Chapter Thirteen
When they returned to the fraternity house that night, a party was in full swing. He and Travis had collected eight checks total, and while none were nearly as generous as Eric’s, they had managed to scrape together a fair amount of cash. Plus a free meal, since the last alumnus they visited insisted on taking them out to dinner.
Girls crowded the house, the guys being obnoxiously loud to impress them. Tim walked from room to room, hoping to tell Quentin the good news. He lost Travis somewhere along the way, but wasn’t worried. The day had been nice, Eric’s fat check cheering Travis up and returning everything to normal.
Tim failed to find Quentin, who was probably boning some sorority girl. Not in the mood for the noise after such a long day, Tim grabbed a beer and headed to his room. To his surprise, Travis was already in bed.
“Yeah, I’m tired too,” Tim said, finding an old envelope for the checks and stashing them in a drawer. When he turned around, Travis patted the bed. An invitation—even if he appeared scared shitless.
“Oh!” Tim grinned and headed straight for him.
“Is the door locked?”
He made sure it was, stripping off his clothes on the way back. Then he slid between the sheets and wrapped his arms around one hundred and ninety pounds of pure Kentucky muscle.
When they awoke the next morning, neither had the smell of stale alcohol on their breath, nor did Travis jolt upright and give a tired speech of regret. Instead he rolled over to see if Tim was awake, his grin goofy when their eyes met.
“Good morning,” Tim murmured.
“Morning!”
“How do you feel?”
For a moment the grin faltered. They weren’t out of the woods quite yet. “It’s a lot better when I can actually remember what we did.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Ready for round two?”
But the longhorn cut these plans short.
“Another fund-raising day,” Tim said with a sigh. “Hey, maybe Quentin will give us the day off once he sees what we came back with.”
They felt self-assured enough that they took showers—separately to Tim’s dismay—before heading downstairs to the common room. Quentin was already dishing out new assignments or criticizing poor performance. When he noticed Tim standing there he waved him over.
“How did you do?”
“See for yourself.” Tim handed him the envelope. Quentin shifted through the checks one by one, grunting after reading each number. Then he got to Eric’s check, which Tim had intentionally put last in the pile.
“Holy shit!”
Tim grinned. “I know, right? Pretty sweet!”
“And it’s from the faggot! What’d you do, suck his dick?”
Tim’s face fell. “Dude. That’s not cool.”
Quentin shrugged, still beaming at the check. “I’m joking. I know you didn’t go down on the old geezer.”
Tim felt heat rising. “Eric’s a brother. You shouldn’t talk about him like that.”
Quentin reluctantly pulled his eyes away from all those zeros. “He’s not a brother. Do you know what he did?”
“I don’t care,” Tim said.
“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Quentin said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Eric Conroy was a brother once, until he was caught sucking off the pledges. He was taking advantage of his status to blow most of them before he got caught.”
“Bullshit!”
Quentin’s brow came together. “Are you calling me a liar, Wyman?”
“I’m saying the story doesn’t add up. Eric was sucking off a bunch of straight guys against their will? How does that work? If some guy put your dick in his mouth, would you get hard?”
“A mouth is a mouth,” one of the brothers shouted with a cackle.
“Just put a wig on the faggot,” another said. “Or a paper bag with a hole in it.”
Tim ignored them, still holding Quentin’s glare. “Well, would you get hard?”
“Hell no!” Quentin snarled.
“There you go. The story is bullshit, so stop bad-mouthing him.”
Face red, Quentin stared long and hard at Tim before he spoke. “You’re lucky I’m your Big. Now get back out there and finish the list.”
“Fine.”
“Hey,” Quentin called after him.
Tim turned around. “Yeah?”
“Good job getting the queer’s money.”
