The buzz of the woman’s voice in his ear faded to a dull drone as she reiterated the parental imprisonment exception. She sounded genuinely excited to be able to help him, and more than a little bit confused by his questions about what regular students needing to declare financial independence in order to be eligible for aid would do.
“Fortunately for you, Tom…”
Because his dad was in one, Tom could get a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
He still got dizzy when he thought about it. How close help had been. All he had to do was use his dad, what his dad had done to all of those people whose lives were in ruins, to get one last advantage for himself.
Other kids whose parents had blown their college funds on gambling addictions or blow, or who threatened to yank their tuition checks because they didn’t like who their kid was dating or what major they wanted to declare… Those kids were out of luck. They wouldn’t get any help.
But Tom, who had never lacked for anything before the past year. Whose father had done so much damage it could never be repaired. Tom could get help, could jump to the front of the financial aid line, as if the terrible things his father had done made Tom most deserving of all.
He couldn’t.
It was stupid, he knew it. Could hear his dad’s voice in his head, scorning Tom for not being smart enough to take advantage of the system.
Oddly enough, that helped.
If he’d learned anything in the past year and a half, it was that pretty much every word that came out of his dad’s mouth had been bullshit.
When the papers had come in the mail, the forms that he needed to fill out and the lists of documentation for his dad’s prison sentence (“Buy a fucking newspaper,” he’d wanted to scrawl on that one), he’d thrown them in the trash, registered for class in the fall, and had gone to work.
He couldn’t explain it clearly, but he knew, he was absolutely certain that the only way he could set foot out of his home, the one he was about to lose, was if he made not taking advantage his guiding principle. He was his father’s namesake and he’d carry that shame forever. But he could make his own decision to be nothing like that man.
The pride in himself, in his own hard work, that he’d managed to scrabble together had been enough to get him back on campus for three more semesters of classes. But it wasn’t enough to allow him to walk into that party downstairs with his head held high. He couldn’t ignore the whispers.
Deep down, he wasn’t sure that he deserved to ignore them.
He looked at the time on his phone.
Fabulous. He’d managed to kill another fifteen minutes sitting around not studying and moping about his life. This was why he kept himself too busy to think. This, and the need to bank as much cash as possible, of course. Because sitting around wishing things were different didn’t do a goddamn thing except get him irritated at himself.
He drummed his fingers on the cover of the book in his lap. What a fucking waste of time. And money. Maybe he could pick up some extra time from dispatch, assuming they’d have a car for him at all now that he’d blown them off mid-shift, stay in Boston through Monday and skip class. Not ideal, since he didn’t talk to anyone in his seminar enough to be in a position to call them up and ask for notes from class, but maybe he could arrange it with the professor. Who would be thrilled to hear from him after weeks of mute observation in class. Not.
“Shit,” he muttered. Time to go. He could be back in the city by midnight, in time to gypsy cab it for the last couple of hours before Boston’s two a.m. closing time. If he got lucky, maybe he’d end up with a group of girls from Gloucester or Worcester who’d come into the big city for a night on the town and lost their ride home. Twenty, thirty bucks a head for four or five chicks squeezed into his car and his night wouldn’t be a total loss.
He slung his bag over his shoulder and headed for the door.
He stopped halfway there and held his bag out for a moment, hating to waste this time, and thinking maybe he should study after all, before shaking his head, again, and striding to the door. The music grew louder the closer he got to the hall.
Hand on the knob, he stopped. Almost laughed.
He was about two seconds away from acting out some kind of cartoon display of indecision. Maybe he should give it up and pace back and forth across the eight feet of open space between their beds while pulling at his hair and tearing at his clothes.
“Drama much?”
And now he was talking to himself. Great.
By the time he was stomping his way downstairs, bag left behind in their room, Tom had almost convinced himself that he was going to check on this party for Reese’s benefit. Because he was worried. Because Reese couldn’t be trusted to act in his own best interest. Shit, even just because he wanted to tell the kid he was leaving so Reese could go back to their room without worrying about finding him there.
That he’d kinda hoped the kid would want to find him there was totally beside the fucking point. A week’s worth of couch surfing by Reese to avoid him made it clear that that was never gonna happen.
The music in the hall had been audible, but by the time he hit the stairs and then the ground floor it was thumping, pounding in his chest with a heavy bass beat and a tenor male voice singing about the confusion between girls and boys who looked like boys or girls and did boys like they’re girls and girls like they’re boys. The whole thing made his balls tighten with some weird mix of nerves, desire and frustration.
He’d spent no time in the public spaces in Perkins house, always heading straight to his room with a vague wave at whichever lucky financial aid student was manning the desk at the front door and getting paid minimum wage to buzz people in while studying or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. Because the sliding doors to the living room space were made of large windowpane glass and wood lathes, he’d seen that there were plump sofas and large armchairs scattered around a room that was anchored by a massive fireplace, but he’d never set foot in the room.
