Chapter 13
Before
It was a stupid thing to do.
I know it now, I knew it then, but I’ve never had much control over what my face does when I see him.
It happened in the hallway between third and fourth period. I rounded the corner on the way to my locker, and there he was, talking to some of the guys from the football team, and I just—
I smiled at him.
You know, the involuntary thing that happens when you see your boyfriend.
He looked away fast, back and forth at his teammates and then back to me, the smile on his face shifting to something colder.
He finds me after school. Behind the gym, where I wait for Nate to drive us home. He’s already there when I come around the corner, wearing the same glare from earlier.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” I ask, keeping my tone innocent even though I know exactly what he’s talking about.
“You think this is funny?” He steps closer.
“I didn’t do anything—”
“You fucking smiled at me.”
“Jason, I don’t—”
“Do you want everyone to know?” His voice has dropped low, and he’s in my face now. “Is that what you want? For the whole school to know I—”
“No,” I say quickly, my eyes going wide. “Of course, I don’t want that. I’m sorry if—”
His fist connects with the side of my face before I know what’s happening, hard enough that I fall to the ground. I clutch my cheek, throbbing in pain, while tears fall from my eyes. “J-Jason?” I stutter, scooting back on the gravel when he takes a step forward.
He runs a hand through his short hair. “Shit,” he says. “Alex—”
“You hit me.”
“I didn’t mean to.” He crouches down in front of me and pulls me in, and I press my face against his chest and try my best to ignore the throbbing in my cheek and tell myself it’s okay. It was an accident.
He loves me, see?
“I’m sorry,” he says into my hair. “You know I can’t have people thinking—”
“I know,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”
“I know it won’t.”
He presses his lips to the top of my head, holding me tighter, and I close my eyes, fighting against the tears.
Now
Making the grocery list has become my worst nightmare.
Chicken. Brown rice. Greek yogurt that tastes like nothing, but Nate says is good protein. I stare at the list and try not to cry.
Seriously.
You don’t realize what you had until it’s gone, and I am really missing eating whatever I wanted before I decided to become whatever this is.
“Mike!” I call out. “You need anything from the store?”
“Poptarts!” comes his response from somewhere in the house.
“I already got that!”
“I’m good then!”
I’m debating whether I actually need the protein powder Nate recommended when he strolls into the kitchen. I look up, the way I always do when he enters a room, but pause when I see him. “Is that my hoodie?”
Mike looks down at himself like he’s only now noticing what he’s wearing, even though it swallows him whole. “What? This old thing?”
“It’s mine.”
He hops up onto the counter, landing directly on my grocery list. “Is it?”
“Mike. That’s my hoodie.”
He looks down at it again, then back up at me with crinkly eyes and the beginning of a smile. “Mm. Well. It’s mine now.”
“No, it’s not, give it back.”
“If you want it back, you’ll have to take it.”
“Fine.” I reach for the sleeve dangling past his hand, but he pulls his arm away, hiding both of them behind his back. “It doesn’t even fit you,” I point out, the hem hitting so far down that I can barely see his shorts.
“That’s the point,” he says simply, opening his arms. “Come here.”
I step between his legs, letting him pull me in, wrapping my arms around his waist. The grocery list forgotten.
“Let me have it, okay? It makes me feel cute.”
I look down at him. His black hair, a permanent mess, and his features softened with something I think I feel too. “You’re always cute,” I tell him, sounding way more sincere than I mean to.
“I know,” he agrees, pulling me the rest of the way in.
We kiss on the counter until it turns more heated, and I can feel his hard cock pressing against my stomach. He thrusts against me once, and I pull back, stilling him with a hand on his thigh.
“You know, someone stealing my stuff is the reason I moved in here.”
Mike pulls back with a frown. “What?”
“I had this roommate, and shit kept going missing from my side of the dorm. Notebooks and pencils at first. I thought I was losing my mind. But then I went to do laundry one day, and my boxers were gone.”
Mike scrunches up his nose. “That’s so creepy.”
“Yeah,” I agree, frowning at the memory. Thank god that’s over. “It was my Spider-Man boxers, too.”
