Screwups (3 page)

“So what are
your
hobbies?” Danny asked him.

“I don’t know.” He really didn’t. “I like to read, I guess. And sketch.”

“Didn’t you say you liked to play soccer and swim?”

Jake smirked at him. “Well, yeah. But just if someone has a game on, or it’s a hot day. It’s not like they’re really hobbies.”

“Can you sketch me?” Eva asked. She struck a pose on the bed that might have been intended to be seductive, though it was rather comical. Or maybe she’d intended it to be. Jake wasn’t sure if he should laugh or not.

Before he could think of a response, Danny said, “You’re not his type.”

Jake felt his blood go cold, just as it had when Danny first told him he was gay. The familiar panic welled up inside him, and he felt like he was back in the truck stop with Tom.
Does he know?

It was all well and good for Tom and Danny to tell the world about themselves, but Jake…. He would have been thrown out of the house in high school, and even now he knew he’d be cut off. The degree he’d spent the last two years studying for, living in this dorm, it would all be yanked out from under him.

“You don’t think I’m pretty enough?” Eva asked, pretending to be insulted. At least, Jake assumed she was pretending by the way she was hamming it up, with her hand splayed across her petite breasts. “Jake! You think I’m pretty, don’t you?”

Jake forced himself to laugh along with the joke, despite the way his heart was pounding. “Of course I do. I’d be happy to sketch you.”

T
HAT
WAS
close
, Danny thought. The joke had slipped out. He hadn’t been thinking. And now it was clear that this was
not
a joke to make around Jake. The combined look of panic and anger that had flashed in Jake’s eyes for just a moment… that was a clear “back off” if Danny had ever seen one.

So he backpedaled. “I’m just saying I think he prefers women with bigger breasts, judging by his sketchbook.”

“Shut up!” Eva said, pretending to be shocked. “My breasts are perfectly shaped and scrumptious. Aren’t they, Jake?”

Jake flushed and busied himself tucking in the bottom corners of his bedspread. “They look fine.”

“There! You see?”

“The women in the sketchbook are just ones I saw in a book of photography,” Jake added defensively. “I wasn’t thinking about their breasts.”

No, I’ll bet you weren’t.

“Well,” Eva said, “you can sketch me in the nude sometime, if you want a live model.”

“Slut,” Danny teased.

“Oh shut up. You’re—” He could see where she was going by the look in her eyes. And he knew it would be justified.
Don’t say it. Please don’t.
As if she could read his thoughts, Eva veered away. “You’re just jealous because
you
want to pose for him, but he clearly prefers me.”

Thank you.

Danny made a rude noise, but privately he thought posing for Jake could be… interesting. Would Jake be turned on by seeing him naked? Danny mentally kicked himself for hoping he would be.
That’s the last thing I need.

Jake was looking mortified by the whole discussion. “I just met you guys. Do we have to talk about people getting naked already?”

Danny laughed, but he was thinking about the fact that he always slept nude. Would Jake be upset by that? Mark had been, so Danny had done his best to slip in and out of bed without flashing him. But he’d be damned if he’d be forced to wear underwear or pajamas in his own bed. He didn’t even like to wear underwear during the
day
.

“If you don’t like people being naked around you,” Eva said, “You’re going to hate the bathrooms.”

Jake had been about to sit down on his newly made bed, but now he stopped, his ass hovering a foot above the mattress a second before he straightened up again. He looked worried. “What about the bathrooms?”

“Y
OU
’
RE
FUCKING
kidding me,” Jake said, looking at the two empty shower stalls as if a naked woman might suddenly leap out of one.

Danny shook his head. “Nope. Co-ed bathrooms. That’s why there are no urinals—only closed stalls—and the showers all have curtains.”

Jake could see that and it was totally freaking him out. How the hell was he going to take a dump if there were
girls
wandering around outside his stall? “Yeah, but… not at the same time, right? There’s some kind of system for when girls are in here and when boys are in here?”

Eva snorted. “Hello?” She gave him a little wave. “You do remember I’m a girl? And I’m standing right here beside you?”

