Clean Break

by Erin McLellan

  Travis scoffed, and I picked up the closest object—a pen—and gripped it hard in my fist.

  He was messing with me, right? Surely he remembered.

  But what if he didn’t remember me? It wasn’t like our weird encounter was exactly inspiring. If he didn’t remember me, we could hit reset.

  “I guess we should exchange emails and phone numbers. I’m pretty good about attendance, and I do not like carrying deadweight on assignments,” Travis said pointedly.

  “I am not deadweight.” Just because I didn’t speak up in class did not mean I was a bad student. I was shy. I had anxiety and OCD. Those things sometimes locked me up. Travis could deal with it.

  “I never said you were.”

  I shook my head, frustration making my thoughts feel poorly cobbled together, and scribbled my email and phone number on one of my blank notecards.

  After I handed it to him, he stared at it for a long second. “Your handwriting is scary perfect.”

  He reached over, his arm brushing mine and stealing my breath, before snatching a notecard from my stack. He wrote down his number and email address and handed it back.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. I might drop this class though,” he said airily, as if it didn’t matter. “I didn’t know about the cockroach thing. Not sure I can handle a pet bug.”

  “I thought everyone knew about the Madagascar hissing cockroaches. They’re why most people take this class. It’s why it’s popular.” People were starting to leave the classroom, but I’d missed Dr. Greer releasing us.

  “Well, some of us aren’t know-it-alls.” Travis’s voice was cutting, and a chill rushed down my spine. I’d heard variations on that insult my whole life—uptight, stuffy, stuck-up, fussy, anal. A “know-it-all” wasn’t that bad in comparison, but it hurt.

  “Are you always a jerk?” I said before I could stop myself.

  Travis touched his chest in mock horror. “Excuse me?”

  I clammed up. I hated conflict, even conflict I brought on myself, and I could not believe those derisive words had escaped me. He made me lose my head, had since the moment I’d first met him.

  After glaring for an uncomfortable length of time, Travis gritted out, “You’re not exactly making me want to work with you, Connor Blume. Normally it takes scared, repressed douchebags at least an hour to insult me. This might be a record.”

  My stomach hit the floor. I started to apologize, but Travis cut me off.

  “Nothing to say?” He shoved the notecard with my number on it into his backpack. “And I’m the jerk?”

  He was out of his seat and halfway to the door before I’d taken a breath. He was leaving, and this might be my only chance to talk to him if he dropped the class. Apologizing to Travis Bradford had not been on any of my three lists, but my mom liked to say that I needed to be more spontaneous.

  I caught up with him on the fourth-floor landing.

  “Travis,” I called, and he came to an abrupt stop, creating a bottleneck on the stairs. I shuffled him out of the way and into the fourth-floor hall, which was deserted.

  He rounded on me, and there was fire in his dark eyes. Up until that moment, he had seemed mostly unaffected, like I was a big joke. Maybe it was messed up, but the anger in his eyes and the hard set of his square jaw made him the sexiest guy I’d ever seen.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he bit out.

  “I want to talk.”

  “Then talk.”

  I glanced around. We were the only ones in the hallway, but the thought of anyone coming upon us made my hands shake. I hated being the center of attention. I hated other people’s eyes on me. Hated making a scene.

  I jerked open a storage-closet door that Travis had stopped beside. It had a shelf of cleaning materials, but was mostly full of office supplies for the graduate assistants who shared offices on this floor.

  “Please,” I said with a gesture toward the open door. “Can we talk in private?”

  He eyed me. “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Travis stormed into the closet and I followed. He shut the door behind me and leaned against it. Someone had tacked green, glow-in-the-dark stars to the back of the wooden door. They were barely illuminated in the dim light of the room. It made the closet feel dreamy.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He exhaled noisily. His warm breath hit my neck and raised goosebumps down my arms. I took a step closer to him.

  “For what? Calling me a jerk?”

  “Yes.”

  He scowled when I didn’t go on.

