3
I came back to the room that night and threw the paper on my desk so hard it slid off the other side and landed at Tommy's feet.
He picked it up. Flipped through it. And then, with the effortless cruelty of a person for whom this material was as simple as breathing, began answering the questions out loud.
"The net force is mass times acceleration, so it's just twelve times nine-point-eight, which is a hundred and seventeen-point-six newtons. This one's a conservation of energy problem—you set kinetic equal to potential and solve for velocity, which gives you... fourteen-point-one meters per second."
He glanced up. "You put seven. How did you get seven?"
"I don’t know—I guessed," I said and shrugged, because I had.
Tommy looked at the paper the way a doctor looks at an X-ray that confirms the bad news.
Then he set it down and said, very calmly, "Ok, this is my final offer: I'll do your homework for the rest of the semester. Every assignment. I'll also help you cheat on your exams—I know how to get into the department's test bank through the student portal.
They haven't patched the exploit since last spring. I checked. Don’t go telling everybody that, please."
I stared at him. This five-three, hundred-and-twenty-pound freshman was sitting on his bed offering to hack a university exam system with the same energy most people used to offer a stick of gum, and I felt two things simultaneously: desperate gratitude and something I immediately tried to smother,
which was that Tommy's intelligence—the sheer, effortless, almost intimidating competence of him—was doing something to me that competence had no business doing.
My dick shifted in my shorts. I crossed my legs.
"I’ll bite. What’s the price?" I asked. “Really, what’s the price? No bullshitting.”
Tommy pretended to think about it. Tapped his chin with one finger. Looked at the ceiling. The performance was so transparent it was almost charming.
Then he grinned.
"You let me… suck your dick."
The sentence sat in the air between us like a grenade with the pin out. I waited for the punchline. For the just kidding or the laugh that would let me file this under Tommy's usual flirtation.
It didn’t come. He just looked at me with those big blue eyes, steady and bright, his usual smug grin nowhere to be found. For once, those pouty lips were perfectly serious.
"You’ve got to be fucking with me," I said. “No fucking way.”
"Okay, no problem." He shrugged and picked his magazine back up. "Offer stands whenever you change your mind."
"When-ever? I'm not going to change my mind. It’s not a matter of ‘when.’ If I want head, I've got a roster of girls on my phone who'd be over here in ten minutes just for the bragging rights."
Tommy smiled at that—a small, knowing smile that suggested he was privy to information I hadn't been given yet. It annoyed me.
Everything about him annoyed me. The confidence, the ease, the way he could sit there offering to suck my cock like he was suggesting we order pizza, as if the act itself was so unremarkable that the only thing worth negotiating was the terms.
I went to bed that night and made the mistake of letting my mind wander.
I thought about Tommy's offer; about what it would actually look like—him on his knees, those pouty lips, those blue eyes looking up at me. The image was vivid enough that my cock went from soft to rock-hard in about three seconds, and I had to roll onto my stomach to hide it from the room.
I was thinking about a cheerleader, I told myself. That's what triggered it. I was picturing Megan. Or Brooke. One of them. Definitely not Tommy.
Sure…
Two days later, Coach Palmer called me into his office and informed me that someone had sent him a photo of me at a Kappa Delta party the previous weekend with a drink in my hand and a pair of girls on my lap.
"You're done with girls," Coach said, in the same tone he used to call plays he expected executed without question.
"No parties, no dates, no hookups, no female contact that isn't your mother or a professor. Your teammates have been informed. If any of them see you with a girl, they report it to me. If I see you with a girl, you're off the roster. Permanently. Am I clear?"
I couldn’t do anything but laugh at how ridiculous it all was. “Whatever,” I said.
“Excuse me?” Coach Palmer said, his brow furrowing.
Shit, I thought. I’d fucked up majorly.
“I’m trying to get your shit together so you can start for us in the playoffs. We’ve got NFL scouts coming to the bowl games this year. You want to so much as sniff a pro football jockstrap, let alone get on the fucking field for one of those teams?
Then I suggest you keep your head down and do what I tell you. Deal?”
I sat in his office and said, "Yes, sir," and walked back to McDonnell Hall trying to figure out who had sent the photo.
I had my suspicions, though my teammates had never ratted me out before—we had an unspoken code about that. But I couldn't prove anything, and the more I thought about who stood to gain from me being cut off from women, the more one answer kept surfacing: Tommy.
