The Amazing Alpha Tau Fratmas Experience (Alpha Tau #6)

Prologue

MARTY

There was something wrong with Scout Talbot-Smith.

And I didn’t just mean that he was uptight, sarcastic, and had the most chronic case of resting bitch face you’d ever seen outside a Botox overdose.

That was all standard Scout. What wasn’t standard Scout was the way he’d shut his bedroom door in Squirrel’s face when Squirrel was just trying to get in there and give him some love.

“What gives, bro?” I asked, picking Squirrel up to give him a hug. Squirrel was very sensitive to rejection.

“I’m studying, Marty!” Scout called back through the closed door.

I wasn’t always super great with time management, but our last exam was yesterday, so I called bullshit.

“I call bullshit,” I told Squirrel as I carried him downstairs.

The Alpha Tau fraternity house was busy this morning.

Some of the guys had already cleared out earlier in the week, the ones who hadn’t had that history exam, but a bunch of us were packing up and getting the hell out over the next few days.

My boo, Dalton, was due to arrive tomorrow from Richmond and then we were gonna head to my grandpa’s place for the Christmas break.

Two weeks of messing around in the snow with Squirrel, doing shots of whiskey with a pair of old men who could easily drink us under the table, and opening presents on Christmas Day in our pajamas.

It was going to be epic! Also, there were a bunch of new sex things I wanted to try with Dalton, and I was super looking forward to that.

It sucked that he was in med school in Richmond, because phone sex really wasn’t cutting it.

Casey, my best bro and roommate, also hated it.

Casey was in the kitchen when I got downstairs. I opened the back door for Squirrel, then stole one of Casey’s pancakes.

“Dude,” he said, shooting me a glare.

“Come on, it’s got strawberries and Nutella!”

“That’s because it’s for Briar, not you!”

“Aw, are you making a romantic breakfast for your boo?”

“I was trying!” He elbowed me away, then squinted down at the plate I’d messed up and said, “Maybe I’ll do a donut run.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Get me a bear claw?”

“Jesus Christ, Marty,” he said. Lots of people said that to me. Then he said, “Yeah, I’ll get you one.” He ate a strawberry. “Is Dalton getting in today?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“I’ll stay in Briar’s room with him and Charlie,” he said. “Give you guys some privacy.”

“Epic,” I said. “There’s a whole lot of stuff I want to try out. I hate that Dalton’s in med school, because he’s not here, but on the upside, it means he’s really good at all the sexy stuff because he has insider knowledge. Literally.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“All I’m saying is that he can find your prostate in the dark, you know?”

Casey raised his eyebrows. “Marty, your prostate is always in the dark.”

“Fair point.” I swiped my finger through some Nutella. “Hey, speaking of things up people’s asses, what’s up Scout’s today?”

Casey’s brow furrowed. “I haven’t seen him yet. What do you mean?”

“He shut his door in Squirrel’s face,” I said.

“Wow, really?” Casey shook his head. “I mean, he shut his door in my face yesterday, but that’s just Scout. Squirrel, though?”

Casey got it. Scout was an asshole. Well, he really wasn’t, but he pretended he was.

He hated it when people found out he was secretly a decent guy, because then they might like him or something.

The point was, he was an asshole who’d close his door in your face, but then somehow your fraternity dues were paid.

Well, not mine, since my parents still paid for all of that even though I’d totally come out as gay, or maybe still a bit bi, and I had ADHD.

And even though my parents weren’t exactly cool about either of those things, they still paid my bills, mostly because Grandpa had threatened to cut them off if they didn’t.

But the point was, there were a couple of guys in Alpha Tau who didn’t have parental support, even under duress, and somehow those guys got their fees paid by mysterious charities that had no paper trail.

And that was all down to Scout. He thought we didn’t know, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

So anyway, Scout would outwardly be an asshole to pretty much everyone while secretly he wasn’t, but he was never mean to Squirrel.

Not even pretend mean, because Squirrel was a whippet and didn’t have fraternity fees or tuition Scout could pay off in secret.

Like, you couldn’t be secretly nice to a dog.

You had to be nice-nice or they didn’t get it.

Scout had tried. When I’d first gotten Squirrel, he’d made a big fuss about not letting him in his room because of dog hair, and he wouldn’t pet him or anything while at the same time a bespoke dog coat and a bunch of treats were left outside my door, but it lasted about a week until I walked in on them in the fraternity office and Squirrel was on Scout’s lap and Scout was cuddling him.

