Chapter Nine
THINGS WERE A little weird between Walter and Kelly after the party at Luna’s, but Walter told himself it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. Kelly had been drunk. Really, stinking drunk, and Walter felt like a shit heel for not watching Kelly’s glass. It was too bad, because if not for that Everclear, it would have been a magical night. Walter hadn’t ever had that much fun dancing.
Right up until Kelly had licked his neck.
Licked it.
Every time Walter let himself think about that moment, every bit of wiring in his brain short-circuited, and he stood still, motionless while the memory played again and again. Once it happened while he was in line for a soda in the cafeteria, Kelly standing right beside him, and he caught a whiff of Kelly’s cologne as he stuck out his arm to put his cup under the ice maker.
Except he knew Kelly didn’t wear cologne and had unscented, non-allergenic, all-natural, hippie deodorant. Which meant he was smelling Kelly straight up and getting hard. And thinking about Kelly running his tongue down his neck.
Over. And over. And over.
“Walter?”
He blinked, coming out of his trance right before the Dr. Pepper overflowed his glass and spilled all over his fingers. Swearing, he tipped some of it out, set the glass on his tray and shook off the sticky residue.
Kelly gave him a wary look. “You okay?”
Walter rolled his eyes at himself, grumbled under his breath and headed for their table.
The one good piece of news was that Mason Jar had moved permanently out of the picture. The texts had stopped, and when Mason walked past them in the union, Kelly went stiff as a board and quickly fixed his gaze on an external window. Mason didn’t even seem to notice Kelly was there.
“Everything okay?” Walter asked, just to be sure.
“Fine,” Kelly replied, in a very not-fine voice, but he didn’t offer anything else, and Walter didn’t push.
He was still worried about Kelly, though, so the next time he Skyped Cara, he brought it up. What did she do? Laugh.
Walter glared at the screen. “What the hell is so funny?”
She gave him a long-suffering look. “Oh please. You’re practically a mother hen over Kelly. You didn’t fuss this much over me.”
“I’m not fussing.”
“You’re not just fussing, you’re obsessing.” She rested her chin in her hand, looking wicked. “Walter, do you have a crush on your roommate?”
Walter refused to dignify that with an answer, only crossed his arms over his chest and waited for her to stop being an idiot.
Now she looked wistful. “Oh, Wally.”
“Oh, Pickles. I think your veil is on too tight. Be reasonable. Just because it would make you feel better if I were trotting off into the sunset like you are, don’t go hooking me up with whoever you think makes me a cuter matching set.”
Their conversation ended shortly after that, and now Walter felt frustrated and guilty in addition to feeling confused. So he did the only thing left he could do. He went to Williams.
It was Saturday afternoon, but Williams was in his office. Two of his kids were making iMovies in the studio across the hall, and Williams was at a command viewing performance when Walter stuck his head in.
“Walter!” Paul, the youngest, beamed and waved him over. “Come watch this. We’re turning a bug into a bird.”
“Oh yeah?” Walter stood behind the table with the professor, not faking much of his praise as he watched a cockroach morph into a chicken pecking at the ground. “Wow, how’d you do that?”
“A five-dollar app,” Williams murmured. “Don’t tell the dean.” He clapped his hand on Paul’s and Mary’s shoulders. “Okay, guys, I’m going to go into my office with Walter for a bit. Don’t break anything, and don’t do any more shopping.”
“Okay,” they said in chorus and made the cockroach morph again.
Williams poured Walter a cup of coffee and nodded at the chair beside his desk. “Sit. I can tell something’s up. You’ve been off in class too. Please tell me it’s not your mother.”
He’d been off in class? “It’s not.” Walter took the mug and sipped. The coffee was almost warm today, but it was still rotgut. “Well, she’s not great, but no, that’s not it.” He put the mug down and shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. “It’s Kelly. Or really, it’s not Kelly. It’s everyone.”
Lifting his eyebrows, Williams cradled his mug, leaned back in his chair until it creaked, and waited.
Walter tried to explain about Kelly’s desire to date and the near train wrecks Walter endured on a daily basis. “He’s going to get his heart broken, and it makes me insane. When I say that to other people, they have knowing smiles and tell me I’m falling for him. I’m not. Even if I were, that’s not what this is about. He’s so fucking clueless it kills me. He doesn’t notice when people do flirt with him, and the only guys he gives the time of day to are the ones with bad pick-up lines who want to get in his pants. Which would be fine, except he acts as if he lives in a goddamn Taylor Swift song.”
“He does seem a bit hung up on the ideal in pretty much everything. I’ve noticed that in how he responds in class.” Williams cocked his head to the side. “Wouldn’t you consider that part of his relationship evolution, though? Maybe he has to get his heart broken a little bit in order to have those rose glasses adjusted for clarity.”