His face breaks into a wide grin, his eyes going all crinkly. “Someone stole your Spider-Man boxers?”
“Nate got them for me for Christmas.”
“That’s—” He presses his lips together. “Wow. I feel cheated. I want to see you in Spider-Man boxers.”
“There are others.”
Why did I say that?
His eyes light up. “How many pairs are we talking?”
“Basically all of the Avengers.”
He looks so delighted by this information that I don’t have it in me to be embarrassed about it. He grabs my shirt, pulling me back between his knees, wrapping his legs around me. “I’m glad your creepy roommate stole your underwear.”
“Why?”
“Brought you to me, didn’t it?”
I don’t have anything to say to that that isn’t way too much for the moment, so I slide my fingers over his cock, hard in his shorts, and we don’t do much more talking after that.
Ryan is already there when I get to the gym, glaring at his phone.
He does that sometimes. Shows up too early, and by the time I get here, he’s already warmed up and ready, which makes me feel like I’m running late even when I’m not.
“You’re late,” he says.
“I thought we were meeting at nine.”
We fall into our rhythm, lifting, spotting each other, the familiar back and forth we’ve done every week for over a year.
Things with Ryan used to feel easy. He was the kind of friend who didn’t require much maintenance, and I liked that about him. It was enough to show up and exist in the same space.
It doesn’t feel easy today.
“You good?” he asks when I give up on the bench press early.
“Fine. Why?”
He shrugs, handing me my water. “You seem distracted.”
“I’m not distracted.”
“You skipped your last set.”
“Just tired, I guess.”
He stares at me with a look I can’t understand, muttering under his breath, “You’ve been tired a lot lately.”
I’ve been noticing it. The way his eyes are constantly scanning my face, looking for the truth of what’s going on, or how he thinks I feel. The comments that feel like they’re supposed to mean something.
I try to ignore him, though.
He’s probably just grumpy because I was late.
We switch positions, me spotting while he lifts, but my mind starts drifting to Mike. He was still asleep when I left this morning, on his stomach, an arm reaching across my side of the bed. I could still be there right now.
“How are things?” Ryan asks, between reps. “Pierce still throwing parties every weekend?”
“Not every weekend.”
“He have anybody over last night?”
“No.”
“Night before?”
I look down at him. “What are you getting at?”
He racks the bar and sits up, grabbing his water. “I think you could do better,” he says, pausing before adding, “With your living situation, I mean.”
“I like where I live.”
“You like him?” Ryan asks, and there’s something weird about how he says it. A question within a question. There have been a lot of those since the other weekend.
I keep my face neutral, even though internally, I’m starting to worry about where this conversation might lead. “He’s my roommate.”
“He wrote you a song.”
“I told you, he was messing around.”
“Was he?”
I move to the next station without answering because there’s nothing I can say to that without saying everything, and I’m not coming out to Ryan at nine in the morning at the university gym.
“I’m not trying to start anything,” he says, falling into step beside me. “But the guy’s not exactly stable.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know his reputation.”
“His reputation,” I repeat, adjusting the weight on the next machine. “You know, you’ve got all these opinions on the dude, and you’ve never even taken the time to get to know him. He’s a good person, Ryan.”
“Listen, I’m just trying to look out for you.”
“I know you are.” I keep my eyes on the mirror, watching my form instead of him. “But you don’t have to do this every time we hang out.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Ryan.”
He goes quiet, picking up his own weights.
I finish my set and reach for my towel, thinking about Mike opening up to me about his parents. And his face when I said you’re mine. The way his eyes went a little glossy.
Maybe this arrangement we have is clouding my judgment. Or maybe, I see a version of him that no one else does.
Things have been off with Ryan since the night of Mike’s show. Almost like he’s a little bit obsessed with him.
Almost like he knows.
But that’s crazy. How would he know? Sure, the song was kind of a giveaway, but for all he knows, Mike was screwing with me. I haven’t given him any reason to believe there are feelings there.
There aren’t supposed to be.
But all I know is, he’s been finding reasons to get me away from the house. Texting at weird hours asking if I want to come over, showing up at the end of my shift with sudden plans I know we didn’t make.
