Wolf Like Me - 7. BAM! GAY DRAMA!

Part One – Indie Comes to Jesus

“Shit.”

Whatever Efrain had to say was lost as he pushed past me, calling for Cory. He paused at the door to shoot a terse “fucking asshole” over his shoulder. I could just barely make out a truck engine pulling away. I few moments later, the front door slammed shut.

There was a loud thump followed by a string of curses from Efrain. Then some stomping before his bedroom door slammed closed.

I knew I had overstepped, but he had to be warned. I decided the best thing right now was to give the guy some space.

~*~*~*~

Cory stood at my door, at three in the damn morning, asking for pain pills and a hug.

I was about ready to shut the door on him when I noticed how miserable he looked.

“Fine,” I said. “Get in here.”

I quickly ushered him inside. My studio apartment was too small for a couch, so I got him comfortable on my bed before I retrieved medicine and a bottle of water.

“Hey, Preston. This is going to sound really lame, but could you open those for me?” he said when I offered him the bottles. “My arms aren’t working right.”

Once opened, he shook out a couple pills and popped them into his mouth. He winced as he brought the water bottle to his lips. He’d also been walking a little stiffly when he came in. I figured he hurt himself during practice.

It wasn’t until he handed back the pill bottle that I noticed his wrists, and my stomach dropped.

“What happened?” I was trying to not freak out. I was apparently failing.

“Dude, I have a good twenty pounds on him. This,” he said while indicating his wrists, “happened because I wanted it to happen.”

I briefly left him to root around in my bathroom for some ointment and gauze. I stood between his knees and applied cream to his raw skin. “How..?”

“Tied me to the bed.”

“With what, exactly?”

“Self-sticking Ace bandages.”

“Resourceful,” I said dryly as I wrapped his injuries. “And the rest?”

“Guess I struggled too much.”

“You seriously let Wolfie do this?” We’d been using the nickname to discuss Efrain around his roommates and it stuck.

“Ever cum without touching your dick?” He gave a half-laugh and pointed to his glasses. “I self-bukkake’d on these.”

“Oh my God.” Somehow relieved, I put my arms around his shoulders as his arms wrapped around my waist. “You’re lucky I like you.”

“Yeah. I’m pretty damn lucky.” His miserable look from earlier returned, and he rested his forehead on my stomach. “You know, you’re one of my best friends.”

“Does Keenan know this?”

“He said you can be my side chick.” It should be a joke, but his voice was too flat to do it justice. An uncomfortable silence stretched behind it.

“Gonna tell me what this is about?”

“I’m overreacting like a little bitch.”

“I doubt that. I mean, you’re the one who started lecturing me when I trash-talked Iceman for going cold on you.”

His arms wrapped around me tighter. I figured whatever he had to say would last longer than my legs could hold me up this early in the morning, so I sat against the headboard and let Cory put his head in my lap.

“I overheard him and Efrain talking about me.”

While he filled me in on the conversation, I ran my fingers through his baby-fine hair to soothe him. My opinion of Indie sank further the more Cory told me about him.

“And after he called you a walking STD…”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Couldn’t let ‘Rain see me like this, so I left.”

“And you came here.”

“I didn’t feel like dealing with the guys either.”

I thought about what I could say to reassure him, but by this point, he was all talked out, and I was tired as fuck. We crawled under the covers to catch the last few hours of sleep.

I’d already decided that I needed to kick Indie’s ass; Wolfie’s fate was still undetermined.

~*~*~*~

When I left for my morning jog, there was a fist-sized hole in the drywall. Efrain missed punching the wall stud by mere inches. I was a little pissed off about the damage from his hissy fit, but he’d already left for the day, and I was running late besides. I had too much shit to do to worry about roommate drama and holes in the wall.

At noon, Mike and I decided we’d caught up enough to break for lunch. I was closing the office door before we headed to the dining hall just as Romero Mackey caught up to me.

“Hey, man, I got a question about an essay for Dr. Collins,” he said. “When will you be back in your office?”

Before I could answer, I was accosted by 5-feet-8-inches of hard fury. Preston, the guy Cory had been making out with at Kiley’s party, stormed up to me and slapped both hands into the middle of my chest, shoving me backward.

“Move.” His voice was cold and forceful, his soft brown eyes seethed with rage.

“What the fuck is this about?” He shoved me another step back and followed me into the office.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he addressed Mike and Romero, who were watching from the doorway, without looking away from me. “This asshole and I need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting.”

