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[ Poll ] Finding Mr. Perfect - A Gay High School Romance 

Inartè being nice when he was a kid is:

******** creepy 0.20588235294118 20.6% [ 14 ]
Kind of weird 0.20588235294118 20.6% [ 14 ]
Not a big deal 0.26470588235294 26.5% [ 18 ]
Totally called it 0.17647058823529 17.6% [ 12 ]
Gold! 0.14705882352941 14.7% [ 10 ]
Total Votes: 68
Tags: finding  perfect  high  school  romance 
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Update: March 7th- Chapter 8, Part II (on page 61)
Update: February 28th - Chapter 8 (on page 58 )
Update: February 25th - Chapter 7, Part III (on page 56)
Update: January 31st - Alternative Universe Gay Faeries (on page 49)

A/N: Takes place in the early 90's

I make no excuses for this. Mostly fluffy/humorous romance. It does contain homosexuality so please don't read if that makes you uncomfortable.

I'm posting this as I write, so most have only undergone minor edits. Very grateful for any grammar errors or awkward phrasing pointed out!

Mega thanks to pikachufan2164 for quick links to the story!

Sections
Chapter 1
Chapter 2, Part I
Chapter 2, Part II
Chapter 3, Part I
Chapter 3, Part II
Chapter 4, Part I
Chapter 4, Part II
Chapter 5, Part I
Chapter 5, Part II
Chapter 6, Part I
Chapter 6, Part II
Chapter 7, Part I
Chapter 7, Part II
Chapter 7, Part III
Chapter 8
Chater 8, Part II

Extras
Six Things You Never Knew about Sam Irving
Time Jump (Warning: major spoilers ahead)
Alternative Universe with FAIRIES
Fairies, Part II

Finding Mr. Perfect


Chapter One:

Inartè Black was three extremely important things: a moody sixteen-year-old, aiming to be a photographer, and very, very gay. It had hit him around puberty that while girls didn’t have cooties, the set of whatever they had down there couldn’t possibly be any better. Plus, men were hot. Luckily, he hung out with open-minded people (who verged on too open-minded at times), so by the time he was fifteen, the whole gay thing wasn’t such a big deal.

Until his family moved.

They moved from the city to a small town in a small place that nobody knew about except for, apparently, his parents, and the only reason they ever gave him and his older sister was that it would do them good to get a 'breath of fresh air.' The real reason was that his mother gained a new job that required them to move, and they figured up heaving his life was a small price to pay.

The town was nothing special and neither was the new high school, Antora High, that he started attending except for one tiny little problem.

To put it simply, it was a pretty damn homophobic, Christian place where everyone knew everyone else, and he figured he was odd enough with his strange family and his strange name without having to throw his sexuality in as well. He did entertained, of course, going to school in glitters and high heels and maybe a feathered boa too just to see the reactions, but it probably wasn’t worth the risk of his sister finding out that he raided her closet.

Only a select few knew that he was gay and they were, for the most part, cool about it. Josh did get rather annoying at times with how elated he was because he finally had a gay friend (********. What was he, a circus freak now?), but at least he never spread any rumours or gave him any crap which was more than he could have said for some of his past ‘friends’. The path to high school hell, however, didn’t really start because he was gay. It started because of something else that he was.

Remember how he was also aiming to be a professional photographer? Yeah. That.

Inartè always, always walked around with an old and dented camera around his neck like some sort of bizarre tourist (a tourist in beaten up sneakers and poorly dyed hair that was) and on those kind of sunny, kind of not days where it was easy to get a decent shot without fiddling too much with the lighting, he liked to wander around town and just take pictures of random things. Random places, random animals, random people, and – well, you get the idea.

So one afternoon, he stayed behind after school when nearly everybody else had gone home and just… took pictures. Dozens of them. Five alone on a fire alarm. When he had started wandering the school fields looking for more things to shoot, he saw the soccer team – with Josh being one of the people running after the black and white ball with some sort of possessed frenzy – and he decided to take a few pictures of them too.

Simple. Harmless. Damned him to hell.

