The Roommate Situation (17 page)

Back at the room later, with no sheets on my bed still, I open my computer and pull up craigslist. Expensive guitar, expensive guitar, telephone that looks like a guitar…

Oh shit.

1954 Harmony archtop. I pull up the listing. Repaired crack in the body, no pick guard, good action, good sound. Sweet photos, and only ninety-five dollars. With the stuff Derek’s sold and the cash my dad gave me, I’m up to ninety. I can probably get an advance on five from Derek; if not, I can buy food with my swipe card and resell it. I’ll get that five bucks somehow. I grab the phone and call the number, my heart racing as it rings.

Voice mail picks up. In a rush, I say that I want that guitar; I’ve got the money; call me.

My heart’s still racing as I end the call and sit back in my desk chair. My fingertips tingle. A 1954 Harmony archtop. I look at the photos again, imagining it in my hands. Imagining the stuff I’m gonna play on it. It’ll need a pickup if I’m going to play in a band. I price those.

I’m going to be doing photo shoots with Derek for the rest of my life.

Not that I have a major problem with that. Christmas money will help too, and maybe Dad’ll slip me some cash at the end of Thanksgiving break.

Shit yeah. This’ll be doable, and in the meantime, until I can get the pickup, I’ll at least be able to play the goddamned guitar, which is a huge step forward from where I am now.

Jesus. This is perfect.

Until the phone call comes: “Sorry, bro. I meant to pull the ad after it sold. You don’t need any pedals, do you? I’ve still got an overdrive and vibrato listed.”

“No. No, thanks.” I hang up with a sigh.

There’s always eBay. I poke around until I find a poor consolation prize, if the bidding doesn’t get out of hand, and I put a bid on it before going downstairs to move my laundry over to a dryer. I find it sitting in a wet pile on the counter.

* * * *

As the day grows late, it gets hard to read the small lines of text in my astronomy book. I turn on the lamp. Not a word from Derek all afternoon. I slide my phone toward me and contemplate texting again, but he didn’t answer an hour ago, and he isn’t any more likely to answer now. I mean, if he’s looked at his phone, he’s seen my text. He’d have texted back if he felt like talking. So either he’s still riding, or he just doesn’t feel like answering. Or his phone’s dead.

Or he’s been in an accident. Or he’s gone to see his mom, and they had a big talk, and then they left together, headed west. I can see him on the bike, following behind whatever she’s driving. Not a bike, probably.

Or he pulled a Skip. I scrub my face with my hands. He didn’t pull a Skip. He isn’t anything like Skip. I can’t think of anyone less likely to pull a Skip.

But then, what do I know?

The stupid thought has fingers. All three thoughts have fingers—accident, left, ran himself over the side of a bridge on purpose, like in that movie
Psychomania
, where the bikers all off themselves so they can come back to life—and those fingers are getting a firmer grip on my insides with every minute that passes on the corner of my computer screen.

When the windows are dark, I close the book I’m not absorbing any information from anyway and put on my jacket and shoes. I stand outside in front of Quaid with my fists shoved in my jacket pockets for a while, then sit on the concrete steps for a while longer. Looking up every time someone approaches.

I check my phone again. No messages.

I pull up craigslist. No new guitars, and that goddamned Harmony archtop is still listed, taunting me.

When I finally see him coming up the walk in the distance, his helmet hanging at his side, my muscles twitch to jump, but I hold myself back. I will not get caught waiting on him.

I don’t rise until he’s twenty feet away.

“Hey,” I say, stretching my arms over my head. I nod at the sky. “Nice night, huh?”

He just shakes his head at me. “What are you doing out here?”

“Taking a break from studying to keep from falling asleep. How are you doing?”

He throws an arm over my shoulder as we walk up the steps. “I’ll live.”

“I almost got a guitar.”

“Almost?” He drops his arm to open the door.

I tell him about the call.

“Sorry. There’ll be more. We can tool around Saturday, see if there are any yard sales going on, if you want.”

“That’d be cool. Were you just riding around all this time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Jesus. How far’d you go? Into the next state?”

He laughs. “It’s not that far to a couple of states. I just rode around, up this way, down that way, hanging out on back roads, seeing where they led.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” I haven’t, except for vending machine junk, but it had done its job.

