The cowboy in the corner of the laundromat didn’t look interested in making trouble, but Adam wasn’t taking any chances. Keeping the man in his sights meant using the smaller table to sort out his socks and underwear and getting a lovely view of the choose-your-communicable-disease bathroom, but it made Adam feel better.

A little, anyway.

In hindsight it had been a dumb idea to come to the laundromat this late on a Friday night. All he’d thought about was that it would be horribly busy on Saturday morning, so out he’d trekked in below-freezing temperatures to take advantage of what had to be the least populated time to wash his clothes. He’d been right. Except he’d forgotten to factor in the part where a one hundred-fifty pound weakling of a grad student in geek glasses and why-yes-I’m-gay feminine mannerisms might as well hang a KICK ME sign around his neck as far as bored frat boys were concerned.

And big, buff, bend-you-over-the-dryer cowboys.

To be fair, the cowboy hadn’t so much as glanced at Adam twice. And Adam would know because he’d done a lot of glancing at the cowboy. He tried not to, because if the cowboy had been watching, Adam probably would have given off the wrong signals. “Scared to death” had to be telegraphed loud and clear, but “turned on unreasonably” had to be broadcast at a pretty intense frequency too. Because, fuck. Cowboy was cut.

Not handsome. Not in the let-me-jack-to-you cowboy porn mag way, at any rate. He wasn’t ugly, but he didn’t have a marble jaw or anything. He was pretty scruffy, to tell the truth. But muscles? Fuck. Yeah. Normally Adam did not go for muscles. He wasn’t really going for them now, either, because muscles scared him. Muscles could hurt him. Muscles had hurt him. Muscles stood good odds of hurting him again.

Cowboy’s guns were so big Adam wasn’t sure he could span them with his hands. But Cowboy himself looked pretty mellow. Aside from getting up to shift clothes from a washer to a dryer, he just read the papers other people had left strewn about the booths and tables. He’d adjusted himself once too.

Adam had to follow suit after seeing that, but otherwise Cowboy and his guns didn’t seem to give a damn whether Adam was there or not. So Adam relaxed as much as he could and hurried about his business of turning dirty laundry into clean, and nothing more eventful happened than he ran out of quarters and had to go next door to the coffee shop and get change. And a latte, even though the caffeine wouldn’t do anything to help his rabbit nerves. He used the toilet there too, because God knew he’d die before using the one at the laundromat.

When Adam returned, Cowboy was gone, and six frat boys occupied the laundromat in his stead.

They were none of them older than twenty-two, and that was probably pushing it. They acted twelve. Three of them were definitely drunk and two were possibly high as well. They weren’t as big as Cowboy, but they were bigger than Adam.

Unlike Cowboy, they noticed Adam right away, and they didn’t ignore him.

“You don’t have to be such a victim,” Brad would have complained. “If you act like a scared rabbit, they’ll treat you like one. Ignore them and act like you don’t give a damn about them. Better yet, don’t give a damn about them. If you keep painting a fucking target on yourself, looking like you expect to be harassed, you will be.”

Adam had tried, he really had. Many times. He wasn’t sure if he was just too old to learn, if the bullying had started when he was too young, or if he really was just stupid. Sometimes he thought it was because he truly was a rabbit. As if in the male evolutionary ladder he occupied that bottom rung where he had to survive by constant vigilance and the ability to hop the fuck out of there at a moment’s notice.

If he didn’t have a load of towels in a washer, he’d have put all his clothes, dry or crazy wet, into baskets and left. Because he knew from vast experience that it was better to run before anything happened, and everything about his situation right now screamed something would happen, no question.

In fact, it had already begun. They were leaning on the table where he’d left his basket of folded socks and underwear, and one of the drunk-high boys was giggling at Adam’s bright blue briefs which, like so much of him, screamed GAY. The boy looked up and made eye contact with Adam. Adam froze at the door of his dryer, trying not to look scared to death, which likely meant his terror was only amplified.

With an evil grin, the boy murmured something to the others. As his buddies turned their wicked, stoned-out gazes to Adam, the instigator pulled out the briefs and began tossing them in the air.

Adam would have crawled into the dryer with his damp clothes if he hadn’t thought they’d turn it on and barricade him inside.

They had his blue briefs, his club shirt, and his Ten Reasons You Shouldn’t Bug an Entomologist tee. They spoke to Adam in theory, but Adam knew better than to answer. He knew they were actually trying to out-macho each other, stepping on Adam to prove they were bigger and badder than the rest. They weren’t hurting him, and they might not if he played his part in the game well. If he was lucky he’d just lose a pair of underwear and a few of his favorite shirts.

He didn’t want to think about being unlucky.

“You wear this freaky blue shit, huh?” They snickered un unison and one of them bumped Adam’s shoulder. “What color you wearing right now?”

Adam pushed his glasses higher up his nose and hunkered deeper over an ad circular.

“We’re talking to you, fag,” one of them said.

When Adam continued to ignore them, they took his glasses. Right off his face.

“Please.” Adam tried to take them back, then stopped himself, knowing that would only make it worse. It was time for him to beg. “Please give me my glasses back.”

“Show us your underwear first, freak.”

The nervous flutter in the pit of Adam’s stomach turned into sick fear. “Please,” he whispered.

But his fear was only fueling them now, and they were laughing, laughing, laughing. “Strip, faggot.” Someone shoved at his shoulder again. And Adam realized with a sick heart that he would very soon be stripping.

He only hoped that was where it ended.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Adam startled, but so did the frat boys. One of them swore, and all of them staggered back, parting from their circle around Adam’s table, allowing him to see the newcomer.

It was Cowboy.