Peak Conditions for Delicate Fruits

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 36: SPRING/SUMMER 2026

He opts for your room because it’s on the first floor and heat rises. The first two nights: a game of catch-up and a handle of cranberry vodka that was meant to last the entire summer, which you down in double shots, inching closer on the bed until the room spins and he can hardly steady his head. How long has it been? You met during that weeklong, pre-orientation program for first-generation students (mostly) of color—you’re rising seniors now. Inseparable then, barely strangers now and for the years in between. Did he still attend the semesterly cohort breakfasts? You, never, but you’re aware: those rare morning sightings of him surrounded by too many friends in the dining hall, laughing over a plate of eggs, always so at ease. When he cracks the window now, a dull breeze passes over the sheets, stale from too much sweat. On the third night he arrives with a slender bottle of Japanese plum wine (a gift from his advisor; a tad sharp for your palate) and a bag of ice that melts through the seal of your mini fridge. At parties, you witnessed him grinding against various shadowy figures, popping like glitter under the strobe lights. What did it feel like to have his body on yours? (Pretty fucking great, it turns out.) Night four, full contact: shirts off, underwear balled and tossed onto your desk, your legs wrapped around him, his tongue deep in your armpit and mouth, his ass a ripe melon in your palm. A bead of sweat forms around his subtle widow’s peak, enticing you to lick it. He’s on campus for a research fellowship, and you’re sorting mail at the post office. 

“you’re rising seniors now. Inseparable then, barely strangers now and for the years in between.”

This is not a coming out story. You both entered college as card-carrying, Pride-flag-waving gays. Your shared homosexuality was the initial conversation starter until deeper commonalities could be unearthed: Catholic trauma, homophobic mothers who swear they love their gay sons, cheap beer, banana splits with extra maraschino cherry syrup, KO’s turn as Anita in the Broadway revival of West Side Story, water-based lube. A pre-vet major with a concentration in animal physiology, he fulfilled the role of a Good Hispanic Son™. You wanted to compose musicals and burdened your courseload with creative writing workshops and piano lessons you would eventually drop. (Lin-Manuel Miranda, you are not!) What was that joke you both started? A stocky Peruvian from Los Angeles and a stout Midwestern Puerto Rican attend a PWI on the East Coast . . . but did you ever reach the punch line? You try to find it one night while kissing his shoulder, brushing against a surgical scar that has hardened, the skin wrinkled like the butt of a dried-out lemon. 

On campus, the library is the only accessible building with strong air conditioning. In the stacks, he gives you a blow job that is majority teeth. He spits the evidence out between the pages of a tome on New World agriculture. One night, when the humidity finally lifts, you suggest a picnic in the Shakespeare Garden. How lush, dreamy. A crusty baguette, chili fig jam, one soft and two hard cheeses, and several bunches of plump red grapes make for the dinner you spread out on a beach towel. He’s not so talkative, but the stars are out: there’s the Milky Way, there’s Venus! Not sure what that is, but it’s fucking beautiful, you say, pointing to the east, your voice ringing out like a bell. A stretch of silence, the sky murky with clouds. He pushes you down for a kiss. Grapes burst beneath your tangled bodies, sticky and cold, which sends him into a high-pitched giggle fit so musical in tone, the gyrations of a bow against violin strings.

You wake early to catch him on his morning jogs. He runs laps around the quad until his gray hoodie is darkened with pit stains, and it’s at that moment you like to appear, pretend you’re casually bumping into him. He believes you when you tell him your shift starts at eight a.m., that you’re on your way to meet the FedEx guy. You offer him apple juice or granola with dried papaya, sometimes a blueberry fruit cup, and tell him it’s extra, that you’ve already eaten. You sit next to him on a bench while he shoves the food in his mouth, barely chewing before swallowing. And when you part ways, you always lean in for a kiss, which he often avoids by standing too soon, until one morning he does meet your lips and asks if you have the time, leading you back to your squeaky dorm bed where he fucks you, excavating the tenderest parts of you while the yogurt is still white on his tongue.

Every two days, a phone call to your mother. Mostly to pass time between work and seeing him. After her shifts at the hospital, she eats guava paste with crackers and tells you about her frustrations. You tend to listen without interruption, but today the thought of him is buzzing on your lips. You are happy you stayed on campus this summer, you tell her, and she knows immediately with sickening recognition you met a boy. She wants to know all about him, and you relay these details at a clip: dark hair, hazel eyes, brawny, a defined chest, glasses, the frames almost too small for his wide face, and an obsession with animals. She asks if he’s one of those bougie rich boys, and you smile while telling her that he is also Latino, that you both come from lower-income families, were raised by working mothers. Scholarship students. He gets it; he gets you. Oh, well, he sounds nice, she says, swallowing a cracker. Her disinterest makes sense. The men she pines for are often married, sometimes have a kid or two they’re not paying child support for. You end the call early. How could she understand you struck gold here?

