The Roommate Situation (33 page)

“At least you’ve got that option after you graduate. Don’t have to stay here.”

“Like she’ll still be in Colorado a year and a half from now.”

I pull my Coke over and gulp three or four swallows down, not wanting to think about the possibility of Derek moving across the country while I’m stuck here. Or if he’d even want me moving across the country if I could.

Dan says, “Maybe you can start suggesting to her places you’d like to go in a year and a half, influence her next migration decision.”

“Here. I’d like to come back here. Do you want her moving here?”

Derek’s dad says, “She can go wherever she wants. No skin off my nose.”

And Dan says, “Jesus, why the hell do you want to move back here?”

Here
is so much closer than Colorado. I’m rooting for here.

“Why don’t you move away, you hate it so much?” Derek asks.

“I like you guys.”

“There you go,” Derek says.

“Shane,” Dan says, “if you could live anywhere, would this dump be at the top of your list?”

The words
If that’s where Derek was, maybe
are too lame to spit out, so I go with, “Can I just deal with one major life decision at a time?”

Derek’s dad laughs.

Derek says, “If all this bullshit from her about wanting to get to know me was actually about her wanting to get to know me, she’d have moved near here. But you know this isn’t about her and me. It’s about whatever her picture of the perfect life is at the moment. I’m just an accessory. And that’s why she ain’t moving here.’”

“That’s how I read it too,” Derek’s dad says.

My phone rings.

Dan says, “Yeah, but you should go visit her one of these breaks, though.”

Looking around, Derek says, “Where’s the singing waitstaff when you could really use them?”

My mother’s cell number is on my screen. I turn the sound off and slip the phone back.

Our food comes, and I take the interruption as an opportunity to change the subject on Derek’s behalf, asking Dan and Dave what they do, even though I already know from Derek. It’s enough of a diversion that they get on to talking about things at work, then things outside of work, through the meal.

The waitress takes our empty plates and comes back with four other servers. They put a plateful of something that looks like an igloo a polar bear’s had diarrhea on in front of Derek and start clapping and chanting their birthday thing. It’s the first time I’ve seen Derek red-faced. He twiddles a spoon with a stiff smile. Most of the diners ignore the ruckus, but a few—kids especially—turn in their seats to gape.

When the waitstaff leaves, Derek pushes the cake toward the middle of the table, and Dan says, “Let’s get out of here, grab a few six-packs, and go someplace Shane’s allowed to have some fun too.”

Which, it turns out, is Derek’s dad’s kitchen table.

“So,” Dan says once everyone has a seat and a bottle of Sam Adams. “Are you gay, Shane?”

Before I can stutter out an answer, Derek says, “He’s conflicted.”

“Yeah? What about you?” Dan wants to know.

Derek gives half a shrug as he puts his bottle to his lips.

“More like confused,” I say finally, meaning me. Derek doesn’t tend to be confused about much.

“Confused, huh? When’d you start liking guys?” Dan asks.

“With Derek.” I lift my beer to my mouth too quickly. Some of it splashes out and dribbles down my chin. I wipe it with the back of my hand, and the beer leaves a bitter aftertaste at the back of my mouth.

“Love at first sight or what?” Dan asks. “Wait—you know what I want to know? Who made the first move?”

“Dan,” Derek’s dad says.

Hot-faced, I cop to it.

Derek dips his head and smiles, his knee bumping mine under the table.

“And how’d you two meet?”

“We’re roommates,” I say.

“Shit.” Dan grins. “I should have gone to college. So you didn’t think about guys before that?”

“Nope.”

“Date girls?”

“A few.” Please don’t ask me if I had sex with any of them.

“He hadn’t had sex with any of them,” Derek says.

“Thanks.” My face grows a shade hotter. I dump more beer down my throat, desperately.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dan says. “It’s just us. We all started somewhere. Dave was a virgin when he slept with Derek’s mom.”

“Thanks,” Derek says. “Let’s just file that under Things I Didn’t Need to Know.”

“So when did you know?” I ask Dan, leaning forward so my stomach presses against the table.

“When didn’t he know?” Dave says.

“Like he knows everything. He wasn’t around the first three years, and he was still running around pissing his shorts for the next two.” Dan turns to him. “What’s the earliest thing you remember, Dave?”

