Going Up! Read Online Free PDF Page B

without hope or color, he got home one Friday evening and was getting on the elevator just when Sean was getting out.
    Sean was dressed nicely—slacks and a sweater, with the familiar peacoat and bright-red scarf over his arm, and there was a stocky, powerfully built man in a suit standing behind him with a hand in the small of his back.
    Sean and Zach stared at each other for a minute, and Zach figured this was it. The moment his heart really did blow away, and he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Except that couldn’t be right because it was thundering in his ears.
    “Hi,” he said, feeling lame.
    “Hi,” Sean said, his sand-colored brows puckering in the middle. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
    “Luck of the elevator,” Zach lied, and Sean nodded like that had to be the case and Zach couldn’t have possibly been avoiding him. That was enough for Zach—this sucked; this hurt horribly. This right here was the reason a flirtation on an elevator was the closest he’d come to a real relationship since he’d gone down on his roommate in college.
    “Well, you know, maybe the elevator can stop avoiding me,” Sean said, and he was the one who sounded put out.
    “Well, maybe it could stop pretending I have the plague,” Zach said sharply.
    “Well maybe— ” and Sean’s mouth was quirking up, like he knew this was a silly conversation to be having right now, and Zach was dying for his response, when the man behind him spoke up.
    “Sean, we’re going to be late. These tickets were expensive!”
    Sean grimaced at Zach and then turned toward his date. “Yeah, sorry.” The elevator was still standing there, open, and Zach moved toward it automatically. He turned around at the last minute, before the doors started to close, and saw that Sean had turned around too.
    “So, see you around?” Sean said hopefully, and Zach smiled.
    “Yeah. Yeah. See you around.”
     
     
    H E DIDN ’ T want to completely ditch Quent and Jace—he’d started to feel like they might be friends too, like Leah and Jenn, and seriously, how had he lived for thirty-three years without friends? So he compromised. He left early two days a week and took the express all the way down, and then left a little late three days a week and switched elevators at the nineteenth floor. He managed to catch his friends on the two days (because apparently Jace was made out of clockwork parts and would never be late, rushed, or anything but perfectly attired) and maybe, once or twice a week, Sean managed to make it into the elevator on time.
    It was just enough to feed Zach’s quiet obsession with him.
    He saw Sean dressed in his Renaissance gear three times—apparently Romeo and Juliet was big in middle schools in the spring. He saw him dressed as a 1950s biker once—S.E. Hinton was also big in middle schools—with his blond hair slicked back and only a highly lacquered cluster of curls allowed to escape out the front. Zach also saw him dressed as a WWI soldier, because some sadist made eighth graders read All’s Quiet on the Western Front, and Jesus, didn’t those kids deserve a good laugh after that!
    And Zach saw him on the last day of school, ebullient because the teacher who had been gone for the second half of the semester and given him access to the job had filed for a two-year leave of absence, and Sean could count on being able to pay his bills.
    “So, what are you going to do for the summer?” Zach asked. He racked his brains, wondering if they had an internship or a gopher position or if they had the budget for a guy to go get coffee or—
    “Theater tech!” Sean said gleefully. “I don’t get to dress up, but Katie has me signed up for three shows—the money’s not great, but it’ll keep me in Top Ramen until August!”
    “School starts in August?” Appalling. Absolutely appalling—at least private schools waited until after Labor Day!
    “Yup. Two months of theater, and suddenly I’ll be a real