Mike threw up his hands and said about the only thing you could given the situation. “He’s all yours.”

Romero just looked confused.

“What the fuck have you been telling Efrain? The fuck is wrong with you? Are you jealous ‘cause you can’t get anyone on your dick? Is that why you’re talking shit?” he demanded, the words striking harder under his controlled tone. He shoved my chest again. “Or is it because you were too much of a pussy to fuck Cory when you had the chance and now you don’t want anyone else to?”

“But—” I started. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me down. I was a whole head taller than the guy, but he was pretty fucking strong. I looked to Mike and Romero for support. The former looked like he was trying really hard not to laugh, the latter looked like an over-excited Labrador with a new toy.

“Bitch, I don’t give a shit about your sad fucking excuses. Cory likes Efrain. A lot. And you’re sticking your ass in where it doesn’t belong. I swear to motherfucking God, if you screw things up for them, you pretentious, wine-drinking, hipster fuck…”

~*~*~*~

“...then he grabs Norman’s junk and threatens to twist his dick up like a balloon animal and make him suck it.”

“Oh God.” I couldn’t imagine Preston James Finnegan, bow-tie and all, threatening to make someone self-fellate.

“Damn,” Gio said. “Fucker is stone cold.”

“That’s not the scary part.”

“Hm?”

“He literally has the guy by the balls and is ripping him to shreds. He even details the exact Brazilian jui-jitsu moves he plans to use on him. Did you know he was into that shit?”

I shook my head.

“So, yeah, he’s maddogging the fuck out of Indie, who looks like he’s about to piss himself, but we hear Dr. Collins coming up the hall, and he pulls a complete 180. He’s suddenly all chipper chipmunk and trying to drag me off for coffee, so he can show me videos from his last tournament.”

Al laughed. “Oh fuck, I’d pay to see that shit.”

“He seriously used the words ‘testicular torsion.’”

“Sounds like an awesome name for a band,” Gio commented.

“Oh, hell yes!” Al’s band already had a name, but they’d been arguing about album names for a couple weeks.

The guys moved on to another topic, and I stopped paying attention. I still hadn’t talked to Efrain, and I probably needed to talk to Preston, too. But, all I really wanted to do was turn off my phone and go back to bed.

“Oh, before I forget.” Something in Romero’s voice grabbed my attention. I had a bad feeling about this. “We have an ID on Cory’s Wolfie.”

As if the situation couldn’t get worse.

~*~*~*~

My shoulders and legs were sore enough that I felt it was a good enough excuse to skip football practice. Vuis agreed to let me off the hook as long as I visited the trainers, so they could look me over. I figured if I went before the guys started coming in for practice, I could avoid seeing Efrain. My head was still too fucked up to deal with him, or anyone else for that matter.

Unfortunately, he was waiting for me when I left the trainer’s office.

He dragged me into an empty room and locked the door. His body pressed me against the wall, and he held my face in his hands. His mouth slanted hungrily across mine. Against my better judgement, I kissed him back. This only further knotted my jacked up emotions.

“This isn’t the best place to talk,” he said and looked like he was about to say more. Instead, he showed me his phone where he had a text message from someone labeled “Epic Douchebag.”

“Tell your boyfriend to call off his attack twink,” I read out loud.

He moved it away, but not before I read his answer – Consider yourself lucky. My boyfriend’s attack twink isn’t the one who wants to strangle you.

“So, you have an attack twink?”

“Seems so.”

“Kinda sad that I missed that.” He rested his forehead against mine. “You turned off your phone.”

“Sorry.”

“How much did you hear last night?”

“More than I wanted to.”

“Why’d you leave?”

I took a fortifying breath.

“This isn’t a smash-and-dash,” I started and he winced. “But it isn’t a relationship either. My hurt feelings are above your pay grade.”

“Cory…”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

“I just need to cool down.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“But not right now,” I said and slipped away from him. “I just want to go back to bed.”

I left the room before he could form a reply.

~*~*~*~

Everything was making me fucking pissed off.

Silence was pissing me off. My pencil tapping on my book was pissing me off. My leg bouncing under the table was pissing me off. Looking at the same goddamn problem all night was pissing me off.

I tried playing some music to calm down, but it started to feel like one of those stupid fucking montages they have in romantic comedies where the guy fucks up and the bitch won’t talk to him.

Above my fucking pay grade. What kind of fucking bullshit was that?

There was a tentative knock on my door, and for the first time in awhile, I got excited that Indie was home because I really wanted to break shit, and his bitch-ass face seemed like a pretty fucking good place to start.