Tim shook his head and left, the chorus of laughter drowned out by the drumming in his ears. What an asshole! What sucked most is that Quentin could be so cool. He had sponsored Tim during the rush, acting as his Big. This meant he helped Tim, his Little, get through and avoid the early pitfalls new brothers are tricked into. Quentin did it mostly because Tim was a legacy, but he could be a warm and protective guy. Except, apparently, when it came to this. Tim wanted to believe that Quentin was only harping on Eric because he had been kicked out, but the homophobic slurs were impossible to ignore.
Quentin had met Eric once and seen how nice he was, which made Tim even angrier. He couldn’t tolerate ignorance like that. Not since Ben. What if Quentin had been talking about Ben just now? Or Travis, who had overheard everything and was no doubt freaking out.
Tim hurried back to their room, which was empty, then checked out the rest of the house. Only when Tim walked out into the yard did he spot Travis sitting morosely on the curb.
“People talk shit,” Tim said, standing behind him. “It comes with the territory.”
Travis didn’t respond.
Tim’s patience exhausted, he left to get the car. Then he took Travis to breakfast but didn’t try to make conversation. The tables around them were full of parents and kids. Travis fixated on these families like his future was calling to him.
The day went downhill from there. Every house they visited had family photos on the wall. Wives brought in drinks while the husbands chatted with them about the good ol’ days. The background sounds of children playing only drove the point home.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just when Travis was coming around, all this stupid fund-raising had come along and wrecked it. Eric, Quentin, all of it made Tim’s mood grow dark as the day wore on. When they were finally through visiting the alumni, that anger found a target.
Quentin.
He could have accepted Eric’s donation with grace. Here was a guy who, despite being kicked out of the fraternity and treated as a joke, still gave an enormous amount of money to them. And Quentin had stood in front of everyone and talked trash about him like an ungrateful dick. Tim wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
Once they were back at the fraternity house, Travis slunk off somewhere while Tim put in an appearance to show the other brothers that everything was cool. He was even friendly to Quentin, giving him the day’s checks and asking how the others had done. Then Tim made himself a sandwich and ate it in the common room, keeping watch until Quentin took the envelopes upstairs.
That’s all he needed to know. Quentin had the only bedroom on the first floor—a sprawling space on one corner of the building. He wasn’t keeping the checks there. That left the second floor office. Tim sat around, watching a movie and waiting until most of the brothers went out for drinks or on dates. Then he went upstairs.
The office door was locked, but the doorknobs were the cheap kind that could be picked by inserting a paperclip into the hole. The brothers trusted each other; such flimsy precautions were only to keep visitors out. Tim picked the lock and slipped inside the office, locking the door after him. There weren’t many places to look. Aside from a computer and desk, the office was furnished with filing cabinets stuffed with paperwork. Tim searched those first, finding the section with the current year written on it. Soon he had a fistful of checks, but he only sifted through them until he found Eric’s. Then he folded it and put it in his back pocket.
He thought about taking the check to the bathroom and burning it, but he felt Eric was owed more than just his money back. Hopping in his car, Tim headed for the outskirts of Austin.
* * * * *
Tim found himself not in the luxurious front room with its burgundy and gold-threaded couches, but deeper in Eric’s home in what was introduced as the living room. One wall was dominated by bookshelves of different widths, between them equally tall and narrow windows that also varied in breadth. A couch and a number of armchairs filled the rest of the space, with thick carpets cast seemingly at random across the hardwood floors.
“Do you recognize it?” Eric asked, nodding to the shelves. “This room is also inspired by one of my favorite paintings.”
Tim was at a total loss in regard to both the right answer and the situation. He had imagined speaking to Eric at his front door, but the older man had greeted him with enthusiasm, practically dragging him inside when they shook hands.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, grasping for anything. He considered the windows, how lights in the yard lit them from behind like stained glass. “It sort of reminds me of a forest, how trees form dark lines and the empty gaps between them glow.”
“Exactly!” Eric gently turned him by the shoulder so Tim faced the opposite wall. There hung a painting of a woman riding through the woods, except something was amiss, because it wasn’t clear if the woman was in front of the trees or behind them or entirely there at all. “René Magritte’s Le Blanc-Seing. The bookshelves are trees, the windows— Well, you’ve already figured it out. Here, sit down.”
