Off Campus (3 page)

Shoving his book in his pack and putting the iPod carefully away—if that thing broke, he'd be hard pressed to replace it—he felt Reese standing over him, watching him with what were no doubt laser eyes of fuck you.

“You sure you wanna come in? Probably smells like come in here.” The attempt to gross him out, to scare him off, wasn't even subtle now. Tom sighed and braced a hand against the dusty floor and stood.

He didn't enjoy using his size to push a smaller guy around, but he stepped in close to Reese, who didn't back down, and leaned in to loom over him. The kid was right. He could smell sex on him and he told his dick to settle down when it showed tingly signs of waking up again. Reese's lips were puffy and red, his eyes narrowed and unblinking as he stared up at Tom.

“Listen, kid. You have no idea the shit I've dealt with lately.” He pushed his face down even closer until he saw Reese's nostrils flare and his skin pale. Shit. He was actually scaring the kid. He took a step back and shook his head. “A room smelling like sex doesn't even make the list of crap that bothers me, so don't go getting hopeful that I'm gonna run screaming down the hall at the idea that you blew some dude in our room.”

“
My
room.” Still battling.

“If it makes you feel good, call it whatever you want.” He entered the room and slung his backpack over the back of what he was now calling his desk chair. “But I'll be sleeping here every night. And if I get tired of sitting in the hall, I'll
probably
remember to knock before I come in.”

Reese scoffed and slammed the door shut as he followed Tom in.

“Maybe I'll keep going. What are you gonna do? Sit there and watch me suck off some guy?”

He was running out of energy to laugh. Tom scrubbed his hands over his face and yawned. The sight of his bed was shutting his brain down.

“Jesus, kid. Don't flatter yourself. Most days I'm so tired you could be gagging on the cocks of half the school and I'm not even gonna notice the line out the door before I crash.”

He caught a glimpse of Reese as he stripped his T-shirt off over his head, a little self-conscious, yes. Two guys had just been full-on naked in their room and taking his clothes off felt…awkward. The kid was chewing gently on his lower lip and frowning, looking unsure about what to do next. Clearly his big plan fizzling out like a dud firework wasn't something he'd anticipated.

He kicked off jeans, socks, shoes all in one go to a pile on the floor, feeling like Groundhog Day for repeating the exact same move as last night with a still-pissed off roommate watching him undress. Good to know he'd made exactly no progress in twenty-four hours.

“Also, you're a slob. Can't you put your clothes in a laundry basket?”

Tom kept his back to Reese as he climbed into bed. It felt like progress, having the kid bitch at him about who was the bigger slob, a regular roommate issue. Maybe the fact that he hadn't backed down at Reese's sex challenge had convinced the kid that he wasn't going anywhere. They were never going to be BFF's obviously, but maybe they could settle into a regularly acrimonious roommate relationship, where neither of them really liked the other but they mostly ignored each other's presence. “Don't have one. But I'll get a box or something, okay? I'm hitting the sack, kid. Have a good night.”

He didn't even care that the overhead light was still shining bright, lighting up the whole room. A pillow over his head was darkness enough and even if Reese kept up the put-upon heavy sighs and general sounds of stomping around their room, Tom knew he'd be out in minutes.

Before he could slow his brain down enough to let sleep in, he heard a faint click and the light seeping in under the edges of the pillow vanished.

Ahhh, sweet. He slid the pillow back under his head and stayed curled up on his side, facing the wall. He could hear Reese moving through the dark room, the sounds of clothes being removed loud in the darkness. Tom refused to picture it. The rustle of skin sliding on fabric was an audible
shush
as Reese got into his own bed. Tom told himself he was imagining being able to hear their slow breaths mingle in a counterpoint that gradually drifted into synchronized easy inhales and exhales.

And, listening to his roommate breathing in the dark, he fell asleep.

