Breathe, Tommy (BxB) (Frat)

Six・Will Burlough

"Sorry, I didn't..."

The body I've crashed into is Christian's. Paradoxical but I'm largely relieved. It could have been Drew's by some ill luck, but with the snippets of memories that return through my hammering headache, my relief is cut short, a bit like Olive's hair when she got a mixture of toffee and glue matted in it.

He runs his eyes over me; they're a shrewd hazel in the daytime, still vaguely unreadable. He's got a smirk etched into his face, his broader body leaning on the doorframe. He doesn't need to tell me I've got greasy, messy hair or the white mark of dried drool on the corner of my mouth staining down to my chin, but he does need to drop that look. I clear my throat, but that smirk never ceases.

"Did you prove your point?" His voice is smug, and his vocal folds are the most irritating kind a human has ever been born with.

"What?" I say.

"That you're not gay." He takes one daunting step towards me. "I saw you take Giana upstairs."

Cascading down on me are all the asphyxiating moments of last night, from her, to the moment I panicked over what he asked. Moments that hold my every breath hostage and rain down an eighth sea between my lungs and the air, no matter how hard I gulp.

I stumble back slightly with the whiplash of his audacity, but he only steps closer. His intentions are indecipherable, but my brain convinces me he's finally dropping the act, that he's going to beat me until I'm a midnight blue and a saturated purple, then pass me around the frat guys like I'm the turkey on the table on Thanksgiving Day to have their turn.

He brings his mouth up to my ear. I'm stock-still.

"Just so you know," he continues, "having sex with a girl doesn't prove you're not gay. Just takes a little imagination. We all did it back in the day when we had wives because it was illegal and we had to play pretend."   

We. We. We...? Oui. His voice is cotton-soft and soothing to the raging hangover headache I have that hollers for about a dozen pills of Tylenol.

"And so, I have a question," he goes on, leaning back to purposely see the queasy look on my face when he says, "Who were you thinking about?"

I'm so far down the never-ending spiral of fear and anxiety that I can barely move my lips to get any words out. In clockwise laps around my brain is the thought that if I leave him unanswered, he'll conjure up his own, far from the truth, or rather, far from the lie I'll cook up if I can think straight. Who am I fooling into thinking I can think straight anyway? But you can think gay, can't you? In anti-clockwise laps around my brain is how if I give him an answer, he might — him being the English Lit student he is — infer what he wants and see things that aren't there, then write an entire essay after studying my life choices for a minute and come to the conclusion that I was thinking about him.

I was thinking about him... Fuck.

"I have to go," I say. He lets me step away too easily compared to what I've started getting used to.

"By the way," a warm smile replaces his smirk, "the ear-piercing suits you."

My hand shoots up to feel the proof of another one of last night's mistakes. When the heck did that happen?

・

It's calming to watch the campus grounds, its freshly mowed grass, cherry blossoms here and there, and a couple of scattered papers swaying with the medium breeze that dries my hair. I faintly smell freshly brewed coffee hanging out the window like this and I breathe it in.

Some students bask in the delightful weather, typing up their coursework as they relax on their picnic blankets with cafe to-go food, others are attending their weekend classes. I opt for rotting away in my room and letting Aidan flick me with the packet of elastics one of his flings left here.