THIRTEEN

 

The good news was, the pranks all stopped. Tristan had accomplished that much, at least, though Grant was still unhappy that Tristan hadn’t been willing to let him help at all. Or maybe it was just that midterms had thoroughly sucked up everyone’s time and energy, even Warren’s. Or he’d just gotten bored.

There was more good news, too. Tristan, when he’d come back from talking to Warren, had been uncharacteristically silent, but he had helped Grant to dry out his midterm paper, and they had been able to salvage most of it. At least he wasn’t going to have to choose between rushing something and turning in nothing at all.

The bad news, though, was that Tristan wasn’t speaking to him. Or sharing his bed, most of the time. Before, Grant had always been able to cling to the thought that Tristan at least wanted him sexually if nothing else, but he didn’t even have that anymore.

And then there was the way that Tristan had outright told him to back off. That anything between them had to be a secret. Grant may have scared the other man off, and the only ways that he could think of to fix it were going to be potentially worse than things were at the moment.

“You don’t seem happy,” his mother had told him when he’d called to check in with her as he tried to do once or twice a week. “What’s going on with you?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” he’d replied, because for a long time now, he’d had to be fine. He’d needed to be able to take care of his own issues, because she was running herself ragged, working her fingers to the bone, just like she had always done. He knew that he got a lot of his work ethic from her.

“You could come home. Get student loans. Go to a community college,” she had mentioned, and the truth was, Grant knew that she was right. There had never been much of a chance that he would be able to keep himself afloat here, keep all the balls in the air that he needed to.

But there was Tristan. Or was there? Tristan, and Grant’s own drive to succeed, to never give up, were the only reasons that he was still here and he knew it. Otherwise, he could stick it out for a few more months and then withdraw. UCLA had always been an ambitious dream for a guy like him.

“I’ll think about it,” he had promised, and he had done so. He was still thinking about it, as he looked at Tristan’s empty bed. Their schedules were so different now. Was Tristan even sleeping in his bed anymore?

Someone pushed the door to his room open, and Grant looked up, hope filling him in an unwelcome wave, because even then, he knew that the hope was likely to be in vain. Maybe it would be Tristan, but if so, it would be this cold, prickly stranger, this Tristan who seemed to want nothing more than for Grant to just go away.

But it wasn’t him. It was the last person that Grant would have expected to seek him out. Warren had stopped harassing Grant, perhaps, but that hadn’t made them tight friends or anything.

Actually, Grant was getting more or less used to being ignored, by pretty much everyone. Manny was friendly, and the other guys were at least civil, but that wasn’t a lot for Grant to go on.

“What’s up?” he finally asked, because Warren was just standing there and smirking at Grant in a way that made him uncomfortable, like the prickly little feet of bugs were romping up and down his spine. Whatever Warren had on his mind, it would be better if he just said, so that he could go again.

“I want you to stay away from my boyfriend.”

For a moment, the words pretty much meant nothing to Grant. He had nothing to hang them on, literally no way to make them make any sort of sense at all. Warren had a boyfriend? He had always come off as a bit homophobic, actually, to Grant, one of the many reasons why he had been cautious around him.

“What?” he finally managed, and Warren stumped into the room, walking gingerly on his cast without needing crutches now, but still moving stiffly and carefully. Grant watched as Warren sank down onto Tristan’s bed, and a nasty, niggling little suspicion was rising in the back of Grant’s mind, one that he wasn’t sure that he wanted to look at too closely.

He wasn’t given a choice.

“Tristan. He’s mine. I dumped him at the beginning of the school year and I thought I could handle him slumming it with you, but I can’t. I know that he never got over me and I never got over him.”

Someone had stolen every last bit of air from Grant’s lungs. Had frozen his blood and slowed his heart. Someone, Warren, in the last twenty seconds, had taken away every last little bit of hope that Grant had and had trampled all over it.

“Tristan doesn’t do relationships,” Grant managed, through lips that felt stiff and numb. This wasn’t happening. It was a nightmare. That was the only possible option.

“Yeah, he probably told you that, right? He started off with that with me, too. He told you that he doesn’t date, he only does sex? But by the end he was crying and begging me not to leave.”

That was just impossible even to picture. Or was it? From the beginning, Tristan had been so vulnerable, so fragile, even though he tried to hide it with snark and sarcasm. There had been hints of openness in his eyes, even, from time to time, and Grant had thought he was so special because he’d gotten Tristan to admit to having some feelings for him, but realistically speaking, was he actually special at all?

