by Eli Easton
Hank looked dubious.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I added quickly. “They’re amazing cities, and I’m lucky I got a chance to live abroad but… I wanted to go to college in the States. And PSU has one of the highest ranked veterinary programs.” I grabbed the tube back from him. “It’s my parents. They travel a lot. In fact, they just moved to Greece.”
Hank gawked at me. “You left for college and your parents moved to Greece? Dude! That sucks ass.”
It didn’t really. I was over going to foreign schools, having to learn a new language, a new everything. I loved how comfortable PSU felt. “Well, I’ll still get to visit them there, so it’s all good. Now take off your shirt.”
We both froze once the words had left my mouth. Hank looked at me oddly, and I had a stab of self-doubt. What was I doing? I honestly had no intention of seducing him, as if I even could. But the thought of getting my hands on those muscles, even for a few brief moments, was heady. I wanted to touch him, and that was a bit not good, even if I had the perfectly reasonable excuse of needing to administer first aid.
“You know what? You can do it yourself.” I tossed the tube back to him and picked up my laptop. I wandered over to his desk chair to get some distance. I’d focus on the party plans. No problem.
I tried to assimilate a mulled wine recipe and failed. Hank was silent.
“Can’t reach it,” Hank grunted. I looked up to see he had his T-shirt off, and he was trying to touch the back of his shoulder with the opposing hand. “There’s a big knot in the back.”
If that wasn’t a green light, I didn’t know what was. And damn, his chest was amazing—roundly muscled and smooth with dark brown nipples. I felt a thrill low in my belly, but I kept my game face on.
“You need help or what?”
“Yeah.” He tossed the tube onto the bed beside him and lay down. On his stomach.
Holy shit.
I so knew this wasn’t going to end well. Warning signs were blaring in my head like it was the zombie apocalypse. But I was powerless to resist. Lying on his stomach with no shirt, his arms bent at the elbows and folded under his head, his back was a work of art. I’d never realized shoulders came that size. His bone structure alone was impressive and then add all the muscles he’d built on top of it, and that perfect, round, denim-clad ass…. My knees literally went weak. It didn’t help that I’d come to actually like Hank Springfield.
God, I was going to regret this.
I made it over to the bed, weak knees notwithstanding, and sat beside him. I picked up the tube. Trying not to talk, or blink, or breathe, I squeezed some out and started working his right shoulder using both hands. Hank gave a pained but satisfied grunt. He didn’t open his eyes.
Wow.
He had amazing skin. Soft, almost downy, and his back was free of hair and blemishes. He had a faded summer tan. His back muscles, even relaxed, were firm. Juicy. It occurred to me that I had never seen him with a girl.
Oh, no. This was bad. Now I was heading into delusional territory.
“There,” I said, forcing myself to remove the hands. “Better?”
Hank lay there without moving for a minute. I thought he wasn’t going to answer. And if he was asleep, I had a semi that needed to see me in my room forthwith.
“That stuff really works. I can feel the burn. Mind getting the other side?” he asked without opening his eyes. He gave his left shoulder a little roll.
The warning bells in my head were silenced in a rush of blood. I should have stood up and moved to the other side of the bed, but I did not. No, I climbed over Hank like he was a jungle gym and straddled his ass, sitting myself on his extremely firm derriere. I massaged the other shoulder with both hands.
Hank didn’t protest, or even open his eyes. But I felt him growing tense underneath me. I was by now fully aroused, but a thrill of fear wormed through the haze. We were alone, behind a closed door, with me sitting on Hank’s ass on a bed and touching his naked back. This. Was gay.
Maybe I could push it. Maybe he was horny and could be convinced to do something he’d regret later. I wanted that. I wanted to touch him all over, but the idea made me a little ill at the same time.
“Thanks,” Hank said abruptly. He started to sit up, dislodging me. I scrambled to get off him and, feeling extremely awkward, went back to the desk.
