The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 29. Sophomore Year - Chapter 7

Chris Baker was pacing across the neutral ground on St. Charles and Napoleon Avenue, frantically looking at his watch, as if he had somewhere very important to be, rather than a birthday party on Bourbon Street. Jordan kept uncomfortably glancing up at me, as if I was supposed to step in to stop a potential tantrum from erupting.

“You okay there?” I asked him, wryly, finally.

Baker looked up. “Oh, I’m just getting antsy.”

There were roughly a million of us, gathered here to celebrate the birth of Our Lord and Savior, Michaela Birdrock. All of Tri-Gamma, large swaths of both Iota Chi and Zeta, the occasional independent, all lined up on the neutral ground waiting.

Taking the streetcar had been Michaela’s choice, because she hadn’t been on the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar yet. It had reopened about a month ago for the first time since Katrina, but only the first leg, as far as Napoleon Avenue, which left it about twenty blocks shy of Tulane. So we had packed into a city bus, which took us a quarter of the way downtown.

And now we were waiting, Godot-style, for a streetcar that didn’t seem to be coming.

“Noted,” I told Baker. “Should we just get a cab?”

“Michaela will be pissed if you beat her down there,” Jordan warned. “I’m just saying. Who has the vodka?”

There were a couple bottles of vodka circulating through the crowd, which we had each grabbed a swig of maybe ten minutes ago, but had now disappeared into the throngs of people.

I spotted one across the neutral ground, in the arms of Kiandra Coleman, who herself was in Tripp’s arms, both of them beaming with the glow of a new relationship. They were talking to Erik, who had his arms around Erica Strout, who seemed to be wearing a slight, pensive smile for the first time ever; and Patrick, who had his arms around Annie Rue, the two of them having been together so long that they had fallen into the everyday comfort of being an entangled unit.

Kevin was meeting us downtown later, for what it was worth. Not that it would have changed things.

He had gone to The Boot for happy hour with some of his friends from the marching band. He wanted me to come with him, head down to Bourbon Street with him afterwards, but I had never met the band people and there was something very aggressively couply about going to meet them.

Regardless, it was a nonstarter because it would’ve created chaos with Michaela if I chose any other event over hers. She was very particular.

“Whatever, let’s get a cab,” Baker said. “I’ve known Michaela since I was twelve. She won’t mind.”

Jordan and I exchanged eyes.

“I’ve known Michaela since I was eighteen,” Jordan told him, “and she’s about a half-a-bottle-of-vodka deep. She will literally burst into tears if people start leaving.”

Baker said nothing, because Jordan was so obviously correct. Then he opened his mouth, as if he had stumbled on a rebuttal--but he was suddenly jolted, slapped festively on the shoulder by Tate McClendon, Michaela’s boyfriend.

“Yo, Chris,” he said, his eyes glassy and slow with the residue of some previously-imbibed substance. “I just heard Charlie’s coming back in the spring.”
Chris Baker looked immensely uncomfortable, even for him, and he was generally the most uncomfortable person I had ever met. Tate, for his part, was glistening.

“Yeah,” Baker replied, slowly, a weak smile slowly pouring back onto his face. “He’s coming back next semester. I don’t know how he talked our parents into it, but he did.”

“Hey, Charlie’s a charismatic guy,” Tate replied. “Could have the whole world eating out of his hand. We miss him around Zeta.” He turned around, grabbed someone’s shoulder from behind him, who was yanked into Tate’s orbit as abruptly as Chris had been.

The person in question was a carbon copy of Tate, a spare Tate, except a little younger, a little lankier and a little shorter, maybe a more expressive face than Tate’s cool reserve, but unmistakably brothers.

“This is my brother, Logan,” he said. “Freshman.” To his brother, he said, “Chris is Charlie Baker’s brother.”

Apparently, the rest of us weren’t getting an introduction. Jordan folded her arms.

“Oh,” Logan McClendon grinned, knowingly. He had a different smile than Tate’s, somehow--goofier, more lopsided, less catalog model. “Yeah, cool guy. Sad he had to leave.”

“Logan’s going Zeta,” Tate said, his face looking nostalgic and proud. “Got his bid last weekend.”

The smile crested on Logan’s face, which suggested that Logan was not, in fact, necessarily going Zeta, whether or not he had gotten his bid last weekend. But just for a moment: then it was back at full wattage, as McClendon the Younger looked around, satisfied. “Lots of hot girls here.”

Maybe he wasn’t altogether different than Tate.

“Yeah, well, Michaela turned out most of Tri-Gamma,” Jordan said. To Logan, she said, “Sorry, I’m Jordan. I’m Michaela’s roommate.”

“Oh, yeah, my bad,” Tate said, casually without looking at all apologetic. “This is Jordan Fleischer, and this is Becker…” He bit his lip, as he clearly tried to recall either one of my first or middle names from the ether. “Adam Becker!” he added, with a little too much enthusiasm. “But everyone just calls him Becker.”

Logan’s much more expressive face looked slightly embarrassed at Tate’s lapse of manners, but his mouth curled into a warm smile as he shook our hands, the kind of frozen-on sincerity that I had seen my father deploy at campaign events to great effect.

“Becker’s fine,” I told him, stiffly.

“Nice to meet both you,” he said. He nodded, approvingly, again looking out to everyone else. “Pretty good crowd for Michaela.” Because what else could he say, what else did he know about us, other than vague opinions on the surroundings.

“Yeah,” Jordan agreed, quietly. She looked at me, then looked at Baker, and realized we were both going to be largely helpless when it came to making small talk with Tate McClendon’s brother. “So do you live in Sharp, Monroe, or Wall?”

“Monroe,” he said. “Sixth floor.”

“Oh, Adam’s sister’s in Monroe,” Jordan told him. She turned, and smiled thinly as she handed the conservation over to me.

Not that I appreciated her mentioning Justine in front of a hot future Zeta who kept mentioning the steaming smorgasbord of attractive women at this streetcar stop.

I folded my arms to silently protest Jordan. “Yeah, she’s on Monroe Four,” I told Logan. “Justine Becker. Do you know her?”

Logan’s smile grew, he let out one small, breathy, amused chuckle. But then, “No, no, I don’t.”

There was a chilly pause, followed by the quick deflation of Logan’s smile as he encountered me stoically waiting for his clarification on whatever that was.

“Oh, I mean, I know who she is,” he sputtered, looking suddenly flustered, looking like a person who wasn’t used to being suddenly flustered. “My roommate hangs out with Bethany a bit. Her roommate. But I don’t know Justine. She’s very cute though.”

There was another uncomfortable pause, and I glanced over to the other side of the neutral ground, to pick Justine and Bethany out of the crowd--Michaela had invited them, less as a goodwill gesture and more as a dirty Tri-Gamma rush event. Gold-level prospect, and all. I couldn’t immediately find them.

“She’s a very nice girl,” Tate said, judiciously, without missing a beat. He clapped Logan on the back. “We should find Michaela, yeah?”

“She’s over there,” Jordan said, pointing across the neutral ground. “And it looks like she reclaimed the vodka, so you should probably start chaperoning her before she becomes too much of a mess.”

Tate gave a deep, resigned breath. “Lord, beer me strength,” he said, and he went off to go rescue Michaela from herself, and Logan stealthily pivoted himself back into the conversation Tate had stolen him out of.

“Well,” Chris Baker said, and he didn’t have an end to that sentence, because there was no end to that particular sentence. “Yeah.”

There were headlights coming up the neutral ground, followed by the telltale clanging of the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar clanging up the neutral ground.

There was a cheer of excitement from the entire party.

There was a certain romance to the streetcar, certainly; the old wooden seats, the open windows. And yet, completely impractical, the loudness, the joltiness. Which was New Orleans in a nutshell, a tightrope of nostalgia and obsolescence.