  “Is that all? Why did you pull me in here?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but lost all thought when he pushed his black-framed glasses higher up his nose. The smarty-pants thing really did it for me, and now we were in an enclosed space, and he smelled good.

  We were so alone, and it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that coming into this storage closet with me took courage. The last time we’d been alone, I’d hurt him with misplaced words and my own self-consciousness. He’d hurt me with acerbic comebacks. It hadn’t been pretty. But still, he’d followed me in here.

  He rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, I’m not sure I can handle the uncomfortable silences for a whole semester. Are you like this with everyone, or am I extra special? Because I’ve gotta tell ya, I don’t—”

  I reached up, cupped his smooth jaw, and ran a thumb over his full bottom lip. His voice cut off abruptly. I couldn’t help but zero in on his mouth, his straight white teeth, the pink of his tongue as his mouth dropped open on a gasp.

  I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to keep holding his face steady and still and press our lips together. The desire fired through me, so shocking that I didn’t want to ignore it. I never wanted to kiss.

  “Travis,” I whispered, pressing a half step closer to him. “Can—”

  “You don’t kiss men.” His eyes were wide, and he was breathing hard.

  “So you do remember me.”

  “Of course I fucking remember you,” he snarled.

  “I was a little tipsy last time we talked, and you had my penis in your hand. I wasn’t speaking clearly.”

  A barely there smile flitted across Travis’s face. It felt like a victory, until he said, “I’m sorry, Connor. You’re gorgeous, but I don’t play with homophobic shitbags. I’d hate to get my gay on you.”

  I dropped my hand. “What are you talking about? I’m not homophobic.”

  He ran a fingertip from my chin, over my Adam’s apple, and tapped it against the hollow of my throat. That fingertip alone was more erotic than most of my previous sexual encounters, few though they were. I swallowed and had to force myself not to pin his wayward hand to the wall. I wanted to hold him down.

  “No offense, baby doll, but a man who lets other dudes touch him or suck him off or anything like that without being willing to return the favor or even give the other guy a kiss is not the type of man I’m going to waste my time on. Or my friendship.”

  He’d misunderstood me. Story of my life.

  There were so many things I wanted to say to that. Starting with, You didn’t suck me off last year.

  And, I would have happily sucked you off. It would have been heaven on earth, to have him in my mouth. I was good with my mouth for most things except talking. Next, Before you approached me last year, some asshole had told me that I was only bisexual because I hadn’t sat on the right dick yet, and I was flustered and mad and uncomfortable.

  Lastly, I want more than anything to be your friend.

  But I didn’t say any of those things.

  I kissed him.

  Travis was taller than me, which was novel. He also had the sexiest mouth—it was quick with a comeback and a smile, but he only seemed willing to extend one of those to me today. I’d thought about his mouth relentlessly last year after I’d told him I wasn’t a fan of kissing. I’d wondered if kissing him wou
ld have been different.

  It was.

  Chapter Two

  TRAVIS

  I was frozen, arms and legs heavy with desire or shock. I wasn’t sure which. I wanted Connor to keep kissing me, and I wanted him to stop right fucking now.

  He must have sensed my unease because he pulled back and stared at me. My vision had adjusted to the dim light, so I could make out the muddy hazel of his eyes and the way his jaw ticked. He had faint acne scars on his cheeks that I’d never noticed, giving his face a rugged quality that was almost offset by all his adorable freckles.

  “I’m sorry. I should have asked you first,” he said.

  “It’s fine,” I whispered. My voice was shot.

  “Can I kiss you again?”

  This was the weirdest day. First, I’d discovered I was going to get a pet cockroach, and now the guy who I’d lost an entire semester pining after was asking permission to kiss me in a closet. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, but I was not in the right mind to analyze it.

  I was curious. And he was sexy as all fuck. Maybe because he was so repressed and stoic? I wanted to be the one to unravel him.

  “I suppose,” I said.

