Off Campus

by Amy Jo Cousins

  That was his own personal stuff. He’d planted a giant Keep Out sign in front of his life that even a kid could read.

  Stress at the idea that Reese might start trying to figure out where Tom went on the weekends, or why he had hardly any personal belongings, built suddenly. The gruff, angry words that burst out of his mouth were way over the top for the bantam-weight teasing the kid had been doing.

  “Yeah, well, you want to tell me how you got in here?” He saw the kid flinch at the slap of his angry tone. “Or is this just a let’s rummage around in Tom’s bag o’ shame party trick?”

  Reese turned his back on him and sat at his desk, dragging a textbook to the center and flipping it open. He didn’t answer, didn’t even look at Tom again.

  Tom knew he was being an asshole but couldn’t stop. He’d had his dirty dark knot of shame dragged into the open after months of being anonymous and sharing nothing more than a word or two with strangers, and his skin crawled with the exposure. The words kept coming out of his mouth, though he knew that the kid didn’t deserve it. That he had something bad, something worse maybe even than Tom did, wrapped deep and tight inside, and Tom picking at his layers, digging his dirty fingers into old scabs was about the shittiest thing he could do to this kid who he actually liked.

  “What is it? Do I have to Google you too?”

  He saw Reese’s shoulders pull up and lock, high and protective, as if he were braced for a blow.

  Tom held his breath, waiting. He’d had to give it up at the threat of a search engine. Would Reese tell him what had happened to get him a spot in the highly limited space of Perkins House? Or would he leave Tom to find out on his own? Because there wasn’t much that could be kept secret with a data plan and a smart phone.

  The screech of Reese’s chair being shoved violently away from the desk as he pushed back and stood up, all in one motion, was shockingly loud in the silence between them.

  Reese slammed his textbook in his backpack, zipped up and headed for the door.

  He stopped for one second in front of the open door with his hand on the knob and looked back over his shoulder, all color drained from his face and the dark shadows under his eyes starker than ever against his white pale skin.

  “Go ahead. Dig all you want, asshole. You won’t find a goddamn thing.”

  His voice was flat, his eyes vacant, before he turned and left the room, shutting the door with a soft click behind him.

  “Fuck.”

  Tom rubbed his hands across dry, scratchy eyes.

  “Nice going, jackass.”

  This was not progress.

  Chapter Five

  By the time Tom crawled out of bed the next morning, fifteen minutes before his class with Quillian, which meant no shower and a granola bar for breakfast again, he was pretty sure that whole late night conversation was a step backwards for the roommate reconciliation plan.

  Tom wasn’t sure why he gave a damn. He wasn’t going anywhere and he didn’t need Reese to like him. Shit. He was barely in the room except to sleep on weeknights, and he had about five minutes of awake time before crashing most nights.

  So, fine.

  Reese didn’t like him. He didn’t dislike Reese, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to leave school to make the kid happy, so he guessed that fell under the heading of not liking your roommate enough to do what they asked you. Roommates didn’t have to enjoy each other’s company. The room would be a crash pad, the place he slept and showered. It was a hell of a lot nicer than living out of his car had been, so fuck it.

  Reese could bitch and moan or fuck every short, skinny, gay guy on campus in their room and they would both have to deal.

  It was what it was.

  He just had to get through these last three semesters.

  Three weeks into the semester, Tom abandoned any pretense that sharing a room with Reese wasn’t messing with his head and headed back to the Res Life office. The woman he’d spoken to his first day on campus hadn’t been optimistic that any rooms would open up, certainly not in Perkins House, but Tom was willing to consider anything, even if it meant moving into a dorm on campus and dealing with the gossip that would surround him there.

  As long as it got him away from Reese’s nightly adventures in sucking guys off before Tom was busted covering up a hard-on in the hallway. And the woman at Res Life on his earlier visit had been kind of a bitch, but in that generic “you’re the eighty-third person who’s asked me that question today” way that actually made Tom feel good, because it had nothing to do with him personally. Like when Reese complained about Tom’s mess in their room. It was almost nice to have ordinary roommate complaints slung his way by a whiny voice and an attitude.

  At the scarred wood counter that barred the way into the depths of the Res Life office, there was an engraved metal sign saying Please Ring For Help and a shiny metal dome of a bell that Tom smacked with his palm, feeling as if he was pulling a velvet rope for a butler in a British manor house. He hated those bells.

  The tall, skinny, dark-haired student who came to answer his ringing clearly didn’t care for them either.

  “Can I help you?” was snapped out like Tom had been banging on the bell nonstop for an hour, as opposed to tapping it once and waiting.

  “I was in a few weeks ago and the woman said I should come back and check—”

  “Are you on the wait list?”

  “Wait list?”

  “Yes. The. Wait. List.” Each word was enunciated with a drawl. The student pulled a pencil from behind his ear and started rattling the ends against the counter. Tom ignored the irritating sound. “Everyone hates their roommate. So if a room opens up, it goes to someone on the wait list.”

  “I don’t hate him. And I don’t know if I’m—”

  “Then you probably aren’t.”

