Jack was standing awkwardly between two seated guys who leaned forward to talk around his knees as if he’d already left, ignoring him as he flushed and looked around. When he caught Tom staring at him, his face burned a darker red, his eyes bright while the lights in the auditorium blinked three times.
“Fuck you, Worthy.” He flung the words at Tom and spun around to leave, shoving past knees to shouts of Hey! Tom felt a weird urge to yell an apology but wrestled that fucking insane idea under control and turned back to the screen.
He had an actual apology that needed addressing more than some guilty feeling toward a guy who’d never been anything but a jerk to him.
Darkness fell like a curtain over the entire room, the only lights all the way in the back as the film cued up and the Turner Classic Movies logo appeared on the large screen.
Though he knew it was too little, too late, Tom reached over and took Reese’s hand in the dark.
“I’m sorry.” His whisper slid under the classical Japanese music of the opening credits as the rain poured off the eaves and streamed down the steps and streets of the medieval village. “I’m trying.”
Reese’s fingers gripped his and Tom tried to fit every apology in the world into his answering squeeze.
“I know.” Reese didn’t turn his head. “Me too.”
Afterward, Tom suggested the four of them head over to the campus center, where he and Cash could smuggle beers to a table in the back of the second story balcony. Reese shook his head and claimed to be too tired for a late night. Back in their room, he smiled at Tom wearily and let himself be pulled into a kiss for a long, quiet moment before pushing away and getting ready for bed. He needed to get some sleep for once, Reese claimed, as he traded his jeans for a pair of sleep pants and crawled into bed, laying claim to the middle of the mattress in a way that made it clear he didn’t have room for anyone else.
Tom, who couldn’t argue that it wasn’t uncomfortable to share a skinny twin bed, knew he was still fucking things up with Reese.
He waited three days to ask Reese what he would have done if Tom and Cash and Steph hadn’t been there and some dude started harassing him about being gay.
He’d meant to leave it alone. But Tom couldn’t get the image out of his head. The way Reese’s shoulders had pulled up to his ears as he hunched over, back braced against a blow that never came.
It wasn’t his job to push Reese. He knew that. Tom was perfectly cognizant of the level of hypocrisy involved in him questioning anyone on why they didn’t engage with a bully. You didn’t have to own a bullshit meter to smell the stench coming off that one.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t stop poking at the picture in his head like a sore tooth. He waited until they were studying one night in the house living room, hoping that might give him some cover.
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” Reese yanked his feet off Tom’s lap and pulled them back to his butt, outrage shooting over his knees to the far end of the couch.
Tom flushed. Yeah, this was how he’d thought it was going to go. The location wasn’t doing him any favors.
“You wait until they turn off the lights to hold my fucking hand and you’re going to give me shit about not confronting that asshole?” Reese flung his pen down on the coffee table and shoved his notebook off his lap.
Theresa was camped out at the round table again and Tom caught her sympathetic grimace before she slipped earbuds in and turned the volume up on her iPod. He doubted the sympathy was directed at him.
“You know I can’t be out on campus. And it’s got nothing to do with us. You know it and you told me it was okay.” This shitty leg to stand on was immediately yanked out from under him.
“Yeah, well that was before I actually experienced you ignoring me in public.” Reese scraped his hair back with both hands, giving it a tight yank. “Which, by the way, sucked.”
“I know.” He couldn’t help himself, though. “Although I wasn’t ignoring you. I talked to you more than I talked to Cash.”
“Now is not the time to argue semantics with me, Tom.” The set of Reese’s mouth was uncompromising.
“I know. I’m just fucking saying—” Tom took a deep breath and ratcheted the volume down several notches. Poor Theresa. He hoped she had a loud playlist. “I’m just saying, if you were talking to someone professionally, maybe you wouldn’t, you know, freeze up in different situations.”
Reese narrowed his eyes and turned without a word, shoving books and notebooks and scattered pens into his messenger bag.
