by Neve Wilder
“Friendzoned.”
Eric snickered. “Yeah, more or less.”
“I’m nice.”
“Mmm.”
“What’s that mean, you disagree?”
“Jesse strikes me as the type to want something I can’t give him.”
“That’s irritatingly mysterious.”
“I can’t explain it any better. He’s too wholesome or something.”
I thought of Jesse with his broad smiles and eager eyes framed by thick lashes and grunted. Yeah, I guess I could see it. He kind of reminded me of a golden retriever, or someone who would be all over loving cuddles and sweet talk. Definitely a handholder. I let it go, moving on to the other issue weighing on my mind, asking, “Does Chet deal?”
Eric shifted onto his back, folding his arms behind his head. “Sometimes? Here and there, I think. Why?”
“Mark seems to think…well, Mark doesn’t like him. Blames him for our friend Cam’s overdose. Which isn’t exactly fair, but I get it. Did you know Cam?”
“Mark has a lot of opinions about other people’s business,” Eric retorted, then sighed. “Not that I can remember really. Maybe vaguely? I didn’t really start hanging out with Chet until the middle of last year when we had a few classes together.”
“And you’ve never hooked up with him?”
Eric laughed softly. “Nope. Not my type.”
“What’s your type?” I’d given this more thought than I wanted to admit. The girls I’d seen him with before didn’t follow any set pattern, aside from looking decidedly not like the girls I usually brought home. And I had no point of reference for guys, seeing as how he’d never brought one around.
“High-strung built dudes who beg me to pound their asses.” I could hear the wry smile in his voice.
I scoffed and he turned serious. “It’s about vibe and personality for me, I guess, not necessarily a type. But Chet wasn’t it either.”
“Were he and Cam hooking up?”
“I don’t think so, but I honestly have no idea. Chet’s never said anything that would make me think they were. What’s with the line of questioning?”
“I dunno, just curious, I guess. Something about the way Mark was talking about it…” I trailed off. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.”
“I can still get Chet’s number for you if you want it,” Eric teased, and I kicked him under the covers as he steamrolled me. “But he’ll have to get through me first.”
A couple of weeks later, I sat in the chapter room at the fraternity house zoning out through the discussion of our next mixer, some upcoming community service event, and a couple of pledges who’d been ordered to stand and recite our creed on the pain of toilet duty.
Shortly after my outburst with Mark and Jesse, things had thankfully settled back into the usual pattern of classes, studying, and partying, with the addition that now 80 percent of nights ended up with me in Eric’s bed, sometimes him in mine if I’d gotten home first. Or I’d meet him at the library, the gym, the cafeteria. Okay, maybe it was a little different. We spent a shit ton of our free time together, and even now I was bouncing my knee ready to get the hell out of this meeting and go grab something to eat with him, maybe let him boss me around a little bit to get me out of my head about upcoming finals before Christmas break.
Though I hadn’t explicitly said anything to Ansel, someone had clued him in, because he’d stopped us as we’d headed out of the house the other day to say, “No fucking in my bedroom.”
Eric had given him a devilish grin. “You live here? I had no idea. What’s your name?”
Ansel arched an imperious brow and then narrowed his eyes. “Or my bathroom.”
I snapped my teeth at that, and Ansel shoved me, cracking up. “I’m serious.” Guess he’d overheard Eric lighting me up in the hall bath the other morning—though I thought we’d been pretty quiet. I mean, I had, seeing as how I’d had a washcloth stuffed in my mouth. We’d been feeling a little adventurous.
“I never use your bathroom,” I’d said drolly. “Ringworm sucks.”
And then we’d all just gone on as usual. For all that Mark had thought Jesse was pissed, he must have gotten over it quickly, because a few days after my announcement in the caf, he was happily eating lunch with me and Eric and chattering on about some course he was excited to take next semester because he thought the professor was hot.
I crashed back into awareness as Jason, our president, said something about discrimination. Blinking into focus, I listened as he read from our handbook. “We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.”
The fire in my cheeks was instantaneous as he droned monotonously through the rest of the passage. It wasn’t anger necessarily, and it wasn’t even all embarrassment. It was just the awareness that I was probably the cause of this reminder, since I didn’t recall him ever reading it during a meeting before. I felt center stage even if no one else had a clue why Jason was mentioning it or who he was referring to.
It wasn’t like there weren’t gay or bi dudes in frats. There were. There just weren’t any in mine. That I knew about, at least. We were the jock frat, the one known for brutal hell weeks and whispered hazing practices, most of which were true. And, if I was being honest, probably the dicks. I mean, every frat had a rep for something, even if it wasn’t entirely true, even if there were jocks in the geeky frats or vice versa. I shot a look over at Mark, noting the strain in his expression, the color that suddenly flooded his cheeks. That motherfucker. He gave a sharp, short shake of his head, and I didn’t know whether to read that as a denial or an apology.
“Did I miss something?” Alex, another junior, piped up.
“Nope. Just a reminder.” Jason flipped the book closed, and maybe it was subliminal that his eyes darted toward me, then away again, but it felt like some kind of signal.
