Dean
CHAPTER SIX
My phone buzzes, and out of some kind of sick, primal instinct, I reach for it as soon as the notification hits my eardrums.
It’s a spam email.
Oh, well.
“Hey, what’s got you on edge?” Claire asks in Mandarin. She’s from Taiwan, she’s on the women’s softball team here, and we worked on a group project together our freshman year, bonding over how useless the other group member was.
And because I stupidly decided to befriend a bunch of people older than me, she’s one of the last friends I have left on campus.
“Nothing.” I put my phone back down. “Waiting on a message from the baseball player I’m tutoring. He’s supposed to send me an assignment to review.”
“You’re tutoring someone?” She scoffs. “In what?”
“Chinese. Which along with English, is basically the only thing I’m kind of qualified to tutor.”
Claire tilts her head, which makes me sigh in frustration—I can already hear where she’s going. “Let me guess. He’s doing so badly, and that’s why you’re jittery about reviewing his work?”
I don’t reply. She doesn’t need any input from me to keep going, not with that singsong voice of hers which tells me everything I need to know about her intentions with this conversation.
“You like him, don’t you?”
“No.”
“But he’s cute, right?”
Pursing my lips together, I fix her with a blank stare. “He’s Nick. Nick Russell.”
Claire stops scribbling notes into her tablet, and her stylus drops to the table. “Don’t fucking fart around, man.”
“I’m not.”
My stomach drops when her lips curve upward. “How much do you know about him?”
“That he’s hot?”
“And?”
And that despite his blasé demeanor, he’s actually smart and he tries hard, which is corkscrewing hard into my competence kink and stretching my self-control.
“He’s…a decent guy,” I say. “What, do you know more?”
“A little. I know his friends, through my teammate Sabrina, who’s friends with Nick’s best friend Ian.”
“Isn’t Ian the guy who went viral for kissing his boyfriend after a game last April?”
“You’re right,” she says.
And then there’s his roommate Jeremy who doesn’t keep what he thinks of me a secret.
“So none of his close friends are straight.” I press my hands together, gears turning in my head. “Does that mean anything for him…by association?”
“You really don’t know?” Claire asks. “Nick was dating a guy in his first year here. They broke up, and Nick hasn’t been seen with anyone else ever since.”
Woah, fuck, hold up. “You said he was dating a guy?”
She nods.
Nick’s into dudes?
Holy shit. Now that the idea of banging my tutee has entered the realm of possibility, I can’t shake the idea of getting my hands on Nick’s—
“Hey, come back.” Claire laughs and waves her hand in front of my face. “Your eyes went all glassy.”
Heat rises up my neck, and I stare at my fidgeting fingers. “Oops.”
She shrugs, tapping her long nails against the metal of her water bottle. “Hey, I don’t blame you. Nick’s hot.”
“I’ll say,” I mutter. “Every time I go to his house, Nick’s lying ass-up on the couch in the most obscene pair of sweatpants I’ve had the privilege of seeing.”
“And you can’t stop thinking about burying your face deep in there, can you?”
That pesky blush creeps into my ears, and I glance around the foyer to make sure there’s nobody around who can potentially understand us.
“You aren’t wrong,” I admit, and I don’t elaborate. Claire knows too much about me already from being friends for the past four years, and now, being an open book is coming back to bite me in the ass.
“I know I’m not. There was the hockey guy from the summer who you were obsessed with.”
“Come on, I wasn’t obsessed with him,” I retort, lying a little. Fucking Zach tempted me into breaking my no-repeats rule, and I paid the predictable price by catching some inconvenient feelings. Hence why I’m doing everything I can to avoid it happening again.
“And now Nick,” Claire continues. “I think it’s clear you have a type for sweet, peachy posteriors.”
I shrug. “What can I say? I’m a guy who…likes other dudes’ asses.”
“So tap that.”
“You make it sound so easy. Nick’s hot.”
“Hmm, yeah, and you’re such a loser. For real. He’s sooooo far out of your league.” She huffs. “Man, shut the fuck up. Go flirt with him the next time you see each other.”
“I’m so bad at it,” I counter.
Claire rolls her eyes. “Come on! I know you can flirt. If he’s like every other guy, you'll just need to compliment him, brush your arm against his, and then he'll drag you to bed by the dick. So easy.”
“Sure.”
I mean, she isn't wrong. It's just that if Nick and I hook up, we can't exactly part ways afterward. I'd still have to tutor him, and besides, we already know each other. For me, there’s an art to hooking up, and step one is making sure I don’t know the guy. Because otherwise, I’d get in too deep, and the last thing I want is to lead someone on or date someone with an expiration date. As much as I like to think I’m a strong guy, I can’t help how hard I fall.
Like with Zach after seeing him twice. It isn’t like I shed tears when he wanted to keep things casual, and then stopped replying at all, but damn, he was cute. And sweet.
And caked up real nice.
At least Nick is more of a dudebro, even if it’s in an endearing way. If anything, I can probably put him in a box and keep things stable—
“Hey.” Claire whacks me on the head, and I almost yell before remembering we’re in a library.
“Don’t get in your head about this. Just wear some nice clothes, come out if you haven’t, and then flirt with him until he falls into your bed and you fall into his something else. Or the other way around.”
“Okay, okay, I got it.” I raise my hands in mock defeat, since I really didn’t need too much convincing. “We aren’t meeting until after Thanksgiving break, so I’ll have time to hype myself up.”
Claire smiles, nudging my shoulder with her hand. “Awesome. Got any plans for break, other than overthinking the easy task of getting with Nick?”
I shake my head.
“Aww, you’re going to be alone?” she asks.
“Shut up. Probably.”
“Maybe you can ask your hot baseball boy if he wants to hang out.”
I shoot her a tired, pointed look. “He’s probably got a family to go back to like everyone else who’s from here.”
That’s when my phone buzzes again, snatching my attention. Claire snickers when I hurry to grab it, smiling when I find out it’s a text from Nick.
Nick Russell
yo here’s the assignment
kinda last minute but I have self-study and an assignment due right after break and I don’t want to leave those
f you’re free tomorrow I’d really appreciate help with the self-study part but no worries if not
“Nick wants to meet up tomorrow for help with something.”
“Don’t say yes. I mean, say yes but not immediately.”
“Hey, I know what I’m doing. I’m not a three-year-old child.”
Nah, sorry. You said it’s self-study so you’re on your own
please man I’m lost without you
If that doesn’t tug at my damn heartstrings.
i’ll stroke you under the table and cook dinner after, promise
I snicker, and Claire raises an eyebrow.
“He made a sex joke,” I admit.
“This is gonna be easier than I thought!” she says. “He’s doing most of the work for you.”
Ok fine you convinced me but I’ll hold you to it
I’m free at 4 tmr
I fill Claire in, and before she has a chance to make another inconveniently true observation, I stick my hand up to stop her. “He’s treating me like a friend. I don’t think he’s into me.”
“Does he know you’re into guys?”
“No.”
“That’s probably why,” she says. “All you’re gonna have to do is ramp up the weird joking you men always do with each other, and then keep it up after you casually tell him you’re gay.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”
Smiling to myself, I return my focus to my hellish assignment, but only partially. The prospect of getting my hands on Nick stays in the back of my mind, and already, I’m counting down the seconds until four p.m. tomorrow.
I’ll get a haircut first thing in the morning and wear something nice like Claire suggested. Nick isn’t exactly out of my league, but he’s still super fucking attractive. Anything that’ll boost my chances is fair game.