Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
harrison
The Bel House party was our most daring outing to date, and the highest that the stakes had been so far.
The flipside was that Emma wouldn’t be a factor because she wouldn’t attend something like a fraternity party in a million years.
Neither would I, except that I was supposed to be dating a frat boy.
The stage was set, the players all accounted for.
Taylor’s closest friends were Greg, Finn, Jason, and now, Jason’s boyfriend, Bennet.
The house was full of students who didn’t see themselves as the typical fraternity guys.
They fell on the various spots of the various spectrums, which I guessed Taylor had told me about in order to illustrate just how atypical Bel was.
And when I came with a bottle of wine and a little bow tied to its neck, the doors were wide open, and the music was not deafening, and people seemed to hold on to the ground just fine, not flying off it with too many keg stands to blame.
I stepped through the door and into a crowd of people who seemingly all knew each other.
The small clusters didn’t stay the same size for long, people passing and greeting each other, joining groups or merging them.
Between the legs, Peanut made his way through the living room, and he carried a rope in his mouth, minding his own business.
He ignored me as I walked a few steps deeper into the house and the crowd, watching out for anyone I knew.
This wasn’t exactly my crowd. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was still just a campus party.
On the far end of the room, laughing as ever, was Taylor. His hair stuck out in an unruly and messy way, his eyes glimmered with amusement, and his teeth shone, completely bared as he smiled broadly at something Jason was saying.
I paused in the middle of the room, looking at Taylor for a long, aching moment. Life would have been easier if I’d picked anyone else for this task, but the universe had sent me Taylor on a dare.
Almost as if he could feel my gaze, feel the intensity of it, of its hidden meanings and its secret desires and its shameless attempts to see through the white shirt he wore and beneath the dark brown trousers held around his waist by a blue belt, Taylor turned around and looked right into my eyes.
His face lit up. I hadn’t realized he could look any brighter, yet he did, just then, as he stepped away from Jason with a flirtatious little smile.
He was a very good actor.
If I were directing him, I would have told him to do precisely this. He looked like he was so pleased to see me, like everything else had just fallen off the face of the Earth, and all that mattered was right in front of him. And he looked like he was trying to hide that feeling.
He fooled me.
I cleared my throat and shook off the feeling that I had just stepped into a place of incomprehensible and unconditional love, then tried to appear a little out of place, which wasn’t too difficult.
Taylor and I met halfway to one another. “You came,” he said.
“I said I would,” I reminded him, though it was mostly for anyone overhearing the conversation.
“Come. Let’s get you a drink and loosen those muscles,” he said, putting a hand on the small of my back to lead me through the crowd to where he had been standing with Jason earlier.
There was a table with various bottles set up there, and a large and colorful list of recipes for simple cocktails that could be made with the provided ingredients.
“Jason,” Taylor said. “Meet Harrison.”
Jason frowned a little at Taylor, then nodded and smiled at me. “Hey, you’re, uh, the guy Taylor met at the bar, right?”
“He knows it was a dare,” Taylor explained.
I shook Jason’s hand as relief relaxed his face. “Oh, good. I hate keeping secrets.”
I laughed. The pure Marx Brothers farce of this was hilarious to me, even if nobody else was laughing. “We call it a happy accident.”
Jason’s eyes twinkled as though his suspicions were confirmed. “Of course.”
“What have you got here?” I asked, placing the bottle of wine I’d brought with me on the table and rubbing my hands as I looked through the bottles that were already open and being used generously.
Taylor walked me through the options for a drink, but as he began, he placed a hand on my arm, and I stopped listening altogether.
It was such a casual, unbothered, unplanned gesture that would have been the reassurance of a beloved partner that I was in the right place, with the right person, and that everything was very good around us.
It would have been all that, except that it was fake, and Taylor knew it.
He glanced at me and winked, making my heart thump a little softer.
He put a cocktail into my hand after a couple of minutes of mixing, and it blew me away, refreshing, a little spicy, and very alcoholic. “Trying to get me drunk this early?” I asked.
Taylor pressed his shoulder against mine. “Gonna take advantage of you,” he said in a low voice, acting all cool for Finn, whose back was turned to us but whose ears perked as soon as those words had landed.
