Chapter One
“An hour,” Mark Cooper said. Brandon watched as Mark flopped onto Deacon’s neatly made bed and stretched, rumpling the covers. “I can stay an hour, and then I need to go back to Alpha Delt. It’s our mixer tonight as well, you know.”
Brandon raised his brows at the open window. From the Alpha Delta Phi house next door, music was blasting and it wasn’t even dark yet. Brandon already had a headache. “Oh, trust me, we know. The whole campus knows.”
Deacon Holt snorted from his desk. He balled up a piece of notepaper and threw it at Mark. “Are you guys going to be the neighbors from hell again this year?”
“Shut up, nerds.” Mark grinned then sat up suddenly. “I was supposed to ask if someone could come and help us with our Internet.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Deacon asked.
Mark shrugged. “I dunno. Blake thinks we broke it by downloading too much porn.”
“Under normal circumstances I’d say that’s not even possible,” Deacon said. “But with you guys…”
“I know, right?” Mark’s smile turned wicked.
“Okaaaay.” Brandon rose. “I think it’s time I leave before you two get—”
“Freaky?” Mark suggested.
“Ew.” Brandon rolled his eyes. “I was going to keep it clean and say distracted. I’ll catch you downstairs.”
He made sure he closed the door behind him when he left. Mark and Deacon could get kind of…demonstrative, which was cool and everything. Brandon just wasn’t good with PDAs.
He headed down the stairs to see if the guys needed a hand setting up. Not like Phi Sig’s mixer would require much planning—board games and soda was about as rowdy as it got around here, which was how Brandon liked it. He’d pledged Alpha Delta last year, and it had been a disaster. God. He still hated going over there to visit Mark. Just catching a glimpse of the basement door sent something creeping under his skin.
But Bengal, last year’s pledge trainer, was out of Alpha Delt now, and not in a position to be an asshole to the newbies like he had been to Brandon. The guys over there could still be douches, but they were mostly okay. Some of them were actually friendly to Brandon. A lot of that had to do with Mark.
Alpha Delta and Phi Sig had once waged a legendary rivalry, which Mark had blatantly ignored. When it had come out that he was not only gay but sleeping with a guy from Phi Sig, it kind of made the whole feud seem stupid. Like some of the guys on both sides had thought they should be angry about it, and then realized how dumb that sounded. It was the frat war that had ended with a whimper instead of a bang, and Alpha Delta Phi and Phi Sigma Kappa went from sworn enemies to uneasy neighbors in the space of an academic year. They didn’t exactly have an open-door policy, but it wasn’t pistols at dawn anymore either.
When Brandon dropped out of pledging Alpha Delt, he’d felt like a failure. His dad had always told him he needed to be in a fraternity. All those executives on the Fortune 500 list? Frat guys. Or 80 percent of them, or something. So Brandon had failed, which hadn’t come as a great surprise to him—or to his dad—but he’d been gutted. He’d tried so hard, and just because Bengal had put him in the fucking basement that night…
Anyway, Mark had come through for Brandon in the end. And Deacon. A spot had opened up in Phi Sig, and they’d invited Brandon to join. And now it felt like home. He wasn’t always on guard like he’d been when he was pledging Alpha Delt, or feeling like he had something to prove. The guys at Phi Sig didn’t care about how much beer you could drink or how often you got laid. They really only cared that you didn’t accidentally record over last week’s Stargate Atlantis marathon on SyFy.
Tony and James were in the common room, tipping bags of ice into large coolers packed with sodas.
“Do you guys need a hand?” Brandon asked.
Tony wiped his hands on his jeans. “I think we’re good. Pete’s gone to get more chips and dip and stuff.”
A nose nuzzled around the knees of Brandon’s jeans. He dropped his hand and rubbed the dog’s head. “Hey, Anabelle.”
Her tail thumped against the arm of the sofa.
“Actually…” Tony said.
“Yeah?”
“She’s pretty stinky. I guess she could do with a bath.”
“I can do that.” Brandon grinned. “Come on, girl!”
He slapped his thigh and headed for the back door. Anabelle waddled after him. She was getting fat too. Man, nobody was sticking to that “No leftovers for the dog” rule.
Brandon held the back door open for her, and caught her by the collar when she finally figured out what was going on.
“You’re a Labrador,” he reminded her and he hauled her over toward the hose. “You like water.”
