CHAPTER SIX
Ethan ran through the gym lobby and out the double doors. He almost knocked over an old man, presumably there to use the sauna. Why couldn’t that guy have been in the locker room? Ethan never would’ve given him a second glance. Why had it had to be Greg? Of all eight thousand undergrads and five thousand grad students, why him?
The inner-campus shuttle stopped at the curb, but Ethan needed to walk this off. He forced one foot in front of the other at a clip, traveling down the riverfront path that ran through the heart of the North Campus.
He felt a tsunami of relief when he got to his dorm, safely nestled within South Campus. He bumped into a student in the lobby by the dorm lounge and exchanged quick hellos. If Ethan had been in a better mood, he would have gladly kept talking, but he used the “just came from gym/exhausted” excuse and charged up the stairs to his room.
And he locked the door.
He was home. Away from the gym, from Greg, away from the pitchforks and punches that were sure to come his way once it got out that Ethan Follett gawked at naked guys in the locker room.
“I wasn’t gawking!” he said aloud. It was a one-second glance to check if the coast was clear. And Greg’s amazing ass got in the way.
Amazing ass. Awful person attached.
He collapsed onto his bed and took deep, calming breaths he’d learned from a brief flirtation with yoga last year. He thanked the housing gods he’d gotten a single this year, the last one available in his dorm. Had he been one number lower in the lottery, he would’ve had to share a room with Malcolm Czerny, whose body odor entered a room three seconds before he did.
Ethan reached for his iPad under his pillow and searched for Greg online. He only had a little information, but that was enough to pull up the guy’s social media profile.
Greg Sanderson. Senior. From Short Pump, Virginia. A few seconds in Google Maps assured Ethan that Short Pump wasn’t hick country, but instead a well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C. His profile picture was him skiing with his friends. He wore wraparound shades that somehow brought out his pronounced jawline.
Ethan made his way to the rest of the photos. They were all very typical pictures. Greg didn’t break the mold of rich fratboy; he was the mold. Ethan clicked through pictures of him at parties, him doing a kegstand, him on the beach. In all of them, he was in a group of at least five people. Lemmings. They travelled in packs. And to Ethan’s secret dismay, Greg was fully clothed in all of them.
One picture did stick out from the monotony. Greg was in an elementary school classroom, squatting next to the pint-sized desks and posing with two little girls. It was a sweeter side that Ethan didn’t know Greg was capable of at all.
He laid back on his bed. It was that four o’clock lull in the day, and he let his tiredness creep over him like a blanket. His mind flooded with different images, but they all came back to one.
Greg’s ass.
Ethan kept thinking about it, thinking about doing more than thinking about it. When you had a body like Greg Sanderson’s, it was meant to be ogled and objectified. Straight guys did this to girls all the time; now it was their turn.
Ethan’s lower half tingled, a sensation flooded through him. To one part in particular. Greg’s profile stared back at him from the iPad, and Ethan got lost in those brown eyes for a moment. They were dark and deep, like black holes that couldn’t help but suck Ethan in immediately.
Maybe Greg hadn’t even noticed Ethan looking at him at all.
What if he knew I was looking at his profile now? Ethan turned off his iPad just to be sure.
Φ
A burst of gold and orange setting sun flooded through his window, waking Ethan from his nap. He decided to go to the dining hall solo. His friends were busy with newspaper stuff on Thursday nights, so he was on his own. He wasn’t a fan of eating dinner alone. It brought back too many memories of lonely lunch days in the high school cafeteria. At least in college, kids drifted into the dining hall over a two-hour period, and many of them ate while studying or checking their phones. College dining halls were a place to eat, not a social scene.
He scooped pasta Bolognese onto his plate but then imagined his less-than-impressive physique next to Greg’s. He opted for salad and grilled chicken instead. And a caramel brownie. He could indulge a little.
Ethan scoped out the scene in the half-empty seating area. This was college, he reminded himself. Nobody cared where you sat. He spotted some guys from his dorm at a table in the center, guys he knew and said hi to in the bathroom, but was he good enough friends with them to just walk over and join their table? Ethan wasn’t sure of the etiquette, and he didn’t want to risk the awkward looks if he asked.
Why risk it? All I’m doing is eating.