God, he hated his life.

~*~


His closet was his darkroom where he developed most of his photos himself – unless he was feeling particularly lazy and had money to spare which in that case dropped the film canisters off at the mall to be developed like any other sane person – and afterwards, he would spread them around on the floor of his somewhat messy room and just browse through them, one by one. Screw homework.

Pictures of garbage, of trees and clouds, and even a few on gavel (for texture reasons, or so he told himself) before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team. They were mostly taken because he wanted a few of things in motion – lots of them focused on soccer balls and legs and feet kicking up dirt – but he still had a few on profiles, and those he stared at with his head tilted and his mouth firmly set in a frown.

Truth to be told, there was nothing special about any of them. Just people he didn’t know captured in a moment frozen in time with their guards dropped and their attention focused elsewhere. There was Josh, Hank, and Mike – though everyone called him Mickey because of how short he was – and faces upon faces that he barely recognized. That’s when he saw him. Sandy brown hair, light grey eyes, and freckles on a face that seemed too open and cheerful to be real – Inartè stared at him for a few seconds longer than necessary before moving on. A year from now and that person would be the most important man in his life, but until then, he was nothing more than just another face in the crowd.

Had that been that, things would have been left the way they were, but during lunch the next day when he was circling parts of different photos that he liked with a red pen, Josh decided to drop over and rifle through them. Inartè never minded when he did that so he paid him little attention – oh, that’s a nice shade of green there – as he circled on, until –

“Ooooh, what’s this?” Josh said, dangling one of his photos in front of him as if it was something tantalizing instead of a, well, a photo that he took. The piece in question was one that he took of the soccer team with a person’s face circled. He had tried panning with that one and it worked pretty well so he liked it.

“It’s a photo, you moron. You know, out of the dozens of others that you were pawing through?” he bit out as he continued on circling. Later on, he would go through them with a blue pen to cross out anything that he didn’t like.

“No it isn’t,” Josh tried to insist. “It’s of Sam. And you circled his face.”

Inartè looked up and gave him a weird look. “Who the hell’s Sam? I only circled that person’s face because the panning looked decent.”

“That’s Sam.” Josh pointed at the teen whose face was circled as if he hadn’t gotten that by now. Thank you captain obvious. “God, I know the girls are all over him, but I never thought you would be too.”

“Excuse me?” Oh so this was what it was about? Good lord. “Look, that’s just some random picture I took that I liked. Geeze, I’ve never even seen the guy before.”

Josh scoffed as he sat on the table that Inartè was working on. “Got to try better than that, Inny. You have, like, three classes with him, man. Besides, it’s Sam Irving. Everybody knows who he is. Captain of the soccer team, head of the student council, the town’s golden boy, and so on and so forth?”

“Huh?”

“My best friend?”

That’s when it clicked. No wonder the face looked familiar. He’d seen the guy around Josh all the time (he wasn’t going to comment on the part where he shared three classes with him. Wasn’t his fault his classes were so goddamn boring and he never paid attention in them), and probably around a few other of his friends as well. “Him? That person you watch chick flicks – oh I’m sorry, I mean hang out at guy’s night out, with? That’s Sam?”

“‘Somewhere in Time’ was ******** amazing and is much more than just a simple chick flick, thank you very much,” Josh argued as Inartè rolled his eyes. “And yeah, that’s him.”

“He’s… pretty good looking, I guess,” Inartè said, after squinting at the photo a bit more.

“Pretty good? Pretty good?” Josh repeated in a shocked voice like when he first found out that Inartè was gay. “He’s the best looking guy here, okay?”

“Okay, okay.” He held his hands up in defeat and wondered if that would get Josh to leave him alone so he could get back to his photos. “Sorry I’m not worshipping the ground that he walks on just because you think he’s the hottest – I mean, the best looking.”

