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any other way.
    “How long before the supplies arrive?” Derek took a sip of his coffee as he turned around to face Sambit.
    “They said it would be at least an hour,” Sambit answered. “I asked them to bring dog food as well as food for us. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, but we can’t stay healthy for long on vending machine snacks and soda.”
    “If the machines even work still,” Derek agreed. “If we’ve got time to kill, I suppose we should figure out what kind of living quarters we’ll have.”
    “This is it, I think,” Sambit said. “They’re bringing cots, they said, but we’ll have to set them up wherever we can find space. The roads are washed out, and even if they weren’t, we’d have to go a hundred miles or more inland to find a hotel that has power and isn’t damaged. College Station is a hundred fifty miles from the coast, and we got slammed. The eye passed directly over Bay City. There’s nowhere left around here.”
    “Well, shit,” Derek said, ignoring Sambit’s flinch. “I guess I’d better stake my spot out now before we get invaded by whoever they’re sending to work with us.” He dug in his laptop bag and pulled out his magazine, flipping through it until he found the pinups. Pulling them out carefully, he grabbed some thumbtacks from the bulletin board and used them to hang the images in one corner of the break room. “There, my own personal little sanctuary.”
    “Are you trying to offend people?” Sambit asked.
    “Everywhere I go, I’m bombarded with images of half-dressed or naked women,” Derek said. “The world assumes all men will find such things attractive. If it’s all right for me to be subjected to images for their titillation, then it’s fine for me to post images for mine as well.”
    “I’m pretty sure that constitutes sexual harassment,” Sambit pointed out.
    “What are they going to do?” Derek scoffed. “Fire me? Fine, I’ll take Fido and go home. I do have a house and a life to go back to. Oh, and a job that actually pays me instead of this one that I’m doing out of the kindness of my heart since I can’t get to Clear Lake and NASA at the moment.”
    “Why are you like this?” Sambit asked softly. “Why are you determined to anger everyone around you? Putting that much negative energy out into the world is sure to bring it back on you someday.”
    “I’m just sending back all the negative energy the world sends at me.” Derek knew his voice sounded mocking, but he couldn’t stop the reflexive defense mechanism he had developed after enduring years of taunts in high school for being too smart—and too gay—to fit in with the rest of his classmates. They’d taught him all too well that the best defense was a good offense, and if that meant being offensive, he could live with that. He was living on his terms, and that was all that mattered. “They take one look at this bracelet around my wrist and think they know who I am.”
    “And you do nothing to prove them wrong,” Sambit said, indicating the pictures with a wave of his hand. “Indeed, you do everything you can to prove them right.”
    “What’s to prove?” Derek challenged. “I’m gay. I like dick.”
    “As is your right,” Sambit replied with that infuriating calm that made Derek want to see him flustered. “That doesn’t mean you have to advertise the fact. Why does it matter if they know you’re gay? It’s not any of their business.”
    “Easy for you to say,” Derek said. “I’ll bet you’ve got a pretty little wife and five kids stashed away in College Station. You’ve never done anything unexpected. I know your type.”
    “Perhaps you do,” Sambit said, “but you don’t know me. You’re making the same kinds of assumptions about me that you say the world makes about you. You assume I’m married because Indian men usually marry by the time they’re thirty and I passed that marker a few years ago. You assume I have a family because you