Off Campus

by Amy Jo Cousins

“That what you tell yourself?”

  “Listen, kid—”

  “Don’t. We’re the same age pretty much. You don’t want to do something ’cause you know it’s gonna suck, the same as me. Don’t try to make it like you’re older and wiser and know what you’re doing, but I don’t.”

  Tom sighed heavy as if a weight on his chest were squeezing the air out of him.

  “It’s not the same.” When Reese started to interrupt, he talked right over him, certain at least of this one thing. “It’s not. Maybe my reasons for not going to practice are the same as yours for skipping therapy. And I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing half the time. I’m not trying to say that I do. Difference is, my life isn’t fucked up for good if I never run track again. It’s just something I used to do.”

  “Something you used to love.” Reese’s whisper was so low in the dark Tom could barely hear him. But barely wasn’t the same as not at all and Reese’s words dug into his skin and burned like acid.

  “Maybe.” He said the word even more quietly than Reese had spoken, pretty sure the only one who could hear the pain and the lie in the word was himself.

  But either Reese had better hearing than most or his roommate already knew him dangerously well, because a split second after his own voice died away Reese spoke again.

  “Well, I’ll go to therapy when you go to practice.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that. He rolled over onto his back and laced his hands over his chest, concentrating on the slow rise and fall of his ribcage instead of the rustling noises of Reese trying to get comfortable in his own bed, the two of them both fully dressed on top of the covers, wide awake and listening to each other breathe.

  Only as Tom was nodding off, the warm dark blanket of sleep drifting over him, did he wonder what kind of line they had crossed this time.

  Reese snuck out pre-dawn and returned so late the next night, if he returned at all, that Tom didn’t hear him come in. For two days, Tom studied by himself in their room and it was just how he liked it.

  If he felt for a moment that the room was too quiet, or empty, that was ridiculous.

  He liked it best this way.

  He did.

  When Reese did show up again, he was awkward in his skin, all elbows and knees, rushing in and out of the room in short bursts of brittle chit-chat, words rushing out of his mouth like popcorn popping. Tiny explosions of sound that melted away to nothing.

  Which meant Tom was lingering on a Friday morning, hours past his normal dawn takeoff time, waiting for his freaking roommate to come back so he could say one last thing before heading off to Boston for another marathon driving shift.

  When Reese entered the room at less than light speed for the first time in days, Tom was prepared to see the flinch when he was spotted, still there long after he normally left.

  “I want you to call me if you’re gonna do that,” he said before Reese could get a word out.

  “What?”

  “You know what.” He wasn’t going to say it.

  Reese blushed and looked down at the floor.

  “I don’t know if you only do it when I’m here,” Tom started again. “I think you know I’m not going anywhere. So if that’s why you’re doing it…” He let the half-finished sentence hang in the air until Reese grabbed its trailing end.

  “No.” He looked at Tom for a moment and then away, staring at one of his posters of sculpted male nudes or maybe at nothing at all. “I was doing it before you got here. Trying to make you go away was a bonus, really.”

  He wouldn’t ask questions, invite more intimacy, but he could be silent at the right times. He could give Reese space in which to find his way closer to Tom, this strange dance they were doing—waltzing in the dark without a partner, wondering if each was ever going to bump into another lonely dancer.

  “It’s because,” he struggled, mouth twisting with the wrong words. “They don’t get to take that too. It’s not the way I want it to be, the way it used to be, but it’s what I can do.”

  “It’s not safe,” was all Tom said, trying to keep the parental overtones out of his voice. He was in no position to be giving anyone else advice, but he had to say something.

  “But it is. That’s why I pick them.”

  Reese’s words hung in the air between them. Tom didn’t let himself get distracted by memories. He shouldn’t give a damn, but now that he’d had an up close and personal experience with what Reese did with his hookups, all he could picture was how easily things could go very, very wrong. His roommate had some clear limits on what he was willing to do and it didn’t take an imagination of Shakespearean proportions to see what the damage would be if Reese picked up a guy who didn’t respect the lines he drew around these encounters.

  He didn’t think of Reese as a girl, really. But his hands and his cheekbones were delicate, even though the rest of him was strong and wiry. Tom had seen enough girls make dubious decisions about who they chose to leave a party with, and heard enough stories about casual date rape, to be under any illusions that this kind of thing was safe.

  Reese might steer clear of alcohol—and now that Tom knew why, he was pretty sure that rule wasn’t in danger of being broken any time soon—but the danger inherent in Reese’s hookups vibrated in his bones when he thought of it, which was all the time now. This morning, when he’d been shoving clean T-shirts and shorts into his duffel for the weekend, that low hum had crept up in volume until he’d been jittery with it, pacing the room with a barely contained restlessness, unable to leave until he saw Reese.

  “I want you to call me first,” he insisted.

  “Why? So you can talk me out of it?”

  He shook his head. He couldn’t really explain it. “Someone should know. Like, I don’t know, backup.”

  “But you’ll be…where do you go anyway?”

  Strange to realize they’d crossed all these lines and figured out some pretty intimate things about each other, but Reese had been holding him at enough of a distance not to wonder, or at least not to ask, where he went every weekend.

