Off Campus (7 page)

“It's not my furniture. But I have a paper towel if you want to stop dripping on yourself. Looks like you've, um, had an accident.”

“Damn.” He looked down at his shorts. Sure enough. “Nah. Forget it. It's barely cooler than room temperature anyway. It's not gonna drip long. That faucet in the kitchen sucks. I let it run for five minutes and the water never got cold.”

Reese nodded. The kitchenette was a sore spot for everyone, barely functional and generally considered a waste of space. He kicked off his shoes and nudged them into his closet, his back to Tom.

“You could keep them in the fridge. Your water bottles. If you want.”

Tom blinked. That sounded almost…friendly.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That'd be great, thanks.”

Reese grabbed an elastic off his dresser. He pulled most of his hair back into a ponytail, kinda high and off his neck, but left the chunk in front hanging over his face like always. He didn't look at Tom when he spoke.

“I hardly have anything in there, so, you know, feel free. If you want to keep a cold beer around or something.”

Ahh. Tom saw where this was heading. He'd better cut this one off at the pass.

“Is that your subtle way of asking me to buy you beer?”

His roommate's shoulders twitched.

“No.”

Reese's one word answer was flat and not followed up by any kind of leading statements about how he wasn't
asking
, but if Tom wanted to
offer
…

“I'd rather not to do anything that could…” he paused, “…attract attention. And getting my twenty-year-old roommate bombed on cheap beer is…well, someone's gonna notice when I'm holding your hair back over the toilet while you puke.”

“I don't drink.”

“Okay.”

Tom didn't mind being agreeable. His experience with college students who didn't drink was that they started puking their guts out even faster than most kids.

“Would you?”

“What? Hold your hair back while you puke?”

“Yeah.”

Tom shrugged. “Sure. I've done it for enough girls. Why not?”

“You know I'm not a girl, right?”

His mind flashed to the image of Reese bent over another guy on his bed, hand buried between the guy's butt cheeks, lips wrapped tight around a dick, a whole other level of blowjob than anything Tom had ever experienced with a girl. His heart picked up the pace and his dick woke up.

“Yeah.” The word was a gruff bark. “I got that.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, ready to swing his feet up and lie down, hoping the book he'd hold over his lap would conceal his semi until it went away. The idea of having a cold beer in the mini fridge was stuck in his brain like a splinter, though. That would be pretty frigging awesome.

“Is it gonna bother you if I have beer in the room? Because I might take you up on that fridge thing.”

“I wouldn't have offered if it was going to bother me.”

“Okay then.”

He settled in for some serious reading. Somehow he had to turn this into a twenty-page paper on corporate social responsibility. Reese's voice broke the silence.

“I'm not an alcoholic. It doesn't bother me to be around it.”

“I didn't think you were.”

“I just don't drink. Anymore. Ever.”

Which was almost begging for him to follow up with a question. Tom sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. This was one of those moments. A chance for him to ask Reese a gently probing question or two, show some compassion, help them reach a new level in their roomie relationship. Didn't take John Keynes to figure that market trend out. And after the lines they'd crossed already, he owed it to Reese. Owed it to him to pick up on the conversational clues and let the kid talk about whatever it was that had drawn this Grand Canyon of a line in the sand about drinking. He didn't doubt it was tied to the other awful things he'd already guessed about jocks and roommates and why the school would have offered a junior a housing option reserved for a handful of more mature students.

He got it. He really did. And part of him wanted to do it. Wanted to know one person. Let that person know him. Have someone who might give a damn if he wanted to let a little air out of this high-pressure balloon of stress and money and figuring shit out that was constantly threatening to explode with eardrum-shattering force over his head.

Part of him wanted that.

But most of him remembered the time he'd called up a friend from high school to confess how he hadn't been outside in weeks, living like an agoraphobe on canned goods someone had stocked in his dad's pantry and pizza deliveries until the credit cards started getting shut down. He'd wanted some company, someone who would push past the news crews still camped outside their gates and come spend some time with him.