“Yeah, well, then I have to watch it happen. I don’t want to.”
Williams’s gaze gentled. “Walter, you do care for him. He’s your friend. More so than Cara, I think.”
Why did Williams saying that make Walter’s skin feel tight? “I’ve known him a few months.”
“And you talk about him constantly.” When Walter stiffened, he held up a hand. “No, I’m not going to make cutesy comments about how you’re in love with him. It’s worse than that. You love him, period. Friend or lover is irrelevant. You care for him, and the people who fall under that category for you have a horrible track record. They all leave you or go crazy. Especially lately.”
Walter swallowed hard and averted his eyes.
A heavy hand rested briefly on his arm, squeezed, then lifted. “Talk to me about your mom. You haven’t mentioned her, just keep telling me she’s fine, which is the biggest pile of bullshit this side of your sister’s horse barn.”
Walter couldn’t laugh at the stupid joke. He kept his eyes on Williams’s bookshelf. “She’s melting down at the grocery store and crying to me on the phone. Nobody loves her, nobody needs her, there’s nothing for her to do.” Williams said nothing, and the rest came spilling out. “I broke down last week and called Dad. He got mad at me, and now I only ever get his voicemail or secretary. The one he’s fucking. Cara says she’ll check on Mom, but there’s nothing she can do, and she’s stupid busy with the wedding of the year. There isn’t anything anybody can do.”
“You do get that this includes you?”
“She calls me and texts me all the time. If I don’t call back, she sobs and talks about how I am abandoning her. What, am I supposed to follow through?”
“You’re supposed to get the college education she already stopped you once from having. You aren’t her parent. You’re her son.” When Walter said nothing, Williams shook his head in disgust. “Honestly, sometimes I could smack your parents upside the head and feel nothing but gleeful at their pain.”
A headache began to bloom in the back of Walter’s skull. He set the coffee aside.
Sighing, Williams did the same. “If I didn’t have the kids, I’d say let’s go get a beer. All I’m doing here is alternating between stressing over my tenure application and wondering what hell my children are bringing down upon the department.”
Walter thought about the beautiful fall day he’d walked through to get to Williams’s office. “We could take them to the park and get coffee on the way. Real stuff that doesn’t rot our intestines.”
Williams grunted and pushed away from his desk. “I’ll get my coat.”
KELLY DIDN’T GIVE up on relationships, but he did try to be smarter, as Rose had suggested. He continued to go to the freshman social events and school-sponsored “fun breaks,” but he forced himself to be choosier about his affections. He gave considerable attention to a young man who wasn’t talent but had a nice smile. Dave was incredibly eager to talk with Kelly, and he never winked and suggested they go to his room to make out.
Dave was a perfect, if slightly geeky gentleman. And God save him, but Kelly wasn’t interested in him at all.
His failure with Dave made him feel particularly lost, and in a fit of desperation, he stayed after Intro to Humanities one day and asked Dr. Williams about the Lutheran church. The professor seemed surprised but pleased, and he acted as if he and Kelly were already good friends. This turned out to be Walter’s fault.
“I’ve heard so much about you. You’ve single-handedly turned a disappointment into a pleasure for Walter, I think, as far as that whole room thing goes.”
Kelly didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. The next class was filling the auditorium, so the professor motioned for Kelly to follow him out the lower-level door, talking to him all the way down a hallway Kelly hadn’t been in before. “So you’re wanting to go to church, are you? I have to say, I love that Walter’s best friend is a believer. That has to keep him up at night, and things that keep Walter up at night are good for him.”
Best friend? Kelly had no idea how to respond to all this. He stuck with things he could talk about without getting flustered, like church. “Well, originally I thought I’d go because it’d make my mother happy, but now I’m kind of wanting to go for me.”
“You sound surprised by that realization.”
Kelly shrugged. “I don’t really need to be in church to feel okay with God or my faith. But…”
“But now you’re starting to realize that a lot of going to church was about community and comforting ritual, not getting up close and personal with God?”
“Pretty much.”
Williams held the door for Kelly. “How are you finding Hope?”
“It’s okay.” Kelly realized that sounded lackluster and tried to amend his reaction. “I mean, it’s fine. It’s a good school.”
Williams laughed. “I’m not going to report you to Dean Stevens if you tell me it’s not going well.”
Kelly shrugged. “I know. It is fine. Nothing’s really wrong. It’s a good school. It’s more that school isn’t what I thought it would be.”
“Interesting comment. How is it different than what you expected? What did you expect?”
