Page 54 of Something Like Winter

he slid between the sheets and wrapped his arms around one hundred and ninety pounds of pure Kentucky muscle.

When they awoke the next morning, neither had the smell of stale alcohol on their breath, nor did Travis jolt upright and give a tired speech of regret. Instead he rolled over to see if Tim was awake, his grin goofy when their eyes met.

“Good morning,” Tim murmured.

“Morning!”

“How do you feel?”

For a moment the grin faltered. They weren’t out of the woods quite

yet. “It’s a lot better when I can actually remember what we did.” “I’ll take that as a compliment. Ready for round two?”

But the longhorn cut these plans short.

“Another fund-raising day,” Tim said with a sigh. “Hey, maybe

Quentin will give us the day off once he sees what we came back with.” They felt self-assured enough that they took showers—separately to

Tim’s dismay—before heading downstairs to the common room. Quentin

was already dishing out new assignments or criticizing poor

performance. When he noticed Tim standing there he waved him over. “How did you do?”

“See for yourself.” Tim handed him the envelope. Quentin shifted

through the checks one by one, grunting after reading each number. Then

he got to Eric’s check, which Tim had intentionally put last in the pile. “Holy shit!”

Tim grinned. “I know, right? Pretty sweet!”

“And it’s from the faggot! What’d you do, suck his dick?” Tim’s face fell. “Dude. That’s not cool.”

Quentin shrugged, still beaming at the check. “I’m joking. I know

you didn’t go down on the old geezer.”

Tim felt heat rising. “Eric’s a brother. You shouldn’t talk about him

like that.”

Quentin reluctantly pulled his eyes away from all those zeros. “He’s

not a brother. Do you know what he did?”

“I don’t care,” Tim said.

“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Quentin said loud enough for everyone

to hear. “Eric Conroywasa brother once, until he was caught sucking off

the pledges. He was taking advantage of his status to blow most of them

before he got caught.”

“Bullshit!”