FIVE

 

 

It could have been difficult, Grant supposed, living with someone as distractingly gorgeous as Tristan was. Being someone’s roommate could be a curiously intimate thing, but Grant only got hints of that because for the next few weeks, he was rarely in his fraternity house at all. When he was, he was asleep.

Work had him booked every minute that he wasn’t at class or practice or asleep, and speaking of sleep, he wasn’t getting a lot of that. Most nights, when he came home from work, it was all he could do to crack a book, and no one had to tell him that he was getting behind in his classes.

He had no choice, though. He had managed to borrow a couple of hundred dollars from his mother, and that had helped to pay for the fraternity fee, but he fully intended to pay her back. It had used the rest of his meager savings to pay the rest of it, so now, he worked, or he wouldn’t be able to pay his tuition for the next semester.

Grant knew that he needed to work every last minute that he could if he had a chance of being able to pay, but it felt a little bit like he was a bird and his wings were injured, and he had to flap so hard just to stay up in the air. There was nothing which he could let slacken, not his job, for obvious reasons, not his football, because his partial scholarship depended on his performance, and not his grades, for the same reason.

What it came down to was that he had no choice but to continue doing what he was doing. Or admit defeat, which was not something that he was prepared to do. If he could keep his grades up, he could maybe get an academic scholarship as well as his athletic one. It wouldn’t be easy, but that would definitely ease the burden a little.

So he hit the books every night, but he kept slipping further and further behind. The only class he was doing well in was English, and even then, he had a short story due in just a week that he hadn’t even started. He should work on that, but then his Physics class was an utter disaster.

Even though he would prefer to do the story, he sighed and reached for his incredibly overpriced physics book.

But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make his eyes focus. He was too worked up, too wired from too much caffeine and not enough sleep. With a groan of frustration, he got up and paced through the room, his bare feet sinking into the lush softness of the carpet.

He needed something to get his mind back to the level where it could at least function, and as he eyed Tristan’s empty bed, he had to admit that he knew exactly what that thing might be. Not that it mattered. He had turned Tristan down for a reason, and it was better this way.

Deliberately, he turned his attention back to his book, a fresh page open in his notebook, and gripped his pencil in fingers that were starting to feel numb with exhaustion. His eyes blurred but he forced them into focus again, looking resolutely into an incredibly dry explanation of how the pull of gravity could affect light. Which was pretty cool, he had to admit, but the person writing this book made it sound like the most boring thing Grant had ever heard of. Watching paint dry would have been more interesting.

He must have been pressing too hard because the lead in his pencil snapped and he didn’t have another one handy. It was just one more thing, the proverbial straw which broke the camel’s back, and he threw the offending writing implement down onto the desk with a groan of displeasure and frustration.

It got worse. The pencil struck the edge of the desk, and bounced right off of it, flying through the air and landing neatly on Tristan’s pillow. When Grant turned to follow it with his gaze, he couldn’t help but note a freshly sharpened pencil sitting innocently on top of a notebook on Tristan’s bedside table.

He would apologize later, but somehow, Grant didn’t think Tristan would actually care if Grant used it. Then later, when his homework was done, he could sharpen his own pencil or find another one. He wouldn’t normally use something of someone else’s without permission, but Tristan wasn’t around and probably wouldn’t be for at least another hour.

He’d just been getting into some sort of groove, and he rose to his feet, guilt gnawing at him, but it was just a pencil, right? Tristan would probably laugh at him for caring this much about something so small. So he walked over to Tristan’s bed, bending over to snag his own pencil off of Tristan’s pillow.

The plan was then to pick up Tristan’s pencil, sitting there on his bedside table, but it occurred to him that he was actually bending over the place where Tristan slept every night. Tristan’s scent was all around him, and in his fuzzy, sleep deprived state he couldn’t help but entertain the fantasy that swept through him.

