“That’s something you should probably ask him.” I wasn’t completely sure how much he’d shared with Matt and didn’t feel comfortable talking about him without first talking to him. “You know he’s not going to eat that much, right?”
“I want to try something.” Brandon didn’t explain further as he went back to stirring the pot of sauce on the stove. I opened my mouth to question him at the same time he spoke up. “You know it’s just the four of us tonight, right? Zach and Daniel have some meeting, or so they said. Knowing them, they’re going out and didn’t want to offend us by trying to get us to one of the meat markets they go to. I just hope they don’t bring home a girl again. The girl they brought home last night was a screamer. And I think she’s watched too much porn, based on some of the noises she was making. Seriously, I don’t think me being gay is the reason she sounded insane moaning the way she was.”
Well, that was something I could have gone my entire life without knowing. “Glad I missed that.”
“I’m not fucking sure how,” Brandon grumbled. Apparently, there was a reason for his surly mood today. “Seriously, pretty soon we’re going to have to have a meeting and talk about rules. The first one I’m going to propose is, if you’re with someone who insists on making noise, you damned well better find a way to gag them.”
I choked on the water I’d just taken a huge swig of, sputtering and dribbling water down my shirt. Brandon smacked me on the back a couple of times. “You okay?”
“Yep. Fine,” I choked out. I thought about the noises that might have been heard from our room over the past few weeks. Chase wasnotquiet when I sucked him off or played with his ass, and it was always a toss-up as to which he’d beg me for any given night.
“I’m not talking about you guys, you know that, right?” I looked up, and Brandon looked almost embarrassed to have brought it up. “Even if you were loud, it would be different.”
“How so?”
Brandon mangled the tomato he was trying to cut to put into a salad. If it was just the four of us tonight, and I was making nuggets and tots, he was making way too much food. As usual. “It just is. Sometimes it seems like they’re going out of their way to see if they can piss us off. You’re lucky that you’re on the other side of the suite from them.”
“Have you tried, oh, I don’t know, talking to them about it?” Spring break couldn’t come soon enough. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to play the peacemaker between my roommates, but this time I had better things to focus my time and attention on. “Zach can be a bit of a shit, but Daniel’s reasonable. If you tell him, he can reel Zach in.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Brandon shrugged. I leaned against the counter and watched him—really paid attention. As long as I’d known him, Brandon had been the calm, cool, and collected one of the bunch. He never let anything get to him. And yet, he was coming apart at the seams.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” He waved me off. The contents in the door of the fridge rattled when he slammed it closed. Good was a fucking long shot, but was it my place to pry?
I grabbed my bottle of water and went around to the lounge area. If he wanted to talk about it, he’d have to come to me. I wasn’t even a fan of trying to pry information out of Chase, so I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do it with a friend.
With spring break right around the corner, I had two papers left to finish that were due before the break, and I wanted to get a head start on my psych paper that wasn’t due until the end of the term. It was a beast, made even more unbearable because I had yet to compile even a short list of topics. If the professor had given us the slightest indication of the direction she’d wanted us to take, it would have been much easier. Then again, by this stage of the game, she probably assumed we were capable of building our own ideas and exploring the topics that interested us as a whole. And I would have been, if not for the needy little boy I’d allowed to take up every bit of my free time.
I pulled out a yellow legal pad to start free writing. It wouldn’t produce anything, but maybe it would allow me to get past the wall I’d created in my mind.
That didn’t last long. Every time Brandon slammed a pan on the stove or thwacked the knife too hard on the bamboo cutting board, my pen scribbled across the paper like a needle being dragged along the surface of a vinyl record. By the time I had six jagged lines and only three ideas, I slapped my pen onto the table. “Okay, that’s e-fucking-nough. Get your ass over here and tell me what’s going on.”
“You didn’t want to talk about it,” Brandon sniped.
“Yeah, and now I do.” I started packing up my books and binders. “I thought you were trying to get me to dish about my relationship and I don’t work that way. But it’s obvious to me there’s something bugging you, beyond the soundtrack of Zach and Daniel’s exploits. So, what gives?”
Brandon ignored me while he stirred the sauce. I stared at him as he pulled a spoon out of the drawer to taste it. I rolled my eyes when he shook a little of this and a bit of that into the pot. Seriously, we were college kids, we didn’t need a gourmet dinner. Before joining me in the lounge, Brandon grabbed two beers out of the fridge. I wasn’t much of a drinker—something Zach and Daniel loved to give me shit about—but if he thought this was a conversation better had over drinks, I wasn’t going to argue. Besides, maybeheneeded a bit of liquid courage, and I wasn’t going to make him drink alone.
“I just want to understand what you guys do,” Brandon said as he flopped onto the couch. He groaned, scrubbing a hand over his face. “No, that came out wrong. I donotwant to know the details of what you do behind closed doors, but I want to understand.”
“Why?” How much I shared with him depended on his motivation. I would still protect Chase at all costs.
“Because Matt’s been talking about some stuff and I’m trying to get it, I really am, but I don’t know man.” Brandon groaned, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. I felt bad for the guy as he twisted his fingers through his hair. There was nothing I could say to reassure him; he needed time to figure out what he wanted to say and then he’d talk. “The calling me Daddy stuff was a joke at first. Hell, he called me Daddy before we were even fooling around. Once we did start sleeping together, it was weird but hot. But now…he makes all these off-handed comments like he’s trying to test me.”
“How so?”
“Like, the other day I came home from class and he was sitting on the floor putting together a puzzle while he watched cartoons. He looked up at me and said,hi, Daddy. And then he just watched me like he was waiting for a reaction.” He stared straight ahead. “What am I supposed to say?”
“Maybe you could talk to him about it?” I snickered, remembering having a conversation just like this with my uncle. Of course, I hadn’t taken his advice, but Chase and I were in a different place than Matt and Brandon.
They’d never come out and admitted they were fucking, but it had been obvious to all of us. They were buddies when the school year started, but before fall break, it had been hard to miss the way they looked at one another. Hell, I’d thought they’d been together since the first time I met them, but they were apparently slow to feel the sexual tension that followed the two of them around. “It sucks, but sometimes you have to just sit down and ask him where he sees things going.”
“Was it weird for you?” Brandon still wouldn’t look at me. He took a long draw off his beer. “The baby stuff, I mean. Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it, I think.”
“There was a little bit of awkward when I first realized Chase was little,” I admitted. As long as I focused more on my own feelings, I wasn’t saying anything that could get me in trouble. “But it didn’t take long for everything to make sense. It’s not weird, it’s just who he is. And now, I’m not sure I could ever see him without his little side.”
“But what about…” Brandon’s cheeks turned red as he tipped back his bottle.