“Trust me, you talk to Sam once and I guarantee you that you’ll have a crush on him the next day.” Josh scowled. “It always happens. Even with Maureen who Sam knew I liked and –”

“Your poor, shattered love life,” he said, without sympathy. “You do know that I care more about stuff like personality than good looks, right?" Inartè paused. "Oh, no, wait a minute, no I don’t. Because that would imply I think more with my head instead of what’s in my pants, and we all know guys don’t work that way.”

Josh shrugged. “Say what you want. You’ll like him. You’ll see.”

“Oh ******** off,” he snapped, annoyed. If there was one thing he hated more than blockheads like Josh, it was said blockheads trying to – to what? Play matchmaker with him? “Believe what you will, but my true love still belongs to my camera and my collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines. Besides, he’s not really my type. None of you sports maniacs are.”

His friend shrugged as he readjusted his backpack and stood up. “Alright. Whatever helps you sleep easier at night. Just a warning though, Sam’s not gay.”

Inartè glared at him. “I said, ******** off!”

~*~


Huh. So as it turned out, Sam was in three of his classes. More than just that, as Sam was also the person getting the highest score in all three classes and what was more or less the teacher’s pet. Not in a bad way, really, as he never sucked up and all he did was just… be brilliant at everything. It was still kind of irritating.

“Congrats,” Sam said to him, smiling, when he handed back Inartè’s test. It was the day after their geometry unit exam and because angles were the only things that made sense to him, it was the only math test he had gotten perfect on.

“You’re really not supposed to look at our marks you know,” he commented dryly as he took it, folded it, and tucked it away into his binder so he would never have to look at it again, finals and midterms be damned. “Invasion of privacy and all that.”

“Sorry,” the teen apologized, but his smile didn’t dampen at all. “Couldn’t help it. Everybody does it, you know.”

Inartè smiled faintly back. “At least you admit it. You’re on the soccer team, right?”

“Yeah, been on for about… two years now – oh, hang on, where’s Julia?” Sam looked around him before spotting her and handing her test back with a ‘congratulations’ as well. The girl gave him a grin that seemed too bright and too flirty for something as simple as returning an exam back. “But, uh, yes. Two years. It’s quite fun. I’ve seen you hanging around the field sometimes when we practice. Do you play soccer too?”

He balked slightly at the information that Sam actually knew he took pictures of them occasionally. Great, way to guilt trip him even more on the fact that he didn’t even know the other teen existed until Josh pointed it out to him. “I only do photography. I’m not good at sports.”

After handing tests backs to a few more people, Sam turned to talk to him again. “Photography sounds cool. You should give soccer a chance though. It’s really not as bad as people make it out to be as soon as you get the hang of it.”

“Funny, that’s what they tried to tell me about dating girls too,” he said before he could stop himself. s**t. There was definitely a better way of phrasing that. “You, uh, know. Girls. So annoying.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got a few girl friends.” Then, as if realising how that might be taken the wrong way, added, “Girl. Friends. Not girlfriends.”

Inartè was just about to comment on that when the bell rang, signalling the end of school, and Mr. Golden Boy gave him another smile before going to pack up his things and leaving.

Hmm. So that was Sam Irving.

Next section lower down on the first page.
 
     
 
It's not that bad, but in the begining you might want to list the 3 things he is better,
16, a photographer, and gay.
becasue it confused me for a moment..but that might just be me.

And you've stated twice the things he takes photos of so you might want to take one of those out.
he liked to wander around town and just take pictures of random things. Random places, random animals, random people, and
Pictures of random junk, trees and clouds, and even two or three on gravel before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team

Maybe: Pictures of random junk before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team
I didn't read the whole thing...very long, but your writing is pretty good. I don't know what to say about your MC, I didn't read that far.
     
You know you've been spending too much time with your cat when:


You start to take pictures with him.
Desi the fuzzy fluffhead
It's not that bad, but in the begining you might want to list the 3 things he is better,
16, a photographer, and gay.
becasue it confused me for a moment..but that might just be me.

And you've stated twice the things he takes photos of so you might want to take one of those out.
he liked to wander around town and just take pictures of random things. Random places, random animals, random people, and
Pictures of random junk, trees and clouds, and even two or three on gravel before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team

Maybe: Pictures of random junk before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team
I didn't read the whole thing...very long, but your writing is pretty good. I don't know what to say about your MC, I didn't read that far.