“You’re not going to pee in front of me now, are you?” Jake asked, his face screwed up in distaste.

“I don’t have to go just now, but thanks for asking.”

Danny clamped a consoling hand on Jake’s shoulder. “If you really can’t hack it, one of the downstairs wings has a bathroom with a little cardboard sign on it, so you can flip it to ‘Boy in Bathroom’ when you go in.”

Jake thought he might just have to do that. This was seriously wigging him out. Had there been anything about this in the description of the minidorms in the student handbook? He couldn’t remember. He probably would have skipped right on by it, even if there had been. He’d been too excited by the idea of an art dorm.

Eva took him by the hand. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here before you have an embolism or something.”

It occurred to Jake at that moment that, with her holding his hand and Danny’s hand still resting on his shoulder, this was the most physical contact he’d had in years. Danny’s hand felt incredibly hot, as if it might burn his skin, but as Eva pulled him forward it dropped away, leaving a peculiarly cold, empty sensation on his shoulder.

As they left the bathroom, a tall blonde girl walked in, causing Jake to walk a little faster on the way out.

Over the next few days, the bathrooms proved to be a challenge. Initially, he tried following Danny’s suggestion to use the downstairs bathroom, but he soon tired of the stupid sign. On one occasion, he walked in while the sign was flipped to “Boy in Bathroom,” but apparently the girl in there had forgotten to change it. She went apeshit, as if it was
his
fault she hadn’t set the sign correctly. Then one morning while he was showering, one of the girls outside—it turned out the entire wing was occupied by girls—kept shouting at him to hurry up. He really didn’t need that shit first thing in the morning.

So he gave up and just used the bathroom down the hall from his and Danny’s room. It was embarrassing at first. Eva and another girl named Kelly wandered in one afternoon while he was sitting on the toilet. They couldn’t see him, of course, but he was so mortified by the thought of making obscene noises while they were there that he ended up leaving, flushing first to disguise the fact that he hadn’t actually gone to the bathroom. Instead, he ran to the bathroom in McConnell before his class.

The first time he walked in on Eva stepping out of the shower—there were tiny changing areas inside the curtains, but nobody seemed inclined to use them—he nearly had a heart attack. His instinct was to apologize profusely and flee, but she smiled at him and said, “Hey,” as if it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t—to her. Jake pretended the reason he’d come in was just to wash his hands, ignoring his bursting bladder while Eva toweled off and chatted at him about the D&D game they had scheduled that weekend.

That was another thing. It quickly became clear to Jake that the dorm had several cliques. In high school it had always seemed to him that there were just four groups of kids. There were the popular kids; the jocks, who were also popular, but obsessed with sports; the geeky kids into art and computers and stuff like that; and then everybody else. Here he was finding subdivisions of the “geeky” crowd. First of all, this dorm didn’t have a lot of kids into computers. Sure, there was a terminal in the upstairs lounge for connecting to the miniframe on campus—the college had a VAX/VMS system that a lot of students had e-mail and LISTSERV accounts on—and one student in the dorm was rumored to have a Mac
Color Classic that everybody begged for time to play games on. But computers really weren’t a big thing here.

Instead, there were rough divisions along majors. The students majoring in art—as in sketching and painting—didn’t really distinguish themselves from the music majors, but Jake noticed that the theater majors tended to remain somewhat apart, and as a rule the others regarded them as vain and self-absorbed.

Then there were other less formal groupings. The TV and VCR in the downstairs lounge were in constant use from late afternoon until late at night. The “TV crowd,” as Danny and Eva called them, were friendly enough to Jake, but he soon found them dull. He hadn’t fought to get into Eaton House so he could sit on his ass all day watching bootlegged copies of
Twin Peaks
on VHS. There was also the “hippie crowd” downstairs. They pretty much avoided everyone else, which might have been for the best, because Jake heard they were on some kind of antibathing kick, insisting water needed to be conserved and soap wasn’t environmentally friendly.

