A/N: heres a new story, all you slashy lovers!! this is my most favorite idea yet...introducing Trey and Grayson..enjoy!

One

At first he didn’t notice the black rose sitting on his front porch. It just lay there, still, lifeless, and cold. The wind didn’t flutter the petals; the air didn’t wilt the stem.

But when he did, he couldn’t stop staring. That’s when I knew it was all going to work; that’s when I knew I was getting an A.

I sat in my mom’s SVU, a notepad on my lap, staring across the street. Grayson knelt down, and I recorded his facial expressions and body language…timid, shy, and surprised.

He picked up the rose by a thorned stem with two fingers, delicately raising it to his nose to inhale its sweet scent. A smile formed.

I wrote that down, too.

That’s when he noticed the note. I made sure it was crumpled a bit, my hand writing curly and loopy like a girl. He wouldn’t suspect a thing.

But when his hazel eyes scanned that note I wrote with pain-staking imitation, he only sighed. His eyes looked around him, and for a second I thought he noticed me.

But he didn’t…he was seemingly disappointed.

An interesting reaction…something that was definitely worth the subject of my psychology mid-term paper.

He pulled the black fishnet on his bare torso, readjusted his torn shorts, and, with rose in hand and a toss of the note in the nearby bushes, disappeared inside the unlighted house.

With three pages worth of reaction notes and side comments, I drove away from Grayson’s house that day satisfied that I wouldn’t be found out and Mrs. Kelly would print a large, red A on my paper.

My senior year was going perfectly.

I had noticed Grayson all throughout high school; always someone who had just a journal and no binder, always different in a way I couldn’t figure out. When I would see him, a satisfaction would rise inside me, like a quelled craving was just diminishing. I had only seen him talk to someone twice in four years…his mom.

Maybe it was because wearing all black in my conservative town was something no one did, or maybe he just wasn’t like everybody else because being a cookie-cutter clone of every other human around him was something he just couldn’t stand.

Or maybe he was just weird.

All I knew at that moment, walking through my front door with my notepad in my pocket and my cell phone ready to dial, was colleges would most definitely look at this paper as the most ambitious yet.

I didn’t know what possessed me to use Grayson as my subject. I wasn’t telling anyone; I knew I had to present the paper for my psychology class, but I wasn’t going to give any information out or even say it was a guy.

But I knew when the idea came to my head that I had to use this strange boy who slinked his way through high school in a manner I just wanted to figure out.

That’s what research papers are all about, right?