Dr. Eames comes to collect his umbrella and then just kind of stands near Phil's desk, lingering and awkwardly fiddling with the umbrella for longer than is necessary, but again, Phil refuses to pretend that it means anything.
"So, have you got any big plans this weekend?" Dr. Eames asks eventually.
Don't say homework, Phil thinks. For the love of God, don't say masturbation.
"Um, I dunno," Phil says. "I might be going hiking." It's a blatant lie. Phil's never been hiking in his life. He hates the outdoors.
"Hiking, eh?" Dr. Eames asks, with a quirk of his eyebrow. Phil can only hope that he's completely ignorant about the topic and won't ask any questions. Christ, why does he say such stupid things sometimes?
"Yeah, I dunno... if I'm in the mood, maybe," Phil says.
"I see. Well, if you're not too busy with... hiking, I'm having a little get together Saturday night for some people in the department."
For a second Phil is sure Dr. Eames is getting ready to offer him a catering job or something. He doesn't respond right away, just sits there like an idiot waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Dr. Eames doesn't say anything else either and Phil realizes he's waiting for an answer.
"Um, yeah," Phil says. "I could probably do that."
"Excellent," Dr. Eames says, smiling genuinely. "I'll email the directions."
It's happening, it's actually happening!
Phil waits until he’s sure Dr. Eames has left the building before he starts wiggling in his seat with excitement, doing honest-to-god fist pumps. He could practically do a happy dance if he wasn’t so scared of looking ridiculous, even with no one around. He’s so keyed up that he doesn’t realize until later that night, standing in front of his closet with a blank and helpless stare, that he doesn’t have a thing to wear.
He’s not even sure where to start looking. What is a person supposed to wear to a party at a professor’s house? Phil’s never been to one, but it has to be more sophisticated than the house parties and dorm room keg stands he’s used to. It should be something nice, but not too nice. Not nice to the point where it’s obvious he’s gone and bought an entirely new outfit, even though that’s exactly what he intends to do.
He googles “party at professor’s house”, looking for clues, and finds a bunch of useless pictures of old people. He downloads and re-watches the movie Wonder Boys, which he’d originally rented on the promise of a sex scene between Tobey Maquire and Robert Downey Jr. (complete disappointment on that front, but still a decent movie), because he vaguely remembers that the main character was a professor who had a party. It turns out there’s two professor parties, one super-fancy dress and one about as casual as the stupid dorm parties, so that’s pretty useless too.
Phil buys most of his clothes from J. Crew, but they don't have a store in Northampton or Amherst- it's against the hipster building codes or something- so he usually does his shopping over the internet. There's no time for that. He could go to Boston, but a three hour drive seems ridiculously excessive. He absolutely refuses to go to the mall, on principle.
He winds up wandering around Northampton after class on Thursday, getting increasingly pissed off with every shithole, second-hand "vintage" store he passes. He finally finds a place that sells clothes nobody's worn yet, a pretentious and overpriced men's shop in Thorne's Marketplace. When he asks the salesgirl to help him find something "business casual, but not too business. OR too casual!" she doesn't laugh at him, so he decides to stay. For three hours. He comes home with a cashmere sweater vest that looks pretty much exactly like all his other sweater vests but better, a silk tie and an amazingly tailored pair of grey pants that hug his ass and crotch in all the right ways.
He tries on the ensemble with his favorite shirt and shoes and the whole thing comes together beautifully. It's as hot as he's gonna get. He just hopes he's not the only one in a tie.
He doesn't start to get nervous until the night of the party when one of his contact lenses tears and he realizes he's going to have to wear his glasses. This causes him to second-guess the tie, which eventually leads to re-thinking the entire outfit. He changes twelve times, settling finally on the original outfit, and by then he's running about a half hour behind schedule.
He'd timed his arrival so that he'd get there fashionably late, about 45 minutes after the party starts, but now he's getting into the realm of rudely late, which is unacceptable.
