
Timur had never been one to hide in his room, but after Flo
had aired his dirty laundry, he felt too humiliated to face
his friends. He and Flo had been together since halfway through
their freshmen year in college, and most of the time it had
been great, but Timur's ex had always had a temper. The
natural tension over the fact that Flo was going to grad school
and Timur was going to a med school in a different city after
they graduated in a few months had boiled over into a nasty
breakup. They had both said some things they didn't want to,
but Flo had gotten particularly nasty about some of the fetishes
that Timur had admitted to.

He'd thought that the worst of the breakup was over, until a few
days ago someone posted an analysis linking some of his public
writing samples to some of the erotica he had posted. He didn't
have any definitive proof it was Flo, but given the timing,
the fact that she was the only one he had ever hinted at his
fetishes to, the fact that she had angrily (and correctly) accused him of
continuing to write after they started dating, and the fact that
she was about to enter a top natural language processing computer
science program for grad school, he was pretty sure she was behind
it. The post had spread all over social media for a few days before
being reported and deleted as harassment. Timur had been heartened
by the number of people calling the poster out as disgusting and
offering messages of support to him, but the damage was definitely
done. Everyone knew the secret he had instinctively known he had
to keep since he had first understood his own sexuality. It made
him feel naked and violated on a bone deep level, especially since
it was Flo, a girl he had loved for years, who had done it to him.

Still, he couldn't keep hiding forever. Liam had been bugging him
to come out for a week now, and he couldn't keep blowing the guy
off forever. He got dressed, taking a bit longer than usual to
fix his hair, mostly as a way to procrastinate, but also because
he was single now.

"Lads," Timur nodded at his friends as he walked up to them at
the campus center.

"What's up bruh?" Andrew said. Andrew really leaned into bro culture,
but Timur was never sure how serious he was.

"Not much, not much," Timur just wanted to fade into the background,
which was unusual for an extrovert like him.

"Vamanos!" Andrew made a circling motion in the air with his finger.

"What about Mike?" Timur asked.

"Check your texts dude," Liam spoke up, "he flaked. Viv and Carly
are already there."

"Oh ok, cool," Timur nodded. They walked for about ten minutes until
they got the bowling ally where the girls were already waiting.