Tim was directed to a couch, its fabric the same color as the horse in the painting. Eric took a seat in one of the comfortable chairs across from him, cheeks warm and red as if he had enjoyed a glass or two of wine.
“You have an artistic eye,” Eric said. “Do you draw? Or paint?”
“Uh, listen,” Tim said. “I really need to get something off my chest.” He stood enough to get the folded check from his jeans pocket and stretched out his arm, handing it to Eric.
“What’s this?”
“Your check. You were right about the fraternity. They are a bunch of homophobic assholes.” Tim sighed. “Well, not all of them, but they don’t deserve your money.”
“I take it you heard the gruesome legend of Eric Conroy?”
Tim nodded.
“Well, go on. No doubt it’s changed since the last time I heard it.”
The idea of repeating the story made Tim uncomfortable, so he tried to present it in the most polite language. “They said that you were taking advantage of pledges, uh, sexually. But it didn’t make sense, because the pledges weren’t the ones pleasing you. Um.”
“I was sucking their dicks?” Eric said candidly.
“Yeah.”
“Thrilling.” Eric rolled his eyes. “Next time I hear the story I’ll probably be sodomizing the entire fraternity against their will.”
Tim shook his head. “It’s stupid because it’s not like there aren’t gay brothers in the fraternity. One night I got up the guts to visit Oilcan Harry’s, the gay bar in the warehouse district.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“Oh. Well, I walked in and almost had a heart attack because one of my fraternity brothers was sitting right there at the bar.”
Eric snorted. “What did you do?”
“Uh.” Tim scratched the back of his head. “Ended up getting it on in his car. He didn’t even recognize me until afterwards.”
Eric laughed so hard he started coughing. “And I take it he’s not the only one? Your friend Travis, for instance.”
“Exactly. The guy at the bar has since graduated, but there’s at least one other besides us, and that’s a story I’m definitely not telling.”
“At least not sober,” Eric said. “If you weren’t driving I’d offer you a drink.”
“Thanks anyway,” Tim said.
Unfolding the check, Eric studied it. “I take it you’re still in the closet?”
“That’s the other thing,” Tim said. “I acted like Alpha Theta Sigma was all progressive just because I’m gay, but none of them really know. That was misleading of me.”
Eric shrugged. “I’ve never needed any help in leaping to conclusions.” He looked up from the check to consider Tim. “For someone in the closet, you seem very comfortable with your sexuality.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice.” Tim saluted. “Proud closet case since I was seventeen!”
Eric gestured for him to continue.
Tim shook his head. “It’s a long story.”
“Then you have time for that beer after all.”
And when Eric came back with an ice cold bottle, plus a glass of wine for himself, Tim told him everything. Talking about Ben again, even saying his name aloud, opened up so many old wounds. Those old emotions, both good and bad, had never left him completely. Even though he tried to kill them—turn his heart to ice—all he had really done was enter a fragile denial. These days he didn’t suffocate his feelings. Like the dull throb of a toothache never tended to, Tim had slowly learned to live with the pain.
“You know what the worst part is? I still remember that feeling when we first moved to Texas. All the potential I saw, how my life was going to be bigger and better. When I was with Ben, it was. Everything else was Kansas, act two. Darryl was just another Brody, Stacy another Carla. The only new thing was Ben. Once he was gone, the same boring pattern repeated itself. Even now. Quentin might as well be Darryl or whoever.”
“Except now you have Travis.”
Tim didn’t respond to this. There was no comparison to Ben. Instead he took a swig of beer and said, “What’s it say about a person when they know they have a problem but never do anything to fix it?”
Eric smiled. “That they’re human.”
Tim shifted in his seat and stretched, stiff from sitting for so long. “Man, I’ve just been rambling on and on about myself. Sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. I enjoyed it.”
“It’s been one-sided though. Tell me about your life.”
