Off Campus (12 page)

“Relax. Keep your eyes closed and tell yourself it's a girl.”

Tom almost spoke, because he didn't
want
to imagine some random chick stroking him. The only person inside his head was Reese and he knew that was important. But somehow the weight of all of these minutes of silence on his part was too heavy on his mouth for him to open it now and say anything. He let his body sink deeper into the slick smooth sensation of Reese's hand on him, sliding, still sliding, his hand sliding over the tip of Tom's dick to cup it in his palm and twist every few strokes. Tom rocked his hips in rhythm with Reese's hand and let the sounds pour out of him now, groans and shaky breaths and short, sharp grunts as Reese sped his hand up.

When he took his hand away, Tom almost cried, although not for feeling sad this time. The snick of a plastic cap opening and closing was followed by Reese's hand back on him, newly slick, and the smell of strawberries floated up to him.

“This may seem like overkill, but trust me. The sloppier we make it, the better.”

That'
s what he'd smelled before? Flavored lube? He almost laughed, snorting a little instead before groaning out something that almost sounded like an
Oh God
as Reese slicked the lube all over him, not trying to stroke him as much as spread it all around, which had the same effect.

“Not that I doubt that you're yummy all by yourself, but I know from experience that my massage oil is not. And those edible oils? Not unless you want to smell like fruit salad for days. They do
not
come off.”

The room was suddenly hotter than hell, the fan not helping cool him down now that sweat was pouring off him as all of his muscles tensed with the pounding urgency of his need to come, to come soon. He didn't know how to ask for what he wanted first, though, so he dug in and tried to hang on, hoping it would happen without him having to say it out loud.

In the end, of course, because Reese somehow knew him better than anyone these days, he didn't have to say or ask for anything at all.

A hot wet mouth closed over him and sucked him down with shocking ease until Tom could feel the press of his dick against the back of Reese's throat, where the younger man swallowed against the tip, taking him in farther until Tom was chanting,
fuck, fuck, fuck
, under his breath and praying he didn't stop.

Reese didn't.

He wasn't going to last more than a minute or two and Tom wanted to feel everything, Reese's hand at the base of his dick, holding him steady as he sucked and bobbed, pulling hard on Tom's cock until the tingling pressure built to the breaking point, his other hand braced hard against Tom's hip, holding him flat to the bed as Tom dug in with his heels and tried not to push into Reese's mouth. Reese's hair drifted against the skin of his stomach with every plunge down, a faint tickling that brushed a relentless counterpoint to the heat that built like a ball of fire in his belly before shooting up his spine and arching his back as Reese pulled his mouth away as he came, came, came all over his own stomach, shouting into the dark.

His chest heaved with deep, dragging breaths. Tom unkinked his fingers from where they'd locked around the bar above his head and dropped his hand on his chest. Reese was gone. He hadn't even felt him let go and walk away. Couldn't move to look for him. Knew he needed to. His numb hand dripped cold water on his belly. He didn't even remember pulling it out of the bucket.

Light spilled into their room from the hallway for a moment as Reese came back in the room.

Without saying a word, he poured more ice into the now only cool bucket and moved Tom's hand back down to the water with a loose grasp on his wrist. Then he wiped a warmly damp towel against Tom's belly, moving his soft dick out of the way and cleaning him, still taking care of him. Dipped another corner of the towel in the bucket and used it to wipe the sweat off Tom's face, a cold clean feeling.

His arm had started to throb again, but Tom felt sleep sucking him down into the dark and didn't care enough about the pain to let it keep him awake. All he needed was to keep his eyes closed and slide a little deeper under the exhaustion he'd held at bay all day.

A hand brushed the top of his head. One last swipe of the cool damp cloth over his forehead and cheeks, and the barely there press of soft lips against his own. Reese.

Reese had him.

He could let go for a while.

When he woke, in a room shining bright with sun pouring in the uncurtained windows, Reese was gone. Before Tom left for class, he'd already decided that a major conversation was in order and that a break from the weekly parade of blowjob boys was going to be a roommate requirement. It wouldn't keep Reese from blowing some guy in the bathroom, but maybe it would slow him down.