Chapter Three

After three more days of sharing the room with Reese, Tom was fucking hanging by a thread, and he hit the road in his carefully maintained BMW early Friday morning with a deep sigh of relief and guilt.

Reese hadn't given up on his plan to get Tom to move out by battering him with his gayness, but he'd only brought a guy back to their room on one of the past few nights. No notebook paper sign on the bulletin board, but the pink bandana still tied defiantly on the doorknob. Guess the kid didn't really want to give him the shock of walking in on a full-on gay sex, naked dude extravaganza, no matter what he might threaten. Tom had sighed and settled down again in the hall, determined not to be run off. He'd gone through the book on lap, buds in ears routine but had found himself hesitating with a finger over the iPod on switch before leaving it off.

He felt kind of pervy, eavesdropping on his roommate's sex life, but wasn't this what Reese wanted? To force him to listen in? And Tom couldn't deny the irresistible nagging curiosity that had its claws in him.

Once again, the only voice he heard was not his roommate's. A different male voice this time, not as wordy as the last guy, but into almost nonstop moaning and groaning and this guy definitely didn't care who heard him. His shout at the end was loud enough to be heard on the floors below them and Tom had found himself again with a hard-on that wouldn't quit until he pinched the tip of his dick through his jeans and squeezed hard enough for the pain to block out some of the thick, sticky pulses of heat that had him thinking he could feel his heartbeat in his cock.

Reese had only looked at him for a second while hustling his latest pick-up out the door just minutes after that final orgasm yell to wake the dead, as if he already knew what he'd find. They'd locked eyes for a moment, neither of them blinking. The skin under Reese's dark eyes was shadowed a deep purple and his face was paler than usual. Whatever thrill he got out of trying to fuck with Tom's head with this game, it clearly wasn't giving
him
much joy. Either that, or he was lying awake all night, plotting Tom's ultimate demise, instead of sleeping.

Not Tom's problem. Sooner or later the kid would settle down and they could get on with their lives. Or at least Tom would. If Reese wanted to simmer and seethe with resentment for the rest of the year, he could knock himself out. Tom had work to do and all he needed was a safe place to crash in the hours when he wasn't busting his ass to catch up on his thesis work.

Not his problem.

Right.

That's what he told himself as he finally gave up on sleep and grabbed his towel on the way out of their room, heading to the showers at two a.m.

He left the lights off, not wanting to draw any attention. Or maybe it was that he didn't want to look at himself in the mirror and see his own face as he hung his shorts and his towel on the hook outside the shower stall and stepped naked into the dark cubicle. He cranked on the water until it was so hot it scalded him and suffered under the hard stinging spray for minutes. But in the end, he gave in. He'd known he would. Turning the water to warm and leaning against the wall with his head braced against his forearm, he grabbed his dick and stroked it slowly, almost painfully, with the drag of his hand up and down until he shuddered hard and came so fast it hurt, his mind full of Reese. Reese's slim hips in those low-slung sweats, the bones of his pelvis visible because he didn't weigh enough, even for a skinny guy. Reese's hair, always falling in his face, his way of blocking out the people around him, Tom thought, and pictured pushing it back with fingers plunged deep and curving around Reese's skull.

Reese's mouth. Those lips he'd seen twice now, puffy from sucking cock and bruised reddish-purple with the force of wrapping his lips around his teeth. He knew that mouth would be full of heat, wet, and the strong muscle of a tongue that would stroke his dick while Reese sucked him until he came.

He was so fucked.

The warm water was raining down on him, sluicing the sweat from his body as he shook a little in the aftermath of the hardest orgasm he'd had in years, just from a two-minute jerk session and thoughts of his roommate's mouth.

He kept his thoughts to himself about this little late night fantasy session. Or rather, put to the side the admission that he'd given in to the urge at all. He hadn't had sex worth fantasizing about in months. He'd been too worn out to get excited about much of anything, but a bed and a roof were apparently rejuvenating to the sex drive.

