The man's name was Coran, and Sam was in love with him.

It wasn't on purpose. He was already married.

But Coran was all things wonderful and Sam was in love with him.

He first met him at the PTA, partway through the school year. Coran and his niece had only recently joined their school district after moving from somewhere that Coran assured them was very far away.

And what a change it was.

There was nobody else who smiled like Coran, nobody who lived life with such enthusiasm, like every moment was a delicacy and every person was a friend.

He felt noticed. Maybe he wasn't, but he felt that way.

And it was a feeling he'd had before, when Coran looked him in the eye and smiled as though they had an inside joke and said something that he didn't understand.

It was a very old feeling indeed.

It was how KIDS felt. It hadn't happened to him since college, back when he'd first met Colleen. They'd been put on a group project together, they met in the library, and she let him go on and on about gravity and dark matter before smiling and telling him, "Your theories are shit."

He couldn't stop thinking about it for days.

When he next saw her, he could barely hold it together, but he bit his cheek and managed to say, "I have a shitty theory that I should ask you out on a date."

And she smiled again, with that sly look of hers, and said, "It's always fun to test shitty theories."

They were married a few years later.

And this was both different and the same. It was slow, it moved unnoticed until it had snuck up close enough to drag him under.

There was one day when he realized why he was looking forward to the PTA meeting so much more than usual.

He was fascinated, and he was afraid.

It really wasn't that he didn't love Colleen…

It was just something different. It was new, it was thrilling, it was scary.

And yet it was just like how it had been with Colleen. The more he tried not to think about it, the more he couldn't stop.

He thought about it on his way to work.

He thought about it when she kissed him goodnight.

What else was there inside him that he didn't know about?

He thought about that, too.