Either way, as soon as he saw his roommate, he was sitting him down for a conversation that was already making his stomach roil, just thinking about it.

It was a good plan. Only one small problem with the execution.

Reese didn't come back for five days.

Chapter Nine

Every Friday since he'd arrived back on campus, Tom had hit the road early in the morning, heading in to Boston to drive a legitimate cab during the day and gypsy cab it for the couple of bars where he knew the bouncers. They referred him to bar patrons, usually girls or groups of girls who were hammered and needed to get home safely when the wait time on a regular taxi was over an hour.

He split on Friday mornings and came back on Sunday nights and, although he'd never discussed it with Reese, he knew his roommate had fallen into the rhythm of his weekends away. Tom came home on Sundays to find that the sheets on both beds had been washed and replaced, the various little messes, dirty coffee mugs or leftover dessert plates, that accumulated during the course of the week were straightened up or disposed of. Clearly some kind major cleaning routine was executed during the seventy-two hours he was gone. He kept meaning to say something about helping out, and he did try to keep his side of the room as neat as possible, a pretty pathetic gesture, he knew, but it was a habit they'd fallen into.

So when Tom left the room early Friday morning, he caught himself looking over his shoulder as he walked away from Perkins House. Wondering if he'd catch a glimpse of Reese heading back into the house now that Tom was gone, ending his self-imposed exile from their room now that the guy who'd taken advantage of him was
finally
going away for a few days.

Six hours into his twelve-hour shift driving business people from the Prudential to Logan and back again, Tom gave it up for a lost cause. He couldn't stop thinking about Reese, about who Reese might be bringing back to their room now that Tom wasn't there. When he got stuck for the third time in a traffic jam around Faneuil Hall because he kept forgetting about the construction on Congress Street, he called in to dispatch and told them he had an emergency and was bringing the cab back.

An emergency.

It sure as shit
felt
like an emergency and he couldn't. Stop. Thinking. About. It.

It? Him.

Reese.

Tom didn't know exactly what he wanted, but he knew it was back in Western Mass, in a quiet room behind a door that was always closed, and he wouldn't find it unless he went back home and asked for it.

He held his breath when he unlocked the door to their room, hearing nothing but knowing that didn't mean a thing. For the first time in a couple of weeks, he felt like an intruder, as if he should call out before he entered, “Hello? Anyone home?”

In the end, Reese wasn't there. But the room had a different kind of emptiness than the times when Reese didn't come home at all. There was a pair of dark wash jeans draped over the back of Reese's desk chair that hadn't been there in the morning and, yes, he was now apparently memorizing the placement of every single item on Reese's half of the room to see if it had been touched. God, he was pathetic.

The temptation to head out again, to stroll the campus casually, wondering if he could manage to bump into Reese somewhere, was strong. Except for that part where Tom had avoided going anywhere except to or from class and so had no idea any more where the cool places to hang out were located. Coffee shops that didn't serve sludge came and went like the Red Sox on a winning streak. You knew they wouldn't last. Even if he could remember where Reese's friend had said she'd meet him, there was no guarantee they were still going there to study.

After a couple minutes of indecisive back and forthing, he cursed himself for a dumbass and sat on his bed with his econ textbook and tried to get some work done, startling every time he heard loud voices or footsteps near their door.

The sound of a key in the lock had his breath catching in his throat.

Reese's rubber-soled Chuck Taylors stuttered on the floor and his eyes flew open wide as he spotted Tom sitting on his bed. He kept his eyes locked on Tom's as he felt for his desk chair, finally getting a hand on it and slinging his backpack over the back.

“Hi. You're here.”

“Yeah.” Tom nodded. He wasn't sure what to say next. Jumping into the “hey, remember that night when you sucked my dick” conversation required a little more strategic thought than he'd put into it, clearly.

Reese didn't even give him a chance to open his mouth.