Then, if someone was gonna shove their own private sex show in his face, of course he was gonna get hung up on the idea of getting a blowjob. And if there was someone in the room who, although it didn't sound as though he did much getting off of his own, clearly had a thing for sucking guys off, then it shouldn't surprise Tom to find that person pushing his way into Tom's masturbation fantasy.

Only to be expected really.

He snorted and called bullshit on himself as he angled the showerhead to rinse his come off the tiled wall and down the drain. Even if he wanted to, there was no fucking point denying that he'd jacked off to a gay sex fantasy. Who the fuck cared? What a guy did in the privacy of his own head didn't have anything to do with what he did in real life. Every guy he knew had fantasies of hot threesomes with chicks stacked like Playboy bunnies and the only guy he knew who'd actually had a threesome had ended up spending most of the night holding one girl's hair back as she puked in a toilet, because everyone had been so drunk no one really knew what they were doing.

Real life was way less fucking hot than fantasies. Which was why people had them.

It didn't mean your real life was ever going to match the things you got up to in your head.

Still, when he made it back to their room, he'd turned the handle with all the care he could muster to make the sound soft and unlikely to wake anyone. He'd dressed and thrown clothes in his bag with the same hush and snuck out of the room without looking more than once at the sleeping sprawl that was Reese in his twin bed on the opposite side of the room, his sheet pulled up barely far enough to cover his ass, his shoulder blades outlined delicately by the faint light that spilled in the window from the street lights.

Tom would drive a cab all weekend and catnap in his car when necessary to save money on a motel. He'd drive until he was too tired to think of anything at all before he sacked out on the backseat and then wake up to an alarm after a few hours, still tired and disoriented with a need for sleep. He wouldn't have the energy to think about anything except socking enough cash away in his checking account to be able to write that next tuition check. And maybe almost seventy-two hours of privacy would let Reese adjust to the idea that Tom was going to be there during the week, and not frequently even then. Surely he'd noticed Tom only came back to the room to sleep, trying to give the kid as much space as he could.

The sun was sliding up over the horizon as he cruised east on the Mass Pike to Boston, the gentle rise of the hills undulating like waves to either side of the highway as traffic slowly built the closer he got to the city.

He had seven hundred plus pages of reading to do over breaks the next three days. Between that and trying to make sure none of the late night fares he picked up were going to puke in his cab, he wouldn't have any trouble keeping himself busy.

That was the plan.

Sunday night he'd have to get back in the pool again, head back to his room and hope things were smoothed over with Reese. Until then, he had nothing but work, for school or for cash. His focus was clear.

Easier said than done. But by the time he was heading back to Western Mass on Sunday night, Tom felt settled in resignation to the fact that he was going to wake up from hazy dreams of hard, slim bodies and a male mouth, sporting the kind of erection that didn't go back down until he did something about it. It hadn't really even taken the second night to make it clear that this was his burden for the foreseeable future. And if he were honest, it wasn't exactly the first time he'd had a dream about another guy. He'd known for a while now that his dick was an equal opportunity pervhouse, something years at prep school had made clear.

Hey, even sharing a room with another boy wasn't going to keep a teenage kid from jerking off in the middle of the night.

The first time he'd heard the smothered gasps of his roommate and felt himself get hard right along with him—finally reaching down to tug on himself until he came in his boxers, hoping the other boy was too caught up in his own self-induced orgasm to hear him join in—the light had gone on that maybe it wasn't only girls that got to him.

He ignored the voice in his brain that reminded him that jacking off in the dark wasn't exactly as far as he'd gone and cranked the stereo high, blasting some old school Run DMC and letting the fast pitch word play blow all other thoughts out of his head like the wind roaring in the windows as he headed back to Perkins House. He didn't let himself wonder for a moment if his doorknob would have a pink bandana looped over the knob when he got there.

Chapter Four

Tom figured the cardboard box could be seen as a peace offering.

Right?

