WARNING: This is a slash…or will be, eventually. There will be m/m content in later chapters. Homophobes – you have been warned.
Prologue
Puffing his cigarette, Vic scanned the crowd in the bleachers. Disgusting, he thought bitterly, bunch of fucking sheep. What were they cheering for, anyway? Your stupid football team is losing, Vic wanted to scream.
Instead, he glanced at the girl clinging to his right arm. Megan. The only reason he was at this ridiculous excuse for a school function to begin with. Good God, she was ugly. Not that Vic believed in God at all.
Vic was tall and pale. Long red hair hung down in his back in a thick ponytail. Blue eyes glinted underneath the always slightly tilted cowboy hat that had become his trademark.
One of his trademarks, anyway. The other was his cigarette. He was rarely without one and always carried a pack in his pocket. Goddamn, the health class teachers weren't kidding when they said nicotine was addictive, he reminisced.
"Oooh!" Megan squealed, pointing. "Look!"
"Great!" Vic snorted hotly. "They scored their first fucking touchdown all fucking game!" With undisguised sarcasm, he added, "And some people wonder why the hell we're the laughingstock of the entire fucking school district."
Megan rolled her eyes. "Shut the hell up, Vic. We are not."
"Wanna bet?"
"No. For Chrissake, why're you like this?"
Because I'm surrounded by people like you, he thought. Vic had never been sure what, exactly, he was looking for in life, but he'd always been sure what he wasn't looking for. And that was what he always got. He wondered, briefly, if there was something to all that past life bullshit. Maybe this life was the result of accumulating bad karma from other lives that had finally come back to bite him in the ass.
That's ridiculous. Is it normal to think shit like that?
Megan cheered again. Vic was annoyed. It didn't matter what he'd done in a past life; nobody could deserve this. He sighed inwardly and took another puff of his cigarette.
Damien sat, pensive, utterly oblivious to the standing, jumping, shouting people around him. Life, he decided, had become…boringly easy. Most people would not be aggravated because life was easy; Damien was not most people. He wanted a challenge.
Not an academic one. School had never been his "thing."
Damien's blonde hair was short and wavy. His eyes were brown, not amber or chocolate, but simply and modestly brown in a way that presented the very false image of Damien himself as simple and modest.
Was he looking for a girl? Maybe. Sexual challenges had always interested him. Then again, it was hardly fit to call them "challenges." Women are too easy, he thought.
Did that mean he was looking for a man? Maybe, maybe. It would certainly be interesting…he allowed himself an inward smile. He wasn't homosexual, of course (at least, he'd never contemplated the possibility). But nobody could say it wasn't a challenge. And wasn't that what he wanted?
So what did this make him? A faggot? Bisexual? Or just a weirdo?
Well, in any case, he'd always had a thing for redheads of either gender…