Chapter 2
Gabriel
Gabriel Ackermann loved romantic comedies, even though he knew that they weren’t all that realistic. He loved the way that characters in a rom-com bantered, how no matter how bad things got, you could be assured they would end up together. It was comforting.
All his life, Gabriel had wanted to have his rom-com moment.
So far, no luck.
There’d been a few guys in college who were almost promising, though Gabriel was pretty sure that he was reaching when it came to seeing certain interactions as meet-cutes.
It didn’t stop Gabriel from hoping. He saw each new interaction with another queer man as a potential meet-cute, hoping that, one day, one of the men would surprise him.
Unfortunately, Gabriel’s chances at a meet-cute had severely decreased since he’d graduated from college a year ago.
He’d studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
It was a good education at a good college town, and he missed his friends from there.
He also missed the men. He’d had several short-lived situations with other students (and local men), though none of them had lasted.
They’d been fun, and instructive, and had prepared him well to enter into the vibrant queer neighborhoods of Chicago, which had been his plan after he graduated from college.
Unfortunately, due to circumstances he could not have predicted, he had not ended up moving to Chicago, and instead moved back to his small hometown in northern Michigan, which meant that his chances of meeting a cute gay barista, or a thunder-thighed spin instructor, or a clean-cut gay finance bro, had dropped to almost zero.
Orion, Michigan, had many wonderful things to offer, but a rich queer community was not one of them.
There were a couple of older queer couples, and a few kids bravely coming into their identities, and the odd queer tourist here and there, but most of the queer men of a compatible age with Gabriel had moved away—or he’d grown up with them, messed around with them in high school, and shared a mutual disinterest in reopening life chapters better left closed.
That meant that when Gabriel wanted to fulfill his sexual appetite, he usually had to go outside the town limits of Orion.
There were several surrounding towns and small cities, and he generally had more luck on the apps if he set his location there.
He’d even once driven three hours south to Grand Rapids for a weekend-long romp with a real estate agent who had an apartment overlooking the Grand River. That had been fun.
He knew that most of these hookups probably wouldn’t be the rom-com meet-cutes that would lead to a satisfying romance, but he had more or less given up on looking for that.
It wasn’t romance that had brought him home to Orion. Rather, family duty had called him home—and kept him there.
Last night, Gabriel, with nothing else to do, had gotten on his phone and opened his favorite hookup app. Favorite not because it was easy to use (it was notoriously bad for its user experience and interface), but favorite because it was, by far, the most popular and most convenient.
He’d perused his options for about twenty minutes, messaged several different guys, politely requested face pictures from those who didn’t have the pictures in their profiles, and blocked the men who refused to send face, but were more than happy to send cock or hole.
Finally, he’d connected with a guy named Vinnie, a man who lived thirty miles down the coast of Lake Michigan in an elegant lake house.
He’d first learned that Vinnie was twenty-seven, was 5’11”, weighed 175 lbs, preferred twinks to bears, was “open to fun,” and was absolutely “DTF.” Face pictures and a link to Vinnie’s social media profile showed that he was cute, fit, and seemed nice enough.
That was enough for Gabriel. He’d showered, trimmed his pubes, dressed in a tank top and running shorts, thrown a bottle of lube, a dildo, condoms, and a bottle of poppers into a tote bag, fueled up his 2013 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and set off on an adventure to meet Vinnie.
Vinnie had been nice. His house was even bigger than it had looked on social media.
He clearly had money from something, but admitted that most of his money came from his family.
They’d started with a glass of wine on the deck, looking out over the yellow-white beaches and blue waves of Lake Michigan.
Halfway through their second glasses, they’d abandoned their wine and moved inside, where they’d quickly shed their clothes and spent several hours exploring each other’s bodies.
Gabriel usually didn’t spend the night at a hookup’s house.
He preferred to go back to his own place (technically his parents’ cottage), use his own shower, and sleep in his own bed.
But Vinnie was thirty miles from Orion, and it was past midnight by the time they finally collapsed after hours of sex.
Vinnie had invited Gabriel to stay, and Gabriel had taken him up on it.