He spotted the flattened box where it sat behind the sixty-five gallon trash bin at the end of the hall in the kitchenette when he went to refill an empty water bottle to keep by his bed. His head ached from too little sleep this weekend and he knew he was probably dehydrated too. He couldn't always find a water fountain to refill his bottle when he was driving and he sure as shit wasn't about to use a gas station bathroom sink. Or buy a new frigging bottle of what was probably tap water anyway every time he got thirsty. So he knew he should drink up if he didn't want to slip into migraine territory just in time for class on Monday morning. When he spotted the box, he grabbed at it as another gesture he could make to Reese in the hopes of waving the “Hey, look at me! Not a bad guy!” flag.

Back in their room, he set up the box, reconstructing its four sides and tucking opposite flaps under one another to lock in the bottom until he got some duct tape. He cut the top flaps off and when he stripped down, dropped all of his dirty clothes in his new laundry basket at the foot of his bed.

Might not be pretty, but it was functional.

He knew the minute Reese spotted it when he finally showed up in the room at about eleven o'clock, no trick in tow for once. The kid was stripping off a black hoodie, in full-on goth mode with a black T-shirt, pants and eyeliner that made you look at his eyes more, when his motions slowed until he stopped, hoodie dangling from one hand as he narrowed his eyes at the foot of Tom's bed.

“What's that?”

Tom looked up from the book in his lap. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed in his boxers, since it was hot as balls in their room and he still didn't have a desk, what with the giant entertainment center that squatted there. He'd opened the window all the way, but with no through-draft, the Indian summer heat was sitting in their third floor room, camped out for the night. His skin felt sticky wherever his limbs touched, elbow on his thigh or fist against his cheek. And being hot and sticky didn't exactly bring out the Ms. Manners in his personality.

“Never seen one of those before, huh?”

Reese rolled his eyes and hung up his hoodie in his closet. On a frigging hanger. Must be cooler out now that the sun had been down for a while if he'd worn it, but Tom sure couldn't feel the temperature change in his shorts.

And that was the last thought about anything in his shorts that was going to be allowed.

“What's it for? Packing up your stuff?” Reese fluttered his eyelashes and patted his chest. “Be still, my eager heart.”

“You aren't that lucky.” All of a sudden, he felt kind of stupid at admitting it. He'd been trying to do something nice, but somehow saying that out loud felt almost like, well,
flirting
. Like when you offered to take a girl to the chick flick you knew she wanted to see instead of the one about MMA fighters getting into street races with other gangs. And he sure as shit didn't see Reese as a girl. There was no mistaking the wiry muscle and hard bones of his body for the cushiony softness that he looked for in a girl. “It's a laundry basket. Duh.”

Jesus. He was turning into a twelve-year-old.
Duh?

He didn't look up again, but he heard the
harrumph
Reese let escape and hid a grin behind pressed lips.

“I didn't want to be Oscar,” he offered after a moment, not sure if the reference would mean anything. He'd played the part back in high school, when trying out for a school play and getting one of the leads was still important to him. Because he'd been kind of a show-off and little bit of a prick about rubbing it in to his friends that he could do anything he put his mind to.

“Because I'm the uptight, OCD gay roommate who doesn't know how to have any fun?”

“Hey, man. Sounds to me like you get up to all kinds of fun in here.” Okay. So maybe he'd planned on going more than three minutes before bringing up the blowjob party in their room that Reese had been intent on holding the last time he'd seen him.

“Yeah, well, it's not…what it looks like.” Reese didn't look at him as he pulled books from his backpack and stacked them on his desk.

“It's not you sucking dick in the hopes that making me listen to guys coming their brains out is gonna make me move out?”

“Okay. That part's what it looks like.”

“Thought so.” He snapped shut his book. “Look, kid—”

“Stop calling me kid. How much older than me can you be anyway? What are you, twenty-five?”

He felt ancient some days.

“Twenty-two.”

The look of shock on Reese's face was almost comical.

