Off Campus (26 page)

“Truth?” It seemed to be the time for it. But Jesus, this was humiliating. Reese had been sneaking him
food
, like a stray cat you'd feed out of pity. He braced himself and focused hard on the gray squirrel scampering across the lawn in the yellowing light. “I'm not. You don't have an official roommate for next semester yet.”

He heard the sharp intake of breath and clenched his teeth together.

“What do you mean?”

Yeah, that was a different tone. Less sympathy, more sharp.

“I missed the deadline for second semester tuition payments. The dean said she'd take my check if I could give it to her before class starts at the end of January. And she'll hold my spot in the classes I registered for. But I'm short. Right now that check'd bounce. By a lot.”

“Because of me. Because I asked you not to leave so much.” Reese's voice was flat, small.

“No.” This staring into space thing was bullshit. He pulled his knees up and tucked his feet against his butt, hugging his legs against his chest, which felt protected enough to look Reese in the face. “No, because of me. I got careless with my hours, yeah, but it was because I didn't want to go.”

Reese took advantage of the open couch space to sit back and hug his legs to his chest too. He rested his forehead on his own knees for a moment, before turning his head to look at Tom, cheek on his knees. Tom smooshed his toes forward until they were wedged under Reese's butt and feet.

“You're not pissed?” he asked and held his breath.

“At you? For not telling me? I'm totally pissed. Fuck, Tom. You're barely with me as it is. Finding out that you're not telling me shit like this just makes it worse.” Reese's lack of smile told Tom he wasn't kidding. He saw Reese take a deep breath. “But we'll save that for later. We have to figure out how to keep you at school first. Then I can be pissed for as long as I want.”

There it was again. That
we
, the word that slayed him every time because it snuck right under those walls he needed so badly and refused to let him huddle in, what? Not solitary splendor. Hardly. More like solitary ruin. Solitary gloom. Solitary pile of shit in the middle of Crap City.

Tom got off the couch.

“I gotta go shower.” He needed to get out of this room was what he needed.

A fist in the back of his T-shirt stopped him. Reese's arms circled his waist from behind, the bump of his nose poking him in between his shoulder blades.

“We'll figure it out. Okay?”

He rested his hand on the arms that gripped each other around him and nodded. He didn't believe it, but it fucking meant everything to him that Reese would say it.

If he waited until he was in the shower, hot water streaming over his shoulders, almost burning him, to let the tears come, he didn't think Reese would blame him. He cried until the snot stuffed up his nose and he was hiccupping and coughing on the water he inhaled. Toweling off, he tried to calm down, breathing slow and deep and staying in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and glorying in the warmth until his face wasn't pink with anything except the heat of the steam.

When he finally emerged, the smell of pancakes cooking in the kitchen and voices in conversation told him Reese's dad was up.

Time to brace the lion in his den. Or, at his stove. Tom told himself a dad who made Christmas pancakes for his grown son couldn't be all that intimidating, but he still shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders as he entered the sunny room.

Reese's dad lit up at the sight of him as if he were a long-lost friend who'd returned from circumnavigating the globe via dogsled. Mr. Anders wiped his hands on the Rudolph towel tucked into the front of his khaki trousers and grasped Tom by the arm with both hands, pulling him into the kitchen and steering him to a seat at the small butcher block table opposite the stove.

“Have a seat, have a seat. Have a pannkaker. You can call it a pancake. We're fooling ourselves with the Swedish thing. No one really knows how to pronounce it.” Every couple of sentences, Mr. Anders squeezed Tom on the shoulder or the arm, as if reassuring himself that Tom hadn't left the room. “I'm about as Swedish as the president. Reese, get him some milk. Or some orange juice. Do you like OJ, Tom?”

Tom picked himself up from where he'd collapsed under the weight of the conversational freight train that flattened him. “Um, maybe some coffee?”

“Reese! Get him coffee.”

“I'm on it, Dad.” Reese was at the stove, where the coffee brewed in a glass pot contraption that bubbled and dripped like a mad scientist's laboratory. Mr. Anders wiped down the table near Tom again and nudged the butter dish and syrup pitcher another inch closer to him.