She showed him her sad eyes.
“Don’t be like that,” Brandon said, and she sighed. He turned on the water, and Anabelle stood there, legs stiff and snout raised, while he hosed her down. They both turned up their noses at the dog shampoo—it smelled like apples. When had dog shampoo started to smell like people shampoo? Affluenza was so widespread it was affecting pets now. Talk about a first-world problem.
He lathered Anabelle’s coat, paying attention to her ears and the base of her tail. She got lots of itches there, which the apple shampoo promised to soothe.
“You gonna make friends at the party tonight?” he asked her.
She stared stoically ahead as he rinsed her.
“Probably more than me.”
Brandon was not good with people. He wasn’t confident enough to walk up to someone, introduce himself, and ask to hang out. Some guys could get away with that, but Brandon wasn’t one of them. If he ever tried it, he knew it would smack of desperation. But tonight he was a representative of Phi Sig and had to do his best to make the rushees feel welcome. It should have been some consolation that most of them would be just as nervous as he was, but it wasn’t.
“Maybe we can go and hide in my room,” he suggested to Anabelle. He pulled her towel off the peg by the hose reel and began to wipe her down. Her tail thumped against his knees. “Yeah, you like this part.”
The idea of hiding in his room was way too tempting. Except he knew Deacon wouldn’t let him get away with it for long. Deacon was a nice guy, and he’d looked out for Brandon ever since he’d joined Phi Sig. It rankled a little, sometimes, since Brandon knew Mark must have said something to him. Slapped a flashing neon sign on his introverted back: CAUTION: SHY! Or worse, CAUTION: MENTALLY FUCKED UP! But at least Deacon didn’t make a big deal out of Brandon’s shyness. Sometimes Brandon even thought Deacon liked looking out for him.
Brandon hung Anabelle’s towel up again and wrapped her leash around his wrist before she raced off to roll in the dirt.
“No,” he told her firmly. “Tonight you can smell like apple blossoms instead of mud.”
Anabelle huffed at him mournfully.
* * * *
Two hours later Brandon was hiding in his room. He’d made it through the first hour of the Phi Sig Meet and Greet before he’d run out of things to say and gotten the hell out. He sat on his bed with a book, pretending he wasn’t really hiding—he was studying—and he didn’t really need to be downstairs at all.
Next door at the Alpha Delt house, the bass was pumping and people were cheering. Brandon rolled his eyes at the noise before the disparate threads of it joined together into a chant: “Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark!”
Brandon crossed the floor and stuck his head out the window, but he couldn’t see anything from here except the back corner of Alpha Delt. God. He hoped Mark wasn’t on the roof or something stupid.
A victorious cheer rose, and Brandon sighed with relief. Whatever dumb thing Mark had done, at least he hadn’t broken his neck doing it. Yet.
A few minutes later someone knocked at the door.
“Come in.”
Deacon stepped inside, holding his phone. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah. What’s he doing?”
“Surfing.” Deacon sat beside him and held out his phone.
There was a blurred picture of Mark. On a surfboard. In the pool.
“And…” Deacon snorted. “Yes, we have video.”
They both watched, wincing, as Mark took a run up, jumped onto the surfboard, and rode it the length of the pool as the crowd cheered him on.
“He’s going to kill himself,” Brandon said, at the same time as Deacon said, “Crack his head open and die.”
They watched the video again.
Deacon shook his head. “You’d tell me, right, if I was being paranoid? I mean, that’s an incredibly stupid thing to do, isn’t it? It’s not just me.”
“No. It’s incredibly stupid.”
“I am going to kick his ass,” Deacon said, then corrected himself. “Arse.”
Brandon grinned. Mark didn’t have pet peeves so much as an entire menagerie of peeves, but first and foremost was the word ass. He’d been training Deacon out of its use for about a year now.
“Look,” he’d said last night at the bar, “I’ll eat your fries instead of chips, and I’ll learn what the difference is between a gallon and a liter, and how far it takes to walk a mile instead of a kilometer, but you will never take my arse away from me. Are we clear?”
“I wouldn’t dream of taking your arse,” Deacon had said, while Brandon had tried to pretend the conversation wasn’t happening.
Mark had sucked ketchup off his finger. “Actually, Deke, you can take my arse whenever you like, as long as you pronounce it right.”
