Off Campus

by Amy Jo Cousins

  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.”

  “It’s not my furniture. But I have a paper towel if you want to stop dripping on yourself. Looks like you’ve, um, had an accident.”

  “Damn.” He looked down at his shorts. Sure enough. “Nah. Forget it. It’s barely cooler than room temperature anyway. It’s not gonna drip long. That faucet in the kitchen sucks. I let it run for five minutes and the water never got cold.”

  Reese nodded. The kitchenette was a sore spot for everyone, barely functional and generally considered a waste of space. He kicked off his shoes and nudged them into his closet, his back to Tom.

  “You could keep them in the fridge. Your water bottles. If you want.”

  Tom blinked. That sounded almost…friendly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  Reese grabbed an elastic off his dresser. He pulled most of his hair back into a ponytail, kinda high and off his neck, but left the chunk in front hanging over his face like always. He didn’t look at Tom when he spoke.

  “I hardly have anything in there, so, you know, feel free. If you want to keep a cold beer around or something.”

  Ahh. Tom saw where this was heading. He’d better cut this one off at the pass.

  “Is that your subtle way of asking me to buy you beer?”

  His roommate’s shoulders twitched.

  “No.”

  Reese’s one word answer was flat and not followed up by any kind of leading statements about how he wasn’t asking, but if Tom wanted to offer…

  “I’d rather not to do anything that could…” he paused, “…attract attention. And getting my twenty-year-old roommate bombed on cheap beer is…well, someone’s gonna notice when I’m holding your hair back over the toilet while you puke.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Okay.”

  Tom didn’t mind being agreeable. His experience with college students who didn’t drink was that they started puking their guts out even faster than most kids.

  “Would you?”

  “What? Hold your hair back while you puke?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tom shrugged. “Sure. I’ve done it for enough girls. Why not?”

  “You know I’m not a girl, right?”

  His mind flashed to the image of Reese bent over another guy on his bed, hand buried between the guy’s butt cheeks, lips wrapped tight around a dick, a whole other level of blowjob than anything Tom had ever experienced with a girl. His heart picked up the pace and his dick woke up.

  “Yeah.” The word was a gruff bark. “I got that.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, ready to swing his feet up and lie down, hoping the book he’d hold over his lap would conceal his semi until it went away. The idea of having a cold beer in the mini fridge was stuck in his brain like a splinter, though. That would be pretty frigging awesome.

  “Is it gonna bother you if I have beer in the room? Because I might take you up on that fridge thing.”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if it was going to bother me.”

  “Okay then.”

  He settled in for some serious reading. Somehow he had to turn this into a twenty-page paper on corporate social responsibility. Reese’s voice broke the silence.

  “I’m not an alcoholic. It doesn’t bother me to be around it.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “I just don’t drink. Anymore. Ever.”

  Which was almost begging for him to follow up with a question. Tom sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. This was one of those moments. A chance for him to ask Reese a gently probing question or two, show some compassion, help them reach a new level in their roomie relationship. Didn’t take John Keynes to figure that market trend out. And after the lines they’d crossed already, he owed it to Reese. Owed it to him to pick up on the conversational clues and let the kid talk about whatever it was that had drawn this Grand Canyon of a line in the sand about drinking. He didn’t doubt it was tied to the other awful things he’d already guessed about jocks and roommates and why the school would have offered a junior a housing option reserved for a handful of more mature students.

  He got it. He really did. And part of him wanted to do it. Wanted to know one person. Let that person know him. Have someone who might give a damn if he wanted to let a little air out of this high-pressure balloon of stress and money and figuring shit out that was constantly threatening to explode with eardrum-shattering force over his head.

  Part of him wanted that.

  But most of him remembered the time he’d called up a friend from high school to confess how he hadn’t been outside in weeks, living like an agoraphobe on canned goods someone had stocked in his dad’s pantry and pizza deliveries until the credit cards started getting shut down. He’d wanted some company, someone who would push past the news crews still camped outside their gates and come spend some time with him.

  The friend hadn’t showed, but a Boston Globe gossip columnist got a great scoop about the eccentric rich shut-in kid who was scared to go outside. Tom had pictured his friend texting the article link to everyone they knew and had retreated to his room at the back of the house for another week of canned soup and dry cereal.

  So, no. He’d go ahead and pass on the chance to get buddy-buddy with the roomie. Maybe if he hadn’t passed the Evil Nemesis from Res Life in the campus post office that afternoon and caught his casually tossed off, “Still here, Worthy?”. A nickname that was like calling an All-American center linebacker Tiny. He got it. He wasn’t worth shit, per pretty much everyone. It didn’t matter that he’d gotten as fucked as everyone else by his dad’s corruption. Having the same name, the same blood, was enough to taint him.

  So, no, thank you. In the grand scheme of things, he didn’t feel like making any new friends just to have them fuck him over later.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid. It’s cool.”

  He rolled over and kept reading and Reese didn’t bring it up again. The twinge of guilt that pinged at him made Tom twitch with irritation, at himself, at Reese, at the whole fucking world for being one giant pain in his ass. All he wanted was to keep things simple. First Cash showing up—and that guy kept calling him, determined to drag him out of his room sooner or later—and now Reese acting sort of human and decent. All of that shit was complicated.

  Simple. Keep it simple, stupid.

  Which worked, sort of. Right up until Reese popped into their room one day with his BFF in tow.

  Now that he and Reese had achieved a peace in the Middle East d�
�tente, Tom had started spending more time studying in their room instead of the library. He told himself it was because the bathrooms were closer and no one glared at him when he snacked on the dry and crunchy Nature’s Valley granola bars, but he knew he was retreating into hermit levels of shut-in. Cash was threatening to show up with the entire track team if Tom didn’t get it together—he’d refused to show up to practice, since it would only show how far he’d fallen—and Tom was avoiding the entire campus. On general principle.

  So when Reese popped in with a blue-haired biker chick who talked like a psych major, Tom felt pretty fucking justified in his resentment as the two of them swept through the door, voices raised in a high-pitched battle over something life-altering.

  “I can’t believe you threw blueberry soda on me. I can’t believe you were drinking blueberry soda.” Violet smears, like finger paints, trailed down from the purple starburst on Reese’s white tee-covered chest.

  “It was shakabuku.”

  “It was fucking cold, is what it was.”

  “It was a spiritual kick to the head.” She grabbed Reese from behind and snuffled loudly into his neck before he threw her off and pushed her into the room. Tom was watching them, head still bent over his book, eyes flicking up every couple of seconds. Reese hadn’t tensed up the way he did when anyone else got near him. But Tom felt the muscles in his arms tense up. “You need someone to get you out of this self-destructive cycle you’re spiraling through.”

  “Ah, yes. Psych via soda. You should put that in your thesis.”

  She hopped up on Reese’s desk, tucking long, faintly blue hair behind her ears. Loose, faded jeans hung low on her hips, held there by a thick, studded black belt. She wore a tight black racerback tank top that showed off surprisingly broad shoulders for such a small person and what Tom still appreciated as a stellar rack. She crossed one leg over the other, leaning back on her palms and bouncing one boot-clad foot with pent-up energy.

  Without blinking, she stared right at him, talking to Reese but never taking her eyes off Tom for a second.