Closing his eyes, Dave leans back, his fingertips resting on the table. “All the adults going out one night, leaving us with Mamaw, and we had milk and those windmill cookies you never liked. You mashed them up and put them in my milk and told me it was how to make cake.”

“I don’t remember that, but I wouldn’t put it past me.” To me, Dan says, “This isn’t my earliest memory by a long shot, but I do remember being five or so and getting backhanded by my uncle Jessup for saying the guy who’d handed me my cone at the ice-cream shop was cute. Mind, I didn’t say it within earshot of the guy. We’d already left the shop, and I tugged on Jessup’s pocket to say, ‘He was cute, wasn’t he?’ He turned me by the shoulder and
whack
. Then he pointed one of his long fingers at me and said,
‘Men ain’t cute. Don’t let me hear you talkin’ that garbage again.’
”

Dave whistles lowly.

“By the time you came around,” Dan says, nodding at Derek, “Jessup wasn’t well enough to whack a fly. But, boy howdy, he could give a whack in his younger days.”

“I just remember him being shaky,” Derek says. “And sitting in that green chair most of the time.”

“He had that chair about as long as I can remember,” Dan says.

“Fear of Jessup didn’t seem to put you off boys,” Derek’s dad says, rocking his chair on its back legs until the seatback props itself against the wall.

My mother would shoo my chair right back down if I tipped it like that.

“I sure didn’t tell him which ones I liked anymore after that,” Dan says. “Asked for a lot of ice cream that summer, though. Unfortunately, they found it more economical to bring it home from the store than take me to the ice-cream shop, so I only got one or two more glimpses of my dreamboat. He wasn’t but fifteen or so. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with me, but I had the biggest crush.”

“You still haven’t answered Shane’s question, though,” Dave says. “When did you know?”

“I don’t know. That ice-cream incident might have been the first cluing-in I had. At one point, sometime around that time, I sat down and tried to think of a couple I knew that wasn’t made up of a man and a woman, and I couldn’t. So I had kind of a panic that it meant I’d never be able to be with the ice-cream guy, and that just seemed like some unfair kind of damned rule.”

“It’s too bad you can’t look him up and fulfill your dreams,” Dave says.

Somehow my bottle’s gotten empty. So’s everyone else’s. Derek gathers the empties and comes back with fresh ones.

“You guys don’t want to hear about all that old stuff,” Dan says.

“No, it’s interesting,” I say. “I don’t have any stories like that. Derek told me he used to want to be just like you.”

“Oh Jesus,” Dave said. “
‘What are you gonna be when you grow up, Der?’ ‘Gay!’
I thought he’d grown out of that.” He lifts an eyebrow at Derek as he shakes a cigarette out of his pack.

“I’m not gay,” Derek says. “I just happen to like Shane.”

With a shrug and a flick of his spent match into the ashtray, Dave says, “Fair enough.”

“See, the boy’s got a little of both of us in him,” Dan says. “He could do worse.”

“I wish it had been like this when I told my mom,” I say.

“She freaked out, huh?”

“That’s putting it fucking mildly. I can’t even remember what exactly she said. She went off about the ‘homosexual agenda’ and indoctrinating…innocents, that’s it. Corrupting them into their deviant lifestyle because they can’t have kids of their own, so they have to recruit other people’s children.”

“Shit,” Derek says, looking at me with his brows together.

“I told her you hadn’t been with a guy before either, and she said,
‘Of course he’d say that, honey. He’s just trying to make you feel comfortable with him.’
”

His eyebrows rise up his forehead as I tell him this. His mouth hangs open.

“Now I’ve gotta ask,” Dan says. “Why the hell did you go and tell her?”

I give a weary, frustrated sigh. “Ever since she met Derek—for, like, five seconds, and this was when even Derek and I hardly knew each other—she hasn’t missed an opportunity to find ways to put him down. To me, I mean. If she was in the same room with Derek, she’d be nice as anything. That’s my mom.”

“If only we could pick ’em ourselves, right?” Dan says, his gaze sliding toward Derek.

“Anyway, I was talking about maybe splitting a house off campus with some other guys next fall, and one of those guys could be Derek, and she just went off on her Derek Disapproval Wagon. He smokes; he looks like a thug; she doesn’t like the way the room was arranged when I moved in—”

Derek’s dad looks bewildered at that last one.

