Screwups (4 page)

It was a rough night. Eventually, he fell asleep, but he awoke to the feeling that he was pissing the bed, though it was squirting out of his hard cock in pulses, wave after wave of it. There was no way to stop it and he didn’t really want to, despite the fact that he’d have to scrunch against the wall afterward to get out of the wet spot. It was the first wet dream he’d had since he was thirteen.

L
IVING
WITH
Jake was pretty cool, especially having endured Mark for a couple of semesters. Not only was Jake a fuckload more pleasant to look at, but he accepted Danny being naked before bed and first thing in the morning without batting an eye. Mark had been a huge pain in the ass about it, even complaining to the resident assistant that Danny kept “waving his faggy dick around.” Fortunately, the RA was a stoner who didn’t much care for the rules as long as nobody bothered him. He told Mark to chill. Sleeping in the buff was just one of those things you sometimes had to cope with when you had roommates.

Of course, that just made Mark worse. But now the jerk was in a room of his own and more or less out of Danny’s hair. If only he could be prevented from passing his poisonous gossip along to Jake.

Yeah…. Fat chance of that.

Jake wasn’t perfect. He just stared blankly at Danny and his friends when they talked about their latest gaming escapades and didn’t seem interested in joining them. His idea of “music” was country and western, which seemed to consist of two songs—one sung by a man and one sung by a woman—played at varying speeds. And he was still a nervous wreck about the bathroom. He seemed to be okay with showering, though he was careful to stay hidden behind the slime-covered curtain Danny and his friends left open because it was too disgusting to rub up against. But Jake couldn’t use the toilet if there was a girl in the bathroom. Danny couldn’t decide if it was pathetic or kind of cute.

Danny was finding a lot about Jake cute, unfortunately, and it worried him. Steve had completely fucked Danny’s life up in high school, and Jake was entirely too much like Steve. Both gorgeous and athletic. Both sweet, when Danny was alone with them. Both clearly interested, when nobody but Danny was looking. And both total closet cases. Danny had learned the hard way what happened to openly gay kids who got too close to guys terrified of being outed.

Still, Jake hadn’t actually done anything that Danny could complain about. He’d been accommodating and easy to get along with. There hadn’t been any conflict at all.

Until Danny stole his towel.

The thing was, there was a tradition in Eaton House—sort of an initiation. It had been done to Danny when he’d moved in two years ago, and it had been done to pretty much everybody he’d seen move in since then. Or at least the guys. By unspoken consent, the girls were considered immune to this brand of harassment. It went like this: one day when a guy was in the shower, someone would casually walk off with his towel. Then everyone in the wing would gather in the hall to see if he had the balls to run the gauntlet to his room. Danny wasn’t actually sure what would happen if someone refused to do it—nobody ever had. It was stupid and juvenile, but in a dorm where students often posed naked in the lounge for art projects, it wasn’t generally considered a big deal.

However, looking back on it later, he realized he should have known that Jake would prove to be the exception.

It wasn’t particularly planned. One Tuesday morning, Jake woke up late and had to rush to class without showering. When he returned to the room late in the afternoon, he complained to Danny that he was feeling pretty grungy and wanted to grab a shower before dinner. Danny, Eva, and Paul were camped out in the room, discussing the logistics of getting to the LARP in Massachusetts, but when they saw Jake strip down to his pants and grab his towel, they realized they were being handed an opportunity that might not come back around for a while. It fell to Danny, of course, as his roommate, to sneak in when Jake was under the spray and snag his pants, underwear, and towel.

By the time Jake discovered the betrayal, word had spread and the hallway had filled up with people from both upstairs wings. There was a minute of quiet after the shower was turned off and then Jake’s voice bellowed, “Danny!”

Everybody in the hall laughed… except Danny. Suddenly, he was no longer sure this was a good idea. But it was too late. The bathroom door was yanked open and Jake strode into the hall, all traces of shyness forgotten in his fury. He was dripping wet and his skin was beet red from the heat of the shower… and from anger. All traces of Danny’s chronically shy roommate had vanished, to be replaced by a guy with a lot more muscle than Danny had realized—a guy seething with fury. He stopped as his eyes fell on the crowd of students in the hall, but then he caught sight of Danny and jabbed his finger toward him. “You!”