He grabbed a table against the wall, under a photograph of students from the 1950s. Ethan wondered when men stopped wearing blazers all the time.
He dug into his salad and savored the tangy flavor of the chicken, watching the last bits of sun drift below the horizon. It was a relaxing end to a very eventful day.
Or so Ethan thought.
“Hey, is this seat taken?” Preston asked, fingers tapping against the chair right next to Ethan.
He nearly choked on his salad, but he forced his head to nod. Preston smiled with gratitude, and he couldn’t help notice what a benign and kind smile Preston had. He was a good guy. Not like Greg’s know-it-all smirk.
“Yeah. Go for it.” Ethan moved his water glass and brushed aside any stray crumbs, everything short of rolling out a red carpet.
Preston set down his tray and sat mere inches away. Ethan couldn’t believe his luck. He had to seize this opportunity.
“I lucked out. The stir-fry chef is here tonight. I always forget which day he’s here,” Preston said.
“Monday and Thursday.”
Preston mixed his vegetables with his rice. “Thank goodness it’s Thursday.”
Ethan nodded. And here’s where his mind went blank, as it always did. So many sharp opening lines, so many comments and conversation starters circled inside his head. But it was like they were spinning so fast that they all mushed together to form this indecipherable gray matter. Ethan did not lose the irony of his gray matter running around in his brain’s gray matter. At least he could entertain himself.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dining hall food,” Preston said. He wiped the corners of his mouth after taking a huge bite. He wolfed down food with such class.
“Did you know that the company that provides the dining hall catering also services the Pennsylvania prison system?” Ethan didn’t know how he remembered that, but he’d pulled it out of some dusty drawer in his memory.
“Ha! That makes a lot of sense actually.” Preston laughed to himself as he took a drink of his water.
I made Preston laugh! Everything is happening!
Ethan tried to keep the momentum going. I’ll bet my parents would love knowing I eat as well as prisoners, he thought. But instead, it came out like, “I mean, it’s funny because prisoners are eating the same food as us, but we’re paying tuition.”
Are you serious? Get it together, brain! Ethan wanted to clamp his mouth shut. He wished he were a crumb that could be brushed off the table.
“No, no. I hear you.” Preston looked at Ethan with eyes that were as green as a forest. He wouldn’t mind camping out in them. “You know on Parent’s Weekend, they’ll bring out the five-star meals.”
Ethan shrugged. “Yeah.”
Yeah? That was all he had? He tried to think of something better, something that could carry along this conversation. Any drop of wit he thought he had had evaporated as soon as Preston sat down. He figured Greg would know what to say, even though he and Preston would probably never eat at the same table.
“I can’t believe fall is almost here,” Ethan said. Yes, he was resorting to weather talk. It was his last hope.
“My apartment doesn’t have air conditioning, so I’m looking forward to it.”
“Oh no!”
“It’s okay. The summer hasn’t been terrible.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. Again.
Preston moved his food around the plate, further intermingling rice with stir-fry. He looked at Ethan, then back down at his food. Another awkward silence. Ethan wondered how long his malfunctioning conversational skills would last this time. A whopping two minutes?
“There’s a party tomorrow night,” Preston said. “It’s being thrown by the president of the LGBT group, at his house. Did you hear about it?”
Ethan nodded. He’d seen the invite online, but he’d never gone to an LGBT function. He was out to his friends. Browerton—or, at least, South Campus—was so liberal that nobody made a big deal of it. He just never had the courage to go to a public LGBT event alone. Jessica had offered to go with him a few times, but he never wanted to be one of those gays hiding behind his girl best friend.
“Are you going?” Preston asked, his eyes never wavering from Ethan’s.
“I don’t know.”
“That sounded like a no. Let’s go together. I’ve been to them before, and they’re a lot of fun.”
Preston Waters just asked me to go to a party with him. I’m going to a party with Preston Waters. The sentences scrolled through his mind.
“Sure.” Ethan tried to sound as nonchalant as possible, pulling his lips together to avoid the ginormous smile dying to burst across his face and trying to hide the fact that a bleacher full of screaming fans were cheering at the tops of their lungs inside him. He may not have any flirting skills or experience with dating, but he knew now was a time to play it cool.