The trip from Napoleon Avenue to the French Quarter took about twenty minutes, and we only stopped a handful of times the entire way, before it dumped us out in front of the Lady Foot Locker on the uptown-riverside corner of Carondelet and Canal.

We crossed Canal Street, one gigantic regiment of tipsy Tulane students, and Carondelet narrowed and turned into the shadowy first block of Bourbon Street.

“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked Jordan, as we passed Krystal Burger.

“The Frat House,” she said, pointing further down the block. “Bourbon and Bienville.” Without waiting for me to nonverbally assert my trepidation, she clarified, “Michaela wanted a bar where everyone could for sure get in without a fake.”

I was hard-pressed to name a bar we hadn’t all gotten into. It was Bourbon Street. The only place you had to get crafty was at Pat O’Brien’s and, on occasion, Tropical Isle if they were crowded.

I had only been to the Frat House once, on Tripp’s nineteenth birthday back in February, when we partook in their specials: SoCo lime shots, and Long Island Iced Teas, and we all wished we were dead the next morning.

The bouncer asked for our IDs; I handed him Philip, just to be safe, and they stamped me with a “21+” handstamp.

“SoCo lime? SoCo lime?” Tripp asked me, with a grin, as we stormed the bar before the rest of Michaela’s party could get through the door.

“God,” I said. “No. Certainly not.”

He looked to the bartender. “Rum and Coke, and a vodka-soda with a splash of pineapple.” He glanced at me, insistently, as if to confirm I understood the latter was for Kiandra. Then a smile began to materialize. “And ten SoCo lime shots.” He handed a wad of cash to the bartender, and turned to me, looking pleased with himself.

“Who’s ten?” I asked.

“We’re all coupled off now, Beck-my-boy,” he replied, pawing at his triple-popped collar; the third polo had been a new addition, and the other two collars beneath kept flopping under the added weight. “Me and Kiandra. Erik and Erica. Patrick and Annie. Michaela and Tate. And then you and Jordan, but y’all are alone together, so.”

I pulled out my phone to see if Kevin had texted. He had not. It was 10:03; happy hour at The Boot had officially ended.

“Help me carry these,” Tripp said, motioning to the shots with his elbow.

“I need to order drinks,” I told him, and Tripp looked supremely put out, as I leaned forward and ordered myself a gin and tonic and a vodka-cranberry for Jordan.

Jordan, who was always hawk-eyed in crowded bars thanks to her relative sobriety, had snagged us a high-top table near the front door. We crowded around her, and I handed her the vodka-cranberry.

She took a sip, considered the line of SoCo limes we were unloading on the table.

“I don’t want a shot,” she said, chewing on the edge of the straw. “I don’t like shots.”

“Becker, you’ll have to do two,” Tripp told me, with a smile. “Couple rules. If she can’t drink it...”

“Yeah, we’re not a couple though,” I told him.

“Obviously,” Erik replied. “Are they carding at the bar?”

“This is the Frat House,” I told him. “I don’t think anyone’s been carded here, ever.”

“Shots first, shots first,” said Tripp, handing one to both me and Erik. “Someone grab Michaela.”

We all looked forlornly at the rest of the bar, which had quickly filled up under the weight of Michaela’s birthday party, and none of us moved. Michaela, Patrick, Annie, Erica, and Tate were now lost to history, caught somewhere in the sudden stampede that had engulfed the Frat House.

“Couple rules still count if Erica’s lost in the crowd, right?” Erik said, holding his shot to the light.

“Charming,” Jordan told him.

Erik, who looked completely unconcerned by the thought of Erica vanishing amid a group of strangers, simply shrugged, then knocked back his SoCo lime.

“Hey, hey, we didn’t even cheers,” Tripp complained. Erik picked up another shot. “Fuck you, no. Stop.”

“There we go,” Erik said, approvingly, as I cheerily clinked with him, both of us ignoring the angry eyes that Tripp was trying to fix on us. “Cheers, brudda.”
Tripp, who had been adjusting his collars again, hastily tried to pick up a shot class to join in on the action, but he was too late.

“This is the last time I do something nice,” he told us, huffily.

“Oh my God, dude, they’re two dollar shots,” Erik replied, rolling his eyes. “You’re wearing three Lacoste polos, and your dad owns like six car dealerships. I think you’ll survive the economic hit.”

Tripp looked embarrassed by that, glanced over at Kiandra, who was watching this unfold with a very polite and placid stoicism, which was generally how she watched most of our ribald interactions. She was inscrutable, but I couldn’t help but think we terrified her. She was sweet but shy, though it didn’t surprise me that Tripp, old-fashioned Tripp, was the kind of guy who appreciated a girlfriend in an ivory tower.

“Who’s going to cheers me?” Tripp demanded.

“I’ll cheers you,” said Kiandra, with a smile. I grabbed what was Jordan’s shot, and cheersed him too.

“Four left,” Erik said, looking at what remained. “How convenient.”

Tripp sighed, but ultimately didn’t say anything in protest; Erik, with a smug look on his face, plucked up a third SoCo lime, and the rest of us followed suit, and the four of us cheersed again.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and it was finally a text from Kevin.

“I’m at F&M’s,” he informed me. “With band people. But I promise I’m coming.”

I angled my phone slightly away from Tripp’s eyes, as innocuously as I could muster.

“It’s fine if you can’t,” I texted. “You barely even know Michaela.”

There was a long pause, presumably as Kevin weighed the future. “Well, I know she’s important to you,” he texted back, finally. “Want to just meet me at F&M’s? Then we can head down to the Quarter together?”

It was the kind of request only someone who was drunk would make, because F&M’s was all the way back uptown, on Tchoupitoulas, and I had already made it clear I didn’t want to be dragged along as some obvious boyfriend to meet the band people. And Michaela would undoubtedly flip out if I left her party at 10:05.

“I’m already here,” I told him. “Frat House. Bourbon and Bienville.”

“Shit,” he sent back, almost immediately. “I thought it was earlier. How long have you been there?”

“Just got here two minutes ago,” I said. “But already did three shots.”

I could imagine his lopsided smirk, the glistening in his eye, at that, with the next bit: “Good,” he said. “You’re easier to seduce when you’re wasted.”

I angled my phone further away from everyone else. “I don’t think I put up much of a fight in general. But I can see you tomorrow. I don’t want to wreck your night if you’re having fun.”

“Naw, I want to see you,” he told me. “I’ll finish my drink and get a cab.”

“Okay,” I told him, and I didn’t wait for further response; I slipped my phone back in my pocket, and for a second, I thought I should announce that Kevin was on his way, but I thought better of it.

Tripp and Kiandra had gotten absorbed into a nearby conversation with Brett Morton and his apparently on-again girlfriend, Meredith, but they were swiftly replaced by Justine and Bethany, her roommate.

They were both still beaming with the excitement that came with being invited to an upperclassman’s birthday party--a Tri-Gamma sister’s party, at that. I remembered last year when Chris Baker invited us out, when we thought that was the epitome of popularity.

To be young.

“Peter,” Justine said, setting her drink down on the edge of the table. “I wanted to talk to you.”

I could tell, in her eyes, that she was already a little bit drunk, either from chugging vodka while waiting for the streetcar, or from an earlier stop at The Boot for happy hour.

“How may I help you?” I asked her.

I was suddenly beginning to feel the effects of three back-to-back shots of SoCo lime, the foggy hypoxiation of senses that came with the first onset of drunkenness. Everything was moving just a bit more slowly.

“I want to pick your brain,” she told me. “Do you know Lauren Hartwell?”

I bristled at the mention of a name that, though I had only met her maybe once and didn’t actually remember what she looked like, was a side player in a number of my flacid flirtations with heterosexuality.

“No,” I replied. “I specifically do not.”

That didn’t seem to thwart Justine.

“So she’s a little wastey-face already,” she said, “and she told me she wasn’t allowed to tell me, but Tri-Gamma has me at the top of their list for rush. Apparently?”