“Twenty-two?” His voice hit the ceiling in a screech. “How the hell did you get in Perkins then? It's supposed to be for
older
students.”

“And what are you? Benjamin Button? You can't be a day over nineteen.”

“I'm twenty and—” Reese paled and started putting the books he'd removed from his messenger bag back in it like an automaton, “—the school wasn't, um, sure where to put me, so I, um, ended up here.”

My Aunt Fanny, Tom thought, and laughed at how the voice in his head that said the words sounded like his mother when he was a kid. That was the crappiest non-explanation he'd ever heard, but he thought he could see Reese's hands actually shaking as he moved books around and didn't look at Tom. If the kid wanted to keep secrets, that was totally fine with Tom.

He had plenty of things he didn't want to share with everybody and their neighbor too.

“Yeah, me too,” he finally answered. “The school wanted me here. Keep me away from the riff raff.” He tried to crack a joke about it.

“What? Some kind of celebrity? I mean, you did go here last year, right?” Changing the subject back to Tom seemed to bring Reese back to life a little. He didn't really look at Tom, instead glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, as if Tom were a grizzly bear whose attention he wasn't sure he wanted to draw to himself. Giving a little hop, he got his ass up on the edge of his desk, bracing his Chucks on the seat of his chair. Apparently he was settling in for some good ole roomie get to know you conversation.

Great.

Just when Tom really wanted to drop the subject. Now the kid wanted to talk.

“Not last year, no. I took some time off.”

“But before that?”

“Yeah.”

He didn't know why he was dragging it out. It was probably only a matter of luck and stubborn refusal to accept even the idea of him that had kept Reese from doing at least an idle Internet search on him. And Tom's father's arrest by the Feds made up results one through infinity when you dropped Worthington into a search engine.

That's what happened when you were the subject of the largest price-fixing takedown in the history of white-collar-crime, undercover FBI stings. Your name was on the front page of every newspaper in the country for months, especially after you tried to kill yourself while on house arrest and your kid, home from college at the school's request after reporters swarmed his every move on campus, had to call 911 when he found you unconscious with an empty bottle of pills and a mostly empty glass of Scotch on the bedside table.

It was the kind of story that made reporters drool.

This wasn't a secret that could be kept under wraps for very long.

And making himself sound mysterious, as if he had a secret backstory that no one knew, was only going to speed up the process of destroying what little privacy he'd managed to enjoy in the last week on campus with a roommate who didn't know him, keeping his head down and flying under the radar everywhere he went.

He'd known it wouldn't last, but he'd hoped to go a little longer with Reese at least treating him like a regular douchebag and not a semi-celebrity douchebag with a criminal father.

“So what's the deal? Why don't they want you in the dorms?”

“Listen, kid.” He grimaced. “Sorry. Just drop it, okay?”

“Why?”

“Seriously? Because I don't want to fucking talk about it, okay?” But he could already see where this was going. He only wondered if Reese would wait until he left the room to do it.

His roommate stared at him speculatively for a moment, tapping his bottom lip with one index finger before shrugging and grabbing his phone off the desk.

Nope. Guess not.

Reese looked up after a second.

“What's your last name again?”

It figured. The kid didn't even know his last name. Shit. Who knew how long he could have flown under the radar here, with this guy having no idea who his last-minute roommate was. Tom flashed back to the rugby chant a Pakistani dishwasher had taught him in the month last year he'd spent working under the table in the kitchen at a local chop house, knowing if he used his social security number for a legit job, some reporter would track him down faster than he could say breaking news.

“Shit-damn, fuck-a-damn, fuck-a-damn-damn,

Some motherfucker just fucked my man,

I'll fuck another fucker better than the other fucker,

Shit-damn, fuck-a-damn, fuck-a-damn-damn!”