Danny ran. He knew that look. That wasn’t “Ha-ha, you got me!” That was “I’m gonna kill you, faggot!” There were too many people blocking the exit at the south end of the hall and Jake was blocking the exit in the other direction, so Danny did the only thing he could think of—he ran into their room.

He tried to lock the door behind him, but Jake was too fast. The door burst open, causing Danny to screech and jump away toward his bed. But there was nowhere else to go. In an instant, Jake had slammed the door and twisted the lock shut.

“Jake—”

Jake launched himself at Danny, throwing him backward onto the bed. Danny cried out, but the breath was knocked out of him as he hit the mattress. Jake pinned him down as people began to pound on the door and Eva could be heard on the other side shouting, “Someone get the RA!”

“You fucker!”

“It was just a fucking joke!”

Then something odd happened. Jake grabbed both of Danny’s wrists and held him down against the mattress, but the blows Danny was expecting didn’t come. Instead, Jake seemed to be rubbing his body all over Danny’s. It felt sexual.
Is he going to rape me?

Danny struggled against him, trying desperately not to whimper in fear. Jake looked down into his eyes, his face still flushed with anger. Then he scrunched up his nose as if he smelled something disgusting. “What are you…?” He stopped moving. “Don’t look at me like that!”

“Like what?” Danny asked, his voice trembling.

“I’m not gonna hurt you!”

Terrified, Danny barely managed to choke out, “Then why are you on top of me?”

“To get you wet!”

Danny looked up into Jake’s eyes and realized the anger was fading. Now Jake looked more concerned than angry. “I was pissed… but I wasn’t gonna
hurt
you. I just wanted to get you all wet.”

Suddenly, Danny began to cry. He wasn’t quite sure why—it was humiliating as fuck—but he couldn’t stop. He rolled his head to the side, trying to hide his face from Jake’s gaze, but they were too close together. He could feel Jake’s breath in gentle puffs against his cheek.

Then Jake did something else baffling. He let go of Danny’s wrists and wrapped his arms around Danny’s chest, pulling him into a tight embrace. He breathed into Danny’s ear, “Don’t…. I was just trying to get back at you, not…. Jesus, I wasn’t gonna beat you up or anything.”

Jake’s bare skin was hot and wet against his chest, his cheek warm against Danny’s cheek, and his breath tickled Danny’s ear. Danny’s fear was subsiding and he was surprised by how good it felt to be held like this. He didn’t want Jake to let go. He just wanted to lie like this for a while. Possibly forever.

At this worst possible moment, someone punched the lock combination and threw the door open. Danny felt Jake flinch, but he didn’t move.

“Um…. Danny?” It was Sonny, the RA. “Are you okay?”

Jake slowly lifted himself up on his elbows—not exactly off Danny, but enough so Sonny could see Danny’s face. Jake didn’t acknowledge the RA himself. He kept his gaze on Danny.

Danny blinked his eyes quickly, trying to clear the tears out of them. “I’m fine.”

“Jake,” Sonny said cautiously, “maybe you should get off him.”

Jake was still looking down, and Danny saw a look of panic flash into his eyes. At the same instant, he became aware of just why Jake was panicked by the thought of standing up. “It’s okay, Sonny. We just need to talk for a minute. Can you close the door, please?”

“You sure?”

Danny could see Eva and several others trying to peer over Sonny’s shoulder. “We’re fine. Just give us a minute.”

Sonny reluctantly obeyed and once the door was closed again, Jake breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Jake rolled off onto his back, exposing the massive erection he’d been hiding. Danny took a good look at it, figuring he’d earned the privilege. Like the rest of Jake, it was nicely proportioned and looked… delicious.

“You’re still getting my bed wet,” Danny commented.

“The mattress is fucking plastic. Don’t you have any clean sheets?”

Danny just grunted, still feeling shaken.
It wasn’t the same situation. Jake isn’t Steve. He’s not, damn it!