Group studying as a social activity was definitely not his thing. Hiding at a carrel in the back of the dustiest stacks at the library, that was his thing. Shutting himself up in their room to study with his equally hermit-like roommate, clearly his thing.
Sitting in a big room with other people who would want to take a break every hour for coffee and freaking chit-chat about what you were studying or how late your paper was or where you were spending the holidays—sleeping in my car most likely, unless they keep Perkins open over the break, thanks for reminding me to find out about that?
Not. His. Thing.
He caught himself hanging back at the entrance to the living room. Some of the women had draped sheer scarves over the few lamps that were lit, casting oddly colored blue and gold and red lights on the walls. People he’d seen in the halls or on the stairs, but to whom he’d never spoken, sat on the furniture or on the floor, leaning in close for those conversations where you had to shout in someone’s ear but still had total privacy because the music was so loud no one could hear anything said more than six inches from their ear.
The use of wine glasses and actual wine in bottles as opposed to boxes made it clear that this was not the typical undergrad party. Hell, there were even some partygoers drinking soda from cans, and without a hint of having filled half the can with cheap rum first. No one was playing quarters or daring someone else to drink inhumanly large amounts of alcohol in one go. Except for the blazingly loud music, the whole thing was a pretty low-key affair. More of an excuse to unwind than the lead-in to a raging kegger.
A shorter, balding guy brushed past him on his way in the room and then stopped with a double-take at the sight of him. Tom had a vague recollection of seeing the guy in the bathroom once or twice maybe.
“Hey, neighbor.” Check. Definitely a bathroom memory. The man grinned at him through a scruff of something that might eventually be
a beard. “Both of you coming out of the bat cave tonight?”
“What?”
The guy jerked his head toward the sofa closest to the fireplace, although no one was crazy enough to light a fire when the daytime highs were still up over eighty degrees, despite being mid-October. Frigging Indian Summer.
“Your roommate.” He waved a hand in the direction of a bottle-laden table shoved up against the wall to Tom’s right. “Help yourself. It’s a potluck bar.”
“I didn’t—” Shit. Now he felt like a jerk, showing up without anything in his hands. “I’m not staying—”
“Don’t worry about it! Jan’s dad is in wine so we’re pretty much all riding her coattails tonight.” He lifted a plastic cup in a toast in Tom’s general direction. “I can’t be trusted with a real wine glass, but if you’re not a clumsy asshole like me, there’s even grown-up drinking vessels. Help yourself.”
Tom thanked the guy and wandered over to the bar table, mostly so he could have something to do with his hands while he stared across the room at Reese. He opened one bottle of wine for a woman in her pajamas who’d had a couple of glasses already and didn’t seem to know what to do with a bottle that wasn’t a screw top. Tom had been uncorking wine bottles since he was a teenager, a skill his father had made him learn in eighth grade because, “there’ll always be a sommelier in a restaurant to do it for you, but even at a picnic on a beach, a man should know how to open a wine bottle without looking like a fool.” And there hadn’t been any shortage of wine bottles to practice on, what with nightly dinner parties for business competitors and sometimes friends, those clever and calculated meals full of conversation that would later be analyzed for any suggested weaknesses or potential partnerships. Partnerships that would last as long as it was advantageous for them to pull in the same direction, only to be abandoned the moment something more attractive, a better deal, came along.
But no one at this party cared how elegantly and with what minimum of wasted motion Tom could open an eighty-year-old bottle of French Bordeaux. Plus, everything on this table was from the twenty-first century. His father would have scoffed, although not until he was alone with Tom, because you never knew who you might want to bring in on the next deal.
Stop thinking about him.
This was what happened whenever he let himself slow down. He thought about his dad, and thinking about the man was like invoking his spirit. It was hard to get his dad out of his head again.
Tom popped a couple of corks and left the bottles on the table, staring across the room, trying to be casual about it, guessing that he was failing miserably.
Because Reese.
Reese.
His roommate sat on the floor in front of a dusty pink sofa with a curved back like a camel, his knees up and his arms crossed on them, resting his temple on his arms as the woman who sat behind him on the sofa talked, shouted, at the man to her right and ran her fingers through Reese’s hair while he smiled.
There wasn’t a chance in hell he could hear or understand the shouted conversation going on over his head, but Tom didn’t think Reese had come down here for the conversation. Was pretty sure that he’d only been escaping their room.
But he’d been welcomed down here and made a pet of by the older woman with the gray streaks in her long frizzy dark hair, her legs crossed Indian-style on the sofa in some kind of horrendously loud printed pants and a loose tank top in matching gold tones. The blissed-out expression on Reese’s face, his eyes mostly closed and a small smile on his mouth, told him that the strong, blunt fingers running through his chin-length hair, pulling it back from his hairline and letting it trail away, felt like heaven to Reese. When the woman paused to make an emphatic gesture in the air with her hands and then dropped them back to his head, changing her motions to push her fingers up into his hair from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head, Reese curved his back like a cat and practically purred, scooting back even closer to the sofa to press up against it.
