by Eli Easton
Mostly.
“What is this?” Micah asked.
Sloane and I stood in Micah’s office, our arms folded over our chests in what Sloane would call a ‘classic defensive posture’. I knew that because he’d called me on it more than once.
Micah picked up a slick black report binder and flipped through it. I caught a glimpse of a layout of the downstairs of the house done on some kind of CAD/CAM program. I knew it! I knew Sloane would trick his out. I was glad I’d spent all that extra time on mine. I had fucking pie charts. In color. And a full budget.
“Why are there two?” Micah asked flatly as he picked up my proposal and looked it over.
“We couldn’t agree, so we figured we’d let you pick,” I said.
“Because obviously,” Sloane added, “your priority will be whatever will make the Delts look the best. And not other factors. Like blood relations.” Sloane looked at the ceiling innocently.
“Good God.” Micah unfolded the redheaded centerfold in a bikini that I’d put in as visual inspiration for my beach theme. Micah liked redheads. “You guys spent this much time on this thing, but you couldn’t take ten minutes to collaborate?”
Ha! Little did my brother know the excruciating hours we’d spent collaborating. Or maybe just picking on each other.
Sloane looked at me. “There’s a native American legend. It says that one day a white buffalo will be born during a summer storm. The crows will nest with the eagles and salmon will spawn in the sea. Then, and only then, will Hank and Sloane find a common vision.”
I choked back a laugh. Sloane was funny. I had to give him that. He was even more amusing when he was busting someone else’s balls instead of mine.
Micah dumped both proposals in his trash.
“Hey!” I said. “I worked hard on that!”
“Here’s what I want,” Micah said in his nice-guy-about-to-lose-it voice. “You have twenty-four hours to put a joint plan on my desk. I don’t care if it has two words on it ‘charades’ and ‘lemonade’. I don’t care if it’s scrawled on a napkin in red crayon. But I’m not going to arbitrate your battles. You feel me?”
“So…” Sloane said slowly, “The goal here is not to actually have a great party to increase the fraternity’s reputation, but to be some sort of hugely ironic team-building exercise? Is this a research project for an ecosurvivalist class or something?”
“Wait. Is this because Mom always liked me best?” I asked.
Micah opened his office door and gave us a flat smile. “Have a good night, gentlemen. See you tomorrow at eight pm sharp.”
I headed for my room, Sloane on my heels. I tried to shut the door in his face, but he just pushed it open again and followed me inside.
“I’m going for a workout,” I said. I grabbed a pair of sweat pants and a ratty old T-shirt from the dresser.
“We have twenty-four hours, and I have a full class schedule tomorrow,” Sloane complained.
“Look, I’ll find you after, okay? Believe me, it’s better if I take my aggression out on inanimate iron first.”
Sloane cocked his head to the side, watching me as I stripped off my long-sleeved thermal and put on my T-shirt. “Do you actually see the testosterone pour out of you when you work out, or is it more of a mist?”
I ignored him and dropped trou to change, very purposefully mooning him. When I turned around, the coward was gone.
I loved working out. It was quiet. Like, you get into the zone and block everything else out. No one bothers you. It’s just you and your own body. I loved how I could affect my muscles, how I had the control. I could decide I wanted bigger biceps and work toward that, or I could decide to let them go down a bit. I didn’t have any ambition to compete, and I didn’t want to be a steroid monkey like the guys on the front of muscle magazines. I just wanted to be… fit-looking. Strong. Healthy. When I watched myself lifting weights in the mirror, I felt… alive. I could believe that I was fine—better than fine. I needed it, mentally. If I didn’t get to work out for a while, I started goin’ batshit crazy and my muscles ached like they were shrinking—slowly and with great resentment, like the melting Wicked Witch of the West.
That night while I worked out, I found myself looking in the mirror for a ‘mist’. I laughed out loud at myself. Fucking Sloane! I looked around, hoping no one had seen me chortling to myself like a psychotic hyena. But no one was watching me.
Weird that it didn’t feel that way. Why did I feel like Sloane was watching even when he wasn’t there?
~4~
Sloane
HANK went to the gym to burn some inner road rage or something, and I wandered around the house restlessly.
Micah was going to press this thing. He was a laid-back guy, but he was no pushover. Clearly, the leader of the frat pack had lockjaw when he got his teeth into something. I wondered, again, what Micah’s agenda was. It had to have something to do with the fact that Hank was his brother. It had a whiff of fraternal torture about it, that dysfunctional family je ne sais quoi. Somehow, I’d ended up in the middle of it.
The question was, what was I going to do about it? I admit, I enjoyed spending time with Hank, and I was going to be bored when that ended. We had a ‘frenemy’ thing going on that was more entertaining than any other relationship I’d formed at PSU. It was fun to pick on Hank, and I liked that he picked on me right back. And then there was the not-at-all-shabby scenery he provided and the fact that I hadn’t figured him out yet.