“Well, I’m usually in bed by now,” Eric said.
“Oh! Sorry.”
“But if you let me take you to dinner tomorrow, I’ll talk your ear off.”
Tim paused. “Are you asking me on a date?”
“You think you’re man enough to handle me?” Eric winked. “No, no strings attached. Just a nice meal and an old man droning on about all his regrets.”
Somehow Tim doubted it would be anywhere near that boring. “Then it’s a non-date!” he said as he stood.
Eric walked him to the front door, fussing over Tim being able to drive, but he’d only had the one beer. Life at a fraternity meant he had a high tolerance. He was below the legal limit anyway.
“You can have this back,” Eric said, holding out the check.
Tim shook his head. “They don’t deserve it.”
“You’re one of them, and I think you do. Besides, won’t someone notice it missing?”
“I don’t care.”
“But I do,” Eric said, shoving it in his hand. “Please. I can’t stand the thought of you living without air conditioning or a roof over your head.”
They laughed together, and Tim gave in. He would accept the donation, but he wasn’t going to let his brothers bad-mouth Eric again. Maybe he could even find a way to stop them telling that horrible story. Of course he would need to know the truth first.
“I’m holding you to that non-date,” Tim said.
“You name the hour, I’ll choose the place.”
“Okay.” Tim nudged him playfully. “Don’t stand me up!”
“The pretty ones are always the most insecure,” Eric teased.
They said goodbye, and despite how crappy the day had started, Tim grinned most of the drive home.
* * * * *
Tim was dozing off when something thudded against the door to his room. From the snort and the hissing laughter that followed, the smart money was on Travis. His country boy crush had made himself scarce the last couple of days. Tim hadn’t seen him at all Monday or Tuesday, even though there were little signs in their room that Travis had come in late and gotten up early, just to avoid him.
But now Travis had abandoned these tactics, stumbling into the room, shutting the door behind him with a bang, and tromping over to Tim’s bed. Keeping his back to the room, Tim was determined to ignore the racket, but a heavy weight fell halfway on top of him.
“Are you sleeping?” Travis said, throwing an arm around him. His breath smelled like rubbing alcohol.
“No.” Tim replied, straining to breathe. Travis was heavy!
“I’m sorry.” Travis kissed his neck, his lips sloppy and wet. “I just got a little scared. I want to be with you.”
The way he ground his crotch against Tim’s back left little question as to what he wanted. They were entering familiar territory, but Tim wasn’t eager to return there.
“Let me up. I have to take a piss.”
“And then you’re coming back?” Travis slurred.
“Yeah.” The weight rolled off him. Tim got out of bed, surprised by how wasted Travis looked. His hair was a mess, mud smeared one cheek, and a couple leaves were stuck to his shirt, like he had just crawled out of the gutter. Tim started unbuttoning Travis’s shirt, the fabric damp in places with something strong, like whisky.
“You get naked too,” Travis said.
Tim was wearing only a pair of flannel boxers, so he wouldn’t have far to go, but he focused on undressing Travis instead. Then, dodging a few kisses, Tim managed to get him over to his own bed. Travis wouldn’t lie down completely, instead reaching out and trying to pull Tim down with him.
“I have to pee,” Tim reminded him. “I’ll be right back.”
“Hurry.” Travis fell backward carelessly.
“I will.” Tim left the room and slid to the floor with his back against the closed door. Travis was drunk enough that he should pass out quickly. All Tim had to do was wait.
They couldn’t do this anymore. Nothing would change if Tim allowed Travis to use alcohol as an excuse to do what he wanted, to be who he really was. Besides, it wasn’t gratifying to be with someone who would only sleep with him when wasted. Even though Tim’s body wanted to give in, he was cutting Travis off. They could be together sober or not at all.
When he was sure enough time had passed, Tim quietly reentered the room to a chorus of nasal snores. Travis still lay above the sheets, so Tim took the blankets from his own bed and covered him. Then he lay down next to his country boy and held him—just for a little while.