He stepped closer and put his hands on Janine's shoulders as if to pour his own strength into her. "Well, there's one guy in the world who'll make it his business to be real nice to one creative person. One who's got beautiful dark hair and a hot shape, and..."
Janine raised a finger to his lips to stop him. "Don't go there," she said. "The professor might come back in."
"Okay, I'm just saying, we've both got careers cut out for us, I know it. I just want to make the most of them. I'll show you; you'll see we can make things work great."
"If you say it, I believe it," she said.
"Good. Always believe what Shawn says. Shawn knows best." He grinned at her with an assuredness that was only partly a pose. In the time that Janine had been with Shawn, she had come to notice there were times when he feigned arrogance, but was not entirely faking. She accepted this as just Shawn being Shawn. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the entrance to the classroom, where students were filing out but the professor, wherever he had gone, was not returning. Finding the coast clear, he darted closer and stole a quick kiss.
Janine pulled back from the kiss in a pretense of mild annoyance. "That was naughty," she said, mock-scolding him.
"That was a deposit," Shawn replied. "I'll be expecting payment in full for my business advice tonight."
Continuing her pose of aggravation, Janine let Shawn escort her from the art class with an arm around her shoulder. "I swear, you turn everything into a transaction..."
Shawn put on a mockery of petulance. "Miss Fields, are you comparing me to a gigolo? Not that I couldn't be one; I'm just asking..."
"Oh, shush," she admonished him on the way out the door.
Outside on the campus street, the approaching sunset painted the sky with deepening blues and swaths of red, violet, and gold that complemented the brick, marble, and ivy of the classic-looking campus. The day was winding down at Wilson University, with students heading off from classes to the dining halls. Walking down the street, with his arm still around her, Janine and Shawn were so occupied with their banter and mockery that the people they passed lay outside of their notice--including the boy on the motorcycle watching them across the way.
Clad in a black leather jacket with black riding boots and a denim shirt and jeans, he eyed the passing couple from behind a pair of Ray Bans and watched as they went oblivious to everyone but themselves. "So that's your latest acquisition, huh, Brown?" he muttered. "Your taste is as good as ever. I wonder if you are with her like you were with Wendy."
Tyler Austin lifted his Ray Bans back over his eyes and watched, unsmiling, as the couple reached the end of the street of the quad and turned the corner, disappearing amid the grass and brick and ivy. The sunglasses covered dark eyes under waves of medium-brown hair. The face was magnetically handsome, as if it could shoot lightning from the eyes as well as the imaginary daggers he was shooting at Shawn. The jawline was square and coated thinly with dark stubble. The body under the leather and denim was lankier than Shawn's but just as lean and hard and cut. He was sex on a Honda, and he was as oblivious to the looks that girls and boys passing by were giving him as Shawn and Janine were to everything else. "It must be love," Tyler said under his breath.
He took his helmet from the back of his seat and put it over his head, becoming a knight on a gas-fueled horse. Under the helmet, Tyler said to himself, "Good. Let it be love. If that's what it is, it'll be better that way." And he kickstarted and gunned the motor and peeled out onto the quad, a youth on a mission.
_______________
Scoring himself a private room in the dorms was essential to Tyler's plans. The dorm lottery had been very close; he was a transfer sophomore and first preference for the best rooms always went to people who had been enrolled as freshmen. If he had lost out, he would have had to get an off-campus apartment, which would have been more costly. Money had been much more of an issue in Tyler's life than it ought to have been for the past few years. He should have had as easy a ride as Shawn had. That was only one of things for which he meant to pay Shawn Brown back.
Sitting up in his bed, clad only in his tight white briefs, Tyler was a thing of lean, hard, tightness that would soon be on full display to so many people. Tyler was built like a surfer--a champion surfer. His muscles were cut, but sleek and slippery, not bulky. His was a frame meant to be mounted on a board, swerving and swaying along the curl of a wave. That was the way one girl whose bed he shared had once described him. She said he had a surfer's body. Tyler had spent a very enthusiastic night body surfing on top of her, which if he were honest was his favorite athletic event. What he meant to do with his body now--the next phase of his plan--was the thing that made him feel most uneasy. Looking across the room to the full body mirror on his closet door, he knew at least intellectually that his discomfort was needless. He had nothing to worry about and no reason to be embarrassed. If other people--who were not nearly in the kind of shape that he was in--had no problem with it, neither should he. And, he reminded himself, it was necessary. It was the necessary and perfect thing to do.
Tyler looked over at what lay on the bed next to him for motivation. He reached for it and picked it up. The glossy pages of the high school yearbook leafed through his fingers until he reached that one page, with that one photo on it. He stopped at that page and looked into that one face. Shawn Brown had written nothing in Tyler's yearbook, as Tyler had written nothing in his. They had had nothing to say to each other back then, at least nothing that Tyler had felt like writing next to Shawn's face. He had said a few choice words to Shawn back then, and he would have a few more choice words to say to him yet, once he'd gone through with the plan. Then he would look Shawn in the eye, not in the photograph, and give the bastard what he so richly had coming.