Dr. Eames, predictably enough, lives out in the woods in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere. Phil's GPS gets confused on the drive over, re-calculating repeatedly and then refusing to function all together, so he has to resort to the emailed directions saved on his iPhone.
By the time he gets there he's a sweaty, panicked mess. He has to park about a mile away from the house because the driveway and most of the street is already filled with cars. He's doubting the tie again, wondering if the bottle of Grey Goose he brought is really appropriate, wondering what the hell he's supposed to say to a bunch of professors in a social situation. It's too late to back out though, too late to change his clothes or anything else, so all he can really do is hope his night turns out half as well as Tobey Maguire's.
Chapter 5
Phil notices the books before anything else. Dr. Eames must have thousands of them, stacked on shelves from the floor to the ceiling. The house is full of people, but the books seem more alive, more of an interesting presence. Phil thinks he could spend days just looking at them all. Organizing them would be his idea of an amazing weekend. He'd love to sit in the little window nook with a stack of them right now, but this is a party and that would be weird.
The house is pretty big, with hardwood floors and lots of windows. It probably feels roomy and open when it's empty, but tonight it's extremely crowded and hot. Most of Phil's professors are here and judging by the snippets of conversation Phil hears as he makes his way through the room, most of them are pretty wasted already. Everyone's talking loudly and saying stupid, vaguely incoherent things. Even Dr. Miller is here, camped out on the couch and surrounded by a crowd of sycophants.
It's not all that different from the parties Phil is used to after all. The biggest differences seem to be the music (Louis Armstrong instead of Lady Gaga) and the food (stuffed shrimp and cheese platters instead of Pringles and pizza).
Some of the men are dressed in full suits, far more formal than Phil's outfit, but some of them are more casual, in jeans or khakis and no ties. For once Phil seems to have hit a happy medium and he's feeling pretty good about his choices until he reaches the makeshift bar in the dining room and spots Dr. Howe. Dr. Howe was Phil's Abnormal Psychology professor last term. He's a gangly, peculiar, sixty-something year old man, and he's wearing pretty much the same exact outfit as Phil.
Phil deposits his Grey Goose on the table and tries to slip away unnoticed, but Dr. Howe is on him instantly, making awkward jokes about Phil's fabulous taste in clothing and reminiscing about his paper on anxiety disorders. Phil doesn't want to be rude, but more than that he doesn't want anyone to notice that he's wearing the same freaking outfit as a sixty-year old man. Standing next to him like this pretty much guarantees that everyone in the house is going to see, including Dr. Eames. If Dr. Eames is even here. He's pretty much the only professor in the department who seems to be missing.
Phil looks around for an escape route, someone he knows that he just "has to" say hello to or even a restroom to which he can excuse himself, but there's nothing and Dr. Howe just keeps talking.
Phil busies himself with making a cocktail that's about 80 percent vodka and gulps it down quickly, barely listening to Dr. Howe's inebriated babbling.
The girl at the store told him he looked like a hottie. Why didn't she tell him he looked like a senior citizen? Phil starts to sweat a little and tugs at his tie. Why the hell did he think dressing like an old man was a good idea? Why does he have to be so lame all the time? Just as he's starting to regret coming at all, he feels someone tugging at his elbow.
&n
bsp; Angie.
"Phil, I need your help in the kitchen!" she says, like she knows him. Like they're old friends. He doesn't know her. He's seen her around the lab a couple of times, but they've never worked together, never even been introduced and he has no idea how she knows his name. Still, it's an escape and he takes it gratefully. He bids farewell to Dr. Howe and follows Angie through a swinging wooden door into the kitchen.
"You looked like you needed to be rescued," she says, as soon as they're out of Dr. Howe's earshot.
It's blissfully empty in the kitchen, so much so that Phil wonders if they're supposed to be in there at all, but he doesn't particularly care. He's just so grateful to be rid of his geriatric doppelganger.
"Dr. Howe will talk your ear off all night if you let him," Angie says, which may be true, but it's really not the issue.
