Off Campus (6 page)

Every time they crossed a line, they jumped back over it to safety even further away from normal than before.

But there was no denying that the lines pushed further and further into the wilderness each time.

Tom fell asleep, not knowing if Reese ever did, a little afraid of what line was next.

Chapter Six

In the end, it took a month for one of his old teammates to figure out he was back on campus and track him down.

He didn't know who had told them. He hadn't called anyone, not even Coach. But the fact was, there was only so much hiding out you could do when you had to show up for class and collect the occasional piece of mail in the P.O. Plus, in the senior econ seminars, he was going to run into the same students he'd had classes with for three years and some of them were going to know the guys he used to hang out with. Gossip traveled like wildfire through a dry ocean of prairie grass, so he wasn't surprised when someone found him, only that it had taken so long.

He
was
surprised that it was at his room and that the banging on his door came with no warning.

Tom was reading on his bed, a pillow bunched under his chest as he lay on his stomach and stared at the driest text about the effects of tax law on non-profits in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His brain felt like a bowl of oatmeal and was probably taking in about as much information as a pile of mushy grains would too. The early morning light was shining in his eyes. He'd have to move soon or get irritated at the squinting, but he hadn't been motivated yet to get up. Had simply dragged the textbook onto the bed when he woke and started studying. Reese was up, pulling on a pair of skinny jeans, shirtless yet, and Tom was deliberately not watching him get dressed.

Which didn't mean he missed the way Reese spooked at the sudden pounding, pulling the desk chair between himself and the door.

“Hey, Worthy! I know you're in there. Open up!”

Reese looked at him, hands white-knuckled on the back of the chair.

Fuck.

Tom sat up and ran his hands through his short hair, tugging on it. There wasn't much of a chance Cash would go away. The guy had followed him around like a puppy, a freshman trying to make the team when Tom was a sophomore. Running together his junior year as teammates, they'd become the kind of casual friends that gave each other shit about girls and challenged each other to drinking contests at frat parties.

Not a goddamn bit of which interested Tom these days. Cash had been one of the few people who'd bothered to call him up or come see him more than once after the news about his father broke. The guy didn't know the meaning of give up, the reason he'd made it on the team in the first place. He'd kept coming around until Tom had flat out told him to go away, back in days when he couldn't tell the difference between those who were flocking around to gloat and anyone who was actually still a friend.

Having tracked him down to off-campus housing, he wasn't going to go away without seeing Tom, even if it
was
seven o'clock on a Monday morning.

“Fuck,” he repeated out loud and stood, heading for the door. “Sorry, kid.”

Cash was almost too much to handle at the best of times. Inflicting him on his roommate before breakfast was a punishable offense for which he'd have to make amends.

“Dude!” Cash yanked him into a one-arm bro hug as soon as he opened the door, pounding on his back and then pushing back to look him up and down. “You look like shit. What, you couldn't run a lap or two in bumfuck wherever you were?”

He pushed past Tom and walked into the room backwards, still talking with the motormouth that never quit.

“Coach is gonna shit when he hears you're back. Last year sucked, man. We got our asses handed to us on a fucking platter without you. But we got this new kid on anchor now who can suck my dick, he's so good. You'll have to sack up and fight for your job, man. Whoa!”

Cash's eyes flew open and Tom knew what was coming as his buddy stared at the wall he'd backed past. If Tom remembered correctly, there was a poster of a naked male model hung there, stretched across a bed, sheet barely draped over his crotch, pubes peeking out as he stared with heavy-lidded eyes at the photographer.

“What the fuck, dude?”

He spun around to take in the other posters of mostly naked men that covered the walls. Tom didn't notice them anymore and didn't have anything of his own to hang up, so he'd never bothered to ask Reese to take them down on his side of the room. But seeing it with Cash's eyes, it looked like an all-gay, all-the-time revue in here.

And that was
before
Cash spotted the half-naked boy with the slim hips, pink lips, and leather cuffs on his wrists, standing with the chair between him and Tom and Cash.

“Seriously!” Cash threw his hands up in the air. “What. The. Fuck.”