Upstairs, there were two groups. One hovered around the guy who owned the Mac. His name was Bryan, and he was clearly the leader of the “popular crowd”—if such a thing could be said to exist in Eaton House. He presided over a constant stream of students going in and out of his room like a king holding court. And then there was Danny and his group of friends, most of whom lived in Danny and Jake’s wing.

They were the geeks among the geeks.

Well, more precisely they were called the “gaming crowd” by everyone else in the dorm. And that was certainly accurate. Danny, Eva, and Paul were at the core of it, and they organized one big continuing game of D&D on Saturdays, along with some random one-offs on some Sundays or in the evenings during the week, featuring RPG games like Gamma World, in which everyone was mutated from atomic fallout, and Call of Cthulhu, in which everybody eventually went insane, if they lived that long. Danny and his friends also ravenously devoured fantasy novels—the current favorite was a trilogy by Mercedes Lackey—and Paul had a collection of fantasy movies on VHS that they watched now and then, on the rare occasions they could pry the TV away from the clutches of the TV crowd.

Not really stuff Jake could relate to, although he agreed to read the first Mercedes Lackey book, after much coercing from Eva. And although everyone in the dorm was friendly and willing to chat in the lounge or even invite Jake to hang out in their rooms a bit, he still found himself drawn back to Danny and Eva. Especially to Danny. The guy was just so… cute. The way he smiled, the way he laughed, the way he peered out at Jake from underneath his unruly bangs, his eyes full of mischief. He was adorable. And the fact that he slept naked was driving Jake insane.

That first night, Danny had stood by his bed in nothing but his shorts—his usual attire whenever he was in the dorm—waiting… for something. Jake had stripped down to his underwear before he noticed that Danny hadn’t moved for a while.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m just waiting for you to get into bed so I can turn out the light.”

They both had lamps on their desks, so Jake couldn’t make much sense out of that. “Just turn out your light and get into bed. I’ll turn mine out in a minute.”

“I just….” Danny looked really uncomfortable for a moment, finally blurting out “I don’t wear anything to bed. Mark always wanted me to wait until the lights were off before I stripped.”

Jake’s heart fluttered at the thought of Danny stripping—along with a couple of twitches in other parts of his body—but he tried to cover it up by frowning. “That’s pretty stupid.”

“Well, you seemed uncomfortable about people being naked in front of you.”

“That was different!” Jake protested. “That was in the middle of the day. And we were talking about girls showering and stuff like that. I don’t care how you sleep.”

“You’re sure?”

Not knowing quite why he said it, because it was a lie, Jake replied, “I sleep naked too.”

“Oh!” Danny looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to him that Jake might do that. “Cool.”

With that, he shucked his shorts and kicked them into a corner. Jake watched him out of the corner of his eye as long as he could without being obvious. God, he had a beautiful ass! Like the rest of him, it was smooth and flawless, and it was just a hint lighter than the rest of his golden skin. His dick was nicely shaped too, nestled in a small brown patch of pubic hair, a shade darker than the hair on his head.

Jake found himself stiffening in his boxer shorts and remembered that he was supposed to strip now if he wanted to keep up the pretense that he slept nude. But he sure as hell couldn’t do that with a semi!

“I need to take a leak,” he said, feeling lame, because he’d just gotten back from the bathroom.

When he reached for his pants, Danny said, “You can just walk to the bathroom in your boxers. Nobody will care.”

Jake hesitated but put his pants on anyway. He would have felt too self-conscious walking down the hall in his underwear, especially if he was tenting the front of it. Since he hadn’t gotten over his discomfort with the bathroom, he ended up not going in, standing in the hall outside the bathroom door, feeling like an idiot. But it wasn’t long before things were under control again. He returned to the room and stripped. He left the light on until after he’d climbed into bed, conscious that Danny was checking him out, even though his eyes were fixed on the wall. Jake wondered if he’d been that “subtle” when Danny had undressed. Probably. But as long as they were both willing to keep up the pretense that they weren’t interested, they’d be able to live together.

Lying in bed in the dark, Jake was intensely aware of the feel of the cotton sheets on his bare ass and dick. He’d never slept naked before and the sensations instantly made him hard again.