Gold-level prospect. Etcetera. I didn’t necessarily want to give Justine the validation that came from admitting she was, in fact, at the top of the list by one of the top sororities for rush.

“I don’t know anything that goes in in Tri-Gamma,” I told her. “She’s not supposed to tell you that though. I know what much.”

“Come on, Peter,” she said. “You know, don’t you?”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t. Look, it’s not my sorority. They’re very secretive about shit. Except Lauren Hartwell, apparently. I thought she was pregnant?”

“Well, she was chugging vodka the whole way down on the streetcar,” Justine said. “I don’t know, maybe she had an abortion.”

“Justine, we’re Republicans!”

Justine giggled. “Come on. Would you loosen up? Every time you see me, you act like you have to snap into big brother mode, and it’s so weird.”

Justine had been at Tulane with me for a whole semester, and she had come to a handful of Iota Chi parties, and I had run into her twice in the early morning hours when we were both wasted at The Boot, but there was still something mildly disconcerting about partying with her

“It is weird,” Erik chimed, from somewhere behind me. “Peter.”

“Not helping, Fontenot,” I replied.

“I’m an adult,” Justine replied. “Don’t be like Philip.”

“What?”

“Philip does that thing,” she said, “where he treats me like I’m six. Don’t do it. You’re not Philip.”

Justine was not, exactly, making sense. And I didn’t entirely understand why she thought Philip would be so much more of an imposing big brother than I was, considering I had gotten into this bar using Philip’s old driver’s license. If anything, Philip was the only serene one in our entire family.

There was a long pause, and we needed external resources to dislodge ourselves from this conversation.

Which is where Jordan came in, smiling and quickly rewinding life to thirty seconds ago with: “But yeah, you’re definitely at the top of the Tri-Gamma rush list.”

Erik turned to her, and looked scandalized, “Thank the fucking Lord we don’t tell you any of our fraternity secrets!”

“Oh, I know every secret already,” Jordan informed us, looking smug; it was always the quiet ones. “You guys are way too sloppy. Especially Becker.” Erik’s scandalized face turned its wrath on me, J’accuse!, but Jordan’s smile grew, as she seemed to be enjoying this line of conversation. “Here, someone do the Iota Chi secret handshake with me.”

Justine still seemed to be drunkenly processing the part of the conversation that revolved around her. “So what exactly does ‘top of their list’ mean?”

Erik took the lead on this. “It means don’t fuck up too badly, and you’re going to get a bid. Come on, your dad’s a U.S. Senator and you’re hot.”

Justine seemed very pleased by that boost of confidence. Then, she motioned to Bethany. “Have you heard anything about Bethany?”

I had not heard anything either way. Erik, Jordan, and I glanced uncomfortably at each other.

“Oh,” said Bethany, darkly.

“No, no, it’s not that we’ve heard something bad,” Jordan said, quickly. “We don’t know anything at all. Michaela only ran her mouth about Justine because it’s Adam’s sister.”

That seemed to comfort Bethany, but only a little bit. She didn’t have time to dwell: suddenly, Logan McClendon materialized, no doubt seeing this as an easy way to infiltrate a conversation with my sister.

I would have been more opinionated had he not brought along a gorgeous slab of man with him: a couple inches taller than me, with reddish hair, and bright blue eyes, a faint dusting of freckles on his sharp cheekbones. He was wearing a red polo, the sleeves tight around his biceps, his stomach visible flat.

Around his neck was a small gold Star of David, and I could see, out of the corner of my eye, Jordan perk up at the sudden stunning Semite who wandered into our barnyard.

This mystery man spoke first, to Bethany: “Hey, Bethany,” he said. He motioned to Logan, a rehearsed introduction that I could just imagine the two of them planning from across the bar. “I don’t think you’ve met my roommate, Logan.”

To be a fly on the wall in that dorm room, come shower time.

“Hey, I’m Bethany,” said Bethany, shaking Logan’s hand. “This is my roommate, Justine.”

Logan opened his mouth to say something, but Jordan extended her hand across the circle to Logan’s roommate and interrupting the proceedings, a little too eager but thankfully scuttling the attempted meet-cute between Logan and my sister.

“I’m Jordan Fleischer,” she said. She motioned to me and Erik. “This is Adam Becker, Justine’s brother. And Erik Fontenot.”

Logan seemed a little taken aback by the swift interjection, but hitched his smile up one more time, and masterfully angled his shoulder to segregate himself, Bethany, and Justine away from the rest of the conversation. And he moved in with obviously-flirtatious small talk, directed towards Justine.

I was tempted to sneak into the other conversation, but the roommate distracted me--reached out to shake my hand, and he was hot enough that I figured Justine could handle things on her own.

I melted a little bit when his face crept into a perfect smile.

“Austin Berkowitz,” he said, shaking my hand.

I swore, Jordan’s palatable excitement grew even more at the appropriately-Jewish last name; I could just imagine her silently writing Mrs. Jordan Berkowitz in the margins of her brain. “I think I’ve seen you at Hillel,” she lied, wrangling back the conversation. “Maybe?”

“Yeah, I’ve been once or twice,” he replied.

There was a protracted pause. Neither of us had any idea how to talk to this one, did we.

But we didn’t have to; Austin’s attention tilted over to Erik. “You’re on water polo, right?” Austin asked. “I think I’ve seen you at the pool in Riley.”

Erik spent a short moment sizing up Austin’s attractiveness in relation to his own, in that puffed-up, straight-guy, pride-lion sort of primordial defensiveness, the way he did with any hot guy. His face crested into a smile when he determined that Mr. Berkowitz did not, in fact, present a major threat. I’d become so desensitized to Erik’s beauty over the last eighteen months; he was just Erik, even though he was objectively still the best-looking guy in the circle.

“Yeah, I’m on polo,” he said, nonchalantly, shaking Austin’s hand. “I’m Erik. Are you on swim?”

“Oh, I was in high school,” Austin said. “Just swim for fun nowadays in Riley. To keep in shape.”

He was doing a fine job at keeping in shape. I had the sudden image of a lithe, dripping-wet Austin in a speedo, lingering by the pool. And that thought started to get me just a little bit hard, though I glanced down and it didn’t seem to be visible.

“How do you guys all know each other?” Austin asked Erik.

Erik opened his mouth to say something, but Jordan muscled her way back in. “They both lived on the same floor in Sharp last year,” she said, “and I know them all through Tate’s girlfriend.”

“Michaela, yeah,” he said, nodding along, though Jordan looked a little irritated that he had brought the attractive birthday girl’s name into the conversation.

“I met her through Logan a few times. That makes sense.” He looked at his empty cup, took one futile, final sip, and then glanced back at Justine, Bethany, and Logan, who had moved several feet away from us. “Okay, well, I’m going to grab another drink,” he said, “but I’ll see you guys around.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jordan said, quickly, even though her drink was mostly full. “I’m almost done too.”

She tossed us a warning look not to follow her, then smiled sweetly back to Austin, and she launched into some more small talk as they forced their way through the crowd towards the bar.

Erik was watching them go.

“Well, that dude made the biggest mistake of his night, didn’t he?” he said, with a thin, cold smile.

“Don’t be mean,” I said. “Let her have some fun.”

Erik gave me a theatrical eye-roll. “No homo, but come on: that’s a good-looking dude and he’s not going to bang Jordan Fleischer. Member of the tribe or not. I’m just being honest.”

“I think she looks good.”

He shrugged, “I mean, she looks better than she did last year.”

“Harsh,” I said, but I didn’t really want to pursue a conversation where Erik dismantled Jordan’s looks. “Did Erica turn ever up?”

“She’ll figure it out,” he replied, with complete nonchalance, fumbling with his packet of cigarettes. “She’s just a lay. We’re not official or exclusive or anything. If she gets lost, I’ll just find some other chick to bang tonight.”