“So show me this guitar you didn’t get.” He drapes his jacket over his chair, gloves jutting out of the pockets.

I kick off my sneakers and my own jacket before bringing the laptop over. We climb onto the bed together—still the only one in the room with sheets on it because mine are in a pile of wrinkled laundry at the foot of my bed—and I pull up the listing, which
still
hasn’t been taken down.

“I almost want to use your phone and pretend to be someone else trying to buy it. See if he just didn’t like my overeager message and decided to not to sell it to me.”

He laughs. “And he took the time to call you back and let you know? I’m pretty sure he’s just lazy. Looks nice, though. Granted, I know shit about guitars.”

I smile at the guitar, at being comfy on the bed beside Derek finally.

“You’ll find another one,” he says.

“Yeah. Hmm. What was that other thing I was going to look up on Google?”

“What other thing?”

“The reason you wanted to make leg cuffs,” I say.

“Oh. That.”

“Well?”

He puts his hands behind his head, smiling.

“Come on.” I poke him in the ribs. “Tell me.”

“Do an image search.”

I pull up Google Images. “Okay, on what?”

“Hogtie.”

“One word or two?”

“Don’t think it matters.”

“Oh shit,” I say as the results appear on the screen, my fingers poised over the keyboard—the laptop almost rising up to meet them. Damn. “Like that?” I point to a photo of a woman suspended a few inches off the floor by wrist and ankle cuffs. My cock throbs at the way her arms are pulled behind her, her feet in the air.

“That might be a little more extreme than we can do in a dorm room,” he says. “I don’t think the drop ceiling would support your weight.”

I glance up. “No, I guess not.” Damn.

“These are more what I was thinking.” He reaches over my lap to scroll down a little. “Except they used rope.”

“A lot of rope in that case. Is that cling wrap?” I’m pointing to the picture beside it.

“These are the kind of straps they sell for doing a hogtie with cuffs.” He’s talking about a picture of four straps attached to a metal ring. Each strap has a bolt snap on the end, like on a dog leash.

“Couldn’t you just unhook them and get free?” I ask, turning my head, my nose practically in his ear as he looks at the screen.

“Yeah. Not everyone needs to play with locks.”

“I might be a needs-to-play-with-locks person, because I’m not sure I see the point otherwise.” I scoot down a little, my head against the locker behind us. The edge of the laptop digs into my crotch, especially with the weight of my wrists on it. I have no inclination to move my wrists away. I scroll down another screenful of images.

“I could make a strap with two D-rings on each end,” he says. He’s not looking at the screen. His hands move when he talks, like he’s showing me a product that actually exists. “One D-ring to lock to each cuff.”

“We should do product testing.” My head feels light, my groin heavy. I click back to the original hogtie results, with the girl hanging over the floor.

“How much are you going to charge me for that?” he asks.

I smile, scrolling past complicated rope hogties that make me kind of wish Derek made rope, and say, “At least one orgasm per test.”

He laughs. “Well, we could start with the straps I already made.”

“They’re, like, a foot long.”

“I could double them over.”

“I’m game.” Very, very game. I flip the laptop closed and climb off the bed to put it away.

“Me too, but first I’ve gotta finish the leg cuffs.”

“Damn,” I say. “What are you waiting for?”

He pulls himself up.

Chapter Seventeen

I go for a walk while he gets to work on the leg cuffs. When I get back, he’s setting rivets. I lean my hip on his chair, play with the hair curling at his collar.

“Hey,” I say after a minute.

“Mmhmm.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Fine, you?”

I turn and lean against his desk. “About your mom, I mean.”

He slips another rivet through the cuffs.

“Come on,” I say. “She just about tried to kidnap you to Seattle.”

“Portland.”

“Whatever.” I watch him put the strap on a small anvil. He puts a long metal tube on top of the rivet and gives a few taps with the hammer.

“Done.” He tosses the cuff at me and pulls another half-finished one toward him. I tug, testing the rivets—watching him with his head bent over the leather. Finally I say, “Was there a part of you that wanted to go with her?”