Tristan didn’t sleep wearing much. Grant wasn’t sure how far that went, he had never watched, but sometimes Tristan would pass out in bed, and his blankets would fall down around his waist, and it was clear that he, at least, didn’t wear a shirt. It was far too easy to look down at that empty bed and imagine Tristan in it, imagine tugging down the sheets to find his body, bare and vulnerable, beneath them …

Just like that, Grant was hard. He shouldn’t have had the energy for that, but his body and mind, with maddening unpredictability, seemed as though they had no problem at all focusing on sex, and Tristan, and a deeply erotic fantasy unlike anything that he had ever submitted to before.

What was this? Was it just because Tristan had been the first man who had been blatant about his desire for Grant? Was that when the darkly beautiful Tristan had first started to wind his way into Grant’s mind?

His knees went weak, and he fell onto Tristan’s bed, rolling onto his back. His left hand still clutched at the pencil, the broken one, but he wasn’t particularly aware of it. He let his eyes drift closed, and it was then that he started to dimly wonder just how long he had been so hard, how long his dick had been swelling in the prison of his jeans.

It actually hurt, and Grant let out a soft whimper, a sound that he would never have let himself make if anyone else was around. But then, if there had been anyone else around, he also wouldn’t have brushed his fingers over the swelling, tracing lightly over the thick lump of his cock, which seemed to almost leap up toward his touch.

He wasn’t doing this. He wasn’t groping himself on Tristan’s bed. That would be the most incredibly messed up thing that he’d ever done, but here, it was so easy to think about Tristan lying, naked and maybe even just as aroused as Grant was. Tristan, with those mocking, mysterious, almond-shaped eyes, filled with restless intellect even in Grant’s fantasy.

It was so easy to let himself think that it was Tristan who was groping him. Tristan who slid down the zipper of his pants, as Grant was doing now, and pulled out the throbbing fullness of his cock. Tristan who stroked him, who made Grant’s hips writhe up off of the bed toward the stimulation.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time that he’d touched himself like this, but thinking of Tristan only made it better. It was just so incredibly easy—the simplest thing in the world—to let himself go into this, and he whimpered again as his eyes drifted closer, his lips parted as he imagined Tristan kissing him, but like he meant it. Like it actually meant something more than sex.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

That voice. It was real. Not a part of his fantasy at all. Grant gasped, and his eyes flew open, his heart actually stopping for a moment out of the sheer panic of hearing that voice, of being interrupted just when he was starting to think that there was no way he wasn’t going to come soon.

“Tristan,” Grant gasped and tried his best to think of some sort of excuse, something to say that would make what he was doing make any sense. But he had his dick out on another man’s bed, and there could be no doubt about what he was doing with it. His fingers were still clutching at the base of himself, where he had been teasing, stroking just slowly and tightening his grip, trying to hold off the inevitable for just a few more seconds.

Tristan was standing there, mouth agape, eyes wide, and for once, he didn’t have that smug, amused demeanor that he seemed to wear wrapped around him like a blanket at all times. He seemed stunned, as well he should be, but more than that, the door behind him was open, and for a moment, Grant was exposed to the hallway, to anyone who might walk by.

Luckily, no one did. And after a moment, Tristan eased the door shut, as Grant tried to pull himself together, to move past the strange paralysis which was gripping his body. Before he could, though, Tristan was crossing the room, and for some reason, he was going to his knees between Grant’s, which had been flung wide open in his frantic pleasuring of himself.

“You want some help with that?” Tristan asked, and he didn’t really wait for an answer. Suddenly, Grant had fingers, for the first time, which weren’t his own, wrapped around the throbbing shaft of his cock, and Grant watched with disbelief as more precome than he had ever produced before oozed from the blunt head.

That numbness broke when Grant saw Tristan leaning toward him, and he saw how those beautiful dark pink lips parted as Tristan moved closer. Maybe he was inexperienced, but Grant knew enough to be able to guess what it was that Tristan was trying to do, and his whole body seemed to turn to molten metal, to fire.