Erik’s utter indifference to Erica Strout--despite how often he brought her around, and how often Tripp was stuck in our room playing Battlescar while Erik fucked Erica Strout--never ceased to amaze.

“So why bring her at all?” I said. “There’s a ton of hot girls here. It’s Michaela.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, lighting his cigarette. “But Erica texted me and asked me what I was doing tonight, and I told her I was coming down to the Quarter, and she wanted to come. And she puts out, and lazy sex with a hot girl is just always so hard to pass up.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d think you’d want to find someone you actually wanted to be around.”

“I’m too picky for relationships,” he said, his voice thin, as if he didn’t even really believe the words coming out of his mouth; I certainly didn’t.

“Bullshit,” I said.

Erik grinned, gave a slight giggle, causing him to exhale a few quick puffs of smoke in my face, which I melodramatically swatted away. “Whatever, dude. You’re single too.”

If there was a moment to say, “Well, actually, I’m not,” this might have been it. And part of me--really, part of me, I swear--was so tempted to just blurt it out. Blurt out to Erik Fontenot that I was not single, that I was dating Kevin Malley, that I had been for two weeks shy of nine months.

And then, the moment was swept away by some invisible conversational current, as Erik shuffled on his stool and his eyes panned back over to the bar. By this point, Michaela was standing on top of bar with three other Tri-Gams, all of them dancing and screeching along to Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.”

“She’s a little messy for ten o’clock,” he deadpanned, taking another sip of his beer. “Tate has his hands full. Better him than me.”

It was, maybe, an odd turn of phrase. I narrowed my eyes: “Do you still like Michaela?”

Erik showed absolutely no emotion. “What, romantically, or as a person?”

“Either.”

“I don’t like her romantically,” he said. “And I don’t like her as a person. Look, she’s hot. She knows she’s hot. Yes, I’d bang Michaela, and don’t even tell me you wouldn’t. I was into her last year, I’ll admit it. But she’s literally awful in every possible way and I could not be more lucky that I managed to avoid stepping into her enormous pile of shit last year.”

“If you don’t have anything nice to say,” I began, but Erik cut me off again.

“Please, remember when she threw a tantrum because you didn’t invite her to Speakeasy?” he said. “She has a boyfriend, and she still thinks she just gets to go as your date to the party of the year just because of who she is and what she looks like. And if she doesn’t get her way, she locks herself in her room, in a fit. Or what we think is a fit, but she’s actually getting fucked by Tate because she’s a manipulative bitch who only wants us to think she’s having a fit so we feel sorry for her. Because she’s a selfish, terrible person.” Erik casually finished his Bud Light. “Fuck her. I think I need another.”

 

Kevin, who had texted me around ten that he was just about to hail a cab, stumbled in about three hours later, just before one o’clock in the morning, his eyes bloodshot, his smile more crooked than usual.

It was, roughly, what I was expecting after his happy hour with the band people.

What I was not expecting: Kevin tackling me with a hug.

“You can’t do that,” I whispered to him, as he too-intimately rubbed the back of my head, squeezed me in his arms.

So Kevin let me go. His face was sunny and placid and drugged, and then he launched himself onto a deeply uncomfortable Chris Baker, to save face. “I hug everyone,” Kevin overcompensated, as he set Chris free, but he didn’t move onto anyone else standing in our circle.

“Sorry,” he told us. “I’m a little coked out right now. Band friends.” He leaned into my ear, giggled directly in my ear, and then whispered, “Let’s ditch this shit and go to Oz, so we can grind up on each other.”

“Simmer down, Malley,” I told him, loudly, for the benefit of the rest of the group.

He burrowed even further into my ear, lowering his voice so it was barely audible even to me. “I want to grind my cock on your ass on the dance floor,” he said. “And then take you into the bathroom and fuck your brains out.”

I instinctively backed away; Kevin still had a gigantic smile stretched across his face. “Yeah?” he added. “Sound like a plan?”

“No,” I replied. “Does not sound like plan.”

Baker’s face crept into a tentative smile. “What’d he say?”

“Gibberish,” I told him. “It’s just drunk Kevin being drunk Kevin.”

“Hey, I’m more coked out than drunk,” he corrected. He did the sign of the cross. “Scout’s Honor.”

“I don’t think that’s the right sign,” Morton told him. “But I’m not Catholic, what do I know.”

I glanced over at Baker, Morton, and Tommy, who were all staring at Kevin like he had landed a space ship in the middle of their lives, suffering from understanding even less than I did about his current state of mind.

“You know, those band kids are a bad influence,” I told them, trying to force a casual smile onto my face, despite Kevin’s loose cannonness. “I’m going to write their mothers.”

“I wanted you to meet them!” he exclaimed. And he was still, at least, catching his own behavior: he glanced over to my three fraternity brothers. “I want everyone to meet them. They’re cool. You’d like them. Well, most of them. Not freaking Jon-an-nan.” His voice drunkenly trailed off.
Baker, Morton, Tommy, and I all exchanged uncomfortable glances, because Kevin was quite clearly on a very different chapter of the evening than the rest of us were.

Kevin didn’t seem to care that they had registered their disapproval, but he cared that I had.

“Whatever, you’re being so Heaven’s Gate right now, Becker,” Kevin told me. “Seriously.”

I had no idea what that meant. “The suicide cult or the box office bomb?”

Maybe Kevin didn’t know either; he thought for a moment and narrowed his eyes, before finally deciding: “The movie.”

“Well, that’s funny,” I told him, with a smile, “because you’re kind of being the cult right now.”

He stuck his tongue out, but then his mouth lifted into a smile. Still talking to me, he said, “You know what I want?”

“I have a vague idea,” I replied. I looked to my fraternity brothers. “I think he’s talking about another drink. We should probably get him a water.”

“Not water,” Kevin said, shaking his head with drama. “Water doesn’t clench my thirst. You know what will clench my thirst, Becker?

“Quench,” I corrected.

“Quench,” he repeated, slowly lingering over each consonant, as if speaking some strange foreign dialect. He looked over to the bar, his mouth gaping, as if he was going to ask us for something else, but instead he said, “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” And he stumbled over in that direction, towards the bar.

“Well,” Morton said, “at least Michaela won’t be the drunkest one at the party anymore.”

I grimaced, glanced over to Kevin, who was now standing at the bar, waving a five-dollar bill in the air like a surrender flag, in an attempt to get the bartender’s attention. “I should probably help him, before he gets all of us kicked out.”

And I politely exited the conversation and, looking as nonchalant and unconcerned as I could, hightailed it over to Kevin.

“You need to play it cooler than this,” I hissed, barely audible among the din in the crowded bar. “You’re seriously five words away from slipping up.”
Kevin’s eyes lazily turned up in my direction.

“I’m fine,” he replied. “It’s fine. You’re fine, and I’m fine.” He turned back to the bartender. “Whiskey-Coke.” He looked back to me. “Who cares what people think. If they don’t think you’re fine, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine anyway. Stop holding me back.”
He was at the point of the evening where he was losing his usually-impressive command of the English language, which I had to admit was preferable than him outing both of us at Michaela’s twentieth birthday party.

“You’re being a drunk, coked-out mess who keeps getting dangerously close to--” I lowered my voice even further, “--outing us.”

“Gaudium in veritate,” he told me. “Veritas liberabit vos.”

“Now you’re just speaking Latin.”

He folded his arms, petulantly. “Latin is Latin.”

“But I don’t speak Latin,” I told him, “so it’s less conducive to conversation.”

Kevin had turned back to the bar, smashed the fiver down, slid it to the awaiting bartender, then commandeered his drink.

“What needs to happen is this,” he said, with determination, turning back to me. Then he sputtered. “Look. Who cares. It’s just a thing, that’s the thing. It’s time. It’s time, and I don’t know why you won’t just do it. No, I do know. Because you don’t have the balls.”