By the time I sat down, picked up my laptop, and raised my eyes, Hank was at the door. His face was red. “Hey, email me your list, Frenchie. I forgot I gotta be somewhere.”
“But… this is your room.”
“Lock the door when you leave. Later.” He fled.
Fuck! I thought back over what had happened, trying to figure out how badly I’d blown it, where I’d crossed the line, and how pathetically obvious I had or hadn’t made myself.
But like everything with Hank, there was no easy answer.
* * *
After that, Hank avoided me. We emailed back and forth about the party plans, and Hank suggested we divvy up the duties. He headed up the regular party details like food, drinks, and extra tables while I set up the mystery part. We had other frat members assigned to us to help out, and Hank was quick to approve anything I suggested over email.
I knew the fact that I wasn’t seeing him around the house, in the flesh, wasn’t an accident. He’d become the Invisible Man. A few of the other guys even commented on it. But between doing posters and recruiting actors and all of that for the party, and trying to get through my class material leading up to finals, I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it.
This was how I saw it: Hank thought I’d come on to him, and he was uncomfortable with that. Whatever baby steps we’d made toward friendship had been scuppered. I felt really shitty about it, but I knew that ultimately it was for the best. Message received. Maybe if I played it cool and acted like I didn’t care if I ever talked to him again, we could reach some sort of polite tolerance again. Eventually.
For now, I had a Christmas party to survive.
* * *
Hank
The Delta Sigma Phi Christmas party of 2014 was wicked awesome. I had to admit, Frenchie did a bang-up job on the mystery part. He designed a little game and put clues up around campus, ransom notes for Santa from the ‘Justice For The South Pole League’. People were supposed to guess what it was the kidnappers wanted in exchange for Santa’s life and bring it to our party. Sloane and his team plastered posters all over campus, even at the gym, and updated them daily with a countdown. And yeah, the fake body parts were so gross! I laughed my ass off at some of the prissier reactions to them, but most people thought it was sick. Good sick.
The night of the party, I, and three of the other biggest Delts, dressed up like Men in Black with suits, dark shades, and JSPL pins. Micah wore a Santa outfit Sloane had picked up at some costume shop in town. We led Micah, in chains, across campus to the Delts house, inviting people as we went along. When we got to the house, the place was already rocking. There had to be a hundred people there.
We wrestled Micah/Santa into the living room, playing it up tough. Sloane and Emanuelle, Micah’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, were waiting for us. Emanuelle was dressed in a sexy elf costume, and Sloane… Sloane apparently was a reindeer. He had on skin-tight brown pants and a fitted brown T-shirt and wore antlers on his head. Every time he turned, he nearly put someone’s eye out. He pulled it off, though, managing to look like a hipster version of Rudolph. The fucker.
As we’d scripted, I pulled Micah/Santa in front of me and put a water pistol to his head. “Where’s the payoff?” I asked Sloane. “Make it quick, or the fat guy gets it.”
Sloane raised his hands and looked around helplessly at the tittering crowd. “Anybody know what these guys want?”
“We must save Santa!” Emanuelle enthused on cue.
We’d planned for the contingency that no one had actually followed the game and presented the correct solution. We had a ringer seeded in the crowd. But we didn’t have
to resort to that. Four different groups of people held up a six pack of Rumspringa Old Order APA beer, the ransom the mystery clues had all hinted at.
With much hooting and hollering, we opened the big gift box we’d had out on the porch and divvied up the gift certificates, candy, and other doodads that were in there. Micah/Santa tossed them to the winners and… hostage situation negated. The jolly old elf survived to live another year.
Then… then we could fucking relax and party. I was glad to see people had gotten into the spirit of the thing. There were some cosplayers in the crowd—several pairs of Holmes and Watson, a few Bogarts and a Miss Marple—and lots and lots of dead people. There were even a half dozen dead Santas and elves dancing around.
I was loading a plate from the snack table when fuzzy red sleeves clamped around my chest and someone attempted to lift me off my feet. He managed. Barely.