“Nope. But there was a stupid part of me that was happy she wanted me.”

“That’s not stupid.”

“It is when I know what she wants has fuck all to do with me and everything to do with whatever life she’s imagining for herself today.”

“It’s normal to want your mother to want you,” I say. My mother drives me up a fucking wall, but I have plenty of memories of her stealing me away to the library, the ice-cream shop, the playground, just the two of us.

“Is it normal to wish she’d rot in hell?” he asks before tapping another rivet into place.

“Oh yeah. Definitely.”

He keeps working. I wander over to his bed and flop down, prop my chin on my hands. I’m studying the photo by his bed, of him and his dad and his uncle in front of Johnson on his first day here. “What’s your dad like?”

“Taller than me.”

“No shit. I can see that in the picture. What’d he say when you bought a bike?”

“He used to take me for rides on his.”

“Man. How’d you luck into the coolest family in the world? Well, coolest half of a family, at least.” I sit up to get a closer look at the photo. A couple of inches less height might just have been the only thing he inherited from his mother’s side of the family. The three men in the photo could pass for brothers. “Which is your uncle, and which is your dad?” Which is the gay one, I really want to know. Because I can’t tell. I kind of want to say the one on the left, but maybe that’s just because he looks less dad-like. Not that either of them look exactly dad-like—you know, not compared to my databank of dads: mine, the economist; Jamie’s Dr. Dad…Tay’s dad is VP at some pharmaceutical company.

“Dan’s the one making rabbit ears behind my head.”

I laugh. “I’d missed that.” So the one on the left, then.

“It’s subtle.”

“Does Dan ride too?”

“Nope. Well, not bikes, at least.” He flashes a smile my way as he sets down the hammer.

“What would he think?”

“About us?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“He’d probably say,
Good on ya
.”

“And your dad?”

He tips his toothpick up before biting on it. I don’t know if he’s concentrating on what he’s doing with the cuff or thinking about his dad’s response. When he speaks, finally, he says, “No idea.”

“What’s he think of Dan?”

With the shrug of one shoulder, he says, “If he had anything to get over about it, I guess he got over it a long time ago.”

“My parents would lose their shit.”

“Which would freak them out more,” he asks, “dropping economics or sleeping with a guy?”

“It’s not even a close fucking call.”

“You should go ahead and switch majors, then. When they freak out, you can say say,
‘And oh yeah, also.’
Suddenly majoring in music wouldn’t seem so bad.”

“You think I could major in music?” I ask.

“I think you could major in anything that interested you except foosball and fucking, ’cause I don’t think they offer degrees in those. Well.” He dumps his tools into their wooden box. “That’s that.”

“Are we gonna try it out now?”

He gets up from the desk, stretching, smiling a little, and I’m sure he’s going to say yes, but instead “Nope” comes out of his mouth.

“No?”

“I’m beat, and you have an early class. If you’re not gonna make your bed, at least strip down before you get into mine.” He’s already unbuckled his jeans.

I don’t need the offer made twice.

* * * *

After class, and knowing Derek’s in class himself, I swing by the student lounge to see what’s going on, and find Chuck sprawled on a couch in front of the TV.

“Hey,” I say, pushing a knee out of the way so I can sit down too.

He looks at me for a few long seconds before saying, “I knew someone who looked kind of like you once. We used to hang out.”

“Sorry. I’ve been busy. You want to play some foosball?”

“Fuck it. Who’m I to hold a grudge?”

“So what’ve you been up to?” I ask as we take up handles on opposite sides of the table.

“That,” he says, nodding toward the couch.

“What’s Pete up to?”

“He’s got a lecture. You used to know that.”

“You’re worse than a girl, you know that?” I drop the ball, feeding it straight to my men, then slam it into the goal.

He swears and pulls the ball out. “Speaking of girls, are you spending all your time making moon eyes at one like Pete?” He’s picked up the trick of serving to his own five-man row.

As he rolls the ball between his men, I say, “We saw them at a party the other night.”

“I don’t even know where to start with that. We? A party I wasn’t at?”

“My roommate and I. Pete said you were home for the weekend.” I catch the ball as he tries to pass it to another line.

“How
is
the serial killer?”