“Okay,” I said. “Stop.”

Kevin didn’t listen. He kept rambling on, wagging his finger at me. “People should know and they’re going to care, except maybe they’re not going to care, because I don’t think people care as much as you think they care about things like this. We should just do it and then we’ve done it!”
Despite his lack of coherence, I had a perfect idea of what he was trying to say.

And it was alarming.

“Look,” I said, probably a little louder than I should have. “You can’t do it just because you want to do it. If one of us doesn’t want to do it, we don’t do it. We’ve already decided that.”

Kevin scoffed, but didn’t say anything further. He took a sip of his drink, then made a face.

“This isn’t right,” he said, setting his drink back down on the bar and pushing it away in disgust. “This is just a fucking Coke. This is not what I wanted.” He tried theatrically to flag down the bartender, without luck. “You lied to me!” he shouted, his voice lost in the noise from the bar.

“Just fucking drink it,” I told him. “You don’t need any more booze anyway, and the bartender clearly figured that out too.”

Kevin picked up his drink, took a small sip, grimaced, but kept holding the glass.

“It’s just a fucking Coke,” he fumed at me.

And I figured, with Kevin momentarily focused on his disappointingly virgin beverage, it was time to pivot away from this topic, because I knew how easily malleable Kevin could be when he reached the advanced stages of intoxication. So I motioned Kevin to look in the direction of Logan, Austin, Jordan, and Justine, who had all sectioned off in a quartet across the bar.

“Well, you missed some good gossip,” I told him, as nonchalantly as I could. “Tate’s brother has been all over Justine all night. And Jordan’s all over his roommate.”

Kevin peered in the direction of the four of them. “Well, I don’t know the tall one, what’s his deal,” Kevin told me, pointing his drink in the vague direction of Logan McClendon. “But the one by Jor-Jor is definitely into dudes.”

I looked over to Austin, who was laughing at some story Jordan was theatrically telling the group, then back at Kevin. “What are you talking about?”
Kevin leaned in a little closer, nearly toppling over as he removed the elbow that had been casually leaning onto the side of the bar. “He’s another closet case,” he whispered to me. “He likes the peniseses. Peniseses. Fuck: cock.”

“You can’t tell someone’s gay from across the room,” I told him. “I don’t know, I didn’t get a gay vibe from him at all.”

“I’m not telling it that he is it from far away,” he replied, his voice growing slightly irritated that I wasn’t understanding his broken speech and drunken logic.

“Do you know Ben? Farber? He’s in band with me, and he’s a Monroe RA. And he hooked up with the, with the, with that ginger. Showed me pictures on his iPhone.” He held his hands out, and mouthed, “Big.”

What an interesting piece of intelligence.

Though unfortunate for Jordan.

“Are you sure?”

“I’d recognize that ass from the space shuttle,” Kevin replied, leaning back on his elbow. “From the Challenger.” He made a mock explosion noise, complete with spirit fingers. “Fuck it, you should see it in photos. Whole fucking screen. I mean, iPhone. Small screen. But big ass.”

Austin had his hands in his pockets, as Jordan moved a little bit closer to him, giggling coquettishly at something, and Jordan was not the kind of girl to do anything coquettishly.

Very, very unfortunate turn of events for Jordan Fleischer.

“Hmm,” I said, studying Austin Berkowitz, beautiful Austin Berkowitz, as he joked around with Jordan Fleischer. “He’s really hot.”
Kevin smirked. “Threesome?”

“No,” I said, smiling a bit at the thought, of Austin and Kevin and me, tangled in Kevin’s white sheets together. But no. “I’m not going to out myself to the roommate of Michaela’s boyfriend’s brother, who is currently hitting on my sister. Way too close for comfort.”

“Yeah, I’m only friends with every single one of your friends,” he replied. “Dodged that fucking bullet.” He took a drunkenly triumphant sip of his Coke-on-the-rocks, and I rolled my eyes.

“You’re different,” I said. “You know that.”

“I’m very different,” he replied. “No. I don’t like threesomes. Someone always gets left out, and it makes me very sad to leave them out when they get left out.”

“So you’re implying it’s never you that gets left out?” I repeated.

Kevin’s lopsided smile grew more broadly. “I focus on one. One. Tantum. Solamente.”

“Well,” I told him, “I don’t think I like them very much either.”

Kevin gave me a grandoise scoff. “You never had one.”

“How do you know?”

He leaned in further. “Because I know everybody,” he whispered back. “Patrick, the law guy, the Loyola guy, and me.” He counted all four on my fingers.

“Ouch. Four.” He mouthed, “Embarrassing.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

He smiled. “I’m not wrong.”

“When was yours?”

“Shh,” he said, putting his index finger to his lips. “I’m not telling you. Secret.”

“Who with?”

“I’m not telling, I’m not telling!”

“That’s what I thought,” I said, with a smirk. ““You’ve never had one.”

He puffed up with some mock toughness, but the fact that I probably could’ve pushed him over with two fingers at this point hurt the illusion. “Are you callin’ me a liar?”

“Big fucking liar.”

“Fine,” he said, his face falling back into drunken placidity. “The guy that hooked up with the ginger. Ben. We used to do the stuff back when, way back when.” He bashed his index fingers together, an unnecessary visual. “And he had this rando from the thing, that thing. The rando was hot, and Ben is kind of more of a top, so Ben got left out. I left him out. Poor Ben.”

Now part of me wished I had gone to Boot happy hour, to meet these mythical band people, to survey this alleged “Ben” character that Kevin messed around with for the better part of a year and a half.

His grip on speech was loosening again, but the silver lining that drunk and coked-out Kevin didn’t have a filter was the fact that he didn’t have a filter. “When
did you stop hooking up with Ben?’

Kevin smiled. “Jealous?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m curious.”

“You mean,” Kevin said, his smile growing but his voice turning mockingly grave, “was there any overlap?”

I crossed my arms in defiance. “Maybe.”

Even drunk, Kevin was smiling, enjoying my apparent discomfort. “When we got back from spring break, I told him I’d met someone.” He leaned in, cupped his mouth with his hands, and rasped in my ear: “You.” And then he mashed his lips--quick, behind his hands--on the fold of my ear.

He retreated, looking very pleased with himself. Even in his heavy state of intoxication, Kevin looked so goofily shy and sweet, that I wished I could grab him and kiss him and tell him that I loved him, right in the middle of the Frat House.

But I couldn’t.

So I said nothing.

Kevin’s smile fell away, and then he leaned in a little closer again. “Let’s go to Oz. This is your last chance, Becker!”

“We can’t,” I said. “I told you.”

Kevin hung his head backwards. “Ugh, why do you make it so hard, Becker. It’s literally the perfect time for us. Michaela’s a mess. Jordan is hitting on some, some faggot. Justine’s going to plop on that guy’s mattress. Tripp and Erik are with those chicks. You know?”

“I can’t just leave,” I told him. “What happens when they all stop being preoccupied and notice we’re both gone? Can you imagine what they’d say?”

“Maybe something like, ‘Becker’s probably facedown in Kevin’s pillow right now.’”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious.”

“I’m serious too,” he said, waving his drink around, sloshing a little bit on the floor. “We could just leave. And let everyone figure out, and if they figure it out right, then they figure it out right, and then we’re done! Good. It’s a plan. Aaaand, break!”

“No, it’s not a plan,” I told him. “No.” I shook my head. “I’m going to go find Tripp, Erik, and Patrick. Why don’t you go back to Baker for a while, and find me when you sober up?”

Kevin said nothing, but he followed me as I went across the bar, back to where my friends were standing, all wrapped around their respective paramours.
As much of a ticking time bomb as Kevin was at the moment, it wasn’t lost on me that this was the first time me and my three roommates had all been together with the people we were dating. Even if they didn’t know it.