I gotta find a way to get him off my back about this.
Maybe telling him about us wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
“You doing anything for Thanksgiving?” Ryan asks, changing the subject, finally.
“Going home to Nate’s.”
“Oh. Sweet.” He pauses. “You could come over after. Dorms will be mostly empty, so we could watch something in the common room.”
“I don’t think I’ll be back until Monday.”
“Yeah,” he says. “No problem.”
I glance back at him, and he’s staring at the floor, doing another curl, his jaw set in that way that’s starting to seem permanent.
I should be asleep right now, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
Five days.
Nate asked, and I said yes because he said they missed me, and I haven’t spent any real quality time with them since I moved in here, even though they live less than twenty minutes away.
I feel bad about it, I really do.
I chose to go to Rosehill University because I wanted to be close to them. But it’s easy to get wrapped up here. Campus can feel like its own little world. And that was before I was arranging my schedule around getting to spend as much time with Mike as possible.
So I’m going. But I’m in my head about it.
Mike doesn’t announce himself anymore. My warning is the sound of the door opening and closing before he settles in beside me. “You’re not asleep,” he says, into my shoulder.
“I’m working on it,” I tell him, turning around to hold him.
“Liar.” He cuddles closer, looking up at me, reaching up to stroke my hair. “What are you thinking about?”
I look at the ceiling with a deep exhale, but I don’t lie to him. “Are you going to have anyone over?” I ask. “While I’m gone.”
He props himself up on one elbow, looking down at me, and even in the dark, I can feel the knowing expression on his face.
“It’s just that,” I continue, even though I really need to shut up. “Five days is a long time and you—”
“You don’t like being alone,” I finish lamely, regretting ever saying a single word to him in my life.
“Alex.” He says, a smirk in his voice, but his hand only leaves my hair to cup my cheek. “I’m not having anyone over.”
“You’re not?”
He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t do anything that would put that look on your face.”
What—”
He interrupts me with a kiss, soft, different from most of our other kisses, but I’m not complaining.
And it doesn’t stay that way long.
His hands find their way back into my hair, and mine land on his hips, pulling him closer until I can feel every inch of him, his heart pounding against my chest, his cock hard against mine through too many layers of fabric.
He pulls my hair, and I moan into his mouth, sliding my hand down to his ass and squeezing. He gasps, breaking the kiss to catch his breath.
“Alex,” he says, sounding wrecked, and I’m right there with him.
“Uh-huh?”
“I want to fuck.” I don’t have any objections to that, so I reach for his waistband.
But he catches my hand. “No.” His eyes find mine in the dark. “I want to fuck you.”
I freeze, those five words knocking the breath right out of me.
“I don’t—” I start. “I—” The words won’t come out. My chest has gone tight, and Mike is right there, warm and expectant, wanting me, but my brain has gone somewhere else entirely, and I can’t—
He watches my reaction to his words, reading something on my face, and then, without making it a thing, he shifts gears.
“Or you could fuck me,” he offers. “Do you want that?”
The cold dread starts to loosen its grip on my heart. “I thought you didn’t—” I swallow past the tremble in my voice. “You said you don’t bottom.”
He shrugs one shoulder like it’s no big deal. “Not for random guys at the bar, but for you? Definitely. I’ve been wanting to get your massive cock inside me since you moved in.”
I look away, my face heating up at his words. I don’t know why he’s so determined to kill me. He tilts my chin back toward him. “So? You wanna?”
I do. I absolutely want to, but—
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I tell him, but he stares at me, waiting for the point while I search for the words to make him understand. “I want it to be— I don’t want to rush it. And we should probably get tested. Can we wait until I get back?”
The silence that follows seems to last forever.
And then he lets out the most full-bodied sigh I’ve ever heard in my entire life. He flops onto his back, throwing his arm over his eyes.
Uncalled for, if you ask me. It’s not like he’s missing out on anything all that great.
“Five. Days.”
“It’ll go by fast,” I tell him, but he drops his arm to emphasize his pout.
“If I don’t die from sex deprivation in the meantime.”