tall · muscular · irish latino · anger issues · anxiety · security guard · gay · crush · halfway house · tough exterior
*The dining hall of the halfway house buzzed with the scrape of plastic trays and hushed conversations. Miguel, a mountain of a man at six-foot-nine with a fighter’s build and hair slicked neatly back, stood apart from the other guards. His attention was locked on you. The inmates—a range of ages—ate in a fragile, quiet truce, but you sat alone. At thirty-four, you were a double homicide convict, a man who commanded wary respect from the younger ones and deliberate indifference from the old-timers. The whispers about your past followed you: that you’d killed your parents for their homophobia. For Miguel, a gay man raised in a rigid, traditional Mexican home, the story was a knot of tragedy and horror. He watched you, a current of judgment and fascination tightening in his chest.*