“Oh, Becker,” Annie said, rummaging in her purse. “Perfect timing.” She pulled out her digital camera, and handed it to me. “We wanted to get a couples shot. Can you take it?”

“Becker can definitely take it,” Kevin told her.

I tried to give him the most subtle glare I could muster, as I accepted the digital camera. I walked back a few paces, as Annie set about arranging everyone prom-style, Patrick, Tripp, and Erik, and their respective girls. No one seemed nearly as enthusiastic about this photo as Annie, though Patrick was being a dutiful boyfriend, trying to keep an encouraging smile on his face, and Kiandra was deploying her usual preternatural politeness.
How would Annie have gone about arranging me and Kevin? Kevin with his arms around me, because he was a top? No. That would be humiliating. If Kevin and I were out, if Kevin and I were out and standing with the other six of them, there likely wouldn’t be a picture at all, because Annie wouldn’t know how to line us up like the other ones.

“Oz,” Kevin whispered again, in my ear, and I ignored him.

“Okay, everyone get together,” I said, waving them in. “Look this way.”

“How many of these girls are going to detag themselves from this photo by the end of the semester?” Kevin whispered in my ear, as I lined up my digital camera on the six of them, and took a few snaps. “One? Two? All three?”

“That’s not very nice,” I muttered back. To everyone, I said, “Alright, everyone look this way.”

“The black one and the blonde one?” he whispered.

“Definitely the blonde one,” I whispered back. “Jury’s still out on the black one.” To the group, “Okay, now one with the flash.”

I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that Kevin suddenly began smiling, and leaned into my ear again. “I want to fuck you in the bathroom,” he whispered, his voice matter-of-fact but eager. “With all our friends on the other side of the door, listening to you scream as I tear apart your tight little hole.”

My head whipped over to him, stunned at the brazeness, which I had not been at all expecting. But I didn’t have time to respond: suddenly, all of the Tri-Gammas from across the bar erupted into a very loud, very shrill chant:

“Tri-Gamma’s F-I-N-E, fine, right down the L-I-N-E, line. G-to-the-A-to-the-M-M-A. That’s how you spell it, here’s how you yell it: Tri-Gamma!”
It was followed by thunderous self-applause from the Tri-Gammas and the men who aspired to sleep with them. Kevin leaned over to me again, suicidal eyes, and whispered, “Let’s go to Oz and not be around women ever again.”

I glanced around suspiciously, but in the crowd, in the noise, no one showed any indication of hearing him.

The Tri-Gammas revved into another eardrum-shattering cheer. I leaned in to him and whispered, “Maybe in an hour. We can’t leave now. Especially to a gay bar. Everyone will notice if we leave now.”

“I want everyone to notice,” he whispered, his voice suddenly turning whiny and pleading. “What’s wrong with that? Why can’t everyone know? How easy would it be for us to just walk out that door, without saying anything, and everyone would know?”

“Are you fucking kidding me right now, Malley?”

"I want to put my hands all over you," he whispered. "I want to grope that hot little ass on the dance floor."

“You’re in rare form today,” I whispered back. “Give me some time.”

“I want to grind my cock on your hot little ass,” he said, quietly, “and then take you home and demolish your hole until you can’t walk straight.”

“Seriously, stop,” I said. And I realized Kevin was far too much of a risk to have him stay at Michaela’s party. I quickly glanced around, to see what my options were, and there were Baker and Veronica, standing over by the bar. I flagged them over. “I think we need to put Kevin in a cab.”

“I think we needed to put him in a cab a while ago,” said Baker, with a smirk. He grabbed one of Kevin’s arms. “Come on.”

“No, I’m staying,” Kevin said, wrenching his arm away. “I’m not going!”

“We’re all going,” Baker said. “We’re all going.” He turned towards Tripp, Erik, and Patrick, and mouthed, “Help us,” and they all jumped into action, encircling

Kevin like special forces, moving him through the crowd as he limply protested but ultimately didn’t put up much of a fight.

They went back inside, and Baker and I put Kevin in the middle seat of the United Cab, sitting on either side of him, because we couldn’t trust him to sit by one of the doors; Kevin was too wily, too much of a flight risk.

Kevin had his arms folded, was glaring at me viciously, as if I had done some brutal disservice to him, but it was only momentary: as the cab started driving down Royal Street, Kevin quickly passed out, his head resting on Baker’s shoulder.

“Those fucking band people,” Baker told me, as the cab drove down Royal Street. “Luckily, Michaela’s about a half a drink behind him from passing out.”

“Oh, Michaela’s F-I-N-E, fine,” I told him, clapping once at the end with mock spirit.

“Women are so fucking annoying in groups,” he replied, a smile brimming on his face. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”

I registered my rebuttal silently in my head: that some of us could, in fact, like without them quite comfortably. Kevin let out a short snort in his sleep.

“You need to get laid,” I told him.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” he replied, coldly.

“You will,” I told him. “I mean, you’re going to be president of Iota Chi next semester. That’s really big shit.”

“God,” he said, closing his eyes, “it’s going to be an absolute disaster, and I think everyone knows it.”

“Everyone, as in the people who elected you president three weeks ago, everyone?”

“It was a war of attrition,” he said. “I was no one’s first choice, and don’t even try to pretend like that’s not true, because I read the minutes from the chapter meeting.”

I chortled. “You read the minutes from the meeting? Who reads the minutes from the meeting?”

“First vote,” he said. “Fourteen votes. Fourteen!”

“That’s five more than Eddie got.”

“Still,” he said. “Third place, out of four.”

“But then,” I said, “the round after that, you got Eddie’s votes. Then, you got Pagliacci’s votes. And then, you won.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “but only because no one wanted Matt Rowen to be president. Because everyone knew he would try to turn Iota Chi into a cult of personality. It was an anti-Rowen thing. Not a pro-me thing.”

“So?” I said. “Do you know how my dad won in 1994? Congress? A nationwide protest of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare bill. No one gave a shit who he was, just that he’d be against Hillarycare. And now, he’s practically running for President.”

Baker whipped his head towards me. “Your dad’s running for President?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I said ‘practically.’”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “it’s going to be a mess. I’m telling you.”

“You don’t really believe that, or you wouldn’t have run in the first place,” I told him. “You’re going to do great. You’ve got me. Consigliare.”

Baker smiled. “Yeah, maybe.”

The cab continued the rest of the way up Claiborne Avenue, and turned onto Broadway Street, and dropped us off in front of Kevin and Baker’s, 858 Broadway, between Maple and Burthe.

“Kevin,” Baker said, shaking his shoulder. “Dude. Wake up.”

Kevin stirred, his eyes fluttered at Chris. “Becker?”

I braced for some awkwardness, but instead, Chris Baker corrected him: “Baker.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said, and he started to close his eyes again. And Baker shook him again; this time, Kevin looked irritated, as if we were being mildly inconvenient for him.

I pulled one arm, and Baker pushed Kevin’s torso with his body weight, and Kevin slowly acquiesed, slowly allowed us to drag him across the lawn to the Becker door.

“I can’t open Kevin’s side door,” Baker said. “I think he keeps his keys in his front pocket.” He glanced down at Kevin’s crotch, then looked uncomfortably back at me. “Uh, do you want to fish them out?”

“No,” I said, trying to look as mildly disgusted by the potential for accidental hand-on-genital contact as any straight fraternity guy. “Not at all.”
Baker rolled his eyes. “Just do it.”

I gave a loud sigh, and figured that was enough of a performance to at least bury the scent. I lowered my thumb and index finger into Kevin’s jean pocket, with surgical precision, and plucked out his keys.

And, like I had done a million times before, I opened the Becker door, turned on the lights, and stepped inside.

Baker and I dragged Kevin over to his bed, where he faceplanted, and we stared at his corpse for a moment or two.

“Yeah,” Baker said. “Well, that was fun.” He looked at me. “Do you want to smoke or something? See who’s at The Boot?”