In some ways, he was coming to realize, Tristan was the loneliest person that he’d ever met. The most desperate to be loved, even as he pushed love away. Or maybe he was just pushing Grant’s love away.

Maybe Tristan was already in love with someone else, and Grant had been nothing but a heartbroken rebound. Everything in him rebelled against the idea, but of course he wouldn’t want to admit to it. Of course he would be in denial, would try to insist that it wasn’t true.

He didn’t like to lose to start with, and to look at losing something that had come to mean far too much to him, even for as short a time as it had been? Was it any wonder that he was holding on so tightly to Tristan, trying to deny Warren’s words?

“You’re not good enough for him. His family could deal with Tristan being gay easier than they could deal with him being with someone like you,” Warren continued, as Grant stared at him with a face that suddenly felt like it had been carved from stone. “I don’t know how you feel about him, if you’re just using him or whatever, but if you care about him at all, you will let him go.”

Grant still didn’t speak, because he didn’t trust his voice. He would like to rage, to insist that Warren was wrong, but parts of what he was saying just made too much sense. It explained Tristan’s behavior just a little bit too well, if he looked at it that way. Warren was an asshole, and Grant might not understand how anyone could stand to be around him for long, much less fall in love with him, but then a lot of people wouldn’t understand how Grant felt about Tristan, he was sure.

“He doesn’t belong to you.” Grant managed to find his voice finally, and it got stronger with every word that he said. “Even if you hadn’t broken up with him, you don’t own him. He’s a person, not a sweater or a book or something you can possess.”

Warren rolled his eyes and opened his mouth again, but now that Grant had managed to start speaking, he found that he could continue. It got easier the more he did it, the more he felt the rightness of his words.

“But you did break up with him. He’s not your boyfriend. He doesn’t have to come running back to you, but if he does, that’s his choice.”

That was what it really came down to. Tristan could choose to go back with Warren, and it would hurt, but Grant would really have no choice but to accept it. That was the respect that he had for Tristan, to trust him to make his own choices. Or Tristan could choose Grant, and he would be thrilled. Or he could choose neither of them.

“You’ll get him disowned,” Warren warned, and Grant rose to his feet, towering over the seated figure on Tristan’s bed. Brawling wasn’t his way, and he would never hurt anyone who was already injured, but he would admit to getting some satisfaction out of the slight tinge of worry in Warren’s eyes.

“Get out of here,” Grant said, glaring down at the other man. There was nothing more to be gained from this. Nothing more that Warren could say to him that he wanted to hear. Warren opened his mouth, his eyes spewing venom, but Grant just shook his head. “Go.”

There was nothing that Warren could say that Grant would even listen to at the moment, and maybe Warren saw that. Maybe he saw how pointless it would be. He let out a soft huff of frustration, but he did heave himself to his feet and head for the door, moving more quickly than Grant would have expected from someone as injured as he was.

“Just think about it,” Warren spoke, right before he shut the door behind him, and Grant felt all of the strength that he had pulled together running down into the ground. His knees wobbled, and he found that he had to flop down onto the bed once more, a strange, blurry haze over his eyes.

The truth was, Warren’s words had struck deeper than Grant would have liked. He would have loved to be able to say that he just didn’t believe anything that Warren had said, but it seemed like Tristan had lied to him, had told him that he wouldn’t be willing to do a relationship. It wasn’t, it seemed, that Tristan wouldn’t commit, but that he wasn’t going to do so with Grant.

And then there were the threats about Tristan’s family. One thing that Grant had known from the very beginning was that Tristan tried not to act like he was worried about anything, but it very much worried him to be a gay man who might lose everything because of it.

It was easy for Grant to judge, but then, he had never had everything that Tristan had had. Would it be so easy for him to give it up if he’d had it in the first place?

The more he thought about it, the more clear it was. Tristan’s withdrawal from Grant meant that this rebound fling was almost over anyway, didn’t it? Was Grant going to be as selfish as Warren had accused him of being and try to hold on, while ruining Tristan’s life in the process?

Grant would have been willing to face all of that down if he had thought that Tristan wanted to be with him. But he didn’t, which made things seem suddenly all too clear. Too horribly, terribly clear.