“This is my roommate, Reese. The guy with no filter is Cash. We used to run together.”

Nostalgia momentarily evoked, Cash turned back to him for a high five.

“Run strong, bro.” Tom gave a half-hearted smack at his hand. Reese was still staring at them without saying a word, eyes flicking madly back and forth between the two tall, lean, muscled men now crowding the small room.

Cash, of course, wasn't done.

“Reese, cool. Thought this old folks home was singles only, dude. How'd you get stuck with a roommate and please fucking tell me that he's the one hanging pics of naked dudes all over the walls, because that'll give a guy a limp dick all day, you feel me?”

No, and thank God he never would. Cash was the last person on the fucking planet he'd let know exactly how not limp Reese and the idea of naked dudes made his dick. He didn't look at his roommate as he scooped a pair of jeans out of a dresser drawer and pulled them on.

“He got stuck with me. Why are you here, man? Did Coach send you?”

The hurt look that flashed across his friend's face reminded him that foul mouth and dirty mind aside, Cash was a stand-up guy who hadn't flinched for a second when the shit hit the fan.

“No, dude. I heard you were back but you didn't show up anywhere, so I called that chick I used to bang from Gamma. She's got a part-time gig in Res Life now, had her track you down. Had to put out too.” He stuck out his tongue and crossed his eyes, making Tom laugh, actually laugh, at his over-the-top antics. “The things I do for you, dude.”

“Yeah, I haven't been around campus much. I'm busting my ass pretty much around the clock, trying to catch up.”

“Well, come fucking bust it with me.” He pointed a finger at Reese, almost touching him, and Tom had to stop himself from telling him to knock it off when Reese flinched. Cash wasn't doing anything but being his usual goofball self. If Reese didn't like his friends, and Cash was the only one he had left, it wasn't likely to make their relationship much worse. “Don't get any ideas, dude. I don't take it up the ass. But I'm in the library fucking twenty-four seven this semester.” He'd turned back to Tom. “If I don't bring my GPA up, I'm fucked. And you know how long it takes me to drill this shit into my thick skull. It fucking sucks. Be better with company. You can bring the beer.”

“Dude.” Shit. Five minutes around Cash and he sounded like a frat boy again. “You are not sneaking beer into the library.”

Cash shrugged. “I gotta do something, man. I can't just sit there and
read
, for
hours
. I'm not like you.”

Tom rolled his eyes and pulled a T-shirt on. “Yeah, I hate to break it to you, buddy. The beer is not helping you.”

Already distracted, Cash didn't reply. He was spinning slowly in place, eyes crawling over all the posters for a second time. When he'd made a complete rotation, he stood with his hands braced on his hips and stared at Reese.

“So, Reese. You're, like, a total fag, huh?” It was insane how chipper and non-threatening Cash could make a question like that sound. Because he was an idiot with no filter between his brain and his mouth, and a total lack of comprehension of how awful his no doubt genuine curiosity sounded. “Like, have you ever fucked a chick? Ever? Because maybe you'd like it.”

Reese hadn't moved an inch since Cash had come in the room and Tom was pretty sure he was shaking. Something was off when his smart-mouth roommate didn't have a word to say. He sure as shit felt fine calling Tom out at the drop of a hat. But this was obviously different.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Cash. If you can't keep that shit in your tiny little brain and stop it from pouring out of your mouth like fucking diarrhea, you can wait in the hall, you asshole.”

He put his hands on his buddy and steered him to the door, opening it and shoving him out into the hall.

“Sorry, kid! I bet you get
all
the boys.” Cash poked his head back in the door and then grunted when Tom pushed him back and shut the door in his face. “Dude!” His voice was muffled through the wood door, but not enough. “We gotta talk. Imma wait here until you come out, Tom.”

He stopped near Reese, but not too close, without thinking about how he knew that would make it worse. Shoving his hands deep in his pockets felt like the right thing to do.

“Um, sorry. For Cash. He's not a bad guy, but that was totally not cool. I'll tell him not to come around here if he can't keep his mouth shut. And he'll apologize, if you want. I'll make sure of it.”