Reese brought him a steaming mug. “Quick, take some pancakes before my dad has a nervous breakdown.”

Mr. Anders whapped his son on the arm with his towel, before tucking it back in his pants.

“Hush, you. Let your guest eat. Tom, eat.”

Reese slipped into the chair opposite Tom and rolled his eyes behind his dad's back while grinning, which let Tom know that he wasn't really irritated. Beneath the table, Reese's feet bumped up against his own. He pulled his ankles back toward his chair and grimaced an apology at Reese, only to realize a moment later when Reese's toes brushed his again that it hadn't been an accident.

Tom's face burned. There wasn't even a tablecloth. Jesus. Did Reese really not care that his dad could see them playing footsie under the table?

Thank God Mr. Anders had turned back to the stove, where he had set a blackened roasting pan full of what looked like
snakes
?

“We're having a turkey breast, Tom, since it's only the three of us. Nothing too fancy and I didn't have to get up at four a.m.”

“Don't be shy, Dad. You've got ten pounds of neckbones there for your three-day gravy. It's going to be awesome.”

Mr. Anders turned a faint pink and began scraping the bottom of the pan. “I only had two days, so it's a bit of a rush job. But that moron at the butcher shop didn't order my neckbones.” He dipped his head over the pan, muttering to himself. Tom only caught a few words,
how am I, holiday meal, no neckbones, cocksucker…

“Dad!”

Mr. Anders looked over his shoulder. “What?”

“We've talked about this.” Now Reese was the one flushing and staring at his dad, obviously willing him to remember an earlier conversation. Nothing but a blank look from Mr. Anders. “You have a gay son. You can
not
go around calling people cocksucker as an insult. Also, guest here?”

“Oh, shoot. Sorry.” Mr. Anders looked mortified, holding a dripping spatula up across his mouth. “It's so hard to remember sometimes. Jeannie would've killed me.”

“My mom,” Reese explained for Tom's benefit. He jumped up with a napkin to wipe the drips off the floor while pushing his dad's hand back over the roasting pan. Standing up, he pecked his dad on the cheek. “You can call the butcher an asshole. Everyone's got one of those.”

His dad snorted and nodded, bending back to the gravy that Tom hoped could spin turkey feathers into gold.
Days to make?

All of breakfast was like that. Tom watched father and son banter and argue, his head turning from one to the other like a spectator at Wimbledon. He helped Reese clear the table and load the dishwasher after breakfast, but then they poured more coffee and sat back down in their seats. And stayed there.

He'd never seen anyone simply sit in a kitchen and talk with their dad while he cooked. Okay, he'd never known a dad who cooked, other than friends' dads who were into things like molecular gastronomy or would spend thirty-six hours cooking grass-fed duck in a sous vide contraption they'd bought for two thousands dollars. Rich people who relieved stress by pretending they were restaurant chefs. But they didn't cook like this, with pots and pans from the seventies and a spatula with the stub of a broken handle Mr. Anders claimed to like better this way when Reese teased him.

No one Tom knew
ever
talked like Reese and his dad. About whether or not the neighborhood garden association elections were rigged (yes, because the President was bribing people with homemade mulch) and if Reese wanted an old beater to drive to and from school this year (no, parking on or off campus was a pain). About politics and family gossip and stories of holidays past.

Most of Tom's friends went out of their way to make sure their parents knew as little as possible about their lives, dribbling out information in exchange for bribes or threats not to deliver the latest model sports car. He'd been proud that he and his dad had seemed close in comparison, his dad always taking the time to tell his son secrets to the insider world of adults. Of winners.

Watching the Anders talk to each other, though, he felt ashamed, aware that everything his father had told him was bullshit. Every piece of advice, every joshing warning, every time Tom had sat at his metaphorical feet and soaked up every word, was crap. All of it. Because you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see that this was family. Not lectures handed down from on high. Ten warning signs that the guy you were doing business with was running out of money. That wasn't real. That was bullshit.
This
was real. A little bitching, a lot of laughter, a willingness to cheerlead for the other person no matter how silly their triumph. The connection he'd had with his father looked like a shitty plastic imitation. The fake crap you bought when you were too cheap to get the real thing.