“I’m not sure. Certainly not what I got, though.” Kelly worried he should stop talking, but there was something about Williams that made him want to continue. “I feel a bit stupid most of the time. As if everyone gets the joke about life but me.”
Williams’s smile was knowing. “Ah. Yes, I know that feeling well.”
Kelly gave him a hard look. “Not like that. I mean, I feel like a bumpkin.” His cheeks heated. “Well, I guess I kind of am.”
“Mr. Davidson, you’re a young man in his first year of college. You’re a long way from home—Minnesota, I think Walter said—and you’re the eldest in your family, as you said in one of your essays. All your close friends are upperclassmen or bright sophomores. If you didn’t feel lost and confused by the middle of October, you’d be doing it wrong. However, I have great faith that by this time next semester, you’ll be feeling the wind under your sails again, perhaps a bit tentatively, but there all the same.”
“Why?” Kelly asked.
“Because in addition to all the aforementioned, you’re also intelligent and good-hearted.” He pushed open yet another door, this one leading to the outside, and winked at Kelly. “I’ll look for you on Sunday.”
Not sure if he felt bolstered or not, Kelly watched his professor go.
KELLY THOUGHT ABOUT what Williams had said for several days, sometimes taking heart in the conversation and sometimes being frustrated by it. He didn’t go to church that Sunday, partly in a kind of protest, though he’d admit it was a rather useless one. Mostly he simply couldn’t bear to be around people and smile and answer questions about himself. He wanted to sleep more, but his thoughts jumbled and turned on themselves, and the only result in the end was that he was too awake to go back to sleep.
Walter was still unconscious, and after a few minutes’ consideration, Kelly decided to brave the Porterhouse fourth-floor showers on his own.
As he made his way down the hall, Kelly kept his eyes fixed on the distant point of the shower doors, ignoring sly comments they murmured under their breath about stepping on cockroaches. When he went down with Walter, the jocks still made the comments they were making now, but Walter and Kelly usually ignored them and chatted, Walter pointing out talent sotto voce to make Kelly blush. Alone, Kelly felt slightly vulnerable, but he knew how to run this drill: no eye contact, no comment, no trouble.
The one redeeming quality of Porter was its shower stalls were just that, stalls, with private dressing areas staged before single units with their own walls and secondary curtain. Apparently in Sandman the male floors had two mass shower units with six heads each aiming out for true communal action. While in theory the setup sounded like a porn film, in reality Kelly was pretty sure he’d have been showering at midnight just to keep from accidentally sporting wood in front of a nice ass or set of pecs. Here in Porter 4, there were seven private stalls, and as fortune happened to favor him that morning, two of them were free.
He lingered under the spray, stroking himself. As had been his habit since the night at Luna’s, he gave in to the guilty pleasure of fantasizing about sex with Walter, even though he knew it was stupid and possibly dangerous. In the privacy of his shower stall, he allowed his fantasy self to pull out his cock while sitting on Walter’s lap, let Walter do the stroking for him. He switched to pretending Walter was with him in the shower, and he imagined Walter murmuring into his ear, his own hard body pressing Kelly into the wall.
The trouble was, Kelly couldn’t help remembering the way Walter smiled at him in real life, the way he teased, the way he was always there for Kelly. As a friend, he knew—but when he masturbated to the idea of Walter, friend and lover blended oh so easily. Especially when he remembered what it was like to kiss Walter’s neck and make him lose his cool.
His dream Walter moved Kelly’s hand to his own cock. I want to fuck you, Kelly.
Kelly came all over the tiles, wiping up the mess with his washcloth after. His cheeks were still red when he got out of the stall and dried off before stumbling back into his sweats.
When he tossed his towel over his shoulder and opened the curtain, Walter was standing there, holding his shower tote in hand, glaring.
“Walter!” It was a good thing he had the excuse of the shower for being flushed, because Kelly was never more embarrassed in his life.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Walter demanded. He looked sleep-bleary, and his hair stuck out at odd angles. Kelly wanted to rub his hands in it.
Down, boy. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
Walter grunted, but his eyes lost some of their bleary nature as he ran his gaze up and down Kelly’s recently-showered form. Kelly braced for teasing, but all Walter did was pinch Kelly’s ass on his way into the cubicle, hard enough that Kelly could still feel the memory of it as he grabbed his backpack and hustled off to breakfast.
Rose was already seated at their usual table, wearing a blue beret today, and she smiled and waved as he entered. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, and as he saw the puffiness around them and realized that smile wasn’t going all the way to her eyes, he wondered if her relationship with Luna had gone exactly the way Walter had predicted. Kelly waved back as he picked up a tray and headed through the line, determined to hurry so he could wring the story out of her. He made himself ignore the pancakes, delicious as they looked, because he knew damn well they weren’t vegan. He considered the potatoes, but a glance at the spatula of the student worker manning them told a story of many omelets, so he continued on his way. When he saw the soy milk was empty, he got himself a dry bowl of cereal, some black coffee, and tried to swallow his bad attitude before he got to the table.
