Off Campus (2 page)

T- Just sleep on these sheets. The bed was already made up. Plus, your sheets are really pathetic. Seriously. -R.

He stripped off his jeans, T-shirt and socks, leaving them on the floor where they fell at his feet. There was a moment of guilt when he slid between the sheets and wondered if he should have grabbed a quick shower first. But between the muttered curse at realizing he'd left the ceiling light on and the switch was all the way over by the door and the second jaw-breaking yawn of the hour, he fell asleep.

He never heard when Reese came in.

At some point, God knew how many hours of catch-up sleep later, but not enough, obscenely bright sunlight was streaming in the uncurtained window as the sounds of another person moving around the room, opening and closing drawers and a door or two, brought him far enough out of his coma to hear the kid getting dressed.

“Hey, kid.” His voice scratched in his throat. He didn't bother trying to open his eyes, blinded even with them shut. “Reese.”

“What?”

“Any chance you can get the blinds, man? I need another couple before I'm human again.”

A huff of breath that sounded as if it wanted to be a laugh but was trying to pull off annoyed. Then the short whistle of cord running through a pully, followed by the bliss of dimming light.

“Thanks, kid.” He shoved his head under one of these fucking softer than a baby's ass pillows he was not thinking about stealing. “I'll go to Res Life first thing, 'kay?”

Something that sounded like “you and me both” made its way through the down fluff wrapped around his head. And then the real darkness fell again.

Hours later, Tom found himself arguing with the woman behind the scarred wood counter in the Residential Life office until she snapped at him.

“It's up to you, Mr. Worthington. If you'd rather wait to see if you can get a single room next semester, we can change your re-enrollment date. But there aren't any open singles in Perkins House, no matter how much you tell me there has to be.”

Tom blew out a breath and ran his hands through his hair.

“It's just…” He tried to figure out what was stopping him from letting this poor woman go back to her work. “This kid, Reese, he seemed pretty sure that there wasn't supposed to be anyone else in his room. And he looks at me like I'm a serial killer or something.” He thought of something. “I don't even know if he slept there last night.”

“I'm sure you'll work it out.” She slapped the folder containing his file shut and threw him a bright smile. “If not, you can always check back in a couple weeks, see if anything's opened up.”

He could take a hint.

Writing off his chances of making any progress here, he headed back to the dorm, still feeling hungover with fatigue and the sensation of having come to a sudden stop after an eternity of hustling at top speed. Everyone around him, the students crossing the quad or checking mail in the campus P.O. or hauling enormous white Target shopping bags into the dorms, seemed to be moving in fast forward while he trudged through some kind of temporal molasses. The disorientation was fierce.

It didn't help when your brain went off on labyrinthine tangents just to figure out how to say,
Damn, I'm still tired.

Since he didn't have anything until a four p.m. appointment with his advisor, another crack at sacking out seemed like a good plan.

It was only when he got back to his room, at least his room for now, and heard the music blaring from behind the closed door did he realize that his room might not be the most restful spot on campus today.

He braced himself and unlocked the door, feeling enough like a guest to give a half-hearted knock, one that certainly couldn't be heard over the techno crap, before he pushed in.

Either his roommate had ears like a bat or he was watching the door for Tom's return, because Reese was planted like an immovable object ready to meet an unstoppable force ten feet inside the room, hands on his hips, wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off black sweats, a yoga mat unrolled flat on the floor behind him.

“Well?”

It wasn't really a question. More of a demand.

Tom shrugged. “They told me no dice.” He slung his backpack on the bed he'd apparently still be sleeping in tonight, talking loudly to be heard over the dance music. Techno with yoga? He blocked the curiosity that spiked in him. None of his business. “You?”

No answer other than the elegant yet impatient wave of one hand that Tom had already figured out meant Reese didn't care for the answer to the previous question and so was skipping it.

A dice shortage all around.

He raised his voice again and stared pointedly at the stereo.

“Listen, I need some more sleep before I meet my advisor at four. Any chance we can take a vacay from the techno for an hour or two?”

Reese swiped a remote control from his bed and pointed it at the receiver.

Blessed silence.

Until the kid went off on him again. Tom eased himself down onto the edge of the bed and did his best to look as if he were paying attention while he unlaced his shoes.