“Well, see ya. They're having a party in the living room. Told them I'd come hang out.”

What the fuck. The one thing neither of them did, ever, was fucking socialize with their neighbors. He didn't think it was the same for Reese as it was for himself, a desperate desire to avoid speaking with anyone who might have read one of the twenty-seven million articles about his dad or might want to make a quick buck selling cell phone photos of the convict's kid in a towel post-shower, but whatever the reason, Reese did
not
“come hang out” with anyone. Ever. Except maybe Steph. And even then Tom sometimes thought Reese was spending time with Steph to avoid being around Tom.

The door closed lightly behind his roommate as he left.

Well, shit.

Fine. He would study. Quillian's seminar could suck up as many hours of reading as he could afford to throw at it. He was already aware that his arguments in class, much less in his papers, were pretty fucking thin compared to the other students' because he wasn't getting around to most of the suggested supplementary reading. He wasn't going to fail, but at this rate he wouldn't have much of a shot at an A either.

The faint throb of music seeped in from the hallway, or maybe up through the floor. Shit. He punched up the pillow behind his head and propped the book on his belly. He'd never stuck around on the weekend, so he'd assumed Perkins was as grave quiet on Friday and Saturday nights as it was during the week, full of older students who were intent on studying for the degrees that they, and not Mommy and Daddy, were paying for. But it looked like the twenty-five to forty crowd chose to rock it out on a Friday as much as the kids did.

How the hell was he supposed to get any work done?

Between the music and the occasional shouts of his neighbors, dragging the few remaining holdouts away from their books and downstairs to the party, his concentration was for shit for the whole half hour he tried to focus on the nature of data use in business. Lying on his back pressed his chin into his chest and was awkward. Lying on his stomach made his neck hurt. Sitting up with his back against the wall made the bumps of his spine ache.

This sucked.

And the music vibrated through the walls, loud enough to hear the bass beat and get a hint of the song, but not enough to figure it out. He kept catching himself humming some made-up bullshit tune and sort of singing along, without ever knowing what the actual song was.

The last noise from the hall had been a door slamming and a shouted “Fuck off, I'm coming!” ten minutes ago. Why the emptiness of a hallway of vacant dorm rooms felt any different than all the nights he shut himself in the room and ignored the world outside their door, he didn't know.

But for the first time in a long time, Tom was restless. Antsy. Wondering if he was missing out on something…fun.

In the past year, his definition of fun had changed severely to something along the lines of
no one talks to me or follows me with a camera or asks me questions about any-fucking-thing.
Which was a pretty pathetic definition of the word.

But all of the things that he used to consider fun, the parties, the crazy stunts, the drinking and fucking and even the running—the running, which used to be the most fun, the purest joy he knew—all of it was tarnished by the whispers and the constant knowledge that as soon as he left the room, the conversation would get sucked into a vortex of gossip about Tom and his dad and prison and, most fascinating of all, no matter how well-off they themselves were,
where do you think he hid all the money?

And Tom wanted to shout, wanted to throw open a window and stick his whole body out over the street and scream at the top of his lungs, “Nowhere! No-where! He didn't hide any money anywhere, because that's what you do if you're afraid you're going to get caught or if you're worried about what might happen to your
kid
if you're not around anymore. But if you're a fucking criminal with an ego the size of Texas, then you don't do any of those things, because
what could possibly go wrong, son?
”

Tom's legs were sore. He looked down and cursed, unlocking his hands from where they gripped his thighs until his fingertips turned white. He shook out his wrists and rolled his head in circles to the left and then the right. All of the muscles in his body had frozen up while he daydreamed about raging at his father, at the school, at the world in general that had left him behind to figure it all out for himself.

Even thinking such self-pitying crap in the privacy of his own head was embarrassing. Jesus, he was a whiny little bitch. He'd figured it out, hadn't he? At least enough to get himself back here for a semester, and with any luck whatsoever, for another full year and a hallelujah fucking graduation, after which he would be out of here so fast they'd be lucky to catch the blur of his ass speeding away.