“You end the call early. How could she understand you struck gold here?”

The mail room job was meant to be an easy paycheck while you write, write, and write, but your supervisor, Vic, loves to chat and flirt loudly with the admins who come to retrieve their departmental mail, so you end up eavesdropping more than anything. The air conditioner exists, but it’s quite weak. The big guy in charge keeps meaning to tell maintenance about it, but he’s out at golf, swinging off the day until it’s time to retire. Meanwhile, the admins are always fanning themselves with manila envelopes and other traces of intracampus mail. Vic doesn’t sweat, but he is all fire. On the inside of his left forearm is a persimmon tattoo from his military tour in South Korea, and when he runs a hand through his whitened hair, his flexing bicep makes the fruit look deflated, rotten. You describe this thoroughly in one of your midday emailed missives, but it goes unacknowledged. It was the first piece of writing you shared with him, and his lack of a response hurts deeper than you want to admit, though you manage to tell him as much that night over mediocre pizza. Shaking red pepper flakes onto his sausage-and-pineapple slice, he raises both eyebrows, says, Well. Isn’t actual writing more than just observations? 

You attempt to understand his project intimately. He is testing the effects of citrus intake on male rats. He believes gradual exposure could increase tolerance, ultimately reducing the risk of cancer or kidney failure. He spent his first week adding a drop of orange juice to one group’s water supply, while the other subjects drank water purely from the tap. The juice group was split further in two with one half introduced to solid oranges, minced at first, then whole segments. It didn’t immediately make sense to you, but he was confident in his process, and that made you think you simply didn’t understand science. When you asked him if manipulating the rats’ diets could be considered an act of animal cruelty, he said, The rats are happy. This could really help them.

The head of the summer research program sends an email to all student workers. At the end of the six weeks, all research assistants are invited to partake in a seated dinner. Non-research students can work the event for twenty dollars an hour. You forward him the email, asking, Do you care if I sign up? He writes back, You couldn’t pay me enough, but if the money sounds decent to you, go for it. That night, the heat bubbles over, and you’re both dying to stay cool. A family-size bag of frozen mixed berries is your idea for one reason: seeing his thick fingers wrapped around delicate fruits. They stain his lips in scarlets and severe purples; the skin beneath his crooked nails blushes hot pink. He chooses a bulbous strawberry and begs you to cool his neck, which you do, trailing it down to his chest, through his happy trail, to his groin, then inner thigh, stopping at his taint. Its damp warmth turns the berry to mush. He works himself against your face until the air is a smoothie of sweat and spit and pulpy musk.

This is not a love story. He opens Grindr one night after a post-sex cold shower. This guy fucking sucks, he says, and this one can’t kiss. This one was kinda sweet, but he’s into edible underwear that tastes like watermelon, and that’s cool and all but not really for me. He scrolls through the grid and you’re shocked not at the quantity of hookups but by the demographic of men—all of them gruff, in their forties or fifties, one in his seventies, all of them white—and how cavalier he is about his experiences. He talks a lot about their feet. He’s into worshipping them, the size 12s and 13s, but hates when a guy makes too big of a deal about their racial differences, especially when he’s already kneeling before them. Kills my boner, he says. He asks if you’ve gone into town for any hookups, and the answer you give him is, Only once, though the truth is you never have. You check the app periodically, which is how you discovered he was working on campus this summer, but otherwise, you’re a mere observer. It was so against your norm to send the first message. He says, Gotta expand your horizons, to which you tell him you’re perfectly fine with the state of things. You quite like how this has turned out for you. He goes back to his phone. Sure, he says.

“You quite like how this has turned out for you. He goes back to his phone. Sure, he says.”

There are days when you don’t speak to each other. You text, you email, and you send him video clips you find funny and relevant to his interests. He responds with lols and so trues. Lately, the memes populating your feed are all about being in a relationship with another bear or another Latino. Not that you would send him these memes, specifically. They’re far too direct, and you fear becoming too transparent about your wants and desires. If he asked for your hand, you’d give it, but the idea of extending it first feels torturous. You’d sooner lop it off and feed it to his pack of rats. Force him to run more tests, to figure you out chemically, biologically, if the rats, too, appear averse to your very essence.