  No way was he going into detail, but making a mystery of it would only make Reese want to dig deeper.

  “Boston.”

  “Home?”

  “Sure.”

  That was only sort of a lie, he told himself. The city itself felt like home to him now, or at least home turf, even if his actual family residence was long sold under the auctioneer’s hammer to repay a tiny fraction of his father’s debts.

  Home was the back seat of his car most weekend nights, but that fact sure as shit wasn’t gonna be part of the roommate togetherness program.

  “So, long-distance backup, I guess.”

  “Whatever. Someone should know. And you call me in front of them, so they know you’re not by yourself.”

  Reese’s color rose and he shaded his eyes from a non-existent indoor sun with one hand, tilting his head back and staring up at the ceiling.

  “You want me to call you when I’m, what, about to, you know…”

  “Fuck some dude? Yes. Exactly that.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “You know what the campus sex counselors say. If you can’t say it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

  “Ha ha. I can say it to them. I say all kinds of things to them.” Reese’s voice, suddenly gritty and low, hummed through his bones in an entirely different way.

  Tom cleared his throat, too loud in the small room. Reese’s grin showed teeth and looked like it would come with a bite if he got too close.

  “Then you can call me up and say ‘Hey roomie, I met this guy named John Big-Dick Doe and I’m bringing him back to our room to blow him’, ’kay?”

  He felt a little ridiculous, insisting on this, but whatever. Even if it made Reese narrow his eyes at him, running his gaze up and dow
n Tom’s body in a blatant stroke Tom felt like a hand on his cock. He’d already figured out that Reese, when feeling threatened, got mouthy and bold, but he wasn’t expecting his roommate to let a hand drift down his chest to his own crotch, palming the length of his dick through his jeans as he stared at Tom.

  “You gonna be picturing it? Me sucking off some guy, while you’re in your old bed back home, high school trophies on the shelves? Is that why you want me to call?”

  Yes.

  No.

  “Give it a rest, kid.” He trod hard on the last word. “Just do it.”

  “Or what?”

  He tried to think of something that would work as a threat to a guy who was strung out enough that almost anything could be taken as a dare.

  Jackpot.

  “Or I’ll call your dad.”

  Reese’s all-over flinch was a visible shiver on his skin. Direct hit. Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and turned toward the door. Now he could leave.

  “My number’s on your desk. Okay?”

  Lips pressed together, shaking his head, Reese threw himself on his bed and kicked his shoes off, pouting all the way.

  Whatever. He’d be safer at least.

  “Fine. Goodbye. Weirdo.”

  “See you Sunday.”

  Reese’s heaved sigh followed him down the hall and out to his car where he tossed his duffel into the back seat and slid behind the wheel, not exactly grinning, but happier than he’d been in days.

  Now he could relax.

  Chapter Eight

  Relaxed wasn’t exactly the right word for the heat that swept over him when his phone rang on Saturday night at midnight while Tom flew through Callahan tunnel, hauling a late-night fare from the airport to the big Marriott downtown.

  He’d downloaded a ringtone for Reese’s cell number, which he’d pulled in totally underhanded fashion by calling himself from his roommate’s phone while Reese was in the shower. After wavering between the Stones’ “No Satisfaction” and “Sympathy for the Devil”, he decided to go with something a little less revealing and picked Big & Rich’s “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy”, because he thought it’d make Reese laugh if he ever heard it.

  He’d shot Reese a snarky text Saturday afternoon, another reminder to call Tom before engaging in any…escapades. The idea that Reese might skip the hookup rather than call him might have crossed his mind too.

  When the twanging country tones echoed in the front seat of his cab, he flushed as soon as he recognized the song and fumbled for his earbud. He didn’t normally answer the phone while driving, couldn’t afford the risk to his license, but he wasn’t about to miss this call. Sweat sprang out along his hairline as he slid the rubber bud into his ear and swiped Answer.

  “This is Tom.”

  “This is the dumbest idea ever.”

  His mouth lifted in a grin, a reflex he wasn’t going to examine. Neither was the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he realized why his phone would’ve rung at this hour.

  “Hey roomie. Got a hot date?”

  “No, you asshole. I don’t.”

  The flutter in his stomach still made him queasy, but now he wanted to giggle too. Jesus. Giggling. Like a freaking girl.

  “No cute boys out on the town tonight?”

  “Oh, shut up. I picked up a boy who practically came in his pants when I offered to blow him, but I started talking to myself on the walk back here, muttering and ranting about whether or not I was going to call you first, and he took off. Think he thought I was a nutjob. Clearly true.”

  The sour twist to Reese’s voice made Tom laugh out loud even as he expressed his sympathies, which Reese declined to accept in words that included an anatomically impossible act. To his surprise, Reese didn’t hang up after berating him. Bored maybe? Or just lonely. Either way, Tom found himself hitting downtown, dropping off his fare and heading out for a pick-up in Somerville, listening to Reese and laughing at his sharp scolding and catty relay of campus gossip. When they finally got off the phone, the sun was peaking up over the bay and Tom was bleary-eyed with the need for sleep.