Well, fuck. Guess they were done studying.
Tom packed up and followed Reese in silence. Reese nodded at their hallmate who manned the front desk and stomped up the stairs, the hiss of his voice carrying far enough for Tom to know he was about three seconds from losing his shit.
“If you’re talking about what I do in bed, or don’t do, then I’m sorry if my inconvenient PTSD keeps you from getting off in whatever way you’ve decided is important to your down-low sex life.”
Aw, hell no. He was not having this conversation in an open staircase. Tom waited until the door to their room shut behind them. Reese flung his book bag on his bed and started ransacking his dresser drawers.
“I’m not talking about sex.” He stood in the middle of the room and made Reese maneuver around him while he searched for whatever article of clothing he absolutely needed in the middle of this argument. “I’m talking about being fucking terrified I’m going to trigger some kind of flashback if I move the wrong way and thinking it might not be a bad idea for you to talk to somebody about that! In the interest of, say, not spending the rest of your life being scared.”
Reese shoved his head through the neckhole of a skintight black microfiber T-shirt. “I talk to you all the time and that doesn’t seem to be solving any of my problems.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the blind leading the fucking blind and you know it. I’m talking about therapy.” Reese shoved his feet into skinny jeans and ignored Tom while stabbing words into the screen of his cell phone before tossing it on his bed.
“Not being an idiot, I got that.” He shot an expanding blast of mousse into the palm of his hand and then worked it swiftly through his hair, piecing it out until it fell in sexy chunks across his face. Grabbed the eyeliner and smeared a thick rim of black around his lash line. The accumulated effect said boy on the prowl, a look Tom hadn’t seen in weeks. He yanked the bright green Chucks on his feet and grabbed a tailored jacket that was half blazer, half zip-up, and more stylish than anything Tom owned these days. “I told you before. You start going to practice, I’ll start going to therapy. Been for a jog lately, Worthy?”
That was the low blow. Reese knew he hated that nickname and Tom could see by the flush creeping over him that Reese felt he’d been a jerk by his own standards. Tom felt guilt for that too. For being such a crap boyfriend he provoked his lover into losing his temper and saying something spiteful. He knew this wasn’t how Reese talked to people who didn’t disappoint him.
Tom sat on his bed and dropped his head into his hands. “Where are you going?”
“Out. To a gay bar, with Steph.” Reese stood in the middle of their room and flipped his hair back like throwing down a gauntlet. “Wanna come?”
He didn’t wait more than a heartbeat before turning for the door. Reese knew the answer to that question.
“Right. Didn’t think so. Don’t wait up.”
“Reese.” Tom’s voice was low. Urgent. Reese paused with his hand on the doorknob, though he didn’t look back. Tom knew there were a hundred things he shouldn’t say, unless he wanted to drive Reese into doing something they both might not be able to forgive. Don’t do anything stupid. Please. He settled for the one thing he could say and mean. “Be careful.”
A sharp nod was his only answer before the door clicked shut.
&nb
sp; Somewhere in the deep dark of the night, soft noises and the curve of a warm body snuggling up behind him on the bed woke Tom. An arm landed tentatively on his hip and he reached down to grab it and wrap it more securely around him.
“Everything okay?” he asked, voice thick with sleep. He braced himself to hear the worst.
A forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. Words vibrated against his spine. “Nothing happened.”
He hadn’t known how tightly every muscle in his body had been held until they all relaxed at once. Reese squeezed his arm. Tom tucked his chin to his chest and spoke to the wall.
“I know.” He hadn’t, really. Hadn’t been able to figure out how close to the edge Reese was. How much it would take to push him into a night of blowing some strange guy in order to prove that he controlled the situation. Hadn’t known if he, Tom, had already crossed that line.
He’d had to trust.
Not his strong suit.
“Are you mad?” Reese’s words were muffled against Tom’s T-shirt.