The beginning's a bit confusing? Ack, I'll go back and fix that then. xD (same with the repetition; I have a really bad habbit of doing that)

The writing style is a new one for me so that's probably why the beginning is so awkward and sloppy, but I'm definitely going to go through and comb through it again carefully. (Sorry about the length - I'm used to writing ten pages a chapter and my favourite internet authors write over 10k for theirs, so I sometimes forget how different a length like that would be on a forum. I'll be sure to shorten it the next time I update.)

Thanks for your compliment and suggestions! biggrin
 
     
 
I like your writing style. Seriously, it kept me entertained throughout the entire piece, which is something very unique on Gaia, haha. I actually found myself grinning at parts. Especially these lines:

"Remember how he was also aiming to be a professional photographer? Yeah. That."

"Simple. Harmless. Damned him to hell."

Just...clever. Not really the word I'm looking for, but you get the idea.
     
Gravetye
I like your writing style. Seriously, it kept me entertained throughout the entire piece, which is something very unique on Gaia, haha. I actually found myself grinning at parts. Especially these lines:

"Remember how he was also aiming to be a professional photographer? Yeah. That."

"Simple. Harmless. Damned him to hell."

Just...clever. Not really the word I'm looking for, but you get the idea.


Thanks a lot! That means a lot to me as I was worrying if the beginning was too boring or not without dialogue.

Hah, my friend liked the second line as well. xD
 
     
 
Great style of writing.
I was kinda hooked.
smile
x
     
Your spelling's so bad, your blood must be Type-O

Mmmm_baby___
Great style of writing.
I was kinda hooked.
smile
x


Thanks! :3 (Ahaha, guess I should work on that being "completely hooked", eh? xD)
 
     
 
Chapter 2, Part I

“Look, could you just –” Inartè made a low, irritated noise at the back of his throat and waved at his model, Sally, again. “Lean forward, damn it. You’ve got breasts, so use them.”

“Hey! You should be glad I’m even doing this for you for free!” the pretty brunette shot back and shifted her body weight according to his demand. “My god, if you weren’t a gay man, I would’ve slapped you across the face for saying that.”

“I’ve got a nickel and a Starburst I can give y – hold it, hold it right there –” a flash went off, “– that was beautiful, now just a few more –” Sally groaned, “– and we’re good.”

“Human bodies are not meant to bend this way,” she muttered under her breath, but still plastered on a serene look when he took another picture.

Lowering his camera, Inartè gave a large sigh. “I think this is enough for today. Put your clothes back on and help me clean things up, won’t you?”

“I swear, if –”

“If I wasn’t gay, you’d hurt me? Yeah, yeah, I got that the first thousandth time you’ve said that,” he said as he started rolling up the backdrop. “How’s your relationship with Bob going?”

Sally pulled her shirt over her head with a rather annoyed huff. “Pretty good. We went out for dinner last night. It was nice. Say, if you’ve got enough money for all these props for pictures and stuff, why don’t you buy yourself a decent camera for a change instead of that old thing you always use? Have you seen the new Dycams? I hear they’re digital.”

He paused in the middle of stuffing some of the drapery back into his overflowing closet to give her a disgusted look. “Digital? Ugh, I don’t touch that crap. It’s like that Photoshop thing Macintosh recently put out for ‘editing photos.’ The hell.”

“Just suggesting.” She sat on his rumpled bed with an ‘oof’. “What about you? How’s your… uh, love life going?”

“I don’t have a love life,” he snarled. Why did everyone enjoy laughing at his lack of one so freaking much? “You know how people are in this town. It’s like I wear pink and the parents are shielding their children’s eyes from the big, bad gay. I’m just going to graduate and then get the hell out of here. Love life can wait until I’m a millionaire with my photos in the Louvre.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sally sang out, tilting her head to stare at him when he had just finished packing up the lighting equipment. “C’mon. There has to be at least one gir – guy that you like. You can’t tell me that there’s nobody in this entire town that doesn’t interest you. What about Josh? Don’t you hang out with him a lot?”

