2
I guess he had to be confident because the thing about Tommy—and I'm only saying this because it's relevant to what happened later, not because it means anything—was that he had fully, completely, almost aggressively leaned into being pretty.
Back home in whatever small town in Virginia he'd come from, he said being the pretty gay kid had been a nightmare. Bullying, isolation, the whole package. But here in Miami, he'd turned it into a weapon.
He dressed for attention—short trunks, sleeveless shirts, outfits that showed off his smooth, tanned legs and his narrow waist and the compact little ass that I was absolutely not looking at, ever, under any circumstances.
Except sometimes he'd be sitting on his bed with his legs splayed open, reading a textbook or scrolling his phone, and the shorts would ride up, and there'd be a shadow of something—the inside of his thigh, the edge of his underwear,
a hint of skin that was technically just leg but felt like more—and my eyes would move there for a half-second before I redirected.
Half a second. That's it. No different from glancing at a car accident on the highway, right? You look because it's there, not because you want to see it.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
The truth—and I'm only admitting this because I've already committed to telling this story honestly—was that living with Tommy was doing something weird to my head.
Not, like, gay weird. Just weird weird.
After two weeks of sharing a room with him, I'd started to lose the ability to categorize him properly.
He didn't fit in the box marked guy. Yet, he didn't fit in the box marked girl, either. Still, he was so much closer to that box than any male I'd ever known that my brain kept defaulting to it.
The way he moved. The way he smelled—always some kind of lotion or body spray that made our room smell like a Sephora. The way he talked on the phone with his girlfriends, laughing and gossiping and saying things like "shut up" in a pitch that could've come from any sorority girl on campus.
I started catching myself thinking of him the way I thought about girls.
Not wanting him—let me be fucking clear about that—but perceiving him through the same lens.
Noticing when he'd just showered and his skin was pink and damp.
Noticing the way his shorts fit. Noticing his lips when he talked, the way the bottom one was slightly fuller than the top and caught the light from his desk lamp when he was studying.
None of it meant anything. I was Colton Asher. I'd hooked up with more women in three years of college than most guys managed in a lifetime.
I was six-three, two-twenty, with a body I'd built through thousands of hours of work and a face that had been getting me chased by girls since junior year of high school. My sexuality was not a question. It was a statement, chiseled in stone.
But Tommy was making the statement harder to say with a straight face—no pun intended—and the worst part? I think he knew it.
He couldn't have known what he was doing to me, specifically, because I wasn't doing anything.
But he knew he was getting under my skin.
I could see it in that little smile he'd flash whenever he caught me looking away a beat too late.
The smile that said I see you, Colton Asher.
And I can wait until you’re begging for me.
I hated that smile. And I thought about it way too often.
But I had bigger problems than my confusing roommate. I had a 1.6 GPA, a physics midterm I couldn't even read, and a coach who'd made it very clear that if I didn't pull my grades up by December, the only thing I'd be catching next season was a bus back to my parents' house.
McDonnell Hall was supposed to be rock bottom. A wake-up call. Three months of humility and hard work.
I just didn't expect rock bottom to have a beautiful twink waiting down there for me.
I tried to fight it. Held out as long as I could. But it took exactly eleven days for my pride to start costing me my future.
Tommy had figured out the probation thing on day three—not because I told him, but because the guy was apparently a human lie detector with a physics degree pending.
I'd come back from a meeting with my academic advisor, I guess probably looking like somebody had kicked my dog, and Tommy had glanced up from his textbook, studied my face for about two seconds, and said, "You're here because your grades suck and Coach put you on lockdown, aren't you?"
I'd stared at him. "How the fuck did you?—"
"You're Colton Asher. I saw your face on the football stadium during orientation. You’re a campus legend yet you’re living in a freshman honors dorm with the nerds. The math ain’t mathing, as they say." He'd turned a page.
"Mind your business," I said.
"I could help you, you know." He was already looking back at his book, like the offer was barely worth making. "If you wanted."
"Help me how?"
"Tutoring. Homework. Whatever you need." He turned a page. "Free of charge."
"Free? Why does that sound like bullshit?" I muttered.
He smiled without looking up. "Guess you'll never know unless you say yes."
I couldn’t help but wonder what it would cost me. Probably nothing at first. Maybe walking around the room shirtless so he could stare at me and make his little comments.
Maybe letting him "accidentally" see me in a towel after a shower? Some kind of arrangement where his cooperation came with a side of eye candy, because I was quickly learning that Tommy never did anything without an angle—he was too smart not to.
"I'm good," I said. "I've got a tutor."
Fast-forward a few days, and suddenly it wasn’t that I had a tutor. It was that I’d had a tutor.
For all of five days, in fact.
Then Marcus—a grad student in applied mathematics who the athletic department had assigned to me—sent me a text that said, in its entirety: Hey man, I don't think this is a good use of either of our time.
Best of luck. Which was academic-speak for you're too dumb to help and I'd rather do literally anything else.
Tommy, who seemed to know every honors student on campus because they were all in the same orbit of academic overachievers, informed me cheerfully that the word among the tutoring pool was that Colton Asher was a ‘lost cause.’
Nobody wanted the assignment. I was the academic equivalent of a condemned building—theoretically salvageable, but not worth the investment.
"The offer still stands," Tommy said from his bed, where he was lying on his stomach reading a magazine with his bare feet kicked up behind him, wearing a pair of shorts so small they'd probably be legally classified as underwear anywhere outside of Miami beach.
"Free tutoring? No strings? What’s not to like?"
"No strings?” I said. “I still don’t believe you.”
He looked at me over the top of the magazine without saying a word. Those blue eyes. That little smile.
I told him where to shove his offer once again.
And then, a few more days later, I got a forty-one on my physics paper.
Not a forty-one out of fifty. A forty-one out of a hundred. On a paper I had actually, genuinely tried on—had spent an entire weekend reading the textbook and attempting to construct answers that sounded like they came from a person who understood what force and acceleration meant.
I'd turned it in feeling cautiously optimistic.
I'd gotten it back feeling like the universe was actively conspiring to end my football career.
Now I was actually beginning to sweat—and panic.