“No.” He paused. Funny how so many of these conversations happened in the dark. Maybe if you weren’t totally fucked up you could talk about stuff in the daylight. “Are you?”
The answer didn’t come right away, so Tom knew what it was before Reese spoke.
“Trying not to be.” Honesty was a good sign. Or, at least, a better one than flat out lying. Reese’s breath collected in his T-shirt, a warm spot at the base of his neck. “I know you think all these terrible things are going to happen to you if word gets around on campus that you’re gay.”
“Bi,” Tom interrupted as if it were crucial he retain some kind of toehold on heterosexuality, then flinched. Jesus. Couldn’t he go two minutes without denying Reese in some way? “Fuck. Sorry.”
“S’okay. It’s what you are.” But Tom could hear it in Reese’s voice and feel it in the tension in his body pressed up behind him. He’d managed to draw one more line in the sand and place himself on the opposite side of it from Reese. “I just wish you could believe the world wouldn’t end if you kissed me in the campus center.”
Tom rolled over, squirming in place and trying not to shove Reese off the mattress and to the floor, until they faced each other, knees and foreheads touching as they curled up on the bed like a pair of ampersands.
“It’s not just people finding out, Reese.” He tried to find the words. Strange, how hard it was to describe something for the first time. “I held it together this past year. But barely. You don’t know—” Tom trailed off. There were too many things that Reese didn’t know. Time was running out for explaining those things without his having hid them from Reese being a real problem. Truth was, that time might already be past. “If something goes wrong now? If I have to leave school again? I don’t know that I’ll ever make it back.”
Reese smelled like dance sweat and his hair was damp against his forehead. Tom wanted to stick his face in the curve of Reese’s neck and lick his skin, taste the salt on his tongue and breathe deep.
“It feels like the end of the world waiting for me. Know it sounds over the top, but that’s what it feels like. The shit that’s just waiting for me to fuck up.” He felt like Peter, crying wolf, only he could see the wolf, lurking around the corner, hot drool leaking from the corner of black lips, but all anyone else saw was a clear, empty road in front of him.
He wanted to touch Reese but didn’t know if he had regained the right to do that yet. So he settled for trying to make out the line of his cheekbone in the inky dark. The sharp slash of his eyebrow. And he waited.
“I get it. Or, at least, I get that you see it like that. But Tom—” Reese touched him, one hand on his face, but it made touching okay and Tom reached out like a blind man in the dark until he found Reese’s thigh. Slid a hand down it and pulled Reese’s knee forward until his leg hooked over Tom’s hip. He brought that hand back to Reese’s bare chest and laid it flat against his sternum. Everything was better with touching. He heard Reese sigh and felt the breath roll over his face. “Being with you tonight made me feel shitty.”
Pressure was building in his eyes and nose, a hot tightness that squeezed his voice down to microscopic proportions. “I know.”
“And my plate of things that make me feel shitty is kinda full already, you know?”
“I know.”
Reese was stroking his face. Not as if he was trying to turn Tom on. Just touching. Reminding himself, hopefully, that this was a guy who didn’t mean to hurt him. Even if he was.
Reese’s heartbeat under his fingertips was slow and heavy. He wished they could be silent and still in the dark, feeling that strong thud under his hand. His face was tight and hot and he let each breath an inch into his lungs before freezing and pushing it out again. Dizziness was creeping in.
“I’m trying, Tom.” Reese’s hand slid to the back of his head and held him still as Tom shook his head. Not yet. Please, not yet. “I’m a little too good at this already, though. Making myself feel this bad.”
He could hear the words that Reese didn’t say, as clear as if they rang out like a bell. I don’t know how much longer… And there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to stop those words from coming out.
Except the one thing that would make them unnecessary.
Tom fell asleep with Reese’s hand holding him and no good answers on his tongue.
Reese flung an arm over his face to block the morning light, sheets tangled around his waist in Tom’s bed.
“What are you doing?”