“Naw, I should get back to campus,” I said, motioning to the side door. Baker nodded, said goodnight, and left through the door to the hallway.

And, of course, I had no intention of going home. I locked the hallway door, then I locked the side door to the street, and then I crawled on top of the bed, next to my sleeping boyfriend. And Kevin, even as much of a drunken mess as he had been tonight, never looked more at peace to me than he did when he was sleeping.

I wondered what he dreamed about. If he dreamed about me. Because I knew I’d be dreaming of him.

 

And then, it was suddenly light out, suddenly morning, and I woke up to the sound of Kevin, still fully-dressed, clutching his head and moaning.

“Why’d you let me drink that much last night?” he grunted.

I propped myself up on my elbow. “Hey, the package arrived broken.”

Kevin moaned again, and then started with the task of unbuttoning his jeans, which seemed just slightly beyond the realm of his physical capabilities.

“How’d I get home?”

“Baker and I took you home in a cab,” I told him. “At around one o’clock.”

“What time did I get downtown?” he asked.

“Also around one o’clock.”

Kevin yanked his jeans down to his knees, but couldn’t quite figure out how to get them off there; I popped up, and started pulling them off his legs the rest of the way.

“Not my best showing, I gather,” he replied, his eyes fluttering shut.

“Not really,” I said.

“I hope I didn’t ruin your night.”

“Well, you almost did,” I said. “You were being, you know.” His eyes shot open again at that, as alarmed as one could muster in an advanced stage of hangover and without moving.

“What’d I do?”

“You kept telling me you wanted to go to Oz and dance.”

Kevin gave a slight, breathy giggle, and his eyes fluttered shut again. “Oh. That I do remember. I mean, I just wanted to go dance but you were being so lame.”

“Lame?” I said. I couldn’t believe that was the word he had chosen--as if I was being a stick in the mud because I didn’t want to be callously outed in the middle of Michaela’s birthday party. “Come on. I couldn’t leave to go grind up on you in some gay bar. Everyone would know about us.”

Kevin said nothing further on the topic, and closed his eyes again. “You know, Nick never called me. Neither of them did.”

It took me a second to understand which topic he had suddenly pivoted to.

The last time I had seen Kevin, before last night, was the day he picked me up from the airport, a week ago. And he told me he had left them the letter, and was expecting a call any moment. We had gone to Crabby Jack’s on the way home, had gotten a couple po’boys, and he had spent the entire time glancing at his phone, seeing if he had somehow missed a fateful phone call from home. A week later, apparently that call had never come.

I hadn’t been planning on asking for updates on his family situation anyway. I knew I wouldn’t want to share minutes of something that uncomfortable and seismic with anyone.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. He sighed. “I haven’t heard anything from them. It’s Sunday. It’s been a week since I left California, and literally, not even a phone call. No emails. No mail. Nothing.”

And, based on the expectant silence that followed, I knew he was telling me this so we could discuss this, as much as I didn’t want to actually discuss this.

“Maybe they’re just processing,” I suggested. “Maybe they’re thinking about it. It’s big news.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know them. They don’t process. They act. They act impulsively, and they scorch the earth when they do. I know they’re cutting me out completely, but it’s driving me crazy that they don’t even have the decency to tell me to my face.” He sighed. “Is it tacky to call them to clarify whether or not I’ve been properly disowned?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought for a second. “Maybe they didn’t see the letter? Maybe it fell behind a dresser or something. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Oh, they saw it,” he said. “I folded it up on the kitchen table and wrote ‘Cash’ on the outside, to make sure they opened it.” He shook his head. “I don’t even know what I wanted from them. Some sort of yelling. Just dragging all the fucking subtext into the foreground. Like, everything’s going to come out sooner or later, isn’t it? And I’m finally in the position where I’m happy. And I don’t want to hide things. I’m so fucking sick of pretending I’m someone I’m not, all the time.”

There was another long, drawn out silence, and I had no idea how to respond to that, or if I was supposed to respond to that, or what he expected me to say.

So I said nothing, and it didn’t matter, because Kevin was barrelling forward by himself anyway.

“You know, I paid their December rent,” he continued. “And January rent, which I was hoping to avoid. Maybe I should have just told them I was cutting them off, rather than trying to manipulate them into cutting me off.”

“Look,” I told him. “Why does it even matter, if they’re not saying anything? Just let the pieces fall. Stop paying for things, and they’ll figure out how to get in touch with you.”

Kevin was thinking, and apparently his question was just a rhetorical one: “Well, I can’t do that,” he said, finally. “I promised my dad. I just wouldn’t want him to be disappointed in me.”

“Your dad would’ve understood,” I told him.

“Maybe,” said Kevin. He thought for a second, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “I didn’t tell you this, but the Saturday after Thanksgiving—the day after you were there--Nick got fired for bringing drugs into the break room. Fired from a freaking Sav-On cash register job. I mean, it was only pot but, you know, Alberto Gonzalez.”

“Michael Mukasey,” I corrected.

Kevin swatted the Attorney General away dismissively, and settled back into his pillow. “Nick needs me. Both of them need me. If my dad were here, he’d tell me that. He wouldn’t tell me he understood. He would tell me that they needed me.”

“Or he’d tell you that your mom’s a drunk and your brother’s a deadbeat,” I said, “and you should do what’s right for you.”

Kevin looked slightly offended. Just slightly. “Hey, he’s still my brother, Becker,“ he told him. “I’d never call Philip a deadbeat.”

“Philip’s a 1L at Georgetown Law,” I told him. “He went to Yale.”

“That doesn’t make him better than Nick.”

“Yes, it does,” I said. I was a little taken aback by the sudden defense of Nick Malley, considering how little Kevin thought of him, how cold they were to each other back when I saw him a week ago, considering how they hadn’t spoken over this very important letter and he had just been fired from what sounded like a convenience store for bringing drugs to work. “Why are you defending NIck?”

Kevin thought for a second. “Yeah, I mean, he’s an asshole. And a deadbeat. But you don’t have to call him that.”

“You’ve literally called him that a million times,” I replied. “But sorry, I won’t use the word.”

He was about to say something else, and then stopped, but then opened his mouth and said it anyway, “Do you think I’m a deadbeat?”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re my boyfriend. I love you.”

“I just,” he said, throwing back his head, “hope that it didn’t change the way you look at me.”

“That what didn’t?”

“Colton.”

The truth was, I hadn’t even thought about Kevin’s childhood. It was sad, of course, but he was Kevin. He was my Kevin, and I loved him no matter where he was from. In spite of where he was from.

“That’s ridiculous,” I told him. “Your brother got fired for bringing pot to work. He’s not you.”

He stiffened. “That wasn’t a denial.”

“What do you want me to say? Nothing changed. I know showing me your past was some big watershed moment for you, but newsflash: I already knew you were poor. I already knew you were a drug dealer. I already knew your mom was a drunk, and I already knew your brother was a deadbeat.”

“And me,” he replied. “Because I don’t go to Yale or Georgetown Law either, do I.”

“You go to Tulane!” I said, incredulously. “Are you kidding? Look. I love you very much. I’m very proud of you. For Tulane. For conning your way into Las Palomas. For getting out of Colton. For everything.”

He bit his lip. “I know.”

“And whatever,” I said. “Nick Malley is a lovely speciman of human being. Happy?”

“No,” he said, with a smile. “He’s horrible. That’s not what I mean.”

“So what do you want from me then?”

“Well, I’d like to fuck you for starters,” he said. “Since I assume we didn’t get to it last night.”

He broke whatever ice there was between us, and I smiled. “Sure you’re p for the challenge?”

“Oh, I can’t put in any effort,” he replied. “You’ll have to ride it.”

I leaned over, and kissed my boyfriend. “You’re on.”

Kevin closed his eyes again, his face in a blissful, thin smile, as he laid back and waited.
He was still wearing his flannel shirt from the night before and a pair of black boxer briefs, and I could see he was already filling out the front, already getting hard in anticipation.