I decided to raise the stakes. “You wish. If anyone’s taking any advantage of anyone else, it’ll be the other way around.”
Taylor’s eyes widened a little. “Oh yeah? How so?”
“Your cheeks are red,” I said, lowering my voice a little more. “And you popped a button already.”
One side of Taylor’s lips lifted into a devilishly handsome smile. He pulled his shirt together with his hand, barely concealing the planes of his chest that he had bared earlier. “Sorry, I’m a lady.”
“You really wanna do that with me?” I teased him.
His eyebrows rose in a challenge. “Maybe you can get me to be a little shady.”
“A naughty dynamite,” I assured him.
Taylor fanned his face. Somehow, he made himself blush a little harder.
Finn was slowly turning around, and I held back a laugh, keeping a very flirtatious look on my face instead until Finn’s gaze swept over me.
As it did, I made sure I looked like I had just woken out of a dream.
I took a step back from Taylor, who also straightened and cleared his throat.
In a high-pitched voice, he said, “Finn. Have you met Harrison? Harrison’s a… friend.”
“I think we’ve seen each other,” Finn said, offering a fist to bump.
I obliged while Taylor followed up with the explanation that I was aware of the dare and all.
I was more than a little out of place just then.
Finn had heard enough to make him extremely suspicious and curious about what was going on.
Then again, the way Taylor had flirted with me just then made me question everything.
Taylor excused himself because Kate, the girl who’d made the stork I’d bought him, had just entered the house, and Taylor’s face lit up tenfold. He waved at her and pushed through the crowd to greet her.
I hadn’t realized that they’d stayed in touch. Of course they would. He’d made her laugh three times when passing her stall, and she’d made him forget all about our script.
“So, Harrison,” Finn said, making me pull back from a path I had no reason to follow. “Taylor keeps flaking on all our plans for you.”
I forced a laugh. “Is he?”
Finn shrugged. “He’s always out with you. We’re starting to get jealous.”
“What can I say? You made that match, right?” I gave him a challenging look and held his gaze. Perhaps too challenging. Perhaps I was confusing him with Kate and everyone else who was competing with me for Taylor’s attention, the idiot that I was.
“Greg did,” Finn told me after a moment of tense silence. “He picked you, thinking Taylor would never dare to go over. Turned out well, huh?”
“He’s fun to hang with,” I said.
Finn waited for more, watching me for any sign that I was hiding something. Sadly, I wasn’t. For all his flamboyant, larger-than-life personality and his sexy smiles and the gentle, passing touches, Taylor was excited to see a beautiful girl come to his party.
“What’s he like with you? Does he talk without stopping?” Finn asked.
I thought about it and inclined my head. I wondered what Taylor would have been like with me if we were secretly dating and if he were keeping his true sexuality hidden from his friends. “He’s…upbeat. And he dances like he was born in a disco.”
Finn’s eyes went wide. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
I pulled on a face of total confusion. “I mean…he’s alright.”
Finn gave a slow nod, then looked straight at Jason, who was observing from the other side of the room.
Whatever passed between them in that instant was a sort of agreement that all their conspiracies had come true.
Finn stayed with me for a few more minutes, but I didn’t say anything else.
I resolved to stay in my corner, sipping the cocktails Taylor had made for me, and to watch him laugh with Kate and her friend, who wasn’t leaving them alone.
Good. She didn’t seem like she knew anyone here, so she would stick with Kate, and they’d never had a moment alone.
After I’d emptied my glass, I didn’t bother with mixing a cocktail. Gin was not a pleasant thing to have on its own, but it did the job just fine, and my muscles relaxed a little before Taylor waded through the throng in my direction. He was probably just here to make Kate a drink.
I really needed to shake off the feeling of betrayal. It was the most contradictory, most ridiculous thing I could have been feeling, yet it ate me from the inside.
“Enjoying yourself?” Taylor placed his empty glass on the table and took my glass from me. He sipped, then cringed, then stared at me as if I’d just spat on him. “Are you having gin alone?”
“I’m never alone,” I said.
He laughed and put the glass back in my hand. “So?”