“Micah, dude! Watch the plate!” I groused, but I didn’t really mind. It’d been a long time since Micah had done that, and it reminded me of when we were kids.
“Jesus, Hank, what do you eat, rocks?”
I turned to find him grinning at me. He had Sloane with him, and he brought us both in tight with arms around our backs. “Success! You guys did it. This is the best Delts party ever!”
Sloane and I looked at each other. It was the first time I’d been close to him since that night—the night he’d given me a backrub, the night I had freaked the fuck out. I still felt humiliated about it, about how I’d egged him on, how I’d felt when he sat on me—turned on and terrified, and about how I’d acted like a loon afterward. My stomach flushed hot and then cold. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry.
“Yeah, it’s a good party. Nice job, Frenchie.” I tried to sound upbeat, but I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“You too, Hank.” Sloane said other stuff, but he sounded like he was muffled in cotton through the pounding in my ears. I got away as quickly as I could. I was headed for the booze table when I saw Linda giving me the eye from across the room.
Linda was yet another girl Micah had dated briefly, and she had a thing for me. She was a cute brunette, and I… I was determined to get drunk and forget everything. I found the red and green Jello shots—I’d won that argument. I did a red one. Then I had to do a green one to compare. Then I did a third just because.
“Wanna dance?” I asked Linda, my tongue only slightly numb.
“Sure!” Linda grinned at me like I’d offered her a winning lottery ticket, and I took her hand.
The next day, I had to start studying for finals. That night? That night I was getting plowed.
* * *
Sloane
The thing about planning a party is, once it’s actually rolling there’s not a lot more you can do. So there’s a sense of relief, like waking up from a dreaded surgery or finding out Sherlock really isn’t dead despite having gone over Reichenbach Falls.
I wandered around making sure everyone looked like they were having a good time. But our assigned crews in charge of keeping the food and drinks replenished were on it, and everything was going smoothly. I chatted with some of the frat brothers. I watched Micah dancing with Emanuelle.
I watched Hank dancing with some buxom brunette.
The Mystery of H.S. #12: He’s surprisingly not a terrible dancer
And shortly thereafter,
The Mystery of H.S. #13: He’s kissing a woman. With tongue.
And that, I decided, was the end of the list, the last time I would concern myself with Hank Springfield. Case fucking closed.
I turned away from the sight of Hank making out on the dance floor with a girl and swallowed down a ridiculous and much loathed throb of pain. I had no one to blame but myself. I’d made the classic mistake—unrequited love—or at least unrequited lust. It was the first time it had ever happened to me in a way that was more than just a fleeting annoyance, in a way that hurt.
My parents were right. The college years were formidable in their opportunity for life-changing suckage.
“Hey, man!” It was Will, a fellow Delt. He was drunk. “Obscene party, Sloane! I’m so glad I voted for your membership. I am a genius.” Will toasted himself for, however circumstantially, engineering this party. He took a long drink.
“You are an intellectual giant among men,” I agreed.
“So what’re you doin’ for Christmas?” Will asked.
Ah, party small talk.
“I fly to Greece a week from Sunday,” I said over the music. “My parents just moved there.” And I’m going to find a gorgeous gay stud on the beach, or maybe two or three, and shag their brains out. Hot, muscular guys, preferably, since I apparently have a thing for that now. And when I come back, I will have forgotten all about Hank Springfield.
“Phew, shit! Greece!” Will looked impressed. “I’m just going home to Harrisburg.” He laughed the laugh of the very drunk. “Hey, have you met Liam Donahue? I saw him around here somewhere. He’s gay too. He’s cute, I guess. I mean, whatever.”
Normally, I would have made a polite excuse and run far, far away from any straight frat boy trying to set me up. But not tonight.
“Absolutely,” I said, taking Will’s nearly empty glass. “Let’s refill this because, honestly? We need some vomiting if this is going to be a legitimate frat party. And then… let’s go find Liam Donahue.”