Reese looked as if he could happily fall asleep with that woman’s hands playing in his hair while she argued with Scruffy Beard who’d welcomed Tom to the party, and Tom gripped the edge of the bar table with its paper tablecloth crumpling under his fingers, rocked back on his heels by how badly he wanted to be a part of that group. Maybe paying attention with half of his mind, listening to whatever argument was being made about Joyce and the transgressive nature of narrative or whether anyone had really done groundbreaking work in psychology since Jung. Or, even more likely, whether or not Scorsese would ever be recognized as the great American filmmaker he was. Half his attention would be on those bantered words, with casual friends he knew well enough to tease about their bad dates from last weekend or how far behind on their thesis they were.
But the rest of him would be focused on the feel of those straight dark strands sliding through his fingers, because if Tom were a part of that group, Reese would be sitting in front of his lap. His head resting on his knees while Tom stroked him and petted him and smoothed every last bit of tension from his bones until he was half-asleep with the pleasure and the total trust of it. And Tom would be the one who brought him there, to that place where he could be calm and relaxed and completely at home in the moment.
Instead, he watched from across the room.
Watched long enough that eventually Reese opened his eyes at some particularly loud laugh that erupted from the woman who played with his hair, and, with an amused expression on his face that was only half-awake, scanned the room.
Until he saw Tom.
Who cursed under his breath when he saw the tension hit Reese’s shoulders. The smooth curve of his spine straightened and Reese’s arms tightened around his knees until he hugged them to his chest. But he didn’t look away.
His eyes said, This is my space. Go away. And Tom was pleased at least that his boy was still willing to fight for his own ground, his own space in the world.
His boy. But not just that. Because no mere boy could stay standing against the storms that had battered this guy, stay standing and fight the good fight day after goddamn day, when simply showing up was winning a battle to say that this space belonged to him too.
Tom kept his eyes on Reese, music rattling the windows and swirling around him as people reached past him for more cups or glasses, more wine, more of whatever it was they wanted while he stared and stared at the one thing he wanted most of all.
Mine.
My boy.
My guy.
Mine.
He felt his lips shape the word, no sound loud enough to be heard by anyone at all. Not even himself.
But he saw Reese’s eyes widen and his head lift an inch off of his knees and knew that he’d been heard all the way across the crowd and the noise and the social hum of people who claimed their place in the world with a rock-solid belief in their right to be there. There were only two dozen people or so in the room, but they might as well have been two thousand for the weight of their eyes that Tom could already feel would fall upon him if he were to set foot in their midst instead of standing on the edge of the room. Tom took a step back, one small move closer to the door that would get him the hell out of here before someone called him out for not belonging or the whispers started, with looks darting his way over shoulders or from behind, hands raised to cover mouths that quoted trashy news stories or gossip rags.
Another step toward the door while Reese watched him back away.
Tom shoved his hands deep in his pockets and tucked his head down, tracing the worn edge of the faded Oriental rug that covered half the room with his gaze, before looking up at his roommate again.
The shadows under Reese’s eyes, shadows he hadn’t seen when he’d first walked in the room and seen his roommate content at that woman’s feet, darkened like purple bruises when Reese closed his eyes and turned his head away, staring at the wall opposite the door. His semi-mater
nal petting friend was caught up in her argument, hands waving wildly in the air like the guy at the airport directing 747’s with flags, the boy at her feet forgotten for the moment. Which left Reese sitting on the floor in the middle of a party, separate from everyone else in the room again.
Fuck.
Jesus Christ. Fucking sack up and be a man. Asshole.
He headed across the room in a straight line for his roommate, before dodging a tiny blonde who was dragging a bearded giant of a man into a corner and shouting for a dance party to start and then catching the swinging hand of another party guest right before the man nailed him in the chest with a glass of red wine, eyes locked all the time on the huddled form of Reese, green Chucks tucked against his butt, hugging his knees, noise and people swirling around him but separate from the crowd. Separate and alone.
Tom dropped to his heels, squatting like a baseball catcher, at Reese’s side. He dropped one hand on top of Reese’s shoes and gave his feet a shake.
“Hey.”
Reese lifted his head with a jerk and turned to stare at him, eyes wide.
Tom spotted the red plastic cup next to the couch at Reese’s hip and cursed, grabbing it and taking a swig.
Straight up Coca-Cola.
Thank God.
Reese lifted his eyebrows at his and shook his head, one corner of his mouth tucked back in half a frown.
Anything else you want to check on, Dad?
Tom put the cup back down on the floor and steepled his hands between his knees.
“Sorry.”
He wasn’t leaning close enough or speaking loud enough for Reese to hear him, but that was one word everyone who’d ever spent time in a club or a rave could read on someone else’s lips.
Reese shrugged and sat up further, elbows tucked together at the top of his knees, his hands falling forward toward Tom, until he jerked them back and grabbed his own shoulders with crossed palms. He kept his eyes on Tom.
Off Campus Page 13