Page 60 of Want Me
“Sooooo…do I know this guy?”
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Mark heading our way and flashed Sam a quick grin as I started in that direction. “My roommate Eric. Don’t ask. It’s a long story, trust me.”
Jason checked in shortly after to make sure I was good, and Mark waited until he moved on.
I turned my shoulder into the wall to face him. “I’m not going to flip my shit, but I thought you weren’t going to say anything.”
“Dude, I didn’t.” Mark’s expression was nothing but wide-eyed innocence.
“Then why…”
“It was a policy change handed down from high. Some other fraternity recently had an issue with racial slurs being tossed around among members and it blew up. It was on the news and shit. So the policy is supposed to be read at every meeting from now on. Something like that.”
“Oh.” I bit the corner of my thumbnail.
“I wouldn’t do something like that to you, dude.”
His eyes burned bright with sincerity, and I nodded after a moment. “Are you heading home?”
“Not for a while. Gonna do a study thing with some of the guys. We might go out later, too. You want to hang here, or I can give you a ride home?”
“I’ll walk.” I needed the air and the silence to diffuse the insane amount of energy that had waited until after the meeting to barrel into me. Mark sent me off with a joking salute, and I headed out.
In the scheme of a lifetime, maybe it’d be a small thing. It should be a small thing. In a lifetime, there’d be other triumphs, other regrets, other inevitabilities. My parents aging and dying, career pitfalls and upswings. That moment in the chapter room tonight should’ve been a blip, but it felt huge. And as I walked across the quad back home, I felt as much exhilaration as I did a weird sense of calm.
And I really fucking wanted to see Eric.
Once back at the house,I pushed his door open without knocking. Eric sat at his desk, his back to me and his task lamp on as he typed on his laptop. He craned a look over his shoulder at me and gave me one of those devious grins meant to make my dick perk, but something about my expression had it fading quickly.
“Everything okay?” he asked, pushing back in his chair to face me.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Never. I was just…” He glanced back at his screen, and I caught a quick glimpse of the web page before he closed the top. “Nothing important.”
“Let’s take a drive.”
“Your car or mine?”
“Yours.”
Downstairs I grabbed a beer from the fridge, and we pulled on our jackets before heading out.
“Somewhere specific in mind, or you just want to drive?” Eric asked, once we were on the open road.
“Think I just want to drive around.” I cracked the window, frigid air rushing in the car before I closed it again, fidgety with leftover energy. My restlessness had nowhere to go inside the car, so I found an outlet in fiddling with the window buttons, the hem of my shirt.
“Secret’s out at the frat house, I’m guessing? They found out somehow, or you told them?” Eric glanced over me, his gaze dropping to the closed tab of the beer I was rubbing my thumb over.
“Both, kind of. The opportunity was there, and I could either take it or not. Maybe that’s cheating.”
Eric barked out a laugh. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as cheating with shit like that.”
I shrugged.
“What, it counts less because you didn’t walk in and formally announce it? You didn’t have to say shit at all. It’s nobody’s business.”
I needed to do something other than shrug. “This is going to sound stupid, but do you think…I wondered…do you think it’ll be the same with us now that we’re not sneaking around?”