The friend hadn't showed, but a
Boston Globe
gossip columnist got a great scoop about the eccentric rich shut-in kid who was scared to go outside. Tom had pictured his friend texting the article link to everyone they knew and had retreated to his room at the back of the house for another week of canned soup and dry cereal.

So, no. He'd go ahead and pass on the chance to get buddy-buddy with the roomie. Maybe if he hadn't passed the Evil Nemesis from Res Life in the campus post office that afternoon and caught his casually tossed off, “Still here, Worthy?”. A nickname that was like calling an All-American center linebacker Tiny. He got it. He wasn't worth shit, per pretty much everyone. It didn't matter that he'd gotten as fucked as everyone else by his dad's corruption. Having the same name, the same blood, was enough to taint him.

So, no, thank you. In the grand scheme of things, he didn't feel like making any new friends just to have them fuck him over later.

“Don't worry about it, kid. It's cool.”

He rolled over and kept reading and Reese didn't bring it up again. The twinge of guilt that pinged at him made Tom twitch with irritation, at himself, at Reese, at the whole fucking world for being one giant pain in his ass. All he wanted was to keep things simple. First Cash showing up—and that guy kept calling him, determined to drag him out of his room sooner or later—and now Reese acting sort of human and decent. All of that shit was complicated.

Simple. Keep it simple, stupid.

Which worked, sort of. Right up until Reese popped into their room one day with his BFF in tow.

Now that he and Reese had achieved a peace in the Middle East détente, Tom had started spending more time studying in their room instead of the library. He told himself it was because the bathrooms were closer and no one glared at him when he snacked on the dry and crunchy Nature's Valley granola bars, but he knew he was retreating into hermit levels of shut-in. Cash was threatening to show up with the entire track team if Tom didn't get it together—he'd refused to show up to practice, since it would only show how far he'd fallen—and Tom was avoiding the entire campus. On general principle.

So when Reese popped in with a blue-haired biker chick who talked like a psych major, Tom felt pretty fucking justified in his resentment as the two of them swept through the door, voices raised in a high-pitched battle over
something
life-altering.

“I can't believe you threw blueberry soda on me. I can't believe you were drinking blueberry soda.” Violet smears, like finger paints, trailed down from the purple starburst on Reese's white tee-covered chest.

“It was shakabuku.”

“It was fucking cold, is what it was.”

“It was a spiritual kick to the head.” She grabbed Reese from behind and snuffled loudly into his neck before he threw her off and pushed her into the room. Tom was watching them, head still bent over his book, eyes flicking up every couple of seconds. Reese hadn't tensed up the way he did when anyone else got near him. But Tom felt the muscles in his arms tense up. “You need someone to get you out of this self-destructive cycle you're spiraling through.”

“Ah, yes. Psych via soda. You should put that in your thesis.”

She hopped up on Reese's desk, tucking long, faintly blue hair behind her ears. Loose, faded jeans hung low on her hips, held there by a thick, studded black belt. She wore a tight black racerback tank top that showed off surprisingly broad shoulders for such a small person and what Tom still appreciated as a stellar rack. She crossed one leg over the other, leaning back on her palms and bouncing one boot-clad foot with pent-up energy.

Without blinking, she stared right at him, talking to Reese but never taking her eyes off Tom for a second.

“My thesis is gonna be on why some people keep letting others walk all over them and put them in compromising positions, because they're chickenshits and want to avoid confrontation.”

Yeah, that was a definite glare blazing in his direction.

No way did this girl qualify as simple. Whirlwind, maybe. Force of nature, sure.

Simple?

Not a chance.

Maybe she'd leave before Reese remembered to introduce them.

“Don't be a bitch, Steph.” Reese leaned into the room, hanging on to the edge of his closet with one hand. “Tom, Steph. Steph, Tom. Be nice.”

“I'm always nice.”

“Ha!”

Steph's smile showed a whole lot of teeth.