One rom-com cliché that Gabriel always found annoying was the hero or heroine waking up at the start of the film, messy-haired and inevitably late for something. Wasn’t there another way to show that someone was a mess?
He was very disappointed in himself when he woke up in Vinnie’s bed, messy-haired and (as it turned out) late for a meeting with the staff at his parents’ summer camp, where he would be working this summer as the assistant director.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, looking at his phone.
“Good morning,” Vinnie mumbled into his pillow. It was 8:24, and Gabriel was supposed to be meeting his parents and the other administrative staff of Orion’s Belt Hockey Camp at 8:30 for coffee and official business.
Gabriel fell out of bed. “I’m late,” he said.
“I thought gay guys didn’t have to worry about being late after sex,” Vinnie said.
It took Gabriel a moment to catch Vinnie’s meaning, and then he rolled his eyes. “Nice one,” he said, his voice dry. “Where’s my underwear?”
Vinnie searched under the covers for a moment and then handed Gabriel a discarded jockstrap. “This yours?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Gabriel said, taking the offered underwear.
These, paired with his tank top and running shorts, weren’t what he wanted to wear to a meeting with his parents and their staff.
The outfit didn’t exactly scream “competent assistant director,” but that was his own fault for sleeping in.
Gabriel struggled into the, pausing to look in the mirror and make sure that he didn’t look too disheveled.
He was tall and long-limbed, with sculpted muscles, an angular face, and a square chin.
He was twenty-three years old, had thick brown hair, full lips, and light blue eyes.
His skin had already acquired a rich summer tan, and blonde highlights were coming into his hair.
“So, no morning sex?” Vinnie was saying, smiling at Gabriel from bed.
“No morning sex,” Gabriel confirmed. “But last night was fun. I’d be down to do this again sometime, if you wanted to.”
“I want to,” Vinnie said. He waved Gabriel over for a kiss. Gabriel pecked Vinnie on the lips, grabbed his keys and wallet from beside the bed, snagged a cheese danish from a box on the kitchen counter, and hurried from the house.
He called his parents on the drive, said he’d spent the night at a friend’s, and would be to the meeting late, but would get there as soon as possible.
He took the scenic M-22 highway up the coast. The green forests of Michigan were on his right, the blue waters of Lake Michigan on his left. When he entered Leelanau County, he turned west off M-22, taking a two-lane paved road towards the small town of Orion.
Normally, when passing through town, he would stop at his favorite coffee shop, Dune Grass Roasters, but this time, he went straight through town and onto a tree-lined road that led past several campgrounds until he reached a turnoff with a large painted wood sign that showed a deer wearing hockey skates, advertising Orion’s Belt Hockey Camp.
He still remembered his mother repainting that sign when he was twelve.
It could probably do with another coat, but the chipped nature made it look adorably vintage.
He drove down a bumpy dirt road. The forest here was mostly pine trees, the sort that Michigan was known for. He rolled his windows down, drinking in the rich smell of the forest.
The road split after a half mile, and he turned right.
The dirt became gravel, and he started to pass cabins on his right and his left.
He smiled as he passed each cabin. Each was named after an NHL legend.
There were twenty cabins in total: twelve for boys, eight for girls.
When Gabriel was growing up, he had stayed in all twelve of the boys’ cabins in different years as a camper.
In the summer right after high school, and the summer after his freshman year, he had stayed in the coaching staff’s cabins, closer to Three Star Lake, on which the camp sat.
Those fourteen summers were full of fond memories.
After his last summer working on the coaching staff, he had thought his time with Orion's Belt Hockey Camp was over. Maybe, someday, he’d send his kids there, if he ever had kids, and if they wanted to play hockey.
He’d been gently forced into the sport as a kid.
He wouldn’t do the same with his hypothetical children.
They could play (or not play) whatever sports they wanted.
The main building on the camp’s property was a massive log cabin that long ago had been dubbed “the Citadel.” No one knew where the name came from, though there were plenty of ideas and legends.
Three cars were already parked in the gravel parking lot: his parents’ dusty Subaru Forester, and two other SUVs, which belonged to Hank the Crank, the head of maintenance, and Danielle VanDykstra, the operations manager.