After that, he kind of gave up the pretense of being a dick to Squirrel because there was no going back from someone overhearing you use babytalk to a dog.

And then, since he couldn’t pretend to be a dick to my dog, he went all in on being a Squirrel fan and glared at the entire fraternity while he made them sit through a PowerPoint presentation about what they could and couldn’t feed dogs safely.

He even made them take a quiz afterward.

It was almost sweet but mostly terrifying, which summed up Scout pretty well.

So yeah, Scout acting ugly to Squirrel was unprecedented.

Legal words FTW. My internship with Cal Fisher in town was really starting to pay off. I was going to be the lawyeriest lawyer to ever law.

“Bro?” Casey asked me.

“Huh?” I looked down to where my finger was stuck in the jar of Nutella. “Oh, my bad.” I took my finger out, sucked it, and put the lid back on the jar. “There you go.”

Casey stared. “I don’t want it back.”

“Can I have it?”

“I thought I was buying you a bear claw.”

“Okay. But I can still have this too, right?” Donuts and Nutella? This morning was starting right!

I thought about asking Scout if he wanted donuts too. They always cheered me up. But then I decided against it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the psychological impact on Squirrel if Scout shut the door in his face again, and dog therapists were expensive.

“Yeah, you can have that too,” Casey said, and I slipped the Nutella into the pouch of my hoodie before he could change his mind.

“Let’s go get breakfast!”

Isort of forgot about the Scout thing for most of the rest of the day, mostly because I got busy doing other stuff.

I had to pack, which meant that first I had to do laundry, which meant that first I had to get quarters for the machine, which meant that first I had to get change.

Anyway, long story short, I ended up at Walmart with Charlie, looking at dog costumes.

Squirrel was hard to buy for. Like, not to body shame other dogs, but the sizes in Walmart definitely favored your pitties over your whippets.

“I thought we were here to get change,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, we’re gonna get it by buying something,” I said. “And Squirrel needs a Christmas costume.”

Charlie let out a sigh. “I’m gonna go look at backpacks.”

I ended up with a dog sweater and two different costumes—one was a reindeer and the other one was Santa—and forgot to ask the cashier for quarters in my change.

So when we got back to campus, I had to go around asking the brothers if they had any.

Which I probably could have done in the first place, except then I wouldn’t have three new Christmas outfits for Squirrel, so I was still winning.

Point was, it was almost dinnertime when I remembered how weird Scout was acting.

Dinner wasn’t great. Our housekeeper had been off since Sunday because everyone was leaving this week for the break, and there were no groceries in the house, so everyone who was still at Alpha Tau had contributed to a kind of potluck.

Casey ordered pizzas, Archer also ordered pizzas and—everything was pizza, basically.

We all fought over the ones from the best place, like lions in a wildlife documentary growling at each other over who got the tastiest part of the antelope and who got the gross bits.

Did lions eat all the bits of the antelope?

When I was a kid, we had a cat that would eat all the bits of a mouse except for some unidentifiable organ that he’d leave lying on the carpet.

Were the African savannahs littered with discarded bits of antelope?

Casey sat down beside me on the couch. “What are you looking up?”

“Antelope organs,” I said, showing him my phone.

He gave me a weird look, then got distracted when Briar came and sat on his lap. And things weren’t crowded enough in the big living room that there was a lack of seats. It was cute, though, because Casey was such a sap for Briar and vice versa.

A bunch of guys had already left as soon as their exams were done, but there were still a lot of us hanging around, leaving in dribs and drabs the week before Christmas.

I was super excited for Christmas at Harrisonburg and for spending it with Dalton, of course.

I couldn’t wait. And how cute would Squirrel look, running in the snow in his reindeer costume?

I could probably take pictures and use them on Christmas cards next year.

“So, when do you head out, Marty?” Archer asked me around a mouthful of pizza.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Scout entering the room. He sneered at the pizza—again, totally usual for Scout—and picked up a slice like he thought it might poison him.

“Dalton gets here tomorrow,” I said, “and then we’re going to Harrisonburg on Thursday. It’s gonna be awesome!”

Archer laughed. “That’s great, bro. I mean, it’s no Vienna…” He cast a teasing look in Scout’s direction.