“I can't believe you let me drink those three Red-Eyes. What were you thinking?” Reese called out with his head stuck in his closet.

Steph slid off the desk and flopped down on Reese's bed, snagging a book from his desk and paging through it, ignoring Tom. “I was thinking you told me, mind your own business, bitch, because you don't need a mother.”

“Yeah, well now I gotta pee like a racehorse.” Reese pulled a skinny, long-sleeve black T-shirt out of his closet and stripped off his stained white shirt, tossing it in his laundry basket before putting the clean shirt on. Steph kept her head down but Tom saw her eyes skitter back and forth between Reese and him, as if startled to see Reese change his shirt in front of him.

“So go.”

Reese stopped in front of his mirror and ran his fingers through his hair, settling it back in place after the quick change. Without turning from the mirror, he pointed behind him, directly at Steph.

“Behave. He's not like…” he waved the hand in a vague circle, “…He Who Shall Not Be Named.”

Steph flipped him off, pretending to read the book in her lap.

“Go pee, drama boy.”

Reese left, stopping at the door to shoot one last glare at Steph, who acted as if she hadn't seen anything at all. He left the door open behind him, reluctant maybe to confine the two of them in one small enclosed space.

As soon as Reese was out of sight, Steph looked up at Tom.

“That's weird, you know. That he's trying to protect
you
.”

Tom shrugged. He didn't know what was weird with Reese or not.

She clapped the cover of the book shut with a bang. Sat up straight.

“Okay, I'll be fast. You do anything to hurt him and I'll fuck you up. I can organize a protest rally faster than you can say Take Back the Night.”

“Okay.” He tried not to smile, certain it wouldn't do anything except piss her off.

“Okay?” She was out-and-out frowning at him now, looking as if she'd like nothing better than to beat the shit out of him, if only he'd give her an excuse.

Tom was just smart enough to avoid that.

“He's right. You
are
weird. Different.”

Tom shrugged again. It was his default response these days when he didn't know what to say next. He didn't think her hard-ass pose was much more than that, a pose put on by a girl who was scared to death he'd further wound her damaged friend.

Steph softened in the face of his lack of protest, her shoulders turning in and her back curving forward. “It's just, he was fucked up pretty badly, you know.”

“Still looks pretty fucked up to me most of the time.” He hadn't meant to say anything, but it suddenly seemed important this girl know that if Reese was convincing her everything was okay, then he was putting on a total fucking song-and-dance routine with no basis in reality.

But she was nodding. “I know, but this is total sanity compared to—listen, you know what happened, right?”

“No.”

“His—”

He cut her off. “Wait. Are you sure he'd want you to tell me what you're about to tell me?” There was nothing,
nothing
, he hated more than the idea of gossip going on behind someone's back. This girl meant well, but if Reese wanted him to know something—

“No, he would not,” snapped out the man himself as he re-entered the room. “Damn it, Steph. I told you to leave him alone.”

She stuck her tongue out at Reese and got off the bed to hang on him like a monkey, arms looped around his neck while she smacked kisses on his cheek. In between smooches, she turned back to Tom.

“Fine. So, you're over twenty-one, right? I'll give you twenty bucks to get me a six-pack of Rolling Rock from across the street.”

The liquor store down the block still carded Tom every time he went in, which was admittedly not that frequently. He could imagine the tiny pixie of a girl with the blue hair and blue nails got the extra-special ID examination each time.

Reese snaked out from under her arms and gave her a push toward the door. “Leave him alone. Jesus. He's not gonna buy you beer.”

Steph peered around him, hands on Reese's hips as he walked her backwards toward the door, pushing against each step.

“I'm not an alcoholic, you know. But four hundred pages of Proust on a Thursday night instead of the Living Dead concert? Deserves a beer.”

“Let's go. I'll come study with you. I'm better than beer.”

“Okay. You can crash on my couch again if you want. But don't text anyone to come over. And no fucking!”