He flipped and thumbed his way through other parts of the yearbook, going over the pictures of himself and Shawn and Wendy and so many other people that he remembered from those days. He wished the yearbook could have included snapshots of some of the other things that went on, the things that happened outside of school. He wished it could have shown the other places and things that had figured in his life those few short years ago, so recent in memory, which felt like another lifetime ago because of what they had meant to his life, what they had done to his future. Those things were recorded in the yearbook of Tyler Austin's mind, as indelible as photos on a page, never to be forgotten. Like old photographs, those things and the feelings that went with them--the anger, the sorrow, the humiliation, the bile--were fixed and unchanging. They might turn brown with age, but they would never go away.
Putting the book on the floor beside the bed, Tyler looked out into space while looking back in his mind's eye into the past. Present and past lived in his mind together with the future that he foresaw, and through them all he saw that one face. He muttered the name bitterly. "Shawn Brown. Shawn Brown. You didn't see me today. You haven't seen me yet. But you will, you son of a bitch. You will."
He stood up and peeled off his tighty whities, letting them slide down around his ankles and stepping out of them. They lay there on the floor next to the yearbook while Tyler showed himself naked in the mirror. Fully exposed was his young, tight, beautiful body in its entirety, including the dangling and ample member that Wendy and other girls had so enjoyed. It stiffened a bit at the memory of Wendy. She was his first, even as Shawn was Wendy's first. Wendy had enrolled out of state after high school. Tyler knew where she was and had more than once considered just jumping on his bike and going to see her. He had opted against it, as she must have another boyfriend now the same as she had another boyfriend then. He had no interest in sleeping with other boys' girlfriends now.
Well, almost no interest.
Tyler stepped closer to the mirror, looking his lean muscularity up and down and watching his growing length and stiffness at the memory of those first nights with Wendy--and the anticipation of his plans coming to fruition. And he smiled, a smile of expected satisfaction, not only from
what he planned to do, but from the way Shawn Brown would look when he learned that Tyler did it.
There was a saying that he had learned, a quote from Mark Twain: "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Very soon, thought Tyler, the future was going to rhyme with the past. And Shawn Brown was not going to like the way the verses went at all.
_______________
Janine was among the last to arrive for class the next morning. She was in danger of being late, as Shawn had kept her busy collecting his "payment" for his advice on juggling art and commerce. He had collected very well for services rendered--and rendered further good service--three times during the night and once again in the morning before she finally threw him out. Breathlessly she got herself and her art supplies together, practically inhaled a blueberry muffin and a hot cocoa, and hustled into class to find herself a stool and an easel in front of the model's posing stage right in the proverbial nick. The girl sitting next to her, who had already set up her sketch pad and whipped out her charcoals, leaned over and whispered, "Professor Kellaway says we've got a new model today."
Janine, setting up her own sketch pad and drawing out her own charcoals from her satchel, simply shrugged and said, "That's nice." A new model was just a different subject and no cause for excitement. She had found the models in life drawing classes were all of one range of unremarkable types: a succession of plain, common faces and ordinary, often sagging bodies. The new model, no doubt, would be just more of the same. All set up, she watched the Professor, a sweater-clad man with a tuft of white hair that crowned his head like whipped cream on top of a latte, went to a partition on one side of the room and softly said something to the ordinary body undressing behind it. The ordinary body said something back, and Professor Kellaway stepped away and withdrew to the back of the room.
A few seconds later, the model, carrying a cotton robe in one hand, stepped out from behind the partition, as naked as every other model ever to grace the posing stage onto which he stepped up. Janine felt a huge breath filling her chest, and her lungs suddenly growing paralyzed. She felt as if she were in one of those movie close-ups in which the director puts someone in a fish-eye lens, making the background recede and her face loom fully into frame. Nudity was the one and only thing that the new model had in common with all the others. This was no common art-class life drawing subject--not unless art classes were now recruiting their subjects out of the pages of Gentleman's Quarterly or the Abercrombie and Fitch Catalog. This was a subject of an entirely different kind, a completely different calibre.
He sat on the bench and set the robe down beside him, and all at once Janine envied the bench: for the buttocks now resting on that wood and the rest of the body that accompanied them begged not merely to be rendered in charcoal, but worshipped. The model glanced around the room until his dark brown eyes came to rest on her--and she could have sworn that the smile that ever so subtly curled amid the unshaved stubble on his upper lip and lower jaw was meant just for her. So intent was Janine on that subtle smile, and the way he carried that body, and what just barely rested between his thighs, that she almost did not hear Kellaway at the back of the room give the order to start drawing. She was dimly aware that her mouth was hanging slightly open while the model kept those eyes squarely on her. Kellaway's command registered with her only when she heard the scratching of other people's charcoal on their pads. Then, with strokes of her own stick on the paper before her, Janine began to draw Tyler Austin.