My parents had given me a big lecture about the ongoing physical, cognitive, and sociological development of a young man my age. In sum: people changed a lot during the college years, particularly as a result of the ‘first real separation from parental authority and caretaking’ and ‘a realization of adulthood as a socially-enforced but self-sustained burden.’ I wondered what my semi-fascination with Hank Springfield meant about my cognitive development. Maybe I was only interested in people I clashed heads with, like a wee pearl that needed the grit of friction to grow.
That was a depressing thought.
My best guess about the party thing was that one of us would have to just capitulate. Maybe we could rock-paper-scissors for it. I wanted to argue with Hank about it right then, a weird little itchy niggle in my stomach. But Hank wasn’t here. I wandered out to the living room to see what the guys were up to.
“Sloane!” Danny called out. There were five guys sprawled over the couches in the common room watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in sunglasses. “Terminator marathon, bro! Hang with us!”
“And make some popcorn,” a redhead named Will called out without looking away from the screen.
“Tempting. But I think I’ll pass. You guys have fun.”
I went into the kitchen and poked into Hank’s little shelf on the fridge. It contained a fat roll of Lebanon baloney—Pennsylvanians were big on meat products—and two glass bottles like the ones Hank had stashed in his room. The labels were facing the back of the fridge. I dug one out and looked at it. There was a Post-it note that read “HANK” conveniently hiding the label. I pulled it off. The bottle had a hand-written label that said “Grape Kombucha”. I got out my phone and googled it. It was a fermented tea beverage, supposedly a good detoxifier. Origin: Asia. Popular with the hippy health crowd and often homemade.
Had Hank made it himself? Did he buy it from someone who made it? And why did he cross out the labels?
“Hank, you wacky, muscle-bundle of contrariness,” I muttered. I put the bottle back.
I wasn’t in the mood to study, so I went back to my room and settled down to watch my secret vice on my laptop.
* * *
I was really getting into the video and just starting to rub my hand over my hardening dick, which was still in my jeans, when a big paw pounded on the door and then it flew open.
“Hey, Frenchie!” Hank bellowed as loud as he possibly could. His beard was damp, and he was in comfy sweats, like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
I sat up qu
ickly, discreetly hiding my boner and hitting PAUSE on the video.
“What are you watching?” Hank asked suspiciously, looking me up and down.
I turned the computer so he could see it. “Inspector Lynley.”
Hank huffed a laugh. “You jerk off to Masterpiece Mystery? Wait. Of course you do.”
I groaned and hid my face in my hands. “I wasn’t—”
“Guess Lynley is kind of cute.”
“It’s not—” Hank was Satan. The Prince of Humiliation. I could see that now. “I’m just a good multitasker, okay? I like watching mysteries, and I like… that. It’s simply an efficient use of my time to do them together. ‘Comfort layering’ if you will.” I waved my hands in the air in a vaguely descriptive manner.
“Sure. I get it. Like my mom knits when she watches TV.”
“Exactly.”
He plopped down on the bed. “What about Inspector Morse? He get you off? Or is he too old?”
I picked up a pillow and smacked him in the head with it. “I don’t actually recall inviting you in here, Hank.”
“Yeah, payback’s a bitch. I saw the first season of this awhile back. What’s this one?” He nudged his chin toward the screen and tried to sound all casual. But he looked like a dog gazing in the window of a chicken hatchery.
Really?
“It’s, um, the start of season three. You can, uh…” I trailed off, eyebrows in my hairline, waiting for the ‘ha ha gotcha’ to come. But he just avoided my gaze and looked around the room nervously.
“I can… turn this off, and we can talk about the party? Or you can… watch it with me?”
“Watch,” Hank said decisively. He shoved himself up against the headboard and thrust his legs out, which was a trick, because me and my laptop were already on the bed and he wasn’t small. “Anything to avoid talking about the party.” He made a gagging gesture.
“They’re watching Terminator downstairs,” I pointed out, though surely he’d walked past it when he came in.
Hank shrugged. He jerked his head at the screen again in a silent command.
I started the video. I managed to keep my hands off any and all sexual appendages—his or mine.
We watched the first two episodes of season three. By then, it was just past eleven and the house was quiet for once. I should have been tired, but I felt wired. Hank, on the other hand, lay propped up against my headboard with his eyes at half-mast like he might fall asleep there. His two-hundred-plus-pounds looked like it had morphed into six hundred, he lay so heavily. He made no move to get up when I turned the laptop off.
It was so quiet you could hear the tick tick of computer cooling down.
“You really like mysteries?” I asked, sitting up and turning around to face him.
“Yeah. You?”
“Exceedingly.”
We stared at each other with expressions of mutual distrust. Did we actually have something in common?
“Like… ‘they’re okay but I’d rather watch action flicks or sci-fi?’ like them? Or…” I prompted, trying to get clarity.
“Well, I don’t jerk off to them or anything….”
I groaned. “I wasn’t… Okay, I think it’s time for anyone with a tattoo to go ni-nite.” I stood up and motioned to the door.
“We haven’t talked about the party,” Hank yawned, stretching out and making himself even more comfortable.
I sighed and looked at him, my face in a carefully calculated expression of annoyance. But really, he looked damn good lying on my bed, all warm-skinned and sleepy, his beard and bulging muscles stirring that unexpected little kink pot inside me that would probably have my mom writing a new thesis if she knew about it.