Reese's fingers on the chair back loosened and he took what looked like his first breath in ten minutes with a slow, controlled inhale that lifted his slim chest. After a moment, he pushed back the hair that had fallen forward to cover his face as he'd stared at the floor through that whole disastrous encounter. Dropping his hands to his sides, he flexed and curled his fingers for a second, letting go.

“It's okay.”

“No, it's not. I know that. You won't have to put up with him, I promise.”

Reese looked up at him. Really looked at him, for once. As if he was trying to see inside Tom's skull and read whatever hieroglyphics he found there. And suddenly even a couple of feet away felt too close, because Tom wanted to put his hands on Reese's arms and rub them briskly, like warming up a date you were waiting outside with in the cold.

He was pretty sure Reese would jump through the ceiling if someone touched him right now. Plus, no.

Just no.

He was not going there. Not now.

That's what he told himself as Reese looked at him until Tom was about ready to crawl out of his skin and leave it behind, if it would get him out from under that steady, searching gaze. But he felt as if he owed Reese. So he stood there.

“You're…not like them. Are you?”

Reese laid his fingertips on Tom's wrist for a second before pulling his hand back. Like he was checking to see if it hurt.

Tom tried not to flinch or to show that he'd felt a crackle of energy shoot up his arm, down his spine, and straight to his dick at the hesitant touch.

“Like who?”

“Jocks.”

He could guess how much fun an openly gay kid had had with athletes over the years.

“I don't know. There's a lot of different kinds of jocks.” He didn't mention that for most of his life he'd been pretty much the kind of guy Reese was describing with that word. A walking stereotype.

“I haven't noticed much difference.”

“Well, like I said, Cash won't bother you again. Okay?”

Reese didn't say anything, just looked down at his hands, which he rested again on the back of the chair, but lightly, loosely, this time.

Tom waited a moment to see if he'd say anything and then shrugged to himself and grabbed his backpack and shoes. He could finish getting dressed in the hall, where Cash was currently rocking out to a too loud for seven a.m. version of Jimmy Buffett's “Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw”. Maybe he could sit on him and get him to shut up.

He was about to open the door when he heard Reese's voice again.

“That? Right there?” Tom paused, hand on the doorknob, and looked over his shoulder. The desk chair was pushed to the side and Reese stood in the middle of the room. His eyes were intent on Tom. “Not one jock has ever done that. Ever.”

“Done what?”

“Made someone stop when they were hurting me.
That's
different.”

He couldn't look away, although he wanted to. This was too intense. Too much was unsaid but so very clear in what Reese was telling him. Tom didn't know how to separate himself from this and couldn't shake the feeling that he was doing the opposite of separation with every conversation he had with this kid. But he still owed him, for crashing into his neatly ordered hideaway here in Perkins House, for his friend who couldn't open his mouth without insults falling out, so he stood there and held Reese's gaze and tried not to flinch.

After what felt like most of the rest of his life, Reese finally looked away for a second, breaking that tense connection between them.

“Thanks.”

Tom didn't know what to say, and Cash's was making a radio DJ's smooth transition to “Like a Virgin”, so in the end, he nodded at his roommate and left.

Strangely enough, Cash's tornado of offensiveness, or Tom's response to it, brokered some kind of détente between the roommates. Or maybe it was only a temporary cease fire before all-out war broke out again, like the Christmas Eve friendliness between the Germans and the Americans in the trenches of World War One before they settled back into shelling and gassing each other.

Reese disappeared for a day and a night, his standard response to having lowered his guard for a moment, but he showed up the night after without any drama or a trick in tow.

Tom had just returned from filling up his water bottle in the kitchenette at the end of the hall, grimacing at the lukewarm water and cursing the faucet that never ran ice cold. Even that mildly cool water was enough though to make the bottle drip with condensation onto the corner of the desk where he'd set it down.

He caught Reese eyeing the wet bottle and grunted in irritation, sure he was about to get scolded.

“Don't tell me you want me to use a coaster.”