The thought should have made me furious.
Instead—and this is the part I'm least proud of—it made me hard. The possibility that this five-three, hundred-and-twenty-pound twink wanted to suck my cock badly enough to orchestrate my sexual isolation was so deranged and so flattering that my body responded before my brain could intervene.
I was half-mast by the time I hit the second floor of McDonnell, and fully hard by the time I closed our door behind me. Either he was behind all this, or he’d gotten so far under my skin that I was starting to see conspiracies where there weren’t any.
Either way, he was getting to me in a way I’d never let anyone get to me before.
Tommy was on his bed, studying. He didn't look up. He didn't need to. He knew exactly what he'd done. Allegedly.
I reminded myself, firmly and repeatedly, that I was the straightest guy on this campus.
I had never once looked at another man and felt anything other than competitiveness.
I had spent every day of my life since adolescence being attracted to women exclusively, and no amount of proximity to a pretty-boy freshman with a smart mouth was going to change that.
But I'd also never lived with a guy like Tommy; a guy who blurred the line so thoroughly that my brain couldn't maintain the categories.
He moved like a girl—hips first, fluid, deliberate.
He smelled like a girl—that lotion, that body spray, the constant, ambient sweetness that our room had absorbed until everything smelled like him.
He talked like a girl, laughed like a girl, and had an ass that I could've easily mistaken for a girl's.
That one was especially brutal—seeing that cute ass of his always snug in his tiny shorts and having to remind myself it was my male roommate and not some skimpy, petite sorority girl that I was ready to destroy in my bed.
And over the next few days, the horniness became a problem I knew I couldn't contain for much longer.
With girls officially off-limits, my body had nowhere to put the energy, and it was accumulating with a pressure that made me feel like a pipe about to burst.
I was popping random boners at catastrophic times—in the room, at my desk, lying on my bed pretending to read while my cock tented my shorts with a prominence that you could probably see in total darkness.
I started wearing my thin practice shorts around the room. Just the shorts. No underwear. I told myself it was because they were comfortable.
The truth—which I could barely admit even to myself—was that I wanted Tommy to see. I wanted to know if those big blue eyes would drift down to my lap the way I suspected they would. And I wanted to test whether the effect I had on him was as powerful as the effect he was starting to have on me.
Spoiler alert: It was.
Tommy's gaze dropped to my crotch every time I shifted in my chair or stood up or adjusted myself. He'd bite his lower lip—that full, pink, pouty lip—and look away a beat too late, and the thrill I felt at catching him was electric and confusing and made me harder every single time.
We were playing chicken. Both of us. And neither of us was swerving.
The breaking point finally came on a Thursday night.
Tommy was on his bed, phone to his ear, talking to one of his girlfriends. I was at my desk pretending to read a textbook and actually listening to every word, because Tommy's phone conversations were never boring and tonight's was about to become the most dangerous thing I'd ever overheard.
"Girl, I'm telling you," Tommy said, twirling a pen between his fingers and lowering his voice. "This bouncer at Neon—you know the one with the crew cut?—he took me home after my shift and absolutely destroyed me. Like, wrecked. I couldn't walk right for two days."
My hand stopped turning the page.
"His dick was so huge," Tommy continued, his voice dropping into that breathless, conspiratorial register he reserved for the filthiest gossip. "Like, seven inches, and he just pounded me. I came so hard I almost blacked out."
My cock was concrete in my shorts by this point. Fully, painfully, humiliatingly hard—and I was sitting four feet from him with nothing but a textbook for cover.
Seven inches. Tommy was gushing over seven inches?
I was nine. Almost nine, anyway—eight and three-quarters and sometimes a solid nine; and thick enough that girls almost always audibly gasped the first time they saw it.
I guessed my cock was as thick as Tommy's delicate, girlish wrist.
The thought of his reaction—those blue eyes going wide, that pouty mouth falling open—hit me like a truck and activated the competitiveness inside me. Not good.
"And the best part," Tommy said into the phone, "is that he came inside me. Like, deep. And afterward, he told me my ass was tighter and better than any pussy he'd ever had. But then, guys always say that to me."
I was across the room before I knew I'd stood up.
I grabbed Tommy's phone out of his hand. Hit the red button. Tossed it onto his bed.