“Why not?” Olly asked. “Looks like we’re both fans.”
“I don’t think we like him for the same reasons,” I told him, my gut clenching. This was the moment. I had to come out to him. What was he going to do? Mock me? Beat me? Call me disgusting and run away?
Olly shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I like his abs. I wish I could get mine to look like that.”
My gaze dipped to the front of his white t-shirt unwillingly, then up again. From what I remembered, Olly wasn’t badly off in that department. He’d been the star football player at our high school before he got offered a fancy scholarship somewhere else and moved away. Half the school had been devastated.
Me and my friends had had a party. Alright, so it was more of a gathering – three of us and a small cupcake from the local grocery store, cut into thirds – but we’d celebrated. It had been the end of the torture he’d subjected us all to, him and his friends. Except most of them had stayed behind, and honestly, things had gotten worse from that point on.
Wait. Why was he talking about abs? Specifically, about liking them?
I furrowed my brow at him. “You know?”
He dropped his gaze to look at me. “That you’re gay?”
I nodded wordlessly. I didn’t want to say anything. It was like I was standing on a sheet of ice, waiting for it to crack. No need to move and risk breaking it quicker.
“Yeah. I know.” Olly sat down on his bed. I guessed he was finished with unpacking. That had taken all of three minutes. “I still talk to some of the guys on the team. They told me about how you came out last year. All the drama.”
I chuckled mirthlessly. I doubted very much that any of the football team really knew about ‘all’ the drama. “And you’re not freaking out?” I had to be sure. This all seemed way too easy. That wasn’t the Oliver Harvey I knew.
Olly shook his head, his brow creased. “Why would I freak out about that?” he asked.
I felt like I was going to have to keep spelling things out for him. This was going to get tedious really quick. I wasn’t interested in babysitting some dumb jock all year round. “Because we’re sharing a room together.” I raised an eyebrow, pointing at his bed.
“So?”
I sighed. Was he really going to make this hard? “I know what you’re like, Oliver. I went to school with you.”
He made a restless movement, looking away from me. “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. And it’s Olly, not Oliver.”
As if he’d really changed all that much. I was willing to accept there was a chance he had made friends with a gay guy somewhere along the way and realized that we weren’t all that bad, but there was no way he was a different person. I imagined it must have been a fellow football player. So long as the guy was good at sports, he would have been accepted no matter what.
“Whatever,” I said, brushing it all off. It didn’t matter, did it? Because we weren’t going to be staying together for very long. “I’ll go talk to the Dean in the morning and see if we can get a switch. It’s early in the year, so I bet there will be a lot of people applying soon, and we’ll be able to swap.”
“You mean, swap rooms?” Olly asked. I looked back at him. Why did he look so hurt? He had to have known how I would react.
“Of course,” I said. Didn’t he want this too? “They made a mistake. They can’t expect us to share a room all year. Not with our past.”
Olly shifted uncomfortably. For a second I thought he was going to do something awful like tell me again how he was a changed man.
“Right,” he said eventually.
I studied him, sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms hanging loosely over his knees and his head down. I could still make out his profile. He was handsome. He always had been. He had blond hair and blue eyes and cheekbones that made him the all-American star that football teams seemed to love. Or maybe football fans. From what I remembered in high school, he’d had his fair share of cheerleaders.
He was handsome, and I was sure he’d developed his body a lot more since we last met. His arms were buff, muscles swelling under the lines of the shirt he was wearing. Typical jock, just wearing a t-shirt and nothing else in the fall weather.
I looked away. I didn’t want to take in his body and how hot he looked. I knew from experience that looks could be deceiving. Hot or not, Olly Harvey was not the kind of guy I wanted to be sharing a room with.
In fact, if he was hot, that was only going to make things worse.
“Is there any chance,” Olly started suddenly, but I cut him off.
“Hold on,” I said. My phone had started buzzing at the exact same moment. “I’m getting a call from my sister.”
“Oh,” was all he said as I grabbed the phone and got up, walking out of the room.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said, a moment before I answered the call.