"Did you um... did you notice we were dressed the same?" Phil asks, not really caring how desperate he sounds. He just wants someone to tell him he was imagining it, or that it's not as bad as he thought.
Angie doesn't offer him any reassurances; she looks at him like he's from outer space.
"You need to loosen up or something," she says. "Let's do a shot."
"Isn't all the liquor in the other room?" Phil asks.
"Probably not the good stuff." She starts rooting around in Dr. Eames' cabinets and then his freezer, like she lives here or something. It's either terribly familiar or terribly rude and either way Phil doesn't like it. He's sort of put the rumors out of his head since he started working at the lab- they've been seeming more and more like the clueless ranting of a bunch of jealous bitches- but now he's starting to see where the jealous bitches are coming from. Who does she think she is, touching his frozen goods like that?
"Are you old enough to do a shot?" he asks as she pulls a bottle of Jägermeister from the freezer. She may be a graduate student, but she looks about twelve years old.
"Are you?" she asks back with a snort and pours two shots into glasses she locates a little too easily for Phil's comfort.
Phil throws his back in a hurry and immediately pours himself another. Angie follows his lead and before long they've each had three or four or possibly more and he's starting to feel rather buzzed.
At some point Angie looks at him and starts giggling. "You are kind of dressed the same," she says.
"Fuck me," Phil says. "I should just go home."
"Nah, it's not that bad. I totally wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out."
Phil doesn't believe her. Not even a little bit. Fortunately he's getting too drunk to care.
"What difference does it make anyway?" she asks. "Why are you so nervous? They're just teachers. And they're all wasted."
Obviously Angie is not a person familiar with social anxiety. Either that or she's been to so many of these things, they don't seem like a big deal anymore. Maybe Dr. Eames takes her to parties all the time. Maybe they go to social events in England with sophisticated, international professors.
"I'm not really a party person," Phil says. "I kind of dread them."
"Wow, are you, like, anti-social?" Angie asks.
"It's not as simple as that," Phil says, even though it's entirely possible that it is. He's not about to be reduced to a simple neurosis by some psych grad student in Converse sneakers.
"Well, why did you come?" she asks. "If you're so anti-party."
"Because he's one of my instructors," Phil says. "I had to."
"You totally didn't. It's not like he would've gotten mad if you'd told him you had other plans or something."
"It would've been rude," he says.
"Uh huh..." Angie says, a little too knowingly for Phil's taste. Again, he starts wondering how she knew his name in the first place. Is it possible that Dr. Eames has mentioned him to her? Have they been discussing him? Laughing together about his stupid crush?
"You know Dr. Eames pretty well, huh?" Phil says, and then swallows yet another shot.
Angie hops up to sit on the counter and smirks at him. "We're not doing it if that's what you're wondering," she says, and Phil nearly chokes on the liquor burning down his throat.
"I- I didn't...no. But...you know. People do. Wonder that."
Shit, he really is drunk.
"I know that," she says. "I'm not an idiot."
"I mean I don't care," he says. "If it's true. It's not like...I don't care or anything."
Phil's a terrible liar and an even worse actor, but thankfully Angie seems like she might be too loaded to notice his blatant bullshit.
Unfortunately, Phil is also too loaded to tell if she's bullshitting him.
"Well, do you believe me?" she asks.
Phil shrugs. "Yeah, I mean, I guess."
"We're just friends," Angie says. "He's my advisor."
"Okay."
"He's not even my type."
"Oh, come on!" Phil says. Now she's just crazy talking. Dr. Eames is everybody's type.
"I'm serious!" she insists. "I like skinny, nerdy guys. Like you, but... you know, less gay."
"Um, okay..." Now Phil is starting to get a little creeped out. She must know about his crush, because how else would she know that? It's not like he goes out of his way to hide it or anything, but he's pretty sure it's not blatantly obvious. Not to the point where she'd just say it like that to a near stranger.
Not to mention- skinny and nerdy? What the hell?
"You really don't remember me, do you," she says.
"Well, yeah. From the lab and stuff."