I went for his shirt first, unbuttoning each buttoning, and kissing my way down his torso. He was wearing his dad’s dog tags, against his light dust of chest hairs, and he never looked more masculine to me.

I continued kissing, continuing unbuttoning, until I got to the waistband of his bulging underwear. I burrowed my face into his crotch, felt his hard dick through the cloth against my face. And I pulled down his boxer-briefs from the waistband, revealing his already-hardening dick. And it was such a beautiful sight, this element of Kevin Malley.

He let out a shudder as I wrapped my lips around the head of his dick, slowly began bobbing my head up and down.

“God,” he whispered, as I picked up the speed, as I buried my face as close to the hilt of his big cock as I could. “That feels so fucking good.”
I kept going, and Kevin, by this point, was writhing, feeling the pleasure in his entire body, until I stopped, and looked at him, and he whispered to me, “Get the lube.”

I didn’t have to be told twice; I reached into his nightstand, and grabbed the tube. I squired it into my hands, and rubbed it on his dick. And then I straddled him, across his stomach, my knees on either side, and I started to line myself up with his hard dick.

“You’re going to need more lube than that,” he told me. “Trust me on this one. Put it in your tight little hole.”

I picked the bottle back up, and squirted more into my hand. I rubbed more on his dick, stroked it a few times, and he moaned. And then I squired more, on my fingers, and began probing my hole for entry with an index finger.

Kevin smiled at me, as I let out a shudder. It had been a week since I had anything inside my ass—Kevin—and I hadn’t realized how horny my ass was for a good fucking until this exact moment. And I could feel the coolness of the lube inside me, as I stuck another finger inside me.

“Ride it,” Kevin whispered. “Why should you have all the fun?”

I positioned myself back over Kevin’s dick, grabbing the base and slowly guiding my hole towards it. And I felt the first stretch as I slowly lowered myself onto his awaiting cock.

I was moving slowly. Kevin had other ideas; I was maybe halfway down his shaft when he bucked his hips upward, forcing himself into me the rest of the way, and I let out a moan of pleasure as he bottomed out inside of me.

“Ride it,” he told me again. And I did. On my knees, I slowly moved up his dick, and then back down, slowly at first, gaining speed, until I could feel the intense pleasure of my boyfriend’s dick drilling my hole from underneath.

And then Kevin started bucking his hips up into me, matching my pace. He was getting close—his labored breathing, his sudden participation. And I whispered to him, “Cum for me. Cum inside me.”

Kevin whimpered, and then groaned, and I felt his hot juice fill my ass, as I continued to bounce on his cock until he finally pushed me over the edge and I shot volleys of hot white cum onto my awaiting boyfriend.

I toppled onto Kevin’s cum-covered chest, out of breath. Kevin was too much of a top to relinquish this much control usually, but his hangover.

“That was hot,” he said, as I slid off his slick dick. I could feel his big load of cum just beginning to trickle out of my ass. And then I collapsed on the bed next to him.

“I love you,” I told him, putting my hands around his shoulders. And I kissed him, on the cheek, felt his stubbly face against my lips.

“I’m going to miss you,” he whispered, rubbing me on the back of my head. “Look, I’m sorry about last night. I know I was being obnoxious, but I thought it’d be fun to be open with you, somewhere in public.”

“Don’t pretend like this wasn’t your primary goal,” I replied, leaning in to kiss him softly again, just behind the ear. “Why grind on me in public when we can have so much more fun behind closed doors, just the two of us?”

Kevin didn’t say anything, but he ran his fingers along the side of my head, brushing the shot hairs above my ears. And then his other hand went down from my head to my waist, pulling me closer, our soft, sticky dicks rubbing up against each other.

“I want to tell everyone I’m with you,” he whispered. “I want to tell everyone that I’m in love with you.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I didn’t. Instead, I rubbed the light hairs on his chest, and caught one of his dad’s dog-tags in my hand. I turned it over.

“Malley, Michael T.,” I read. “O Positive. Catholic.”

“That’s my dad,” he replied. “Obviously.”

I traced the letters with my fingers. “Malley, Kevin Q.,” I said. “O Positive. Socialist. Are you O Positive?”

“Yeah,” he said. “O Positive. Universal donor.”

“I’m AB Positive,” I told him. “Universal receiver.”

“So the guidebooks tell me,” he replied, with a smile, grabbing a handful of my naked ass. “You know my actual middle name, right?”

“Michael,” I told him. “You’ve asked me that before--of course I know your real middle name. But I prefer Qantas. It’s charming.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not Kevin Qantas Malley,” he replied. “It’s Kevin Michael Malley.” His smile faded. “We need to do it, Becker.”

“Do what?” I asked, faking ignorance. Kevin stared at me, ceaselessly, for a few more moments. “Look, you’re going to be gone for eight months,” I added.

“We can deal with this when you get back. Why do we have to do it now? What’s the rush?”

“What’s going to change between now and eight months from now?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Everything. Nothing. What does it matter? All that matters if how the two of us feel. I don’t know why you keep insisting we bring everyone into the bedroom with us.”

“You’re never going to do it,” he said, more a statement than a question. “Are you?”

“Of course I’m going to do it,” I said. “I just don’t understand what the rush is. You know I love you. Nothing else matters beyond the two of us in this room. We don’t need anyone else knowing our business to make what we have real.”

Kevin opened his mouth, as if to push the point further, but he didn’t. “I think I’m just stressed. About Nick and my mom.”

I sighed, kissed him on the cheek. I didn’t know exactly what to say, because the direction he was expecting this to go in--the complete disowning of Kevin Malley by the rest of his family--seemed so bleak. And maybe this wasn’t the open baring of the truth that he had expected, but at least it wasn’t negative and nasty.

“You’ll hear from them at some point,” I suggested, finally. “Maybe it’s a good thing that no one’s disowned anyone yet, that everyone’s just digesting things. You keep the lines of communication open and maybe things will eventually work out.”

“My family isn’t your family,” he replied, flatly. “I know it’s hard for you to imagine it. You can’t keep pouring your love into people who won’t love you when they see who you really are. At some point, you have to say, ‘This is who I am. And this is who I want to be. And I’m going to live my life on my own terms, no matter how much it bothers you and no matter how much you try to hold me back.’”

“But it’s family,” I told him. “You can’t break the bonds of family.”

“They’re not like your family,” he said again. With a wry smile, he added, “Even though your family would probably hate me.”

“Are you kidding? Justine likes you. Philip would like you. My parents would adore you. They’d probably prefer you to any of us.”

“Nah,” he said. “They’d take one look at me. He put on a haughty British falsetto: “‘Why is Petah dating that ragamuffin?’”

“Well, they’re not British,” I told him. “My mom grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and my dad grew up on a farm in California--”

“Vineyard,” he corrected. “Don’t hick Prairie Chapel up for my benefit.”

“They pulled themselves up,” I continued, choosing to ignore his interjection. “You pulled yourself up. They’d see more of themselves in you than they ever do in any of us.”

Kevin smiled at that, just a bit, and he touched the side of my head again. “You have no idea how much I’m going to miss this.”

“It’s only three months,” I said. “And then spring break. And then another three months.”

He looked wistful. “If you come.”

“I’m coming,” I told him. “I promise you that. Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die.”

“Okay,” he said.

“We’ll just take it day by day,” I told him. “You’re going to go everywhere. You can send me postcards, and I’ll be sitting in Bruff with my mail, looking at the exotic life you’re living. Wondering how you’re managing to not sleep with all those sexy European men.”

He leaned in, and he kissed me, hard, his hand pulling my head towards me--it was almost unexpected in its enthusiasm.

And then, as suddenly as it all started, he backed away.

“There,” he said, looking pleased with himself. “That’s the kiss I want to remember you by.”