  “She didn’t mention it. But maybe she put—”

  “I wouldn’t have done that unless you asked.” This guy obviously wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. “If you don’t care enough to ask, then why bother?”

  “Maybe you could check.”

  “Maybe I could.”

  Maybe Tom could fit his size thirteen Adidas up this kid’s rectum.

  He kept his hands loose on the worn edge of the wood counter, even though they wanted to grip tightly enough to make his fingertips turn white, and waited the asshole out.

  With an overblown sigh, the guy shoved up the cuffed sleeves of his starched white button down, pulled a clipboard from a drawer under the counter and started scanning down the first page.

  “Your name?”

  Fifteen months of practice had taught him how to say it so it sounded like any other student’s name. Nothing special.

  “Worthington. Tom.”

  Practice didn’t mean jack when you were talking to a professional gossip. The guy’s hand jerked to a halt halfway down the list and he looked up at Tom without lifting his head. The glare from his eyes wanted to melt glass.

  “Surprised you came back.”

  Tom’s shoulders tensed up as he braced himself for the blow.

  “Surprised you weren’t too embarrassed to show your face. I can’t believe your dad tried to kill himself rather than go to jail. Obviously he was embarrassed.”

  An icy cold swept over Tom, leaving his muscles trembling as he tucked his head down and stared at the floor. With people like this, he’d learned not to react, to let them vent their dislike of him like breaking a bottle over his head, the words running off his hair and skin and dripping to the ground around him.

  “I saw the dean’s letter to you.” The kid tapped the tip of the pencil against his teeth. Tom wished for the days when pencils were still made with lead and this guy would be poisoning himself with his tics, but he kept his mouth shut. He wanted his name on that list. The kid kept talking, poking at him with sharp
words, like poking a wounded animal he knew wouldn’t fight back.

  “You know, when she said ‘I suggest you keep a low-profile on campus this year,’ it’s not really a—” the guy made sarcastic air quotes, “—‘suggestion’.”

  No shit, Sherlock. Tom was under no illusions as to the tenuous nature of his stay on campus. Without saying it in so many words, the dean had made it clear that if his presence on campus was a disruption to the other students, he would be asked to leave.

  “Yeah, I got that. Any luck?”

  It was a pointless effort but he couldn’t stop himself from hoping. Maybe that woman had put him on the list and his name would come up if someone dropped out during the semester.

  Battle flags were waved with less triumph over fields of bloody corpses than he heard in this guy’s voice.

  “Nope! Don’t see you. I can put you on the list, but you’re so late asking you’re never gonna be called. I’m just saying.” The kid held his pencil above the page and raised his eyebrows. Tom wanted to punch him in his shit-eating face.

  “Yes. Please.” He bit the words out with his last strings of patience wrapped tightly around his need to scream. To shout. To complain about the unfairness of every goddamn thing in his life right now. He was sure this kid would take pleasure in accidentally forgetting to add his name to the list at all. Tom lectured himself, again, about not making waves.

  A frosted glass door swung open from the office immediately to the left of the desk. The woman who walked out was petite, with spiky graying dark hair and chunky black eyeglasses. Her nose was sharp like a hawk’s beak and her mouth was a flat line as she barked into her cell phone and plonked a stack of manila file folders into a wire tray on the counter. The Dean of Residential Life resembled nothing so much as a small bird of prey: tiny, deadly, willing to crap on your head if a better alternative didn’t present itself.

  “Jack, I’m done with these.” She tucked her phone under her chin a little as she ignored whoever was on the other end of the call. Her eyes focused on Tom and he flinched as he saw recognition light them up. “Mr. Worthington. Is there a problem?”

  He knew better than to complain. About anything. What he needed was for this woman to forget that he existed. Bringing himself to her attention was a bad, bad move.

  “No, ma’am. I was just leaving.”

  He felt her narrowly focused eyes on his back his entire walk to the door across scuffed hardwood planks that suddenly stretched for miles between the desk and his escape. He closed the door softly behind him as the dean started barking out instructions to his latest Evil Nemesis, Jack.

  “Get on this filing right away. What have you been doing so far this morning? I fail to see any progress here—”

  The latch clicked.

  Tom almost smiled. If reaming that jerk a new asshole took the dean’s mind off him for the rest of the day, he was more than happy to wish the kid a terrible morning on the job.

  Outside the ivy-covered walls of the building, though, Tom slumped against the stair railing and stared out over the sparkling green lawn, the dew fainter in the sun as it burned off, still sparkling in the puddles of shade spread out under trees that had probably been planted before the Revolutionary War.

  Before this past year he wouldn’t have hesitated to raise a stink about that little prick playing lord of the manor at the fucking help desk of Res Life. In the days before he acquired evil nemeses like flies on shit and was as vulnerable to them as an unwary strolling tourists at a horse farm. He was sure there was supposed to be some other office on campus where he could go for help. Colleges paraded their willingness to help students like a battle flag to parents. We will always take care of your baby! But a year and a half of getting a fist in the face instead of a helping hand left him under no illusions as to the nature of that help.

  Help was for kids who didn’t come with a backpack, a carry-on and a traveling trunk of disgrace and the kind of notoriety that brought paparazzi like crows to carrion.

