Chapter 1 When We Met
Hello, my name is Diogo (not my real name—some intimacy is necessary). I’m 23 years old, and this story is based on real events. I hope my best friend (Julián, 24) never discovers it. But I’m a writer, and I’m a little tired of writing fiction, so here goes a bit of reality.
I met my flatmate in my third year in England. I worked at a Brazilian BBQ restaurant; I’d been there since mid-2021. I hated it—yes—but I loved it too. I hated the impatient customers, the Brazilians who came in without speaking a word of English and talked to me in Portuguese as if they knew me from somewhere, or the way people walked past the sign that said wait to be seated and sat down as if they owned the place.
But I never left. The money was good, and it was also where I met some of the best people in that country—people I now call family. It was also where I came out of the closet, where I had my first gay romance (more like a Mexican soap opera). One day I’ll write the prequel, but spoiler: it was toxic.
I met him in 2023, though we’d probably crossed paths on the street or at parties more than once before. I was in my last few months working there. In December I was going back to my country for the whole month, and I’d return in January clean and distraction-free, ready to look for jobs in the career I’d paid 32k to study: Acting and Performance (32k badly spent).
It must’ve been October or early December. Most of my friends had already left the country to chase their dreams. I was the only one left from the team I’d started with (the people my age), and a new generation had arrived to work there. I’ll call them Zoo. They threw Latin parties in the city—the typical straight guys who fucked all the girls between them and whose names everyone knew, but who only knew yours if you had a pair of tits or a nice ass. Some of them were fine, I won’t lie, but that didn’t stop me from judging them. Little by little, my restaurant was filling up with them.
One day my husband—the one from the Mexican soap opera (yes, we got married)—came up to me and said:
“Look how hot the new Zoo guy is.”
I glanced at him rushing through the dining room: tall, pale, dark brown hair almost black, his beard even darker and thick—not Santa Claus thick, just nicely done. Good body—not shredded, but well-shaped for his age—and a very nice ass.
“Eh... not my type. He seems normal.”
I was being honest. Just a normal guy, nothing special. Maybe it was jealousy, or maybe I just didn’t care. You know when you see someone all the time and they end up becoming your friend, and then you start seeing them differently? Well—if you ask me now, he’s the most handsome man in the world.
I don’t remember exactly how we started talking. He worked really well, very fast, and since he was new, he had to cut the meat—something I sometimes had to do too, and hated. I usually worked as a runner, waiter, or bartender, which I loved, because that’s where my current straight crush was—another Zoo guy, a total fuckboy, but I liked talking to him. Obviously nothing was going to happen; besides, I was married. But my husband and I liked having these impossible crushes to keep our minds—and our sexual fantasies—busy.
Anyway, the bar guy, Julián, and I started closing the restaurant together a lot. While we cleaned up, we talked about TV shows—mostly sitcoms: Friends, How I Met Your Mother, things like that. I remember we talked about when the actor who played Chandler died. I also remember that Julián’s girlfriend often came to the restaurant to eat with him. She didn’t talk to anyone else—she was shy. Fair enough. I honestly didn’t care. In the end, he wasn’t really part of the Zoo group; he was just friends with them. That alone earned him points.
ZOOLANDIA was the biggest Latin party the Zoo guys organized. They had another smaller one every week, but ZOOLANDIA was the one worth going to. It was also the party where my gay friends and I discovered true love... ecstasy. When you go to the same party every week with the same people, alcohol stops being enough. And on ecstasy, I turned into pure love.
I’m very shy around strangers; with my friends I talk nonstop, I’m sarcastic and joke about everything. But on ecstasy, I said everything that was in my heart—no filters—and I loved that. At the last party my husband attended, I was pretty high when Julián showed up with his girlfriend. He hugged me and said:
“What’s up, sir?”
I liked when he called me sir or boss. It made me feel important—manly. I probably told him I was high as fuck; he was drunk. We stayed talking, and I started chatting with his girlfriend. I love women, and on pills I was super social. I had a great night, and I really liked her—but the next time I saw her at my workplace, she didn’t say a word to me. Rude. But I didn’t care.
I started to really like Julián, and since I was leaving the job, I had to give my locker to someone—and I gave it to him. We had great platonic chemistry. Everyone thought he was gay; I’d say bisexual, maybe—and if he were, that would just make him hotter. I didn’t care what he was. I liked him, and I liked having straight friends. Since coming out, I didn’t have many straight friendships—maybe four people I could truly call friends. The ones from my home country