~6~
Sloane
I WAS scheduled to fly out on Sunday, December 21st. On Saturday morning, disturbingly early for the post-finals hangover I was sporting, my parents rang my cell phone. I assumed this was a standard check-in and wished I’d remembered to turn my phone off the night before. But I was awake now.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“Greg? Sorry to wake you, but we wanted to be sure to catch you this morning,” my father said.
“Mmm. Wassup?” I rubbed my face, trying to pull my head out of some weird-ass dream about flying around on the back of a monkey. My mother would have a field day with that one.
“We have exciting news. It’s a bit unexpected.” I could hear the hyper tension in my mom’s voice. That didn’t bode well. “You remember the Levensteins? He was a colleague of your father’s at NYU and she’s a surgeon at Mount Sinai. She does Doctors Without Borders too.”
I remembered them. They were ‘substantial’ people of the sort my parents loved. They had two daughters just a little older than me who were freakishly intelligent and more than a little snobby.
“Yeah.”
“Well, their Sara just spent a year in Israel, and she met a man. She’s getting married! It’s a last minute thing. They’re having the ceremony in Jerusalem on the 25th, right after the last night of Hanukkah.”
I sat up in a hurry. “December 25th?”
“Yes, and I know we had plans to spend Christmas here in Greece but, well, what an amazing opportunity! To attend a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem at this time of year! And we’re leaving early so we’ll get to experience part of Hanukkah as well. The Levensteins were such dear friends. They’re scrambling to pull this together at the last minute, and I promised Hannah I’d be there to help.”
I closed my eyes as if I could make this entire conversation disappear. This was just like my parents, always flittering after the next ‘amazing experience’ and never mind how it uprooted my life.
“Greg?” my mother prompted with a touch of guilt. “Now, your father’s already called the airline. Dr. Levenstein wrote you a note so we can avoid the airline change fees. We can just move your Greece tickets to spring break. The weather will be better then anyway. And we can get you a flight to Israel if you’d like to go with us. Of course, it’s ridiculously expensive last minute like this, but the Levensteins insisted on paying for our tickets so—”
“No,” I said.
There was silence on the other end of the line. I could picture my parents communicating to each other with their eyes.
“Tell us what you’d like to do, Greg,” my father said in his professional voice
. In other words, this is your decision, and we expect you to be mature about it.
What I wanted was to spend Christmas on the beach in Greece and be with my parents. I’d actually been ready for a little parental unit time after not seeing them for four months, even though they could drive me round the twist. What I didn’t want was spend my break in a strange country with people I barely knew and with my own parents busy helping with a wedding. It was nice of them to invite me, but I didn’t want an ‘adventure’ for Christmas. I wanted… I just wanted to go home.
And where is that?
“You know what?” I said, my voice rough. I cleared my throat. “I think I’d like to just stay here. I have a ton of stuff to do, and I’ll see you guys at spring break anyway.”
“But, sweetie, we don’t want you to be alone at Christmas,” Mom complained, as if I was missing the point.
“I really think you should take advantage of the opportunity to visit Israel,” Dad advised.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty burnt out after finals, and I want to just relax. I can hang out here. And there’s snow and… yeah. It’s fine. I’ve got friends I can spend it with. It’s perfect actually.”
Another pause while my parents consulted on the other end.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” my mother asked hopefully.
“No one specific. Just… friends.”
“It’s all right, Sloane. We’ll respect your privacy. When you’re ready to tell us, you’ll tell us,” Dad said.
I rolled my eyes. “Right. So… have a good time. Send pictures.”
“You too! Let us know your plans, and make sure we have an address if you leave campus,” Mom enthused. “We’ll call you Christmas Day.”
“We’ll send your gifts out,” Dad said. “They might get there by Christmas if we Fed Ex them. Should we send them to the dorm?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.” I just wanted to get off the phone now.
“We’ll miss you! I can’t believe you’re all grown up and spending Christmas with your friends!” My mother was already spinning this as my choice. Perfect.