“Pierce tried to blow me last night,” Sam joked, and Pierce lifted his middle finger to him in reply as everyone cracked up. The dude was already engaged to the same girl he’d come to college with. He was more married than my own parents at this point.
“It’s cool. I got Nate to do it, instead.” Sam angled a goofy brow waggle at me.
Fucking perfect. My skin was flaming, and adrenaline pumped through me, its telltale prickle rushing over my armpits, the back of my neck.
I thought of Eric’s hand on me, the slow, sweeping way he touched me sometimes, and as quick as the anxiety had come I felt it recede, a sense of calm descending. “The cock in my mouth last night actually hit the back of my throat and gagged the shit out of me, so I know it wasn’t yours.” Okay, maybe I laced a little stinger of a size dig there on the end, but that was what we did. What I wasn’t doing was panicking, even when Sam gave a strained chuckle that faded quickly into oppressive silence. No one knew what to say, I guess. Least of all me. But I was two for two now, so why not knock the mortar out of what had always felt like the highest wall to me?
“Shit, are you serious, dude?” Sam’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a visible cringe. “Sorry, man. For real, though?”
“Is it going to be a problem?” I let my gaze stray from his expression to the faces around me, not really seeing any of them but hell-bent on making sure they all knew they were included in the question. “Because I can leave. I’m dead-ass serious. I know we all razz the fuck out of each other, but if anyone actually has an issue with what kind of equipment the person I’m with is sporting, I’m out, and I won’t even be mad about it. But I sure as shit am not going to stick around for hostility—low-key or otherwise. So speak up, or take a fucking vote or something.” Once again, I was sure I could have been smoother or more diplomatic about it, but at least this time my voice came out even and neutral rather than frantic.
Sam lifted his hands in a no-harm gesture. “It’s not a problem for me, dude, we’re good. I was totally just messing around. And apologies for really fucking bad timing.”
Marty walked the room with the slips of paper and jar of pencils, and one by one, the guys stuck their folded slips in the hat. I thought I’d feel more anxious, more strung-out or emotional. I’d built this moment up so much in my head that it seemed completely improbable that I was as calm as I was. Maybe it was all the time I’d spent with Eric lately, maybe it was the way I felt about him that made the things that’d seemed like such colossal hurdles when we first got together more like nuisances now. I’d loved being a part of this fraternity, but I was ready to move on if I had to. And I was entirely okay with that.
Jason went through the papers quickly, discarding them on top of the table, then glanced up at me. “No issues.” Relief flooded my chest like the end of a balloon let go all at once. It felt as heavy as the threat of tears, in spite of how ready I’d been to walk out of there. I took a deep breath and nodded. “Cool.”
After the meeting adjourned, Sam trotted up to me as I headed down the hall toward the front door. “Sorry, again. Are we good, for real?” He shifted on his feet as I stopped and faced him.
“Yeah, it’s fine. No sweat.”
“Sooooo…do I know this guy?”
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Mark heading our way and flashed Sam a quick grin as I started in that direction. “My roommate Eric. Don’t ask. It’s a long story, trust me.”
Jason checked in shortly after to make sure I was good, and Mark waited until he moved on.
I turned my shoulder into the wall to face him. “I’m not going to flip my shit, but I thought you weren’t going to say anything.”
“Dude, I didn’t.” Mark’s expression was nothing but wide-eyed innocence.
“Then why…”
“It was a policy change handed down from high. Some other fraternity recently had an issue with racial slurs being tossed around among members and it blew up. It was on the news and shit. So the policy is supposed to be read at every meeting from now on. Something like that.”
“Oh.” I bit the corner of my thumbnail.
“I wouldn’t do something like that to you, dude.”
His eyes burned bright with sincerity, and I nodded after a moment. “Are you heading home?”
“Not for a while. Gonna do a study thing with some of the guys. We might go out later, too. You want to hang here, or I can give you a ride home?”
“I’ll walk.” I needed the air and the silence to diffuse the insane amount of energy that had waited until after the meeting to barrel into me. Mark sent me off with a joking salute, and I headed out.
In the scheme of a lifetime, maybe it’d be a small thing. It should be a small thing. In a lifetime, there’d be other triumphs, other regrets, other inevitabilities. My parents aging and dying, career pitfalls and upswings. That moment in the chapter room tonight should’ve been a blip, but it felt huge. And as I walked across the quad back home, I felt as much exhilaration as I did a weird sense of calm.
And I really fucking wanted to see Eric.
Once back at the house, I pushed his door open without knocking. Eric sat at his desk, his back to me and his task lamp on as he typed on his laptop. He craned a look over his shoulder at me and gave me one of those devious grins meant to make my dick perk, but something about my expression had it fading quickly.
“Everything okay?” he asked, pushing back in his chair to face me.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Never. I was just…” He glanced back at his screen, and I caught a quick glimpse of the web page before he closed the top. “Nothing important.”
“Let’s take a drive.”
“Your car or mine?”
“Yours.”
Downstairs I grabbed a beer from the fridge, and we pulled on our jackets before heading out.