Inartè made a choking noise. Did she just…? “No! God, no! He’s like a… like a… oh for the love of – I like him the way someone would like their pet hamster or something, alright?! And I sure as hell wouldn’t go out with a hamster.”

“Finch?” she tried again. Would the woman not let it rest? And they wondered why he didn’t date them. “Kevin K.? Joey? Sam?”

“Finch has no brains, Kevin’s silhouette could be mistaken for that of a large truck, and Joey has an unhealthy obsession with our Lord and Saviour’s testicles,” he rattled off, even going to the point of holding up fingers to illustrate. “I think not.”

“Oh,” Sally said as a crafty look spread across her face. “You didn’t answer me about Sam.”

“Which Sam? There’s, what, three in our grade alone.”

“Sam Irving.” The crafty look on her face didn’t disappear. “You know. Smartest guy in our grade. Helped raise over twenty-three hundred dollars for charity last year. The nicest, kindest, hottest –”

“You realise that you have a boyfriend, right?” Inartè interrupted, amused. So how exactly did he miss the existence of the guy in the few months that he’d been here anyways?

“Yeah. Him.” She made a hand waving motion as if to show how little her boyfriend mattered next to Sam. “Seriously, any girl would jump at the chance to date him. He’s, like, Mr. Perfect.”

“Uh huh.” He remained unconvinced and, bored, kicked at one of his shirts lying on the ground. “So why aren’t you dating him then if you worship him so much?”

“Turned me down,” she said flatly. “He turns pretty much everyone down. Nicely, but still. I think he went out with Angela for a few months last year, and maybe Nicole, but I don’t remember anyone else.”

“That’s fascinating. Oh wait. It’s not. Can we talk about something else now? Like how maybe you should get out of my house before my sister returns?” Even the mere memory of what had happened the last time Sally and his sister met up was enough to send both of them shuddering in fear.

She pushed herself off his bed with a groan and smoothed out the wrinkles in her shirt. Luckily, Sally didn’t seem too offended by the way he had kind of demanded her to leave. “What was wrong with her, anyways? Did your parents not learn childcare or something?”

“Uh, you’re talking about my parents here?” he said as they walked out of his room and down the stairs. “God, I think my mom was high for the first two years of my sister’s life. I mean, they use to tell me to stick my hands into electric sockets because there’s candy hidden in there as a joke. Best parents ever to blame childhood trauma on.”

“Yeah, I never win when I play the ‘who has the most messed up family’ game with you.” She paused at the door and twisted around to give him one of those cat-eating-canary grins. “You know, for all your subject changing, you still haven’t told me how you felt about Sam.”

He slammed the door in her face.

Next section lower down on the first page.
     
Chapter 2, Part II

“You should take Biology,” his mother had told him once, her voice and expression serene. “Maybe get a job like your father’s.”

Of course, she had conveniently forgotten that nobody in their family actually knew what his father did for a job outside of that it was eight to four from Monday to Wednesday, nine to seven from Thursday to Saturday, and pays two thousand and two hundred dollars a month. The point she made, however, was clear – take Biology. Now.

Mrs. Sharpain, a skeletal lady who looked forty years older than she actually was, taught Biology 11 with pursed lips, an adoration of dead fish, and an unhidden hatred for earrings. Of which Inartè had five of with three studs in his left ear and two in his right.

Needless to say, she was not very fond of him, and he swore softly under his breath when he saw that he had forgotten to do his homework again. He did not need another lecture about how dyed hair and earrings were the ruin of society as he was such a perfect example of today.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” came a kind voice, and he had looked up to snap that it was none of that person’s business before he saw that it was Sam who had said that.

“Homework. Forgot to do it.” He held up his blank worksheet and Sam winced.

“There’s still a bit of time before class starts,” he said, pulling over his binder and opening it. “You want to just – wait, let me – you want to just copy mine?”