Strange, the crap that got stuck in your head and insisted on popping up at the oddest moments. But as he sat there, staring at Reese, this kid with the soft mouth and the tired eyes who'd perked up for all of two minutes at the idea of figuring out what he probably thought was a fun bit of gossip, Tom couldn't think of anything else but that foul-mouthed rhyme, sung in a British accent. Tell the kid or not? If he didn't, it wouldn't get him more than ten hours of grace, since all Reese had to do was dial up Res Life in the a.m. and ask “Who the hell is this guy in my room again?”

For a minute, those ten hours seemed as if they might be worth it. The last little bit of peace he could hold on to. One more night. Who knew what would happen then. Worst case scenario had the kid taking naked pictures of him and selling them to some gossip mag. He could see the made-up headlines now.
Price-Fixing Jailbird's Son Does Porn.
He remembered the days, and then weeks, months, of having flashes blow up in his face every time he tried to set foot out the door of their Beacon Hill home. Of trying to sneak out in the middle of the night, only to realize that the paparazzi never left. That there was always someone watching them, watching him. He started referring to the pack of them as the Evil Nemesis. He remembered the first time he'd tried to argue with a reporter who shouted out lies about his father as Tom pushed his way through the crowd blocking the gate to their front walk, wanting to get inside and hide.

“Did you know your father was embezzling money too, Tom?”

He'd been told later that it was a trick question, designed to draw him out. The PR company that had been working on his father's press, until the corporate board decided that working to repair the image of a man who was absolutely, positively going to jail was a waste of money, sent an agent around to coach him after that disaster.

Losing his cool sure had made for good television. Tom had watched himself on television that night and even
he
didn't believe himself. All of his sputtering furious protests about his father's innocence looked like a fucking cover-up. With their enormous red brick Georgian townhouse visible behind the eight-foot-high wrought iron fence that surrounded their property, he looked like a spoiled little rich kid who was throwing a temper tantrum because someone wanted to take his toys away.

A pretty accurate picture at the time.

The PR guy had shown him how anything he said could be twisted around to mean the opposite by the time reporters were done with it. The guy had advised him to keep his fucking mouth shut and tattoo the words
No Comment
across his forehead.

“Also, don't fuck any under eighteens and please God, don't let someone take a picture with their fucking cell phone of you with your lips wrapped around a bong. Or some guy's dick, all right?”

He'd thought that was a funny one right there, hadn't he? Had elbowed Tom and rolled his eyes. A little dick-sucking joke between two straight dudes, right, buddy? Ha, ha. Tom had never been sure if there'd been a kernel of true warning in the kidding around, though. Something about that guy screamed that he'd seen it all and wouldn't be surprised to see it again.

Reese was waiting across the room, perched on the edge of the desk like a dark little bird with claws, thumbs ready to go on his phone. If he was tempted to smile because he knew he had Tom, in the end, even if not right this moment, he kept it to himself. But his eyes and the press of his lips together said he wasn't going anywhere until Tom coughed up his name. If he'd said anything, one word, made one crack about cyberstalking or celebrity disguises, Tom would have told him to fuck off and gone to bed. But the kid just sat there and waited.

Like he wasn't going anywhere, ever. Which should have felt stalkerish and creepy but instead felt…inevitable.

Tom looked Reese in the eye, letting him see that this was the last thing he wanted. The kid would learn why in about point eight seconds.

“Worthington. Need me to spell it?”

He waited for the light to spark in Reese's eyes, the way it always did when someone found out who he was. Everyone wanted something, even if it was just to gossip about how awful he must feel and how terrible it must be for his family to lose everything. But even those pain vultures, who got off on asking “Aren't you too embarrassed to show your face anywhere? You must be so miserable,” didn't really believe it. Everyone assumed there were hidden assets. Extended family to fall back on. Foreign bank accounts. What the fuck ever. And he'd let them go on believing it, shrugging off all concern, real or fake, because after a while he couldn't tell the difference. He nodded or shook his head and stopped saying anything at all because he never knew what someone would turn his words into. And now he waited for Reese.