“Listen, what's your name again? Tom?” He nodded and kicked his running shoes off. “You can't stay here.”

“Sorry, kid. But here's all they gave me. Trust me, if I could get out of your hair, I would.”

“Did you even try to convince the Res Life lowlifes that they'd fucked up? Shit.” The kid was pacing, three steps and turn, three steps and turn, across the small open floor space. “Those jerks couldn't find their own assholes with two hands and a flashlight.”

Tom flinched. “Vivid. But there isn't anything they can do about it. There's nowhere for me to go. You can't blame them for not fixing it. We're just stuck.”

Reese's laugh was short and bitter. “Yeah, well, they don't exactly have a brilliant track record with me and roommates.”

Tom could tell there was something there, loaded and heavy behind the sarcastic words and the sharp head shake, but the pillow at his hip was calling to his head like a Siren to Odysseus and Reese didn't look as if he was really up for probing questions anyway.

He shrugged and stood up to slough off his jeans, planning to crash in his boxers and a T-shirt. It'd been a long time since he'd stripped in front of a stranger, at least in a situation that didn't involve enough alcohol to sink a battleship, and he was weirdly aware of Reese watching him.

Not like pervy watching him. More like someone plotting how to do away with him. Speculative. As if he were measuring Tom with his eyes and figuring out where he could hide his body.

He stripped the comforter way back, not wanting to sweat his ass off in the early September heat of a summer that wouldn't quit, and slid under the sheet to lie on his stomach. Kid could keep talking if he wanted. Tom was pretty sure he could sleep through an air raid alarm, much less a cranky twenty-year-old. He punched a pillow up and wedged it under his cheek.

“You can't stay here!” Agitation overload. And still with the pacing.

His eyes were getting tired of tracking the back and forth. Resting them for a moment was clearly the best option.

Just a moment.

“Don't worry. Hardly be here.”

“I don't care if you check in once a quarter, dude. You having a key to this room is not an option.”

“Sorry.” He was really drifting now. “S'okay.”

“No, it's not. I'm
gay,
you idiot.”

He could tell from the dramatic flounce to the words this was supposed to be a big deal, so he made a valiant effort and cracked an eye open.

“I noticed. So?”

Which was enough of an answer as far as Tom was concerned. It wasn't as if he could miss the rainbow flags on the door and the walls, or the black and white photography posters of naked people, all of them male.

Reese's sexuality was not exactly a state secret here.

No surprise to hear that Reese didn't consider that answer satisfactory.

“So? I suck cock and kiss guys and you're telling me you're okay with that?” His disbelief was raging as he took two steps closer to where Tom had perked up a bit at those last sentences, looming over the bed.

“In that order?”

“What?”

“You do it in that order? Suck cock and then kiss? Seems a little backwards.” This conversation was enough to wake him up a little. Opening his eyes, he propped his head on one fist and watched Reese fling himself into the wooden desk chair.

“Seriously? That's where you're taking this conversation?” He grabbed a pen out of cup on the desk and started tapping on the edge of the seat between his widespread legs. “You wanna talk about blowjobs?”

Tom shrugged one shoulder. “Just saying. There's no way you'd get a girl to go for that.”

“Yes, well, guys sometimes have a more pragmatic approach to sex. And can we not talk about vagina please? It ain't my thing.”

“Well, shit. When you call it that, it ain't my thing either,” Tom said and laughed. He dropped his head back down, but kept his eyes open. Reese reached for a strip of gunmetal gray fabric that turned out to be a stretchy headband and pulled it over his head and then pushed it back across his hairline, pulling all his chin-length ebony hair off his face. Tom realized he hadn't actually seen Reese's entire face before. He'd had half of it covered with that sweep of straight, dark hair until now.

He was a good-looking kid. Probably got plenty of cock-first, kissing-second action, Tom thought and kept the grin off his face. But seriously, with that dramatically pale skin and the cheekbones, plus the puffy lips and the skinny but muscled abs he was showing off with the stretched out waistband of those sweats, he could have been a model for one of those clothing companies whose catalogs looked more like high-class porn than sales books.

And now it was definitely time for that nap. That was more brain time devoted to how gay dudes probably wanted to fuck his young roommate than Tom was really comfortable spending.

“I'm out, kid. C'n we take this up tonight?” He rolled over to face the wall for emphasis.