Clearly it didn’t work, because Rose looked at him in concern, then glanced at his tray. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She slid her heaping plate of food away.
Kelly stopped her gesture with his free hand. “Don’t. It’s not your fault.” With a sigh, he sat down and poked at his cereal. “I should go and ask for soy milk. I probably will in a minute. I just…I get tired of it sometimes, even though it’s been most of my life. It’s not any fun when the rest of the world can eat and you can’t.”
Rose patted his hand. “If it helps, the food sucks, same as always.”
Kelly took in her red eyes and sobered. “Is everything okay?”
Rose folded up like a picnic blanket and all but pasted a no trespassing sign on her forehead. “Fine.”
Kelly tried to figure out how to nudge the story out of her, but before he could Walter appeared, slouching into the seat beside Kelly.
“What the fuck is this, you won’t even wait for me?” Walter nodded at Rose. “Hey, Manchester. Kelly, what the fuck is this you’re eating? Christ. Let me guess, no soy milk. And polluted hash browns. Fucking idiots.”
He rose from the table and stormed off toward the food counters. Kelly, who hadn’t even been able to set down his coffee and manage a reply, sat with his cup in midair and watched his roommate turn into a tornado.
Rose sipped at her tea, eyes twinkling. “You and Walter are such a couple, and it’s adorable. I know. You’re not dating. Except that you are. It’s almost as if you skipped dating and went straight to married.”
“Walter doesn’t date.” Kelly had said this to her before, but it felt like a lifeline right now. Remember that, before you hurt yourself.
Rose had a wicked look about her. “Walter takes better care of you than anyone I’ve ever dated, slept with, or simply called a friend.”
“I want to date.” Why did he feel so panicked? “I don’t just want to fool around when one of us is horny. I want to have a boyfriend.”
Now Rose looked intrigued. “You’ve been fooling around? With Walter?”
“No.” Do not think about licking his neck. Do not think about licking his neck. “This has nothing to do with Walter,” he lied. “I want the full package. I want to meet someone at a restaurant and wonder if we’ll kiss at the end of the night. I want a sweet first kiss, and I want to lie in bed wondering when we’re going to have sex. I want it to feel special.”
Rose snorted into her coffee. “Honey, you want a fantasy. Which is fine, except you need to remember that life isn’t a fantasy.”
“What’s wrong with wanting what I want?”
“Nothing—except you want the experience, not the person. Relationships aren’t mail order, and people don’t have tidy little boxes to check off. I know you’ve been trying to be more discerning since Mason, and I applaud that, but—come on. Are you telling me you scan guys and think about whether or not that one or this one will open the door for you, and that’s how you decide if you’ll date them?”
Kelly did, kind of, but the hell he was going to admit that with her making it sound like a bad thing. “So what if I did that?”
“Well, it’s a free country, so do what you want, but I’d sure love to know how is that any different than Walter eyeing their asses.”
Kelly was so thrown by her question he could only blink. He was still trying to form a response when Walter came back to the table, brandishing a tray of clean hash browns, a bottle of ketchup and a paper quart of soy milk. He had a wild look about him, and he put down the tray with a bit of satisfied flourish.
“They’re making a tofu scramble with clean utensils. It’s too bad I’m not straight, because I think the vegan girl behind me in line was about to blow me on the spot. I’m having them hold a plate for you, and I’ll pick it up when I go back in line.” He glanced at Rose, as if just now realizing she too might need to be cared for. “Hon, you need anything?”
Rose lifted an eyebrow and eyed him with open lechery. “One of you that comes in bi and poly.”
Walter laughed and openly fondled his crotch as he did a brief, exaggerated porn wiggle for Rose. “I’ll be right back, baby, and all this is sitting right next to you, throbbing like a mighty hunter.”
Rose laughed, and Walter grinned. He put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder and nudged the disappointing tray out of the way for the one he’d prepared. “Eat up, Red. I hear you need to replenish some fluids and nutrients after your shower.”
Kelly was so embarrassed the room spun, and when he recovered himself, Walter had already walked away. Even before Kelly looked at Rose, he could feel the weight of her meaningful stare.
“He doesn’t date,” Kelly said, almost desperate this time. Thank God she couldn’t know how his shoulder tingled from Walter’s touch or how the murmur in Kelly’s ear had made his insides churn into gooey butter.
Rose said nothing, just kept smiling and staring as she drank her coffee.