But I refused to give in and lust after a man who was off the gaydar, no matter how good he looked. Nope. Not going to happen.
I sighed and began to pace. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. Party.”
“Party,” Hank agreed with a yawn.
An idea popped into my head, and I stopped. “If you like mysteries, and I like mysteries….” I faltered doubtfully.
“Go on.”
I paced again, starting to feel a bit of excitement. The angels weren’t exactly singing yet, but they were filing in for choir practice.
“Okay. Christmas. Mystery theme. What if people can either cosplay their favorite detective or…” I paused, knowing that some people wouldn’t want to go to all that trouble the week before finals.
“A murder victim,” Hank said.
“Yeah,” I smiled. Even the laziest frat guy would find it amusing to paint a red line against his throat or hang a noose around his neck. “And we can take your TV idea but instead of playing beach movies we can play classic mysteries like the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes.”
“We gotta show the new BBC Sherlock too. That’s my favorite TV show of all time.” Hank said sincerely.
My throat closed up, and I stared at him. Oh shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. This could not be happening. We could not be so firmly on the same bloody wavelength, not me and butch boy. “Sure,” I shrugged, turning away. I hate you for being straight, Hank Springfield.
I booted up my laptop to look over some of my party ideas. Surely there’d be things we could adapt.
“We need an actual mystery, though,” Hank said. “Somethin’. Something not lame.”
“They have those dinner party murder mystery games.”
“Nah, too complicated for a frat party.”
He was right. “It is a Christmas party. We could make up a mystery skit involving Santa.”
Hank screwed up his face. “Nothing cutesy. Please.”
“What about…. Santa’s been abducted and is being held at an undisclosed location on campus. People have to figure out what the kidnappers want for ransom and bring it to the party, or he’ll be dead Santa.”
“So we run most of the mystery before the party….”
“We’ll use it as marketing! That way we can build up interest. And the party is the big reveal. We could have a prize for those who solve the mystery, a big Christmas gift box on the porch that we open that night.”
I could see the excitement in Hank’s eyes, but he chewed his lip thoughtfully. “Will people really pay attention to, what, flyers around campus? Everyone’s so busy with their own shit.”
“They will if it’s catchy enough. Give me a sec.”
I was decent with Photoshop, and I browsed the web to find some quick stock images and did a mockup with a Santa chained to a chair with some blood on the floor. It was very noir, if I did say so myself. I turned the laptop to show Hank.
He leaned toward me, elbows on the bed. He slowly smiled.
“We can find a place online that sells fake body parts like a pinky finger or something,” I said, getting into it, “and put those up with the sign in a central location on campus. Lots of red paint.”
“And a cut off reindeer hoof!” Hank chuckled.
We sat there on the bed and grinned at each other.
“It’s not exactly classy….” I hedged. “Not sure it’s what Micah had in mind.”
“Screw that. It beats the hell out of charades and lemonade anyway, right? And we agree?”
He put his hand out for a shake. It was a big hand, strong. It wasn’t anything like my long and narrow, normal guy’s hand. I put my hand in his, the contrast not lost on me. He was so warm.
Strange bedfellows, I thought.
Who would ever have thought Hank Springfield and I would find common ground over killing Santa Claus?
~5~
Sloane
THE CHRISTMAS party was set for Friday night, December 12th. It was the last official day of classes. The week after was finals, so the weekend of the 13th was going to be spent studying like mad. That Friday night was therefore like the Mardi Gras before lent.
Of course, a lot of houses were having parties that same night. But ours was definitely the most creative.
Micah loved our party plan
, and we started mapping it out. Maybe things were going a little too well, and I was getting a little too comfortable, because that was when the bottom dropped out.
We were in Hank’s room breaking down lists of what had to be done, when I noticed Hank kept rolling his right shoulder and stretching that arm over his head.
“Hurt yourself?” I asked, breaking off my web search for mulled wine recipes.
Hank made a pained face as he crossed his right arm in front of him, stretching it. “Pulled my shoulder doing deadlifts.”
“Do you have any liniment that heats up?” I wasn’t sure what it was called in America, but I’d been a fan of the stuff ever since joining the swim team at my high school.
Hank shook his head. “It’s fine.”
“Hang on.”
I’d actually brought some with me to the States, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find anything as good here. I went to my room and came back with the tube.
“This stuff is magic. Wait til you feel it.”
Hank grabbed the tube out of my hand and looked at it. “It’s in French.”
“Yeah, imagine that. A French label on a product I bought in France.”
“So how did you end up at PSU anyway, if you were living in Paris?” he asked, as if he’d been wondering.
I sighed. Did I give the quick and dirty answer or the truth? “When I was little, we lived in New York City. I used to visit my grandparents in Wisconsin during the summers.” I shrugged. “I liked it there.” That was an understatement. I’d adored my grandparents’ house. They lived in a real house instead of a high-rise apartment, with a yard full of green grass and everything. “We moved to London when I was in fifth grade, and then Paris my last few years of high school. But they never felt like home exactly.”