Everyone’s got secrets. Some are just harder to hide.
Off Campus
© 2014 Amy Jo Cousins
Bend or Break, Book 1
With his father’s ponzi scheme assets frozen, Tom Worthington believes finishing college is impossible unless he can pay his own way. After months sleeping in his car and gypsy-cabbing for cash, he’s ready to do just that.
But his new, older-student housing comes with an unapologetically gay roommate. Tom doesn’t ask why Reese Anders has been separated from the rest of the student population. He’s just happy to be sleeping in a bed.
Reese isn’t about to share his brutal story with his gruff new roommate. You’ve seen one homophobic jock, you’ve seen ’em all. He plans to drag every twink on campus into his bed until Tom moves out. But soon it becomes clear Tom isn’t budging.
Tom isn’t going to let some late-night sex noise scare him off, especially when it’s turning him on. But he doesn’t want any drama either. He’ll keep his hands, if not his eyes, to himself. Boundaries have a way of blurring when you start sharing truths, though. And if Tom and Reese cross too many lines, they may need to find out just how far they can bend…before they break.
Warning: This book contains cranky roommates who vacillate between lashing out and licking, some male/male voyeurism, emotional baggage that neither guy wants to unpack, and the definitive proof that sound carries in college housing.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Off Campus:
“So what’s the deal? Why don’t they want you in the dorms?”
“Listen, kid.” He grimaced. “Sorry. Just drop it, okay?”
“Why?”
“Seriously? Because I don’t want to fucking talk about it, okay?” But he could already see where this was going. He only wondered if Reese would wait until he left the room to do it.
His roommate stared at him speculatively for a moment, tapping his bottom lip with one index finger before shrugging and grabbing his phone off the desk.
Nope. Guess not.
Reese looked up after a second.
“What’s your last name again?”
It figured. The kid didn’t even know his last name. Shit. Who knew how long he could have flown under the radar here, with this guy having no idea who his last-minute roommate was.
Tell the kid or not? If he didn’t, it wouldn’t get him more than ten hours of grace, since all Reese had to do was dial up Res Life in the a.m. and ask “Who the hell is this guy in my room again?”
For a minute, those ten hours seemed as if they might be worth it. The last little bit of peace he could hold on to. One more night. Who knew what would happen then. Worst case scenario had the kid taking naked pictures of him and selling them to some gossip mag. He could see the made-up headlines now. Price-Fixing Jailbird’s Son Does Porn. He remembered the days, and then weeks, months, of having flashes blow up in his face every time he tried to set foot out the door of their Beacon Hill home. Of trying to sneak out in the middle of the night, only to realize that the paparazzi never left. That there was always someone watching them, watching him. He started referring to the pack of them as the Evil Nemesis. He remembered the first time he’d tried to argue with a reporter who shouted out lies about his father as Tom pushed his way through the crowd blocking the gate to their front walk, wanting to get inside and hide.
“Did you know your father was embezzling money too, Tom?”
He’d been told later that it was a trick question, designed to draw him out. The PR company that had been working on his father’s press, until the corporate board decided that working to repair the image of a man who was absolutely, positively going to jail was a waste of money, sent an agent around to coach him after that disaster.
Losing his cool sure had made for good television. Tom had watched himself on television that night and even he didn’t believe himself. All of his sputtering furious protests about his father’s innocence looked like a fucking cover-up. With their enormous red brick Georgian townhouse visible behind the eight-foot-high wrought iron fence that surrounded their property, he looked like a spoiled little rich kid who was throwing a temper tantrum because someone wanted to take his toys away.
A pretty accurate picture at the time.
The PR guy had shown him how anything he said could be twisted around to mean the opposite by the time reporters were done with it. The guy had advised him to keep his fucking mouth shut and tattoo the words No Comment across his forehead.
“Also, don’t fuck any under eighteens and please God, don’t let someone take a picture with their fucking cell phone of you with your lips wrapped around a bong. Or some guy’s dick, all right?”
He’d thought that was a funny one right there, hadn’t he? Had elbowed Tom and rolled his eyes. A little dick-sucking joke between two straight dudes, right, buddy? Ha, ha. Tom had never been sure if there’d been a kernel of true warning in the kidding around, though. Something about that guy screamed that he’d seen it all and wouldn’t be surprised to see it again.
Reese was waiting across the room, perched on the edge of the desk like a dark little bird with claws, thumbs ready to go on his phone. If he was tempted to smile because he knew he had Tom, in the end, even if not right this moment, he kept it to himself. But his eyes and the press of his lips together said he wasn’t going anywhere until Tom coughed up his name. If he’d said anything, one word, made one crack about cyberstalking or celebrity disguises, Tom would have told him to fuck off and gone to bed. But the kid just sat there and waited.
Like he wasn’t going anywhere, ever. Which should have felt stalkerish and creepy but instead felt…inevitable.
Tom looked Reese in the eye, letting him see that this was the last thing he wanted. The kid would learn why in about point eight seconds.
“Worthington. Need me to spell it?”
He waited for the light to spark in Reese’s eyes, the way it always did when someone found out who he was. Everyone wanted something, even if it was just to gossip about how awful he must feel and how terrible it must be for his family to lose everything. But even those pain vultures, who got off on asking “Aren’t you too embarrassed to show your face anywhere? You must be so miserable,” didn’t really believe it. Everyone assumed there were hidden assets. Extended family to fall back on. Foreign bank accounts. What the fuck ever. And he’d let them go on believing it, shrugging off all concern, real or fake, because after a while he couldn’t tell the difference. He nodded or shook his head and stopped saying anything at all because he never knew what someone would turn his words into. And now he waited for Reese.