“Somewhere specific in mind, or you just want to drive?” Eric asked, once we were on the open road.
“Think I just want to drive around.” I cracked the window, frigid air rushing in the car before I closed it again, fidgety with leftover energy. My restlessness had nowhere to go inside the car, so I found an outlet in fiddling with the window buttons, the hem of my shirt.
“Secret’s out at the frat house, I’m guessing? They found out somehow, or you told them?” Eric glanced over me, his gaze dropping to the closed tab of the beer I was rubbing my thumb over.
“Both, kind of. The opportunity was there, and I could either take it or not. Maybe that’s cheating.”
Eric barked out a laugh. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as cheating with shit like that.”
I shrugged.
“What, it counts less because you didn’t walk in and formally announce it? You didn’t have to say shit at all. It’s nobody’s business.”
I needed to do something other than shrug. “This is going to sound stupid, but do you think…I wondered…do you think it’ll be the same with us now that we’re not sneaking around?”
Eric let off the gas, turning his head fully in my direction and studying me as he licked his lips. That intensity was there full force, and it made my heart corkscrew in my chest as it beat rapid-fire.
“What’re you doing?” I asked when he slowed the car to a stop on the shoulder, but he didn’t answer me, just unclipped his seat belt and leaned across the seat, one hand rising to my throat. The heat of his palm, the soft pressure as he squeezed. I kept waiting to feel his hand on my thigh or my cock, but there was only the mellow warmth of his touch to my neck as he drew in close. “What do you think? Does it feel different?”
I gave a tiny shake of my head as Eric’s other hand found my right, fingers slotting between mine before he lifted it to press against the glass of the passenger window. I gripped the collar of his shirt, trying to yank him closer, but the console gave him the leverage he needed to deny me. My answer was no. My answer was that it felt just as fucking good. Maybe better now that there was an unfurling sense of possibility in me, this idea of togetherness not counted in just singular encounters, but in days and weeks and months to come. I didn’t know how to transmit the feeling in my chest into succinct phrasing, though.
“Good,” he murmured, running his nose along my jaw and nipping my earlobe, then the skin of my neck, still tender from the night before. I shivered at the hot sting and the light trace of his tongue. “I want you just as much as yesterday and days before. Nothing has changed for me. If anything, it’s intensified.”
I stretched my neck, hoping for more, but Eric brushed a kiss over my lips and dropped back into his seat. When I groaned, he laughed.
“You’re such a fucking tease.”
“That part’s not changing either.” He gave me an unrepentant smirk. “And let me point out that you do plenty of it yourself.”
“Defensive tactics,” I grumbled, adjusting myself as he put the car into gear again.
“Uh-huh.”
We drove around a while longer, talking aimlessly, sharing the beer I’d finally opened and held in my lap.
Just before we pulled onto the main thoroughfare that led back in the direction our house, Eric slanted another look at me. “You’ve probably been in more actual normal…” He paused and backed up. “Traditional relationships than I have, so you can tell me if I’m wrong or off base, but nothing has to change that we don’t want to change, know what I mean? You don’t have to suddenly parade around calling me your boyfriend with a capital B or anything.”
“You don’t want me to? Are you ashamed of me?”
His brows shot up. “What? No? If anything…no. I’m definitely not ashamed of you.”
I broke into
a laugh, and he flipped me off. “Idiot.” He focused on the road, then glanced over at me again. “I just mean that we can make our own rules, do what feels good to us.”
I was itching to make some other stupid quip, but the sincerity and concern in his expression stopped me. I picked at the tab on my beer can, eyeing him, thinking about how fucking good he’d been to me—for me—and I was off and running into that emotional minefield that always had me mentally hot stepping because I was by no stretch of the imagination romantic, even though I was definitely a fool for this man. It was the strangest realization how much I liked feeling taken care of by him. In ways both as blunt as him telling me to get on my knees and suck his cock because he knew I fucking loved that shit, and as subtle as the way he glanced over me as we drove, like he was looking for some visual gauge of my headspace. In every other one of my relationships, I’d seemed to naturally fall into the protective role, the dominant force, and the shield. And there was some of that present with Eric, too, because it wasn’t as if I felt like I was weak with him. It was actually the opposite.
“You’re glaring again.”
“With affection. Or something.”
“Uh-huh.” He laughed and reached over, dropping his hand on the nape of my neck and giving it a little squeeze. No clue why that always felt so reassuring to me, but it was clear he’d picked up on that, too, and had weaponized it in the best way possible. I sank back against the seat and let my eyes drift shut for a second, the steady hum of the road beneath us lulling me. “If I tried to say something, it’d come out cheesy. And I’m not much for cheesy.”
“I know.” And the way he said it and looked at me afterward let me know he was talking about more than just me not wanting to be cheesy. The corners of his mouth tipped up. I think I’d known it before, but I definitely knew then it was an expression I’d be seeing on him for a long time coming. There’d be others, yeah. There’d be fights, and disappointments, and bad fucking moods, but there’d be that grin, and the smirk I loved, the way his mouth curved just before he said my name.