"No, not from the lab," she says. "You hooked up with my roommate, like, a year ago."
"Lifeguard boy?" he blurts out, panicked, before he can stop himself.
"What? No, he's not a lifeguard," she says. "He's in a band."
Phil tries to mentally scroll through the possibilities, but he's too fuzzy-headed and unfocused. The only guy he can remember from last year is lifeguard boy. Who isn't actually a lifeguard, so maybe it is the same guy.
"Does he go to UMass?" Phil asks.
"No, he's not in school. He's kind of a bum actually," she says. "I met you when you were trying to sneak out in the morning. I gave you a donut."
Phil stares at her for a minute and a mental picture starts to form. Angie sitting on another kitchen counter, eating from a box of Dunkin' Donuts, wearing a flannel nightshirt with little sheep on it... just like in his dream.
"Guitar guy!" Phil exclaims.
"Yeah, guitar guy..." Angie says, rolling her eyes pointedly. "So do you ever get anyone's actual name before you sleep with them?"
"Um," Phil says. He tries to think of someone's name, anyone's, from any time, but he can't. It's not like he never asks, he just usually does his best to forget. "I'm kind of..."
"Slutty?" Angie supplies.
"No! Just... I don't like to, you know, get involved."
"So, emotionally stunted then," she says. "You know Todd was kind of upset you never called."
Fucking hell, this is a nightmare. Phil sloppily pours some Jägermeister- quite a bit more than a shot- into his big cocktail glass and wipes his face.
"So, you're really not sleeping with Dr. Eames?" he asks, lamely attempting to wrangle back some control over the conversation.
"I'm really not," she says. "And I'm not gonna stop hanging out with him just because some people are psychotically obsessed with him and like to spread rumors."
"Yeah, no, you shouldn't," Phil says. "I mean, it's so ridiculous, isn't it? Those people are totally ridiculous."
"Totally," Angie says. "So...are you one of them?"
"What? No!"
Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck, he's so stupid. So obvious! Jesus.
"No," he says again. "No, no of course- why would you even think- no."
Angie's got such an amused expression on her face that he has to look away.
"Are you sure?" she asks. "I know you're not one of the psychos, okay? But do you like him?"
"No!" Phil's starting to wish he'd never come
in here. He's even starting to miss Dr. Howe a little bit.
"It's okay," Angie says. "I won't tell anybody or anything."
"I don't like him!"
Phil realizes that he's practically shouting, that his voice is doing that annoying, high-pitched cracking thing that happens when he's particularly angry or upset. He sounds like a lunatic and a liar and he has to get out of here.
"I need a smoke," he says, grabbing his glass and huffing his way out the side door which leads to the backyard, hoping like hell she doesn't follow him.
It's a brisk, clear night and stepping out into it causes the alcohol to hit him even harder. He feels dizzy suddenly, almost like he might puke. He really should've eaten something before he came over here.
With trembling fingers, he lights up a cigarette from the stale old pack of American Spirits he's been hanging onto for months. Phil smokes only in a crisis, maybe ten or fifteen cigarettes a year. This definitely qualifies. The nicotine and the deep breathing calms him down a little, though it makes his nausea even worse, and he tries to ready himself to head back inside eventually. He can't exactly drive himself home in this condition.
He steps off the porch and onto the grass, wandering a few feet away from the house and taking some more deep, calming breaths. The further he gets, the more he starts to notice a strong and familiar odor. At first he thinks it may be a clove cigarette or something, but then he realizes no, it's a different kind of cigarette. Someone's smoking weed out here. Really good weed.
He follows the smell, curious to see which of his professors is a pothead and hoping that, whoever it is, they're cool enough to share. Eventually he spots the outline of a man and a dog standing in the dark at the perimeter of the yard, almost in the woods.
The dog is definitely Penelope and the man is definitely Dr. Eames, which means Dr. Eames is out here getting high by himself at his own freaking party and Phil thinks this is it. This is the reason I came.
Dreaming of You: M/M Gay Romance Page 4