  This time he sucked on my bottom lip, and my knees immediately went weak. He didn’t kiss like other guys. He kissed like he wasn’t totally sure of himself, and maybe it made me a jerk, but I wasn’t helping him out at all. I stood stock-still, and let him explore.

  He kissed slowly around my mouth, his lips slipping against mine, almost reverently, and my head spun.

  This was not a breath-stealing kiss. His tongue wasn’t stuffed so far in my mouth I couldn’t think. In fact, he hadn’t used his tongue at all. He captured my top lip, suckled lightly, then nibbled on it.

  I couldn’t help it. I groaned and pulled him closer so our bodies touched. He pressed me into the door with an intensity that scared and excited me all at once. The back of my head ground into one of those plastic glowing stars.

  “Shhh,” he mumbled, his mouth not leaving mine.

  “Don’t shush me,” I snapped before gripping his face in both hands and biting his lip hard.

  He grabbed my hands, ripped them off his cheeks, and pinned them above my head against the closet door.

  We stared at each other, both breathing hard.

  “I liked that,” he said. His voice was wary, as if he didn’t want to give too much away.

  I wanted him to give everything away.

  “What? Taking control?”

  “Yes. That. But also the kissing.”

  I wanted to escape this closet and never talk to him again. I also wanted to drop to my knees and blow his mind, really give him something to like.

  I wanted all kinds of shit, basically.

  “Let me go,” I finally said. Connor was staring at my lips, and if I didn’t get the hell out of here, I’d do something dumb, like lick the stubble on his jaw or ruffle his adorable auburn hair.

  He released me, stepped back, and wrapped his arms around his stomach, as if he were holding himself together. I hated that self-consciousness. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to feel anything for him that wasn’t outright hate.

  “This didn’t mean anything,” I said, my hand on the doorknob.

  He nodded, but wouldn’t meet my eyes. Why was his shyness so damn cute? Why did he do this to me?

  I couldn’t leave him like that, no matter how much he pissed me off. I stepped toward him and brushed a kiss over his cheek.

  He smelled good—all crisp outdoors and hair product—and I lingered too long. With a move so sudden it caused me to jump, his hands framed my neck. I’d bet he had no idea what that did to me. What it made me want to do for him.

  He tipped my head back with his thumbs under my jaw, and my breath hitched when he kissed my Adam’s apple. God, what would it feel like to have his palm there, on my throat? I clenched my hands in his crisp shirt and crumpled it in my fists.

  “I ironed this shirt this morning,” he said wryly, like the fussy asshole he was.

  “Shut up,” I gasped. He kissed my throat again, a tiny whisper of lips that about made me explode out of my skin.

  When he pulled back, his eyes were self-satisfied. I frowned at him.

  “I’ll see you Wednesday?” he asked.

  “I don’t like you very much.” I wanted him to know this fact, since I couldn’t seem to show him with my body. Each time he touched me, I melted.

  He didn’t react except for a twitch of his eyebrows. “I got that message loud and clear when you were moaning for me.”

  Oh, smart guy’s got humor now?

  I laughed, licked the tip of my middle finger, and gave him a one-fingered salute.

  “Bye, Travis.”

  “Bye, asshole.”

  I escaped the storage closet, was relieved to find the hallway empty, and practically ran from the building.

  I should drop the class. Or ask Dr. Greer if I could change partners. But then Connor would win, and I’d take a pet cockroach home for an entire semester before I’d let that happen.

  I had an hour until my next class—Literature of the New American West—so I needed to cool down, stat. I didn’t want to walk into Dr. Birdie’s class sweating. Or hard.

  I jogged from the agriculture building to the student union, hoping the line wouldn’t be too long at the coffee cart. Everywhere I turned, people from my classes or campus groups or the Lumberyard waved or smiled at me. I tried to put up an emotional shield that said, “I’m busy,” or, “Don’t talk to me.” My best friend, Joel, was ace at that, but I was terrible at those types of boundaries.

  I wanted a couple minutes to calm down and analyze what had happened with Connor. Was that too much to ask? Sometimes I wished I was more anonymous.

