excerpted from the beginning
"Stop looking at me like that. You wanted to come along." Jim continued to carefully circle the table of folded shirts, fingering and musing on them. He hesitated on one, sniffed. Its undefinably irritating scents entered him, an inhalation of molecules, the kind Sandburg was always going on about, and it struck him again, as it had been lately, that it was possible to be too conscious of things. Stuff. The world. Molecules entering his body. What was that? It was like some alien invasion. Tension pulled at his brows like a needle drawing thread.
"Of course I wanted to come along. I want to be here. But every time I start looking at the labels, you freak out."
"You're carrying a binder, Sandburg." Jim glared at him. "The salesgirls are staring."
The fluorescent lights did cruelty to Sandburg's face, tinting his skin yellow, green and tired; the department store was a catalytic hell for Jim's senses, and in it all of Sandburg was magnified. He seemed part of the mixing light and scents, and Jim hated that. He couldn't focus. The other man's hair was messy today, his clothes rumpled. An old backpack was slung over his shoulders, straps frayed. His sneakers were ancient relics, ingrained with sweat, mud, saltwater. Tramp shoes. These were good Sandburg elements and Jim could have twined his attention into this familiar, material chaos if not for the jungle of fifty thousand fucking shirts they were trapped in.
"Jim, they're staring at the six-pack strapped under your ribs, man, and nothing else. Chill."
Jim's cheeks heated, and his temper flirted with distraction. "Right." The salesgirls were talking about boyfriends and cheesecake, and comparing their values on a quality-of-life scale. Cheesecake pulled rank. It was no longer shocking to Jim that women talked like this regularly.
Light stroked his peripheral vision; he glanced up. The tilt of Blair's glasses as he looked through his binder. The disruptive movement of his curls. He was muttering.
"I'm still freaked out by this. I'm surprised you don't break out in hives every time you get dressed. I don't even know what good this is going to do. I'm thinkin' we should just find you something you want to wear and, like, wash it fifty times in pure water."
"Hell of a waste." He picked up a light, green sweater. "I like this."
Blair looked up. "Read the tag."
Patiently, unnecessarily, Jim flipped the tag into view. "It's one-hundred percent cotton."
"Good, good! Um...okay. The usual bleach and dye job, chlorine, acids. Probably a nonionic softener, silicone defoamer, flame-retardant, a fluorocarbon finish that would have been washed out, a dye-carrier based on an aromatic ester--"
"Do you even know what all that means?"
Blair broke off. "More or less."
A glint of annoyance caught Jim's attention, something in Blair's voice, smell. Even his glasses seemed to flash the message asshole. Jim almost smiled.
"So how do those feel? Do you smell anything on the sweater that bugs you?"
"Is that the scientific term--bugs me?" Jim said, sniffing absently. It smelled like a headache, but so did everything else in the place. Somewhere on the other side of the store a child screeched, and the whole building rang like an animal's cage with that juvenile fury.
"Stop yanking my chain."
"Chief, I wouldn't know an aromatic ester if it walked up and gave me a kiss."
Blair smiled goodnaturedly back at that, stroked back some loose hair. "Okay, I wouldn't either. Just go with your instincts."
"Maybe we should get one of those electronic noses you were talking about the other day."
Blair, the picture of disheveled encouragement, came nearer, bringing with him a fuzzy corona of oranges and warmth, tendriled with all his hundred other scents. "Jim, please. You're driving me crazy here. Focus, man, focus."
"Hmmm," Jim said vaguely. Blair was peering down at the sweater as if it were a prospective pet. His hair was close, and Jim could have brushed his face into the edge of the cloud, if he'd bent a few inches. His nose peeled away layers of sage, coriander, almond, the green products of a little green man. Coriander was the motif of his deoderant. It was disturbing on some level to know the exact name for the scent of your roommate's deoderant. What a weird private history they had, when you thought about it. He tried not to--but how many tests had he done over the past few years, learning the names for everything that touched his senses? Coriander. Once you'd pegged that, it was hard to shake loose the word. Not to mention motif. He'd made the mistake of telling Simon one day that his cologne had a motif of bergamot. In return he'd received a penetrating, alpha-dog stare that said back off, I didn't invite you to sniff me. True, Simon had eventually lightened up, but that was even worse; the chuckles and ragging had lasted weeks. Simon commenting thoughtfully on the motif of his coffee, the motif of Jim's sweater. The motif of his danish. Cheese. The motif of the weather. Rain.
"You want to try that on?"
"I don’t need to. I know what fits."
"Jim, you never wear half the things you buy. The dressing room is nothing to fear, man."
The remark invited parry. "A real man only needs to visit the dressing room when he’s buying a suit," Jim said, keeping his voice offhand as if he truly believed this small gem of wisdom that seemed like something his father would say, and maybe had.
"Ri-ii-iight," Blair drawled. "I try on clothes, Jim."
Jim raised his eyebrows, mugged a bit and made an expansive hand gesture. "Hey, if you're going to step right into it...." Blair took the sweater from Jim's indecisive hands, tossed it over his shoulder. "Did I say I wanted that?" Jim complained.
"Yes."
"Oh." They drifted to the next table, Blair not so subtly herding him. His entire body chivvied Jim toward a circular rack of denims, and he effectively trapped Jim between two adjoining racks so closely aligned that had he tried to push through them it would have been like forcing himself through a pair of grindstones. He hovered close to Jim then, nose back in his binder, glasses halfway down his nose, his compact frame readjusting itself restlessly, rolling from foot to foot as if he were dancing to some inner rumba. His lips moved as he read and his kissable brow wrinkled and relaxed in an arrhythmic synch. Cut it out, Jim said to his wayward libido. Respect your roomie and stop ogling the man. Libido and headache had him between a rock and a hard place. A vein in Jim's temple throbbed as the store's muzak was broken by a sharp-voiced announcement recalling an employee to housewares. He felt pincered from every direction. He reclaimed some space, edging Blair to one side.
Blair looked up, not seeming to notice he'd been maneuvered an additional foot away. "We should definitely stay on this natural-fiber track."
"Natural fiber, right."
"Cotton is the way to go. I mean, not much chance of you wearing hemp. Or linen. Or silk." Blair's blue gaze prodded mockingly at Jim. "Silk boxers, though, maybe."
"I don't need any boxers right now. And don't suggest underwear to me."
Blair rifled idly through a curtain of shirts. "Overstepping my boundaries, check."
"And don't put words in my mouth."
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