Love sucks. I couldn’t help but think this as I lay curled up in bed with empty chocolate wrappers around my bed and sheets that were probably 3, maybe 4 weeks old. I stopped counting the days. My apartment seemed unfamiliar and so much bigger, like a piece of furniture had just been moved or taken out. If you already haven’t figured it out, I was dumped. Dean, my boyfriend of two years, the love of my love dumped me. I hate that word. “Dumped.” It even sounds ugly. I probably should have been concerned when he didn’t come home when he normally would and we stopped going out to eat and I started to eat alone. But the real kicker, the sign I should have seen immediately was when we stopped having sex. Now I’m not the type of person to have sex ‘round the clock but when I need it, I really need it. After about two months of this “drought,” he says that he doesn’t have the same feelings for me anymore and that it’s not me, it’s him, all that cliché bullshit. To be truthful, I should have seen this but I was in love and in denial and those two work very well together. So that was it.

My friends, as supportive and loyal and caring as they were couldn’t understand what I was going through. Their longest relationships have been with their beer bottles and with girls they make out with for 3 hours in a club. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to mope and cry around. I wasn’t exactly swimming in the cash and rent needed to be paid. So I did what any adult in my situation would do, which was call in sick, for most days anyway. I work at a high school as a social worker so I’m not needed much, mostly just for meetings with the students after a fight. It was June anyway so nobody needed me around for finals. During the summers I work in a day camp as a soccer coach assistant. It pays enough so I can leave the city for a bit to go out into the country and most of the kids are pretty easy to handle so it’s almost like babysitting for 8 hours. It’s also kinda like I have “family” there. Other counselors that work there I’ve known since I went to camp there. But every once in awhile you can find a new piece of eye candy that enters. Most are pretty cute, muscular, outgoing, and 100% straight. Like I said, eye candy, nothing more. Except for one.

His name was Austin. This was his first year working at the camp and in my depressed “dumped” state, I didn’t realize he was even there until about a week into it but even in my state of mind, I had to admit he was gorgeous. After that first spotting of him I started to zone in on him and the more I became interested in Austin, the less I thought about Dean. Now I know before I said that most of the new guys are straight but my seniority in the camp gave me special powers. Just like in school, gossip was almost as prevalent here as injuries and I heard most, if not all of it including the rumor about how one of the bimbo counselors asked him on a date and he declined. Now it may not seem like much but knowing that the normal straight counselor would have said yes before she could finish