“You think that’s bad?” I lean back in my chair and cross my arms. “I had to live across the hall from you for sixteen years. You want to talk about images you can’t unscrub from your brain? How about the time I walked into the bathroom and found you with that magazine and?—”
“Okay! Okay.” Marvin holds up both hands, his face contorting. “We’re done. This conversation is over. Goodnight.”
“You brought it up.”
“And I’m putting it down. Permanently. In a hole. Six feet deep.” He grabs his bottle and takes a long, aggressive swig. “I’m hanging up now.”
“Goodnight, Marvin.”
“Goodnight, you delinquent.”
His free hand rises to the camera, middle finger extended with the ease of someone who has been flipping off his younger brother since birth. The city blazes behind him, and then the screen goes black.
I sit in the quiet of my dorm room for a while, staring at the darkened Skype window. Jackson’s side of the room is empty; he’s at the Hockey House for the night, which means I have the space to myself. The silence is vast after the sensory onslaught of Marvin’s Manhattan backdrop.
I close my laptop and lean back, letting my head rest against the headrest. The ceiling above me is unremarkable—white plaster, a single overhead light, a hairline crack that runs from the fixture to the corner. Nothing to map. Nothing to name.
But I’m smiling. And I can’t seem to stop.
16
OLIVER
The basement of the library has been purgatory for seven days straight, but it turns out the real hell has been waiting for me back at the Hockey House.
“Oh God, Principal Montgomery, yes!” Gerard’s voice carries through the wall between our rooms in surround sound.
I press my pillow over my face and contemplate jumping out of the window. It’s eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night. I have to be back in that dusty archival nightmare in eight hours. And my best friend is getting railed by his boyfriend while apparently still living out his “Breakfast Club” fantasy.
“Detention has never felt so good!”
I groan into the pillow. The walls in the Hockey House are thin—we’ve all accepted this as an unfortunate reality of communal living—but Gerard has the vocal projection of someone who genuinely believes the back row needs to hear every word.
A rhythmic thumping joins the symphony. I abandon the pillow strategy and reach for my phone, jamming my earbuds in. I need to listen to something loud and aggressive that will drown out the sounds of Gerard discovering new positions.
The bass kicks in, pounding through my skull, and for ablessed moment, there’s nothing but drums and distorted guitars. I crank the volume until my eardrums bleed. But even with the music maxed out, my brain won’t shut off. It keeps drifting back to the archives. To Ryan, sitting across from me at that dusty table, the lamplight catching the honey tones in his hazel eyes. To the way he’d opened up about his mom, his family, his loneliness. To the confession that he’d never been kissed.
Ryan Abrams, with his vintage clothes, his quiet dignity, and his smile that appears so rarely it’s a gift when it does, has never felt someone else’s lips against his own. Has never experienced that rush of connection, that electric moment when breath mingles and boundaries dissolve.
My hand drifts down my stomach before I consciously decide to move it.
The music continues thumping in my ears, but my mind is elsewhere now. Constructing. Imagining. Building a fantasy from the raw materials of the past week.
I picture the pool. Ryan and I, the water glowing blue around us, moonlight streaming through the glass walls. In my fantasy, Ryan isn’t hunched with self-consciousness the way he was that night. He’s confident. Relaxed, even. His lean body cuts through the water as he swims toward me, droplets clinging to his collarbones and glistening like diamonds.
The elastic waistband catches briefly on my hips before sliding down with a soft snap, pooling in a rumpled heap where my feet meet the mattress. The cool air of my bedroom raises goosebumps along newly exposed skin.
“Oliver,” fantasy-Ryan says, his voice low and intimate, nothing like the careful politeness he usually maintains. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
I wrap my fingers around my hardening cock, stroking slowly, while I close the distance between us in my fantasy. The water is warm, lapping against our chests as I cup his face in my hands. His skin is cool from the pool, but his eyes are burning.
“Can I kiss you?” I ask because even in a masturbatory dream,I need his permission. Need to know he wants this as much as I do.
“Please,” he whispers.
The first press of lips is gentle. I imagine the tiny gasp he’d make, the way his fingers would curl against my shoulders as he steadies himself. He’s never done this before, and I want to make it perfect for him. Want to show him what it can feel like when someone takes their time, when someone cares.
My grip tightens around my shaft, thumb swiping over the head where precome has already started to gather.