He stared at the homework that Sam held out. All the questions were answered and all the diagrams were labelled in a sort of writing that either came from typewriters or a**l-retentive girls – minus the hearts and the pink. “Thanks,” Inartè said as he took the pristine worksheets from him. “Don’t you perfect students hate it when we lower denominator copy off of you guys though?”

“I don’t mind all that much.” Sam shrugged. “If I had a penny for every time I’ve lent my homework to Josh, I’d have... oh, fifty dollars and twenty three cents.”

Inartè gave him a bemused look as he started copying in his own messy, looping handwriting. “You don’t actually count do you?”

“When I’m bored,” Sam replied, smiling. “Nah, of course I don’t. Hey, uh, do you mind if I sit next to you? Somebody piled a whole bunch of posters on where I usually sit and I don’t want to be rude and move it. This desk here is free, right?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” he said, waving at the spot beside him. Jimmy T. was technically supposed to sit next to him, but the kid hasn’t been to school in months because of his ‘depression’. “Hope my social ineptitude waves don’t destroy your reputation or anything.”

“My reputation sucks,” Sam claimed as he slid into the desk next to him, and Inartè snorted. “No, really! I mean, all I’m known for is getting good grades and stuff. I’m... pretty boring when you get right down to it. You’re much cooler than me.”

“I... I doubt that.” What the hell? Did the most popular guy in the school just compliment him? Was everyone in this world out to guilt trip him about not noticing Sam before, including Sam himself? He fidgeted in his seat, uncomfortable. “So, uh. The homework’s not that hard once you get down to it, huh?” Did he seriously just start a conversation about homework? Oh wow. When was the last time he failed this spectacularly in talking?

“It’s not that bad.” Sam leaned in closer so he could see where Inartè was. “This chapter feels like one of the easier ones. Oh, if you ever need help, I do peer tutoring afterschool and stuff on Tuesdays. Feel free to drop by.”

“I actually might if Mrs. Vulture here keeps on giving her blasted pop quizzes,” he muttered under his breath as he started filling out the short answers on the last page. Barely finishing when the bell rang and Mrs. Sharpain waltzed in with an inch thick of make-up on her face, Inartè handed Sam’s worksheet back to him with an aggravated sigh. “Thanks a lot for this. I really mean it. You saved my life.”

“I told you, I’m fine with it,” the other teen responded with a crooked grin and Inartè could almost swear that, for a second there, something in his chest skipped a beat.

Next section on second page.
 
     
 
Shamless bump because I'm working on this again and would like more feedback.
     
....So is she encouraging him to get a terrible job? Because correct me if I'm wrong but a thousand dollars a month is like 12,000 dollars a year. He could make that much pumping gas ._.
 
     
http://i42.tinypic.com/2uf682f.png
 
Dads Creepy Friend
....So is she encouraging him to get a terrible job? Because correct me if I'm wrong but a thousand dollars a month is like 12,000 dollars a year. He could make that much pumping gas ._.


In the beginning it's said that this takes place in the early 90's, not present day, so a thousand dollars a month is quite a lot back then. xD (Also why Inartè thinks that using a digital camera and photoshop is weird because they just came out around that time.)

Also, if you don't mind me asking as you've probably read the entire thing through, is there anything else that stuck out to you as illogical or jarring?
     
I like it so far. Inartè is quite amusing to read about. I haven't noticed an major mistakes, but if I do, I'll point them out.
 
     
 
Celestial Terror
I like it so far. Inartè is quite amusing to read about. I haven't noticed an major mistakes, but if I do, I'll point them out.


Thank you very much! <3 Haha, Inartè's just a little brat once you get down to it. I went through the entire thing again and corrected a few minor mess-ups so I think the story reads a bit better now (gawd, I wish I had a beta reader).

Anyways, thanks for reading all of it and I think I should have the next bit up in a while. :3
     
I LOVE it. In the beginning, it was kinda weird in terms of flow, but the story line is amazing! MORE I need more!!!

By the way, how do you pronounce Inarte's name?
 
     
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