“I just got fed up and threw it in her face,” I finish.

“Not sure that helped Derek’s case any,” Dan says with a smile.

“No, probably not. Anyway. So. That’s why I’m here this week!”

“Did she kick you out?”

“No, I kicked myself out.” Somehow most of my second bottle is gone too. I’m starting to feel pretty good, though. It’s not so bad talking to Derek’s dad and uncle.

“Well,” Dan says, “that’s some backward-ass thinking on her part, though she’s right about the smoking.” He points a finger at Derek and then moves it to Dave, who’s pulling a drag off his cigarette at the moment. Dave lifts and drops a shoulder. Smoke makes twin streams out his nostrils.

“Apparently,” I say, “she got it from her pastor. The gay stuff, I mean.”

“I’d suggest finding a new one of those, but I know that’s about as likely as a pig showing up for dinner in a tailored suit.”

I laugh.

“I’m not gonna make you sit here and listen to what I think about people who think like your mom,” Dan says. “And Lord knows I can go on about it. I’m just gonna sit back and hope that her son seeing another man is enough to start opening her eyes to the fact that we’re goddamned people just like her, and maybe some light will shine into the cracks in her head and show her some sense.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Dave says, tilting the bottom of his bottle toward us before he does.

I smile and drink. I’m feeling loose and relieved and like I’d like to lean a shoulder against Derek while we sit here at the table. I settle for butting my knee into his under the table. His fingers settle on my thigh, caressing. I smile again, sink down in my chair a little more, and tip the last of my beer into my mouth.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“So, Merry late Christmas,” Derek says, holding out a package wrapped in familiar paper.

“Oh shit. Yeah. Let me get your gift.” I dig in my backpack for my flash drive. We swap, with me feeling a bit like a loser because it’s just copied music files, and I’d already even told him what they were. But Derek sticks it into his laptop and starts dragging the files to his music player while I unwrap the gift he gave me.

At first I think it’s a belt—a nice, if plain, black belt—but when I unroll it, it doesn’t have a buckle on either end, just slits. “Oh—oh shit. It’s a guitar strap?”

He looks over his arm, smiling.

The Black Angels start up—the first song on
Phosphene Dream
, which immediately puts me in mind of the time I played that for Derek, though I doubt Derek had been paying attention to the musical selection that night.

“Hey,” I say. “I thought you said this gift was as much for you as it is for me. I was expecting a gag or something.”

“I get to listen to you play, so that’s what’s in it for me. When did you say your birthday was? Because I can arrange a gag.” He smiles as he says it.

I grin. “January. January second. Is that enough time for you to make one?”

“I’mmm pretty sure you said April.”

“Are you going to spank me for lying?”

“If my dad weren’t sitting in the living room watching TV, I’d use that strap to do it.”

“Mmm. When does he leave the house again?”

The Black Angels sing about bad vibrations, and as Derek tumbles me to the bed, I decide this is quickly becoming my favorite album.

* * * *

“It’s been fun this week,” I murmur against his jaw. “If they’d move the school closer, I’d be happy to stay here through the rest of my academic years.”

He nuzzles my neck. “I don’t think anyone’s offering a degree in hanging out at my dad’s house.”

“No, but it’s been a nice way to spend a week.” I roll on top of him, kissing his nose, his lips, his chin. “It’s also been nice having a bathroom right around the corner, instead of halfway down the goddamned hall.”

“That has definitely been nice.”

“We could have a bathroom around the corner if we rented a place next fall. It could be like this the whole week…except we’d be drinking beers with Chuck and Pete instead of your dad and Dan.”

“Or,” he says, “it could just be us.”

I look up.

He shrugs.

“Just us?” I ask.

“If we got an apartment instead of a whole house. Just the two of us, we wouldn’t even need a big one.”

“Seriously?”

Again he shrugs. “It’s just a thought. Being able to go to the bathroom without having to pull on some clothes first, being able to smack your ass whenever I want without having to worry about someone in the next room hearing. Except the neighbors, but, you know.” He rolls me onto my back, his body pressing against mine. “Fuck the neighbors.”

I laugh.

“I’m not much of a cook, though,” he says.

“Me either.”

“I guess we’ll figure it out.” His lips press mine, opening as soon as they touch. I could live on
this
—who needs food?