If he just let this happen, he would have his first ever blowjob. And that thought was deeply overwhelming to him. He hadn’t thought that it would happen like this, with someone who didn’t even want to date him, who wanted nothing but sex …

And that was what finally broke through the paralysis which had seemed to freeze him in place from the moment that Tristan had opened the door. He came back to himself, and the first thing he realized was that he had been so worked up, so filled with desire and pleasure and arousal, that his strong hand had closed around the fragile shaft of the pencil and had snapped it cleanly in two.

Focusing on that helped, and with a soft groan, Grant tossed the shards of the writing implement aside and reached down to grip Tristan’s shoulders instead. Just before those full lips touched the desperate head of his pulsing cock, Grant tugged the more slender man up onto the bed beside him instead.

“Tristan, wait, hold on, please,” Grant breathed, hardly able to believe that this was happening and that he had been seconds from having a mouth around him for the first time. But he couldn’t help but remember that Tristan didn’t want to date Grant or anyone, and Grant had always wanted some sort of emotional connection before he did any of this stuff.

If only Tristan could want him for more than just sex, he thought. Grant had always known that, for the right person, he could give everything. He could come out, he could let himself feel these things that he had tended to push away, but he needed something, some bond, between him and the other man.

So he did something that he had never done before. He cupped Tristan’s face, his fingers brushing over his cheeks, feeling his cheekbones beneath his fingertips, as he kissed him. Once or twice, in high school, Grant had been kissed, but he had never initiated it, and he had never gone any further than kissing.

At first, it was impossible to think about anything other than the way that Tristan felt in his hands, the way that Tristan let out a surprised little noise when Grant kissed him. But then other things sunk in. The way that Tristan groaned and relaxed, the soft noises he made, the way his slender body inclined toward Grant and the taste of him …

Only that was where it all went wrong because that taste was something that Grant recognized. Not from tasting it himself, but from the drinks that his overworked, overtired mother had fixed herself in the years while Grant had been growing up.

Whiskey.

“You’re drunk,” Grant whispered, and all of a sudden, it all made sense. Tristan coming on to him in the first place, Tristan being willing to kiss him, it was all just because of the liquor. The disappointment was a palpable force inside of him, crushing his organs, all of his hope, because what connection could there be if Tristan was too drunk to make it?

“I’m not that drunk,” Tristan protested and reached for Grant again, but Grant had had enough. His whole body was still clenched tight, throbbing with arousal that he dare not give in to, and he pulled away from Tristan and shoved his aching cock back into the prison of his jeans before he stalked over to the light switch and flicked it off.

“Sleep it off,” Grant told him, his voice firm, uncompromising, and luckily, Tristan just sighed, and Grant saw the dim, dark shape of Tristan slipping under his covers. Grant undressed quickly, slipping into a tank top and a new pair of boxers before lying down in his own bed, his eyes stinging, but dry.

That could have been his first time.

If Tristan had shown him even the slightest sign that they could share anything but sex, Grant knew that he would have given that to him. He would have happily let Tristan show him how this whole sex thing worked, and the fact that it hadn’t happened that way disappointed him intensely.

He was kidding himself. This crush, this fixation, on Tristan, he had to kick it somehow. Tristan had been clear from the beginning. He didn’t date. Grant had to keep that in mind, or else he was pretty sure he was going to get his heart broken.

From the other bed, Grant heard the soft sound of slow, even breathing, and he knew that Tristan had fallen asleep. Grant lay awake, his whole body a pulsing, throbbing mass of arousal, and his conflicted feelings couldn’t even dull the force of that.

With his disappointment, it shouldn’t have been Tristan who came into his mind as he finally bowed to the inevitable and pushed his hand into his boxers. But it was Tristan, and as Grant stroked himself, as he turned his head and buried it in the pillow to muffle his moans, it was Tristan, down on his knees, ready to pleasure Grant, which would bring him over the edge.

All it took was a few brief flicks of his wrist, his fingers gripping his shaft, and then he was coming all over his hands, shuddering as the tension flowed out of him along with his release. He could sleep now, but it didn’t escape his notice that it was Tristan who had gotten him there in the end after all.