At an off-campus pub, you order a dozen habanero mango flats and eat the meat in thin strands you’ve tweezed away from the bone. From the opposite corner of the bar, his laugh rings out; he’s with friends, some white students from his program. Your mother says you think too much about race. That you went off to school and it seems to be all you can talk about; it’s hard to even tell you a joke without being reprimanded. They’re white, so what? Enough! And of course you have white friends, some you even consider your best friends, sure. But does he prefer their company? Is it Stockholm syndrome? When does the oppressed become an oppressor? On the nights he leaves you still panting in bed, is he running off to meet them for drinks, a game of Kings? Does he tell them he wasn’t busy, that he wasn’t doing anything at all? You check your phone to see the last time you heard from him was three days ago. You sent him a dick pic just this morning, an odd choice given that you are not a top. You linger on a rickety stool at the bar long after receiving the check and wait for him to see you. For a second, your eyes meet, and his shoulders tense up, and you think about the massages you’ve given him, all that lab work stressing the fuck out of him, and he smiles nervously, then turns back to his friends, who pay their checks, gather their belongings, then head back out into the night.

In the mail room, Vic offers half a Georgia peach. He segments it with a paring knife. The core is rusty blood, but the flesh is sweet with juice and slides easily down your throat. Listen to me, Vic says, you’re so young. You’re so handsome. Do you know how powerful that is? The concept of handsome roils inside your brain. You think of his lips, his dimples, the widow’s peak, his hands, his calves, his thighs, the scar, his large feet, which you’ve come to appreciate and yearn for, wishing you could touch them with yours, slip the entire universe of his body into your mouth. This situation is familiar, you tell Vic, but it feels so new. There is no road map for this. Oh, buddy, Vic says, there never is. What would that even look like? There’s only one you.

“There is no road map for this. Oh, buddy, Vic says, there never is. What would that even look like? There’s only one you.”

Time doesn’t stand still—it folds in on itself. You take naps after work that extend into the morning hours. It’s unclear when one day ends and another begins. The humidity rises until a tropical storm spins up the Hudson River, graying the skies and enveloping you in so much rain some nights you run outside and open your mouth to see if you’ll drown. Beneath his window, you meet the gaze of his LED desk lamp. You choke a few times, spitting out all the rainwater, and eventually go back inside when the light flicks off. You slump back into bed, soaked, dripping, and fall asleep to the score of West Side Story until it’s time again to wake up and return to work. 

He no longer acknowledges your texts or stops to talk on his runs, weaving instead through the grassy center of the quad on mornings you park yourself on the one shaded bench along his path. The unresolved energy triggers a bout of insomnia. The dorm’s piano lives down in the multipurpose room; in the thick of night, you run your fingers along its keys. It’s like trying to recall a language you spoke once but now can’t access. Everything is rapid, clunky, not quite right. From the vending machine you purchase a bag of tropical-flavored gummy bears and gnaw on one that is hard, vaguely flavored like dragon fruit. Nothing about this is original, you understand. Boy meets boy, and one falls harder, faster. No one knows how to behave with an open heart. It releases a flood, a geyser. Impossible to control. You play a shrill glissando, which wakes you from your dreary, nighttime zombiedom. You came to this school to pursue your dreams. You came to break open the closed doors and windows of your life. Pursuing love is the ultimate explosion. But to be intentional here, to choose to go for it, that would be the difference between this and some other summer fling.

“Pursuing love is the ultimate explosion. But to be intentional here, to choose to go for it, that would be the difference between this and some other summer fling.”

He works late one night in the lab. Needs to wrap up notes for the final presentation, you overhear him tell another student outside the post office. Vic says sometimes it pays to be bold. You are also very much your mother’s son, so tonight you decide to follow her lead, live a little looser: you show up with an ice shaker, tequila, and a Tupperware of lime wedges you swiped from the dining hall. They’re not juicy but should do the job. Just a nightcap, you offer. The inside of the lab is frigid. Your hands are shaking. He does not smirk or laugh. He says, This isn’t a joke. All around the rats are squeaking. They must be cold, too. I’ve never been so serious, you say. I need some space, he says. Their squeaking intensifies. He has less than a week left on campus. Jesus, he says, I can’t do this now. He grabs your arm and walks you out of the lab, slamming the door in your face. You sit in the hall alternating between bites of lime and swigs of tequila until half the bottle is drained and your tongue is puckered, lips cracked at the creases. He reappears, holding a box. One died on me, he says, then bursts into tears. The rat is lying prone inside the box, its paws and entire lower half crusty with shit that smells overwhelmingly of orange, slightly chemical, like furniture polish. Too much zest, he says. I thought he was ready for the whole peel. He allows you to stay while he tends to the corpse, wiping it thoroughly and gently with a damp cloth, placing it inside a double-lined plastic bag. When he asks you to hold open the freezer door, you’re grateful for the task, at this opportunity to be needed. After, you walk him back to his room and lie with him in his bed for the first time. It’s dark, but you watch the shadows blossom across his bedroom. His bedsheets are navy, the comforter too. He sleeps with a stuffed avocado, frayed around the edges. From my sister, he says, when you ask about it, before making room for you in the bed. You do not have sex. He talks with both hands covering his eyes, tells you that if this presentation doesn’t go well he may not get into his top program. He says he’s exhausted. The entire summer he’s been working his ass off, trying to make connections, talking to the rats like they possess all the answers. He keeps talking until his words fade and he knocks out. You are happier than ever. In the morning, he offers Special-K cereal without milk, which you eat by the palmful while he showers, the tart, freeze-dried strawberries burning your hungover tongue.