“I do not, under any circumstances, hang out with homophobic jocks and their fuckhead buddies.” The kid was like a terrier with a bone, worrying it to death with tiny teeth.

Tom told himself not to answer. To let the kid wind down. He couldn't keep ranting forever.

“Well, I'm not an athlete anymore.”

It was too bad he couldn't be convinced to take his own advice.

“But you
were
an athlete!” Reese practically pounced on him and said,
Ah ha!
like a cartoon villain. With his face to the wall and his eyes shut, for all Tom knew he actually had made some kind of melodramatic one-finger pointing accusation.

“Jesus, kid, shut up. I was a virgin once too, but everything changes. And I don't have any fuckhead buddies here. Not anymore. So how about we keep it that way and you can ignore me and pretend I'm not here, okay?”

No answer. Praise God. A lot of barefoot stomping, which wasn't really a big deal since that was pretty quiet anyway, and some aggressive drawer opening and closing. If Reese thought that kind of nonverbal protest was going to drive him out then Tom would break it to him gently. Not a chance.

He was almost out cold when he heard their door open and shut as Reese left.

And Tom would have been a lot less relaxed if he'd understood what Reese said as he left.

“See if you can ignore this.”

Chapter Two

Tom forgot all about Reese's last throwaway challenge by the time he got back to their room late that night after a less than encouraging meeting with his advisor and a solid four hours in the library trying to catch up on the pre-reading for his senior seminar on Ethics in Business. Ha. As if he needed it.

The professor was notorious for the blinding white lights of interrogation he shone on the students in his class on the first day. Anyone who made it through without crying or telling him to fuck off got to stay in the class. After that first hideous day, the prof actually morphed into a rigorous but compassionate teacher.
Thinning the herd,
he called it. Tom had thought he'd have plenty of time to check the texts out of the library in Boston, and that had actually been the easy part. But finding time to read about the social responsibilities of businesses to the communities in which they are located when he was spending every waking moment driving a cab to get his first semester paid up before the final September deadline for registration was harder than he'd thought.

Of course, it wasn't as if he were reading
Playboy
or
Entertainment Weekly
. Even an Econ major like Tom had a hard time staying awake over seven hundred pages of the ethical and philosophical issues in product liability law. That shit was better than Xanax for chilling him right out into sleep mode.

In any case, he needed to knock out another fifty pages, which felt more like five hundred pages by the time he finished looking up all the words he didn't know in the textbook glossary. And he'd decided that studying in his room would be okay, if he could show up and say hi and not make this kid think he was an asshole, something he'd been reassuring the kid about since walking in the door.

When he saw the hot pink bandana tied around the doorknob of their room, he groaned out loud.

“Oh, fuck me.”

Or rather…

In case that booty call flag wasn't clear, Reese had stuck a piece of notebook paper to the bulletin board with big block letters and an arrow pointing to the bandana scrawled on it in black marker.

YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, RIGHT? COME BACK LATER.

A LOT LATER.

Fucking fantastic.

Tom dropped his backpack on the linoleum floor and slid his butt down the wall until he joined it. Great. No way was he walking all the way back to the library now. He figured Reese would have mentioned a boyfriend during the whole cocksucking conversation earlier, so maybe this was a random hookup. A new twist on revenge sex. Call it drive-out-your-roommate sex.

He'd just have to hang out in the hall and hope that whatever dude his roommate had picked up was a quick and unsatisfying lay. Propping the text on his lap, Tom dug deep and tried to focus on tax laws for non-profits in the U.S.

It didn't take long for distraction to set in.

Once he'd settled in and the only sounds were the flicking of a page and the occasional “hey” of a passing resident who lived down the hall, the quiet took over.

Which made the noises emanating from behind the closed door to their room that much more impossible to ignore.

The first soft, low moans that slipped out under the bottom edge of the door, that tiny gap a window into the action behind the solid wood plank, eased their way into Tom's subconscious without him really being aware of it. It wasn't until he went to adjust his jeans, shifting on the floor and pulling the denim away from his crotch, that he realized his dick was waking up and noticing that something going on was making things a little tingly.

What the fuck? The Internal Revenue Code was never exciting enough to give him a semi.