  “Night, weirdo.”

  “See you Sunday, shit, tonight, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid.”

  He was smiling when he cranked his seat back while he waited in line at the cabstand at Logan again and curled up on his shoulder. Sundays were normally a day of dread for him, knowing he was heading back to campus at the end of the day, but for once he was almost looking forward to getting back to school.

  Having a place, even one he shared with a prickly, argumentative guy who made his dick hard, had him breathing deep and easy as he fell asleep while the sun rose.

  By the time Tom made it back to his room at Perkins, his breathing was harsh with smothered pain and he was regretting deeply not taking the MDOT worker who’d stopped to help him up on his offer to drive him to an ER.

  He shook his head to clear it and tried to figure out what to do next. The pain from the burn on his arm was intense, sucking every bit of his focus to the throbbing stripe on the outside of his hand and wrist where it felt as if flames were still crisping his skin, even though he could see with his own eyes that there was nothing touching him but air. Air made out of fire maybe.

  When he unlocked the door and stepped into their empty room, he groaned. It was fucking hot as hell inside, the air having baked with the window closed all day. He wondered where Reese was. If he’d been here at all in the past two days. The stuffiness of the room said maybe not.

  He wrestled with the window one-handed and got it partway open. It must have rained out here as much as it had in Boston for Reese to have shut the window all the way.

  “Shit.” He pounded his good hand gently against the window frame. With the window only open a few inches, the box fan wouldn’t be very effective at sucking the warm air out of the room and getting some cooler circulation going. But that was as good as he could get it with his left hand and the awkward angle of the window crank in the corner over the desk. It occurred to him that if he had bothered to get to know any of his neighbors in the dorm he could go and knock on someone’s door and ask for help. Fuck. He could probably go do that right now and get a total stranger to help him. But it was going to become obvious to anyone who saw him try to do anything that he needed help with the simplest of tasks and he wasn’t up to having some guy or woman he didn’t know offer to help him with his pants or whatever.

  He’d bought burn cream and a roll of gauze bandages. Getting any of it on his right wrist and hand using his left was a lesson in lack of coordination. Also, it turned out you were supposed to buy some kind of tape to hold the gauze. After shredding it with the scissors he’d borrowed from Reese’s desk while trying to cut with his left hand, he threw what remained of the tangled mess on the floor and managed to get his clothes off. He left them where they fell on the floor for the first time in weeks.

  His arm was throbbing and burned so hard, his nerves still firing like a hot iron was pressed against his skin, no matter that he told himself it wasn’t. He sat on the edge of his mattress, unable to figure out what he was supposed to do next because he couldn’t hear himself think over the pain in his arm, miserable and beyond uncomfortable. Then the door opened.

  “Holy shit, what happened?”

  He waved at the disaster he’d made of the room, curtains askew, his crap everywhere, trying to explain.

  “Sorry. Can’t use my right hand. Sorry about the mess.”

  Reese’s steps over to him were swift. His hands reached out for Tom’s bandage and then pulled back.

  “Not that, you dumbass. What happened to you?”

  He looked at the floor between his feet. Sweat was running down his back as he tensed his entire body to avoid whimpering out loud with the pain.

  “Burned the shit out of my hand.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah? And how’d you do that?”

  Reese stepped away from him and moved around the room, cleaning up after him. Scooped his clothes up and dropped them in the box at the foot of his bed. Untangled the mess of gauze and rerolled it into a neat coil that he left on Tom’s desk. Then he moved to the window and opened it wide while Tom sat with his elbows on his knees and tried some slow breathing.

  “It’s crazy hot in here. No wonder you’re sweating. I’m gonna open the door for a little bit, get some circulation in here.”

  “Not hot.” He shook his head. Still couldn’t think straight. “Not just hot. It hurts. A lot.”

  “I notice you still haven’t told me how you got hurt.”

  “There was a lady, couple of kids. Car broke down on the highway. Was trying to give her a hand when a hose tore. Steam burn.”

  Reese hissed in sympathetic pain. Cooler air was sucked in from the hallway as soon as he opened the door, the hot stuffy air getting blown out the window by the box fan. The change in temperature was immediately noticeable, though Tom still felt hotter than shit, sitting beneath the bright bare bulbs of the ceiling light. Maybe he was getting sick too. Fuck.

  “Crappy payback for being their knight in shining armor.” The overhead light snapped off leaving the room in darkness for a moment until Reese turned on his desk light, angling it so no direct light shone into the room, only a glow from that corner.

  The relief was intense. The removal of the light made him feel less like he was dying and more like he was simply going to have suffer through a shitload of pain until this burn got better.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got here. Did you put something on it?”

  Reese picked up his hand now, careful where he touched Tom, and started unwinding the twisted mess of gauze.

  “Burn cream. Doesn’t feel like it did shit, though.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think it works that way. Helps the healing, not so much with the pain.” He pulled the final sticky length off of Tom’s skin with delicacy and hissed again at the blisters. They were tiny and not everywhere, but there were enough of them to make it clear this was at least a second-degree burn. “Shit, man. I think you need to go to the ER.”