The whole thing turned out to be about as easy as Tyler expected, thanks to what he had done for money during the previous year. Posing for a roomful of art students did not make him nearly as self-conscious as he felt his first night at The Toy Chest. That was his quite generous prior source of income since becoming a freshman in the neighboring town of Oakwood, before transferring back to Wilson. The first time he did that, he was a nervous wreck, whipping off his clothes in front of an auditorium full of screaming women and parading himself back and forth like a gyrating piece of meat. The perspiration that broke out on his body that night was not a sweat of excitement; it was more like a flop sweat that one gets while sick with the flu. All the screaming and jumping and grabbing and groping had almost sent him into a panic. He was fine with one pretty girl at a time, in private, pawing at him, but here he was besieged by hundreds of women of almost every type. It was only at the end of that first performance, as he counted the bills that they had stuffed so copiously into his thong, that he decided it was not so bad a thing to be a gyrating piece of meat after all, and calmed down all the way to the bank.
The money that he made at The Toy Chest had afforded him the ability to return to Wilson University, in his home town, a year after everything that happened. The intervening year had given the town a chance to forget what happened and move on to other things. Tyler was fine with people forgetting. Let them forget; Tyler still remembered, and remembering was his motivation for everything. Now he had enough money to live comfortably--though not as well as he lived before it all happened--and was back in the town where he grew up, which Shawn Brown had not left. Shawn Brown had stayed right here and enrolled at Wilson right out of high school. Shawn Brown had stayed the golden boy, admired by his peers, his family still respected in the community. Shawn Brown's life never became a shambles. Keeping his eyes on the prize sitting behind the easel up front and to his right, Tyler looked forward to bringing a little more chaos into Shawn's ordered world. That, and the fact that this was a very different atmosphere than the club "for women only" in Oakwood and he was no longer a stranger to being undressed in front of a roomful of people, kept Tyler calm. This was no horde of screaming women waving money to slip into his G-string. This was a roomful of quiet, focused students, both girls and boys, studying his anatomy for a very different purpose.
He imagined that some of them, while they worked, might be thinking the same kinds of things that those women screamed. He guessed that as many of the boys were thinking that as the girls. When he took a tour of the Wilson art department the day he applied as a model, he had gotten to see some of the life drawing work that was done there. None of the other models looked like him. They might not show it, but he was pretty sure that the students were not accustomed to having someone like him to draw. This, he expected, would work to his advantage with Janine. As the class wore on, Professor Kellaway periodically had him change positions--standing, sitting, reclining, standing with one leg up on the bench, now facing the room, then with his back to the room. The pages of the sketchbooks turned and sketches of him filled sheet after sheet.
Tyler knew it would take more than just being the best subject in Janine's drawing class to afford him a chance to fill the sheets of her bed with his eagerly humping body. This was only the vital first step. The most difficult part of it would be to make sure that the whole class did not see between his legs his commitment to his goal. With concentration--and careful diversion from Janine's pretty, earnest face--he managed to keep himself posing at no more than half-mast. It was so typical, he thought. Fair-haired boys like Shawn Brown always got the pretty, earnest, well-turned out girls. Not that Tyler, with his own looks, had ever had to settle for less than a beauty in bed. In fact he had slept with some of the prettier patrons of The Toy Chest. But Shawn and Tyler had both come from fine families. They were both cut out to be All-American golden boys that the best girls took home to meet their folks. But because of what happened back then, only Shawn had gotten to stay golden. Tyler looked forward to putting a little tarnish on that gold.
After a good session Professor Kellaway called for a break, and everyone put down their charcoals and relaxed. Tyler let go of his pose with one foot up on the bench and reached for his robe, watching Janine all the while. He studied her as intently as she had studied him in drawing, paying special attention to the look on her face. He watched her lean back her head and let out a long breath, and swivel her neck as if to release tension from her muscles. He watched her reach down into her s
atchel and pull out a handkerchief, with which she dabbed at her forehead and cheeks. He saw her start to thumb her way back through her morning's worth of sketches--all of him. And perhaps it was only his imagination or his hopes, but he thought she looked almost as if she could use a cigarette. Very soon, he promised himself, he would get her to that point for real.
Tying the robe around his waist, Tyler stepped off the platform and made his way to Janine's side. Her eyes widened noticeably as she looked up at him, with his chest tantalizingly visible in the opening of the robe and the reward he looked forward to giving her carefully concealed. Deciding now was the time to start zeroing in, he put his most seductive smile on his handsome, stubbly face. "Mind if I have a look?" he asked.
With a gulp, Janine replied, "No. Sure. Go ahead."
Janine let Tyler lift and turn the pages of her sketch pad. He had cunningly chosen to wear a robe with half-sleeves that kept his forearms bare. It put a discreet part of his exposed flesh right in Janine's face as he lifted the sheets of paper, at the same time imagining himself peeling away her clothing, lifting open the sheets of her bed, and laying her down in it. He watched her expression carefully from the corners of his eyes and was pleased that her attention was on his arm and not on the drawings. That was good. Very good...
ROMANCE: BAD BOY ROMANCE: Bad Boy Brother (Stepbrother Interracial College Romance) (Contemporary Stepsister Taboo Romance) Page 67