A low groan vibrated through the door and he realized he'd been hearing the urgent sounds of sex for a few minutes now. Long enough for his dick to notice anyways. Although he was a little surprised that he was getting turned on by the sounds of two dudes going at it, it was clear his body thought eavesdropping on his own personal porn show was perfectly fine.

Equal opportunity voyeurism, or whatever the word for listening to someone else get it on was, was apparently his thing.

He laughed self-consciously, glad no one else was around to see him blushing at the idea, and looked back down at the page. Getting his head back into the paragraphs on taxation was even more of a challenge as the moans escalated in intensity and loudness until Tom started glancing down the hall every couple of seconds. He wasn't sure he wanted someone to come along and see him sitting here, listening to some dude getting his rocks off, which he or anyone else within twenty feet now couldn't possibly avoid doing.

The guy who was moaning was a little over the top too, with the
Oh God
's and the
Yes
's.

“You're not making a porno, buddy. Easy.”

Great. Now he was talking to himself about two guys fucking.

And really, what did he know? He'd known Reese for all of twenty-four hours and almost the first thing the kid did was bring a guy back to their room and get busy. For all he knew, they
were
making a porno. The kid could have klieg lights and a camera on a tripod in there. Filming himself, what? Fucking this guy or getting fucked? Tom shifted his weight from one hip to the other, his butt cheeks going numb from sitting on the hard floor. Thinking about how his roommate liked to have sex seemed like a major privacy violation, but it wasn't as if the guy was trying to hide it. In fact, Reese was pretty clearly trying to scare him off with gay sex cooties.

Tom was damned if he was going to flinch first.

“I can listen to two dudes fucking all day long, kid. Not going anywhere,” he said to the empty hall, maybe a little more loudly than he'd planned.

Now that he had the thought in his head though, he couldn't let it go. Was Reese getting fucked or the one doing the fucking? The voice that kept asking now for “harder, don't stop!” didn't really sound like him, but Tom didn't exactly have a history of listening to the kid's sex noises for comparison. If he had to guess, and his inability to stop thinking about it meant he was going to, he'd say the kid was into getting fucked. Maybe it was because he was kind of slim and little and had the chin-length hair and the pretty mouth…

What the fuck? Pretty mouth?

Where the hell had that thought come from?

Jesus. He needed to stop thinking about this shit. He dug through his backpack and found his old iPod, jamming the buds in his ears and hitting Play in a hurry. Picked the textbook in his lap up and settled it more firmly against his knees.

Focus. Tax havens. Not gay sex.

He made it about three sentences in before his hand crept down to the iPod and snuck a finger out to tap Pause, almost as though he was afraid someone would see him turn off the music that for a moment had blocked the low groans and loud shouts of pleasure from his room. He knew he was ridiculous, leaving the buds in so it would look like he was trying to shut out the sounds emanating from his room. He put a semi-disgusted expression on his face so no one would think he was anything except bored or totally turned off, as any straight guy would be.

But still he listened and couldn't stop himself from trying to picture exactly what was happening.

“Yeah, suck me, Reese. Suck—ahhh.”

Shit.

Only a couple of words, but that was all he needed. So, not fucking at all. Although maybe if you were a gay guy, getting a blowjob counted as sex. Or giving one. Which was what Reese was doing right now. Sucking some other guy's dick and doing it like a boss too, if the guy's nonstop stream of begging and praise was any indication.

Tom couldn't get the picture out of his mind. Reese's lips stretched wide around a dick, eyes closed, lashes resting on his cheeks, that sweep of dark hair falling over his face as he bobbed his head up and down, up and down, sucking so hard you could feel it in your fucking balls…

What. The. Fuck.

Tom punched the music back on, yanked his knees up and crossed his arms on them, and dropped his head to hide his face.

Because he wasn't picturing some other guy when he couldn't stop himself from freaking imagining a gay dude
getting a blowjob from
his roommate
. Tom was good at a boatload of things, but self-bullshit wasn't one of them.

When he pictured what it was like to get a blowjob from Reese, the dick the kid was sucking was Tom's. And he was hard as a rock from imagining it, his dick fucking begging for a little attention, making him wonder if he could get away with a quick jerkoff session in the bathroom without getting interrupted.

“Fuck, no.”

He didn't say the next part out loud.

I'm not gonna go jerk off and think about Reese sucking my dick. No fucking way.
Because that's what a gay guy would do and I'm not even thinking about that shit right now.