Brandon had blushed as bright red as the ketchup, he was sure. Mark didn’t have much of a filter. He said whatever the hell he wanted and thought he could get away with it just because he had a cool accent and a wicked smile. And most of the time he was absolutely right.
Brandon sometimes envied his friend’s uninhibited nature. And then he remembered it led to riding a surfboard the length of a pool with a beer in each hand, and, following that scenario to its logical conclusion, would very probably end with a visit to the emergency room and a bunch of stitches.
Mark was crazy, which worked for him but was not Brandon’s thing at all.
“Sometimes I don’t even know why we’re friends,” he said jokingly, feeling a little uncomfortable when Deacon looked at him. Heat rose in his face. God, did Deacon think he needed his self-esteem boosted or, worse, that he was fishing for compliments? He forced a laugh. “Because he is cray-zee!”
Deacon laughed, and looked at his phone again. “Yeah,” he said, like he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Yeah he is.”
* * * *
Brandon wasn’t sure how it had happened, but somehow Deacon had managed to get him downstairs again, and suddenly he was mingling.
“Just mingle,” his mother used to say, waving her hand at a full room as though it was nothing to be worried about. Her smile was a little too bright though, a little too manic, as though she was afraid he’d ruin it. Milford was a small town, and everybody knew about Brandon and Mr. Fenimore. That was the worst part. In a city, maybe Brandon could have been anonymous, but not here. Even though his name was kept out of the paper, everybody knew.
After the trial, Brandon had begged his parents to move towns, or to at least let him change schools. But his dad was the town’s only optometrist, and he couldn’t just pack up and go. They didn’t have the money for boarding school, and they couldn’t send Brandon to St. Mary’s. They weren’t Catholic.
Brandon would have been Catholic in a fucking heartbeat if it had meant not having to walk back into his old school. He’d gone from being a reasonably popular kid to a leper, all in the space of a few months. First he wasn’t invited to birthday parties and sleepovers anymore, and then kids stopped coming to his, and somehow he became that kid—the one with no friends, the loner, the loser—all the way through until he graduated from high school.
He froze as he got caught up in a crush of people. Someone walking by put a hand on Brandon’s shoulder to steady himself as he squeezed past. Nothing threatening about the touch, nothing weird; the guy’s hand was there and then gone. But Brandon suddenly felt too hot. He pushed through the crowd, heading for the stairs, but as soon as he started up, he saw Tony on the landing, showing a group of rushees a video on his phone.
Fuck.
Brandon turned back and headed for the kitchen, not sure what he planned to do there.
He’d told himself Prescott would be a fresh start, but it hadn’t worked out like that. He’d told himself his sophomore year with Phi Sig would be another fresh start, but it had taken Deacon to coax him downstairs to mingle. And now look at him—freaking out because some guy had touched his shoulder. Maybe he’d have to wait until college was done to get that fresh start, or maybe it was never going to happen for him.
He went to fetch a soda from the cooler. A soda was good. It gave him something to do with his hands. He cracked it open as he turned and stepped into a group of rushees. The one closest to him squeaked a warning, but it was too late. Brandon had doused them both in orange soda.
“Shit,” he said, taking in a pair of wide, dark eyes framed by hipster glasses, and a mouth frozen open in surprise. “I’m sorry!”
* * * *
“Omigod.” Alex was sticky and orange. It was even in his shoes. “Omigod.”
“Come with me to the mixer, Alex,” his roommate, Evan, had said. “It’ll be fun!”
Sure.
“I’m sorry,” the guy said again. He looked as guilty as that Labrador, the house dog, had earlier when some seniors had busted her stealing a packet of chips. Alex actually believed him. Maybe this wasn’t some sort of Let’s Be Assholes to the Unsuspecting Freshman game. And really, Phi Sig didn’t seem like that sort of fraternity, but what the hell did Alex know? He’d been at Prescott for all of a week.
“I’ve got a shirt you can borrow,” the guy said. “Come up to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” Alex shot a narrow look at Evan. If I get tied up with duct tape and beaten to death in a hazing ritual gone wrong, remember to tell the police you saw me with this guy last. Which was probably too complicated to convey in a glance to someone he didn’t really know that well.
He followed his assailant up the stairs.