Or maybe when you didn't know any better you thought it
was
the real thing.

Bruce Springsteen belted out “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” on the radio, scolding his saxophonist for not being well-behaved enough to have Santa bring him a new instrument. The kitchen was warm and sunny, windows fogging up with the steam of dishes being prepped on the stovetop, the smell of strong coffee running under a complicated chorus of roasting meats, baking breads, the sharp, sweet smell of cut apples. Tom huddled over his mug.

It wasn't a pain in Tom's chest. More a burning pressure, like too much of
something
squeezed into one tiny spot behind his ribs, until he couldn't sit still at the table for another second. He shoved his chair back with a shriek of casters on tile that pulled father and son's attention to him.

“I gotta…run.” He stood up. “I'll be back. Soon.” He sprinted for his bag in the living room.

He was on his knees, digging through his duffle to see if he'd packed running clothes, or something that could pass for running clothes so he could get out of this house, when Reese walked in on bare feet, dropped into a squat next to him, and bumped his shoulder.

“Hey. Maybe, instead of running, you could take a nap.”

Tom shook his head and kept digging. “I've only been awake for three hours.”

Reese bumped him again. “Yeah, but you probably didn't sleep for three days, right?”

“I slept some.”

“In your car?” Reese didn't wait for him to answer. He stood up and grabbed Tom's hands, tugging him toward the couch. “I bet you're still running a deficit. C'mon, there's gotta be football on TV, right? You can take the couch, stretch out. In case you get tired.”

“The game doesn't start until the afternoon.” His brain turned sluggish at the thought of sleep. Maybe he'd lost the ability to argue with Reese after telling him the worst of his secrets, the last shameful truths he'd hoarded. Maybe it was nothing but giving in from here on out.

“Fine. The Christmas parade. You can watch for Santa.”

He pushed Tom down on the couch, tossed him the afghan again and grabbed the remote. Within ten seconds, there were marching bands and a giant Snoopy on the TV. Reese tucked the blanket around his feet and smacked him on the ass before heading back to the kitchen and somehow Tom wasn't running after all.

He slept through until the late afternoon. Maybe he'd been halfway awake at one point when a football game had started, because he remembered hearing Mr. Anders' voice shouting curses at Green Bay and Reese sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch in front of him. But he'd sunk back into sleep before he could apologize for being a terrible guest.

Dinner was the same, the two Anders keeping up a nonstop commentary, full of smart ass remarks and long stories, while Tom sat silent and awkward, wondering what had happened to him, why he couldn't remember how to talk to people anymore. He used to be able to talk to anyone. Reese and his dad included him as if he were more than a mute lump at the end of the dining room table, and he helped with the serving and cleaning in apology.

Reese set up snacks in the living room for movie night while Tom cleared the last of the dishes. How Reese thought they could possibly eat anything else, Tom didn't know.

In the kitchen, Reese's dad was elbow deep in soapy water, scrubbing the roasting pan that was too large to fit in the dishwasher. Tom excused himself as he opened the dishwasher door next to Mr. Anders and upended the last of the glasses into the upper rack. Reese's dad spoke as Tom closed the door.

“You slept on the couch last night?”

Tom froze, hand on the cycle button.

“Um, yeah.”

“You don't have to do that.” Mr. Anders didn't look up from pot-scrubbing. “I know that you're Reese's…boyfriend. You can stay with him. You know. In his room.”

“I'm not always,” he said the words slowly, trying to figure out what he meant as he spoke, thankfully to Reese's dad's back. “Comfortable. With people knowing things about me. Like that.”

Reese's dad turned his head, glancing at him for a moment before returning to the blackened pan in the sink.

“Reese told me a little about it. Can't say I blame you. But fact is, I do know. And it's okay, kid. We don't have to talk about it, but you don't have to pretend either. All right?”