He recognized that not thinking about shit right now wasn't exactly the same thing as denying the thought entirely. He dropped one hand to his lap and squeezed his dick through his jeans, shivering with the splash of pleasure that shot through him. Fuck. This was
not
the time. He hadn't busted his ass for the past fifteen months to find a way to make it back here only to blow his focus by spending his time thinking about cocksucking. The shit that had gone down in the middle of his last semester at Carlisle meant the school was allowing him to retake those classes without penalty and Tom was determined to ace his classes. Graduating after three more semesters with an academic record that shone was the only thing standing between him and a job making ten bucks an hour after graduation.

He'd had plenty of alone time in the past year to realize how much nicer his life was when he hadn't had to fucking scrape and suffer because of money, and he was going to walk off this campus and straight into the ranks of the gainfully employed in a job he earned all on his own.

Sex could wait. It wasn't that hard to find anyway, if he needed to blow off a little steam. But all this deep fucking thinking that he just
knew
would be required for him to address the fact that imagining his male roommate sucking his dick gave him a hard-on faster than any porno with chicks he'd ever watched? Yeah, that shit would have to wait.

He'd managed to ignore it most of his entire fucking life up until now, hadn't he? No sense changing speeds simply because his dick finally woke up after a year of sex drive-killing stress and pretty much constant homelessness. Crashing on someone's couch or sleeping in a car were surefire lust dampeners. He could vouch for that.

Besides, it was clear his pretty roommate loathed him. And since he wasn't about to give up his spot in Perkins House and go back to the surefire chaos of being in the dorms on campus where he could run into a hundred people who knew all about him and would be ready to spark a wildfire of gossip the moment he showed up, it seemed likely that Reese was going to go on hating him.

He inhaled deeply and then let it out in a long, slow
shhhhh
through his teeth.

Focus. Focus on class and scoring straight A's. There wouldn't be time for anything else. He'd still have to head into the city every weekend and put in round-the-clock hours driving the cab if he wanted to be able to pay for the second semester by the time the bill came due. Solo sessions in the shower would do, if his dick insisted on staying awake after all, or he could always hit a bar and pick up some girl with an apartment or room of her own. He'd never had a hard time doing that and was perfectly aware it wasn't because he was so smooth with the ladies. He knew he looked good, tall and blond and built from the middling amount of weightlifting he did in addition to the running. He'd had more than one chick hit on
him
before he even thought of hitting on her.

“You have sad eyes,” a girl had told him this past summer, before pushing him down on her bed and climbing on top of him.

Sad eyes. No shit. If exhaustion and a constant fear that he wasn't going to quite be able to pull this shit off gave him happy eyes, he'd have signed himself up for the psych ward.

Sitting long enough with his eyes closed and his head down had made him sleepy. He wasn't sure how much time had passed when he finally lifted his head, hard-on mostly gone, and paused the music cautiously to check on the porn scene.

Silence. Thank God.

He turned the music back on, able to enjoy it now that he wasn't wondering if he could hear anything beneath the sounds of his favorite bands. If Reese's fuckbuddy didn't head out in a little while, he'd be giving a courtesy knock before going in. This little “my gay testosterone is tougher than your straight (‘ish' he thought, but pushed that firmly to the side) testosterone” throwdown Reese was determined to have with him was not going to make the kid happy.

After the battle scars he'd earned in the past year, a little guy-on-guy action wasn't going to make him run screaming. Nothing short of a crowbar and a pile of dynamite under his ass was gonna pry him out of this room.

The “heads up, I'm coming in” knock turned out to be unnecessary. A surprisingly short time later, the door at his left shoulder opened and an even slighter, shorter guy stepped out, before leaning back in for what Tom assumed without looking was some kind of goodbye kiss. The kid looked even younger than Reese and had a short shock of bright pink hair that was clearly messed up bedhair, parts of it standing straight up in the original style.

The guy was startled to see Tom camped out on the floor outside the room, if his backward hop after almost stepping on him was any indication. He grinned down at Tom, eyelids at half-mast with what Tom recognized as “I've just had my brains fucked out and if I could, I'd be out cold right now” sleepiness. He was a walking ad for sexual satisfaction and he'd probably crash as soon as he made it back to his own bed.