It was perfect. He was living the life of his dreams, a very simple but engaging life. Part-time student, part-time bookstore cashier, he had friends and money and left the dorm on a regular basis. Overall, Gary felt great. And the best part? He shared a bed with the one guy he loved the most in the whole world. Every night, we'd cuddle (this will ALL be in first person, too lazy to fix it at 3 am now. It's rough and tenses are mixed up and it's not perfect, deal with it.), snuggling and sharing warmth in the closest way imaginable. This had been going on for months and months, the best months of the young and fledgling man's life.

"Gary, can you use the other bed tonight?" his roommate inquired.

"Whyfor?"

A tall, pretty and slender girl walked into the room, seemingly stopping time with her beauty. Gary knows where this is going.

"Gary, meet Melinda, my girlfriend. She's going to be staying here with us from now on, if you don't mind."

Yep.

"Um...okay?" he replied.

Gary was never a Boy Scout. But despite the lack of practice with the wilderness and all the nature that stuck to the bottom of your shoes as a result, his stomach instinctively understood how to form knots. Very tight knots.

---

Gary's roommated picked a rather early time to hop into bed with his new rather significant other. As he pulled the blankets over himself and his warm non-inatimate bed companion, Gary was on the other side of the room, listlessly draping the sheets of the (seemingly) much larger bed he occupied on his own frame. The poor lad spent the next few hours tossing, turning, and exhibiting an unusual amount of thought while attempting, and failing miserably, to fall asleep.

All the generous introspective, jealousy, pent-up rage from being stuck next to his roommate and the inseperable whore snogging and moaning and shaking the adjacent bed finally caused Gary to snap. Overinflate a balloon 'till it pops, and you get a loud bang and an unrepairable balloon. Rupture the human psyche in a similar fashion, and the results are exponentially worse.

Gary hopped off his bed, looking absolutely beaten as if he'd just lost a fight with Mike Tyson.

"I'm going outside", he muttered.

No one paid attention.

Rushing down the stairs, fighting back tears, he ran out the door, past the security guard, and threw himself violently at the ground as if the ground had murdered his family. Hunched over in a giant ball of emotional vomit, he opened the dam and allowed himself to cry to his heart's content; a decidedly ambiguous parameter, because he wasn't sure his heart was even inside his body any longer.

He'd been replaced.

Used.

Tossed aside.

In the middle of the empty campus grounds at four in the morning, Gary cried out an ocean, crumpled in a disheveled ball of fuck. It took a while for anyone to actually notice him. And then it took a while for Gary to notice the samaritan.

"What, is this guy going to rob me? At a time like this?" he angrily pondered.

As Gary stood up and regained his composure defensively, the stranger spoke.

"What's wrong?"