  He heaved his actual backpack onto both shoulders and shuffled down the worn stone steps. Three hours in the library before class and a granola bar and an apple for lunch. He felt kind of guilty about swiping the apple off of Reese’s desk, but the kid kept bringing them back from one of the dining halls and leaving them to wrinkle up on his desk, so he’d figured it wouldn’t be missed. After class, more library time and then maybe he could crash before ten and get a decent night’s sleep for once. If he got back to their room early enough, maybe Reese wouldn’t be there yet with one of his tricks and Tom could lay claim to the room for sleeping instead of fucking.

  A somewhat pathetic plan for the day, but a plan nonetheless.

  It felt like the first good thing that had happened to him in days when Tom returned to their room even earlier than planned at nine o’clock and found it empty. He stripped off, dropping his clothes neatly in his box, and crawled into bed.

  A muffled thud, something his brain immediately interpreted as a body slamming against the door to their room, tugged him halfway out of sleep some time later. The metal-on-metal scrape of a key fumbling into a lock brought him all the way awake. He stayed curled up on his side, hoping the kid would keep the noise and lights low and he could drift off again quickly.

  Yellow light from the hall angled into their room as the door opened, followed by giggling that was quickly shushed.

  Every time Reese had brought home a guy, Tom had been out at the library, only showing up partway through the action to sit in the hall and eavesdrop on the scenes that had been fueling his fantasies for the past month. He’d threatened that one time to walk in on Reese, but there was no way he’d ever do it.

  Only his headache tonight, so intense he’d felt dizzy, had persuaded him to give up precious study time at the library, hiding in the stacks on the seventh floor, for an early night’s sleep. He was curled up on his side, facing the room, a pillow punched up under his cheek. He kept his eyes shut and listened to Reese stop halfway in the room, knowing he’d been spotted.

  “Hey, your roommate—”

  That night’s “first prize is a blowjob” winner wasn’t as drunk as he sounded.

  It took Reese about two seconds to make the decision to cross the line. Tom could have sworn he could hear the thoughts themselves running through his brain.

  It was my room before it was his.

  What’s he doing back so early anyway?

  If he wakes up, who cares? Maybe he’ll leave.

  “Sleeps like the dead,” Reese announced, voice barely low enough to qualify as a whisper. He tugged his guest for the night, smaller and slimmer than him, as always, farther into the room, the other guy leaning back a little, pulling with his body weight against the hands Reese had wrapped around his wrists.

  Tom kept his eyes open, bare slits that allowed him to watch as Reese pushed the smaller boy with the long straight hair past his shoulders up against his closet door, the boy’s hair a dark colorless curtain in the shadows of their entryway, half-lit by the shine from the hall. Reese pulled a wrist to each side and pinned them against the closet door, and Tom felt himself grow hard under his sheet. He slid a hand down to grab himself, simply holding on for now. He squeezed once and a hot jolt of pleasure shot up his spine and down to his toes, flexing them with a quick spasm of sweet nerves.

  Reese was grinding his crotch against that of the strange boy who tore his mouth away from Reese to pant out a protest.

  “Wait. My room. We can go—”

  “No.” Reese captured his mouth again, almost gently, still pinning him to the door with hands spread wide and the pressure of his hips. Tom tried to imagine it, the press of Reese’s hard cock through his jeans and felt his own penis thicken in his hands. He dragged his thumb across the head of his dick and shivered. Reese whispered loud enough for him to hear, “Too far away. Come on. All you have to do is be quie
t. You can do that, right?”

  The strange boy proved almost immediately that he wasn’t a good bet for silence when he moaned as Reese tucked his mouth against the side of his neck. The kid’s head fell back against the door, eyes shut tight, his lower lip clamped between his teeth as he tried to keep his mouth shut while Reese did whatever it was that made the kid push his hips hard against Tom’s roommate and curl one ankle around Reese’s calf, locking them tight together.

  The kid held out for about two minutes.

  “Okay,” he gasped, as soon as Reese transferred both of his wrists to one hand pinned above his head and dove straight for his zipper with his free hand, sliding his hand in the kid’s pants. “But what if he wakes up?”

  Reese’s voice was low and dirty.

  “Do you really care?”

  His arm pumped, hand deep in the kid’s pants.

  Tom dragged his hand up and down his own dick, imagining how different it would feel to have another man’s hand on him instead of his own.

  You don’t have to imagine it. Just remember.

  Because he did remember. He remembered the boy at boarding school who’d followed him into the showers late one night after casting looks up through his eyelashes from across the dining room table for weeks. And don’t think Tom hadn’t been aware of what was going to happen when he announced to the group of boys in his room at midnight that he was kicking them out because he needed to shower the stink of practice off himself before bed.

  That boy, the one who hung out with his crowd, an automatic ticket to join bought by his father’s billions that commanded respect even if the boy hardly opened his mouth, didn’t try to one up the other boys with their increasingly wild and no doubt mostly invented stories of their sexual escapades. That boy followed him a minute later into the bathroom and didn’t say a word when Tom eyed him in the mirror as he hung his towel outside the shower stall and stepped naked inside, somehow managing not to close the off-white plastic curtain all the way.