  A voice that sounded suspiciously like my mom’s blared in my head: If you wanted anonymous, you shouldn’t have gone to a small college in the Middle Of Nowhere, Oklahoma.

  Which was exactly why I was blowing this Popsicle stand the first chance I got. Farm College had been wonderful for me as a teenage boy from a huge city who’d just had his heart broken. I’d lost my cross-country track scholarship to Louisiana State University when I’d trashed my ankle my senior year, and without running, I’d had no idea who I was. My whole identity had been wrapped up in being a runner. After my injury, I’d needed a safe place to rediscover myself, to find the new me that I’d become without track. Farm College had been that bolt-hole, but now it felt like a skin I couldn’t wait to shed.

  I had a plan. A path. My mom liked to say that I’d found my calling. And I hadn’t had a calling since the first day I’d stepped on a track and run until my body was light with happiness. I’d forgotten how amazing it was to feel that deep rightness in my bones.

  But then Kissa came into my life. I met Kissa last May at a trans-rights rally in Tulsa with my friend, Roy. Kissa had fled Uganda two years before and SAFE Asylum—a national organization that provided legal aid to those fleeing persecution due to their gender identity, sexual orientation, or HIV status—was helping her apply for her green card. Kissa’s story was gutting, but it had also lit a fire under me. She’d introduced me to Dr. Chuma. Dr. Chuma was a badass law professor at Oklahoma City University and a former director for SAFE Asylum. Now Dr. Chuma picked up Oklahoma asylum cases, and was the preeminent expert in the area. She’d set me up as an intern with SAFE Asylum last summer at their St. Louis headquarters.

  All it had taken was two and a half months at SAFE Asylum for me to realize that was what I needed to be doing with my life.

  Dr. Chuma had slipped me information about registering for the LSAT at the end of the summer. She’d told me to look into OCU for law school, since it’d be cheaper than most law schools in Texas or Missouri, even as a private university, and there would always be a place for me at SAFE Asylum. I planned to take her up on that for the next three summers and to knock down the door at the St. Louis office once I passed the Missouri bar.

&n
bsp; That was my plan, and I was sticking to it.

  Only four more months at Farm College, at a small university where everyone was all up in my business, where I couldn’t make it through a simple entomology class without coming eye-to-eye with a failed hookup.

  My future was what I should have been thinking about. It was so close I should have been able to taste it. Instead, all I could taste was the sweetness of raisins. All I could think about was Connor fucking Blume.

  I found a dusty, deserted corner in the student union where I could drink my coffee in peace without any classmates or old Grindr dates spotting me. Here I could close my eyes and remember every sensation, sound, touch, and breath from when Connor had kissed me. I wanted to reexamine it in living color, so I could decide it hadn’t been that great and discard the feelings shivering through me once and for all.

  It didn’t work. Memories of Connor’s lips followed me through two literature classes—one of which only assigned books by old, dead, White men—and all the way back to my rental house that afternoon.

  I opened the door to my house and got an eyeful of Joel, my housemate, being seduced by his boyfriend, Paulie, on our couch. Paulie didn’t technically live here, but he might as well have. He was here all the time. He was lucky he was cute.

  Paulie had Joel’s hands locked against the sofa and was giving him a major hickey on his neck. Sensory memories of Connor’s lips on my throat made me shudder. Paulie, for what it was worth, flicked his gaze up, saw it was me coming through the front door, and continued his seduction unbothered.

  I walked into our crappy kitchen, got a beer, skipped back into the living room, and sank into our big, cushy chair-and-a-half. Joel’s shirt was all rucked up, and he was out of breath. I was pretty sure he hadn’t noticed that I’d come in.

  After about thirty seconds of me staring at them like a creeper, Paulie pulled off Joel’s neck and grinned at me. “You just going to sit there and watch, Trav?”

  “I’m enjoying a beer after class. This is the living room. It’s either watch you guys or watch TV, but I think Joel’s lying on the remote.”