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Danny sat up and looked down at Jake, sorry to see that he was deflating. The surprising thing was that Jake didn’t seem self-conscious about it. But perhaps he’d felt Danny’s own erection through his shorts and figured they were both in the same boat. “Do you want to get dressed before I open the door?”

Jake shook his head. “Screw it. Just give me a minute.”

They waited until they were both… presentable, before Danny stepped out into the hall. Everyone was still gathered there, watching the door anxiously, so he spread his arms wide to show them the wet front of his shorts. “He was just horsing around. He wanted to make sure he got me drenched.”

As if taking that as his cue, Jake followed him out into the hall stark naked and announced, “All right! You wanted to see it. Here it is!”

He turned around to a chorus of cheers and catcalls. Sonny was still standing there, but he just hooted along with everyone else. How someone with such a complete disregard for the rules had ever become an RA, Danny had no idea. But that was why they liked him.

From that day forward, Jake rarely bothered closing the curtain when he showered.

“I
DON
’
T
know how I’m gonna keep all of this straight,” Jake complained.

He’d finally agreed to join the Saturday D&D game, partly to get Eva to forgive him for terrorizing Danny a few days ago—something Jake still felt guilty about. That look of pure terror in Danny’s face had really shaken him, and then Danny crying afterward….

Danny seemed to have forgiven him, thankfully. Though when he helped Jake roll a character on Friday night, he told him, “I’ve decided you’re going to be a barbarian—a
wet
one.”

Maybe “forgiven” wasn’t quite the word.

But Jake didn’t really mind being a barbarian. They seemed to be one of the easiest characters for players just starting out. They began the game with a relatively high amount of “hit points,” which meant they didn’t die as easily as mages and thieves, and they seemed to have a higher strength and did more damage with their weapons. They also had a high THAC0. Jake couldn’t remember what a THAC0 was, but supposedly it was good.

But there was a lot of dice rolling, and Jake couldn’t keep track of which die to use and what it was supposed to be for.

“Look,” Paul explained with exaggerated patience, “just follow along with the story, and let Danny help you roll until you get the hang of it.”

Paul was the “Dungeon Master,” who was in control of everything. In addition to Danny and Eva, whose thief character was named Mala, the guy who lived in the room across the hall from Jake and Danny was playing. His name was Wallace and he had a paladin named Hastur. A paladin was some kind of anal-retentive religious knight.

The game took place in a land called Al-Qadim, which was like ancient Saudi Arabia or something. Since Jake—or Berengar, as his character was called—hadn’t been with the party of adventurers when they first set out on their quest, Paul had to arrange for them to stop in a tavern for the night and bump into him.

Jake had hoped Paul would just have him sitting at the bar drinking, and the others would walk into the tavern and invite him to go with them. But apparently that wasn’t exciting enough, so Paul had concocted a little side adventure at the tavern. Jake/Berengar was still sitting in the tavern when they walked in, but unknown to them, he’d been hired as a mercenary to kill Danny/Kareth by some mage who had a grudge against him. Of course, Paul didn’t tell anybody about this except Jake, who immediately began to stress out about it. How was Danny supposed to help him if he didn’t know what was going on?

Jake didn’t care much about the game, but he was finding himself incredibly worried that he would somehow fuck it up—get all their characters killed, or otherwise ruin the “fun.” Then they’d all end up hating him. So he fretted while Paul led the others through arriving at the tavern, eating, and settling in for the night.

Then Paul looked at him and said, “I need you to make a stealth roll.”

Jake couldn’t remember which die he was supposed to roll for that, so he started frantically scanned his character sheet. “Okay….”

“Roll a D20,” Danny coached him. “Then add two, because of your dexterity.”

Jake did as he was told.

Paul told the others, “You should all roll initiative,” though they were already doing so.

Apparently, Eva/Mala’s initiative beat Jake/Berengar’s stealth, because she woke up and spotted him trying to sneak into their room while they were all sleeping. A fight ensued. The turns went back and forth, with Jake needing Danny’s assistance at nearly every step. It was far from a fair fight, with three experienced players ganging up on him, and he felt his frustration mounting. Then after a particularly bad roll, Paul told him, “You lose twelve hit points.”

“Damn it! That puts me at negative eleven!”