Instead, a soft feminine voice called me.

“Efrain?”

“It’s open, Laurel,” I said without turning around. I opened my hand to set down my pencil, only to find that I’d just snapped the stupid thing in half. I was still staring down at it when she hugged my shoulders from behind and rested her chin on my head.

“Hey, roomie.”

“Hey.”

“Heard you had a bad day.”

“From who?”

“Mike,” she answered. “Seems the secretary of the GSA threatened to rip off Indie’s dick and feed it to him.”

“He fucking deserves it.”

“I know. Once I got the whole story out of him, I was hard pressed not to do it myself.”

I managed a half-laugh at this. I’d only known Laurel for this past year, and not as well at that considering that she practically lived at her boyfriend’s apartment, but she’d always struck me as too sweet and nurturing to beat up the guy she’d been best friends with since middle school.

“Mike and I decided he should stay on our couch tonight, so you weren’t tempted to kill him in his sleep.”

“What brought you here, then?”

“Figured you needed someone to talk to. You’re kind of a lone wolf.”

“I guess so.”

“I also busted Indie’s lip open.”

I couldn’t help smiling at this.

“Oh, that’s an improvement,” she laughed. Then my stomach growled (I was pissed off about being hungry, but more pissed off about having to cook). “Come on. I know I’m not as good as you are in the kitchen, but I can still put something together.”

Laurel rummaged through the kitchen for dinner ideas. She found some over-priced grass-fed organic strip steaks in the fridge. They were Indie’s, and when I told her this, she decided that steak was exactly what I needed.

The dinner theme became “Indie’s stuff” as we pulled together the rest of our menu.

While she pan-seared Indie’s steaks, I sliced up Indie’s baby portabella mushrooms and sautéed them in Indie’s pricey Irish butter. She deglazed the pan with Indie’s Merlot and poured that over the mushrooms. We steamed Indie’s fresh green beans with cracked pepper and salt, and nuked Indie’s sweet potatoes in the microwave. We were halfway through a six-pack of Indie’s locally-bottled craft beer by the time we were ready to dig in.

I could live another 19 years and still not have a more satisfying meal.

After dinner, I filled her in on my side of the story while we curled up on the sofa. We drank Indie’s Moscato d’Asti and shared a pint of Indie’s pistachio gelato. I was surprised that my and Indie’s versions of what happened last night matched up. She wasn’t. Indie still didn’t think he did anything wrong.

“He doesn’t make friends easily, but he does care about you.” I scoffed at that. “No, really,” she insisted. “Other than Mike, you’re the only friend he’s made since coming here.”

It was weird, but I did think of him as a friend, too.

I still wanted to rearrange his face.

“I know I was using you at first to scrub all traces of Jameson from that bedroom,” she added quietly. “But Indie’s done a lot better since you came along.” She’d told me a little about the tragic saga of Indie and Jameson before. I was still having a hard time imagining Indie crying himself to sleep for weeks at a time, but I never knew him when he wasn’t so cold and cynical.

“He’s still an asshole.”

“Yes, we’re still working on that,” she said absently. “Have you talked to Cory yet?”

“I tried. He wasn’t even taking my calls, and he skipped class and practice.” Then I told her about running into him at the locker complex.

“And how’d that make you feel?”

“Fucking pissed off.” My fingers clenched in the throw pillow on my lap.

“You don’t want his feelings to be above your paygrade.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Makes sense.”

She gave me a knowing grin. “Well, this is amusing.”

“What?”

“You fell for him.”

“I did not.”

“You did,” she giggled. “Hard.”

“Shit.”

“I told you your silly little rules were going to bite you in the ass.”

~*~*~*~

Part Two – The B-word

I was in the middle of my early morning errand when I got a text from Cory’s roommate.

hes acting all weird and emo fix it

I briefly wondered what exactly Romero thought little ol’ Preston could do, but I figured I might as well get details.

he wont get out of bed and is skipping class again

Seriously, that was it? Sleeping in and skipping class. How was that any different from your average college freshman?

just check on him okay? hes creeping me out

I relented and messaged Romero that I was on my way.

~*~*~*~

I dozed for a bit after my roommates left for whatever they had going on.

I had climbed into bed when I got back from the locker complex yesterday. I couldn’t find the motivation to get back up, so I stayed under my blanket. When Romero asked if I wanted to get dinner, I lied and said I ate already. Pretty much the same thing I had told him about lunch earlier.