Tom bent over in his desk chair and tightened the laces on his Adidas.
“Going for a run. I’m not in good enough shape to compete, but if I don’t wanna look like an asshole at practice, I need to get some runs in.”
Reese’s arm dropped. He pushed himself up on his elbows.
“Why?”
He double-knotted the laces and yanked on them hard. Admitting that he wasn’t going to do the thing that he knew would stop hurting Reese was hard.
“I’m gonna make you feel bad. And that plate is full.” He looked up and met Reese’s eyes. Wished he could smile. But he didn’t know if this was going to be enough. The cold knot in his gut kept twisting. “So I gotta help you get something else off that plate. Or there won’t be room for me, right?”
Reese watched him, saying nothing.
“I did a crappy job asking you about it last night, Reese, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. So if I have to go to practice to guilt you into trying therapy, then I better run.” He stood up and ran damp palms down his thighs. He’d hoped he could get this one run in under the radar. In case it turned out to be a terrible idea and he chickened out and didn’t go again. But if he had to make the call right now, then fuck it. He was committed. It was the least, really the absolutely fucking least, he could do. “If I run far enough, and you talk long enough, maybe that makes room for me around the edges.”
Reese flopped back down onto the mattress with a huff, smacking both of his hands over his eyes and groaning out loud.
“Ah, fuck. What do you have, some kind of script of awesome things to say that make me want to be nice to you? Shit.”
The knot in his gut melted a little.
Tom’s running shoes were soaked with the heavy layer of dew from the grass on the infield by the time they crossed to the far side of the track where the staggered lane starts were painted. He dropped his backpack at the grass’s edge next to lane one.
Reese was already on the track, bouncing on the balls of his feet, throwing fake punches in the clear air of the early morning light.
“You know we’re not here for a boxing match, right?”
The smile Reese threw him was brilliant, making him stagger with its pure shine of happiness. If he’d had moments of questioning the wisdom of this plan, that smile alone made it worthwhile.
“I don’
t know what it is. Something about being up this early and outside, makes me feel uber sporty. Maybe it’s the shorts.” He winked at Tom. As soon as he’d understood that Tom was serious about running, he’d insisted on coming along.
They’d had to use a half dozen safety pins to take in the sides of one of Tom’s pairs of loose silky basketball shorts. Reese had been ready to go in jeans or cut-off cargo pants—“Shorts are not my thing, dude”—but there was only so much ridiculousness Tom could stand. He’d pulled out an old pair of shorts that had promptly fallen off Reese’s hips and then sat there, breathing deep and trying not to pay attention to his face being inches from that bare waist, pale skin glowing with its lack of sun. He wanted to put his mouth on the sharp bone of Reese’s pelvis and bite, but he resisted valiantly and pinned a section of the shorts together as Reese held them in place.
He’d looked up once, when Reese had swayed forward as if on accident and brushed his silk-covered dick against Tom’s forearm while he pinned. A suspicious gleam shone in his eyes as he looked down at Tom, trying not to smile.
“Knock it off, unless you wanna get thrown down on this bed and not let up until tomorrow,” he growled and tried to keep his hands away from the soft skin of Reese’s hip. Fucking pins.
When Reese nudged him again with his dick, the length of him starting to swell under the navy blue nylon, his control snapped. He fisted his hand in the loose fabric below the neat column of pins he’d already set and yanked Reese bodily forward. Laid his mouth on the hot, smooth skin of Reese’s waist and sucked, scraping the flat of his tongue over the skin. Captured Reese between his teeth and let him know how hard he was thinking about biting him by the nip of his teeth on Reese’s skin. Delicate fingertips rested on the back of his neck, scraping through the short shaved hairs there, touching him so lightly he could barely feel it and yet every ounce of his focus zoomed in on those fingertips. His arm was pressed like a bar behind Reese’s thighs, locking him in place so he couldn’t get away, Reese’s back arching him away from Tom’s mouth.
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