Another weekend passes. This is how it’s supposed to go. He’s thumbs-upping your memes again, smiling at you from across the quad, and you’re back to talking to your mother, calling her on her lunch break, waiting for her to inquire about your very good mood. Wednesday is the day of the dinner. You wear your black shirt and slacks to the mail room, and tinker on lyrics to a new song on the computer. You’re not very far—it’s quite bad—but you see a vision: a love song between a prince and a pauper. Very Golden Age Musical, if characters could be gay. When you’re punching out for the evening, Vic places a hand on your shoulder, says, See, it always works out, doesn’t it?

In server mode, you lock in, circling the dining room, refilling water glasses, fetching more cutlery, placing salad plates in front of the guests. You haven’t eaten all day, and everything looks too good. You rushed straight from the mail room, excited to see him in his formal garb: all summer he’s worn basketball shorts and henleys or hoodies, and the thought of a collar framing his neckline, a tie elongating his torso, the pocket square he chooses that is the shade of lucuma green, a gift from his abuela when he left for college, a little something flashy to let others know he did, in fact, belong, finally making its debut. He is seated next to his advisor and the rest of his research team, and every time you peek over at him, he’s smiling or laughing or clapping his hands together. You write a note on a cocktail napkin in white Sharpie and slip it effortlessly next to his wine while clearing plates for the dessert course. He glances down and scrunches his face, for just one second, then covers the napkin with a free hand and crumples it into a ball before dropping it on his plate. You hover long enough for one of the other attendees to ask for something, but you’re spacing out and miss the request. He taps you on the arm, and, without a hint of warmth—in fact, you register his affect, devoid of its usual singsong highs and lows, now all business—he says, She would like a refill on her red wine. In the kitchen, you study the napkin and the remnants of his meal: streaks of applesauce around the lip of the plate, a whole mountain of abandoned peas. You tasted them; they are terrible. He ate the entirety of the porkchop, its bone jagged with scraps of pink. You didn’t know you could eat pork cooked less than well done. You don’t know much of anything. You wish. You wish hard. For summer to last forever. For truth. For fairness. For the cold, pink threads of his leftover meat to satisfy your hungry heart, just this once.

“You wish. You wish hard. For summer to last forever. For truth. For fairness.”

To say college has not been a lonely endeavor would be a snaggletoothed lie. Quiet during lectures. Silent in workshops. Your piano instructor told you to push the keys a bit harder, which is partly why you quit. You exist as a wisp. A cloud of smoke. Something clicked into place the night you met him, that glorious orientation week when everyone felt like new adults, populating a campus that wasn’t designed with any of you in mind. Sharing a pack of Starbursts, you both wandered off from the dorms and discovered the campus lake for the first time. He led you over the bridge, where the water cascaded into a gentle stream, and introduced you to the art of waterfalling: supine on the bridge, your head craned backward until the water was perpendicular, its mist cool against your face, and above you hung the swollen moon, a dark sky pocked with stars. He was laughing, just like you. It’s so crazy we’re here, he said. I feel like I’ve been waiting for my life to begin. And maybe you had been, too, but it’s hard to say. Because at his side, in the thick of an approaching autumn, with orange candy packed into the cracks of your teeth, you didn’t think life could get better.

Wine-poached pears and vanilla ice cream for dessert. The ruby-red fruit glistens like wet gemstones on your tray. You serve everyone else at the table first. Should you drop it in his lap? Maybe rub it in his face, make him a spectacle? You place the tray down and pick up his serving, then his spoon, and begin scooping large bites of its flesh into your mouth. Sorry, you say, there just wasn’t enough for you this time. You chew but do not swallow. You’re chipmunking it. He’s looking around at the other guests and gesturing at you like you’re crazy. There is no tether, is there? Perhaps this is a story about what never was. Time and place. Convenience. Brevity. Mutual interests, shared backgrounds. Everything is so fleeting; the end is too near. He adjusts his glasses and takes you in. All of you. But the dessert is so syrupy, far too sweet; it hits your stomach like an anvil, and you want it out. It is embarrassing, a little childish—you open your mouth and let the masticated pears spill onto his head. Right onto his crown, where the hair is thinning. It’s the first time you’ve been able to see it all so clearly.