“I’m really sorry,” the guy said again, ushering him into a large bathroom. It was nicer than the ones in the dorms, and for the first time Alex saw the point in rushing a fraternity. It was still a communal bathroom, but it didn’t seem like the sort where you were afraid to walk around barefoot. The stalls actually looked clean.
“It’s okay.” He managed a smile as he reached for the hem of his sodden shirt, a little embarrassed to be taking it off in front of some stranger, but aware he’d look more foolish just standing there drenched in orange soda. Alex pulled his shirt off, dislodging his glasses in the process. When he finally readjusted them, it was just in time to see the guy transferring his stare fixedly to the bathroom tiles.
Cute.
Actually seriously cute.
He was a little taller than Alex—no surprises there, since most of the world was taller than Alex—with hazel eyes, blond hair, and flushed skin.
I officially have a thing for blonds now.
“I’ll go get you that shirt,” the guy said, and disappeared.
“Omigod,” Alex whispered to his reflection. “Do not get a hard-on!”
His reflection never listened.
Alex shoved his shirt into the sink and ran water over it before wringing it out as best he could. By the time he was done, Blondie was back.
“I think we’re about the same size.” He handed the shirt over.
Alex tugged the borrowed shirt on. It smelled like fabric softener, which for some reason struck Alex as incredibly sweet. Blondie used fabric softener in his laundry.
“I’m Alex,” he said, resisting the urge to cover his face with the shirt and just inhale.
“Brandon.”
They shook hands.
“I’m really sorry,” Brandon said again.
“It’s okay.” Alex dropped his gaze for a moment, searching for something else to say. Brandon was cute, and his shirt smelled nice, and Alex wished he had the courage to actually make a move. He was in college now. He was supposed to be brave and open and stuff, wasn’t he? This wasn’t high school anymore. Except Alex didn’t really trust his gaydar yet, and Brandon was giving off some seriously weird vibes.
Not looking when Alex had his shirt off. Specifically not looking. His flushed skin. The way his hand had shaken when he’d passed over the shirt.
Maybe he was straight but curious.
Maybe he was still in the closet.
Or maybe—Alex’s breath caught—maybe Brandon was a virgin too.
Omigod. How awesome would it be if they could be each other’s first time?
Best. Idea. Ever.
* * * *
“Ow! Christ on a fucking bike, owwww!”
Brandon stood by with a pillow while Deacon helped Mark down onto his bed. He still didn’t know if Deacon was going to prop Mark’s ankle with the pillow or smother him with it.
“It’s your own fault,” Deacon said.
“I slipped,” Mark said. “Could have happened to anyone.”
“Blake sent me the pictures. And the video.”
“That fucking Judas.” Mark had no actual rancor in his tone. “I’m dying here, you know. I want some sympathy.”
“You have a sprained ankle.”
“So, no sympathy?” Mark frowned.
Deacon leaned over him and kissed him on the forehead. Then smacked his hip. “No, no sympathy.”
Mark beamed. “So, how did your mixer go anyway?”
“Good,” Deacon said. “I think we’ll get some good pledges out of it. This one kid, Reuben, is like a chess prodigy or something. I mean, he’s won tournaments. I think Theta Chi will extend him a bid too, but it’d be great if he chose us.”
“Huh,” Mark said. “We’re going to go with the guy who can eat eight Fruit by the Foot at once.” He showed Deacon his palms. “He volunteered, I swear. He brought his own Fruit by the Foot. What were we supposed to do?”
“You could have told him not to do it.”
“To be fair, I didn’t know how long a foot was until he’d already started.”
Deacon only shook his head.
Mark shifted as Brandon put the pillow under his ankle. “How’d your night go, Bran?”
“It was okay. Apart from where I accidentally tipped a soda all over some poor freshman, and then he followed me around all night.”
Mark grinned.
“It’s not funny. It was weird.”
Weird like how he’d caught himself staring at the kid’s torso, watching the way the muscles moved under his skin as he pulled his wet shirt off? Yeah. Pretty fucking weird. Brandon cleared his throat before the sick feeling in his stomach had a chance to lodge there.
“Awww.” Mark laughed. “Brandon’s got a stalker!”
“Shut up,” Brandon said.
But he laughed too, because the idea that anyone would stalk him was ridiculous. People on campus barely noticed him, which Brandon supposed should have made him feel a little hurt or something, but it turned out he was more than okay with being invisible.