and something darker.