Tom Worthington says goodbye to Carlisle College, the place that offered help for all of the wrong reasons.

Which was a lesson he'd learned easily enough in those first few months.

Don't ask for help. Because help only came at someone else's expense.

Suck it up and figure out a way. He laughed sometimes, remembering his one sociology class and thinking that this was a pretty effective transition into adulthood rite of passage. But you probably couldn't arrange for most kids to have their parents go to prison just in time to leave them stranded with their senior year of college tuition tab still owing and no financial aid because their dad's last official W-2 showed an annual income of seven million dollars.

Not that it wasn't a jumpstart into being a grown up and figuring your own shit out. Slightly impractical maybe, for the prison system alone, if not the parents themselves.

Declaring himself financially independent was harder than it sounded, but not impossible. And he knew that exceptions could be made. When he'd finally worked up the nerve to consider returning to Carlisle—when it had sunk in at last that there would be no last-minute rescue from his dad, just the long, slow dismantling of Tom's life via bank foreclosure and the sale of everything Tom thought of as his stuff, but was now
estate assets
—his first call had been to the financial aid office.

The humiliation of explaining his situation to the financial aid officer had burned so hot his T-shirt stuck to his back with sweat and his hand slipped on the phone as he held it while speaking. The woman had recognized his name immediately and interrupted him halfway through his tangled explanation.

“Tom, Tom, this is going to be
easy
. I can help you.”

Relief swept over him so quickly that he blinked, light-headed and shaky.

She went on to explain that dependency overrides were allowed only in the most extreme of cases, but that “
fortunately for you, Tom,
” parental imprisonment was one of the circumstances.

Because his dad was in prison, he could get help.

“Can't I get help because…there isn't any money?”

He could have accepted financial aid for himself. Hell, he
wanted
it, desperately. But he wanted it for himself. He wanted help because—as much as he hated to admit it—he, Tom, had asked for it.

Apparently that was the “harder than it sounded” part. Rules were rules and there were processes and forms and documentation required. And in the end, he would probably be rejected if he attempted to declare himself financially independent on the FAFSA because he'd still been claimed on his father's taxes, even if that filing was probably fraudulent too. The untangling of that web would take years.

The buzz of the woman's voice in his ear faded to a dull drone as she reiterated the parental imprisonment exception. She sounded genuinely excited to be able to help him, and more than a little bit confused by his questions about what
regular
students needing to declare financial independence in order to be eligible for aid would do.

“Fortunately for you, Tom…”

Because his dad was in one, Tom could get a
Get Out Of Jail Free
card.

He still got dizzy when he thought about it. How close help had been. All he had to do was use his dad, what his dad had done to all of those people whose lives were in ruins, to get one last advantage for himself.

Other kids whose parents had blown their college funds on gambling addictions or blow, or who threatened to yank their tuition checks because they didn't like who their kid was dating or what major they wanted to declare… Those kids were out of luck. They wouldn't get any help.

But Tom, who had never lacked for anything before the past year. Whose father had done so much damage it could never be repaired. Tom could get help, could jump to the front of the financial aid line, as if the terrible things his father had done made Tom most deserving of all.

He couldn't.

It was stupid, he knew it. Could hear his dad's voice in his head, scorning Tom for not being smart enough to take advantage of the system.

Oddly enough, that helped.

If he'd learned anything in the past year and a half, it was that pretty much every word that came out of his dad's mouth had been bullshit.

When the papers had come in the mail, the forms that he needed to fill out and the lists of documentation for his dad's prison sentence (
“Buy a fucking newspaper,”
he'd wanted to scrawl on that one), he'd thrown them in the trash, registered for class in the fall, and had gone to work.

He couldn't explain it clearly, but he knew, he was absolutely certain that the only way he could set foot out of his home, the one he was about to lose, was if he made
not taking advantage
his guiding principle. He was his father's namesake and he'd carry that shame forever. But he could make his own decision to be nothing like that man.