The kid laughed at first, actually looked up after a split second of staring at the screen and laughed. Tom almost shot up off the bed and put him on the floor, hard.
“The Third? Thomas Worthington the Third?” He actually snorted with laughter for a second and the grin he flashed at Tom was so full of play and lightheartedness that Tom leaned back for a moment, forgetting that he was in danger and smiled back at the kid ruefully. “You know that’s pretentious as shit, right? Please tell me you know that.”
“I told my dad that nobody does that anymore, but he said it was a little late to go making changes to my birth certificate when I was about to graduate high school.”
“Man, that sucks. Sorry, dude.” His eyes glanced down again, scanning the first lines of what was probably a page of Google links. Sure enough, Tom could’ve clocked it with an egg timer.
Point eight seconds.
“Whoa.” The word slipped out under Reese’s breath, his lips pursed a little on the soft exhale.
There it was.
Reese’s eyes flicked from his phone to Tom and back again. Tom pretended to read but waited for it.
“Oookay.” Reese sounded as if he were feeling his way through a dark room with a hand out to keep from walking into something hard. “That…wasn’t what I expected.”
“No?”
“Not really.”
“Rings a bell now? The name, I mean.”
“Not really.” He flushed and looked around the room, anywhere but at Tom. “I was, um, sort of a club kid in high school. I partied. A lot. The news wasn’t really my thing.”
“Guess you would’ve been a senior when all that went down, huh? If you’re a sophomore now.”
“Yeah.” Reese’s laugh was short and sharp. “There’s a lot of things that are hazy from senior year. And after.”
“Well, if you didn’t have a 401k invested in a mutual fund anchored by my dad’s company, then you probably weren’t too worried about it.” He tried to joke, feeling grateful. Grateful that Reese wasn’t battering him with questions or looking at him as if he was a two-headed whoremonster who ate babies for breakfast.
He heard another gasp, this one barely audible as the kid swallowed it before letting it halfway out of his mouth. No need to ask what sparked that sudden air suck.
Everyone always gasped when they hit the suicide story.
“I don’t want to talk about that part.”
“Do you hear me asking?”
No. He didn’t. He glanced up out of the corner of his eye, carefully keeping his head down while he snuck a peek. If anything, the kid looked even paler than he normally did and his hands were shaking as he carefully laid his phone down in the center of the desk and didn’t look at it again.
“You travel light for a rich guy.”
Which was far enough for Tom right fucking there. There was no way around admitting he was the son of a convicted felon whose trial had kept courtroom reporters in shits and giggles for three months. But what had happened to him after that was his own fucking personal business and since he’d managed to drop off the paparazzi radar, there was nothing to read on the subject, even for the morbidly curious.
“That’s how I roll. Spent a lot of time ducking the press. Learned to travel light.”
“Well, when you find a place to settle in, you oughta invest in some more stuff. Maybe an actual laundry basket.”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought Reese was teasing him. Which was definitely a change from outright hostility.
But he wasn’t about to get into a discussion of what he was or was not going to be buying. If the kid hadn’t noticed yet that Tom wore the hell out of an extremely limited wardrobe and had exactly one pair of running shoes, which were way past the five-hundred-mile marker that would normally mean it was time to replace them, then he wasn’t about to point it out.
That was his own personal stuff. He’d planted a giant Keep Out sign in front of his life that even a kid could read.
Stress at the idea that Reese might start trying to figure out where Tom went on the weekends, or why he had hardly any personal belongings, built suddenly. The gruff, angry words that burst out of his mouth were way over the top for the bantam-weight teasing the kid had been doing.
“Yeah, well, you want to tell me how you got in here?” He saw the kid flinch at the slap of his angry tone. “Or is this just a let’s rummage around in Tom’s bag o’ shame party trick?”
Reese turned his back on him and sat at his desk, dragging a textbook to the center and flipping it open. He didn’t answer, didn’t even look at Tom again.
Tom knew he was being an asshole but couldn’t stop. He’d had his dirty dark knot of shame dragged into the open after months of being anonymous and sharing nothing more than a word or two with strangers, and his skin crawled with the exposure. The words kept coming out of his mouth, though he knew that the kid didn’t deserve it. That he had something bad, something worse maybe even than Tom did, wrapped deep and tight inside, and Tom picking at his layers, digging his dirty fingers into old scabs was about the shittiest thing he could do to this kid who he actually liked.
“What is it? Do I have to Google you too?”
He saw Reese’s shoulders pull up and lock, high and protective, as if he were braced for a blow.
Tom held his breath, waiting. He’d had to give it up at the threat of a search engine. Would Reese tell him what had happened to get him a spot in the highly limited space of Perkins House? Or would he leave Tom to find out on his own? Because there wasn’t much that could be kept secret with a data plan and a smart phone.
The screech of Reese’s chair being shoved violently away from the desk as he pushed back and stood up, all in one motion, was shockingly loud in the silence between them.
Reese slammed his textbook in his backpack, zipped up and headed for the door.
He stopped for one second in front of the open door with his hand on the knob and looked back over his shoulder, all color drained from his face and the dark shadows under his eyes starker than ever against his white pale skin.
“Go ahead. Dig all you want, asshole. You won’t find a goddamn thing.”
His voice was flat, his eyes vacant, before he turned and left the room, shutting the door with a soft click behind him.