The sound of the bedroom door closing woke me back up. For all I knew, it was someone here to steal shit, but I still couldn’t be bothered to roll over to look.

However, it was Preston’s voice I heard before the covers were lifted, and a warm body slipped into bed with me. The width of the bed forced him to snuggle against my back, but he put his arm around me and hugged me closer.

“Hey, big guy.” As if validating my misery, his presence sent another wave of it crashing over me.

“Hey, Preston.”

“You know you have to get up eventually.”

“Why bother? I’m benched for this week’s game, and they have me on modified conditioning.”

“Your shoulders and legs are that bad?”

“No. They just don’t want to risk a worse injury,” I said.

“So, have you talked to your guy yet?”

“Kinda.”

“Kinda?”

“I ran into him after I saw the trainer. Kept insisting that he wanted to talk, but I begged off.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Scared of what he’d say.”

“What could he possibly say?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That he agrees with Indie. That I’m acting like a girl. That I’m getting too serious for a friends-with-benefits thing.”

“The fact that he wants to talk is a good sign.”

“Or it could just be my wishful thinking.”

Preston seemed like he was about to protest this, but my phone cut him off.

~*~*~*~

Before I could get on Cory’s case for being so goddamn pessimistic, his phone rang from its place on the charger. Efrain’s name appeared on the screen. I grabbed it and swiped to answer the call before he could reject it. Cory glared at me when I passed the phone to him.

“Hey,” he said and rolled back over.

I snuggled back up to his back, mostly so I could hear Efrain’s voice. It was so deep and rich that I was pretty sure he could talk me to climax. I would have to ask Cory if he’s tried it when he was done being gloomy.

“Hey, man. I’m sorry I got you benched.”

“S’okay. I at least enjoyed it.”

“Cory, I promise to go easy next time,” he said.

Cory smiled a little but said nothing in response. The silence stretched a little too long, and I was afraid that they were not going to fix anything. I was about to intervene when Efrain spoke up.

“Listen. I really need to talk to you. I know you want some space and all that, but…” he trailed off with a frustrated sigh.

I heard Cory swallow as if trying to hold something in. Yeah, it was high time for me to step in.

I pulled the phone from Cory’s grasp. He protested and tried to take it back, but I rolled over and hit the speaker.

“Hey, Efrain, you there?”

“Yeah,” he said warily. “Who’s this?”

“Goddammit, Preston, gimme the fucking phone.”

“Aha, the attack twink.”

“Attack twink? I think I like the sound of that.” I’ll confess, my grin was a little too evil given the situation. Cory flopped back down on the bed with a resigned sigh.

“I got a pissy text from my roommate yesterday afternoon. Thank you, by the way.”

“I still want to kick him.”

“Get in line, my man,” he laughed. Fuck, even his laugh was sexy. “If it makes you feel any better, his best friend slapped him hard enough to bust his lip open.”

“Ooooooh! That does make me feel better!”

“Is Cory still there?”

“He is, but you two are acting like dumbasses and need fucking help.” Both made equal sounds of indignation, but I marched on before they could mount a protest. “I agree that you need to talk, but Mr. Man over here is trying to skip class for the second day in a row, which I fully intend to fix.”

“Excuse me?” Cory squawked.

“We’re all going to class, and you’re both going to practice.” Cory started to object, but I cut him off. “You will go to conditioning, whether you like it or not. Or do you really want to be benched for a second game?”

He exhaled slowly. “No.”

“That’s what I thought.” Cory narrowed his eyes at me, but said nothing. “Now, as for you two. Efrain, Cory will take you home after practice today. You will talk then.”

“Fair enough,” Efrain responded evenly.

“Alright, now that that’s settled, we need to let you go. Someone’s roommate informed me that he’s been skipping meals, too.”

“Fuck,” Efrain said miserably. “Cory, I—”

“Don’t worry about him, I’ve got the situation in hand,” I said briskly. “Say ‘see ya,’ guys.”

There was a slight pause before Efrain complied and Cory followed – neither man liked being ordered about by the attack twink. I hung up the phone.

~*~*~*~

“Hey, Mike.”

“Yes, Indie,” he answered without looking up from his stack of ungraded essays.

“Did you put these here?” I pointed to the pile of clear plastic blocks sitting in the middle of my desk blotter.

“No, they were there when I got here,” he said. “What are they anyway?”

“I don’t know.” I picked a couple up and tossed one to him. They were cut to look like ice cubes, but had faces drawn on each of the six sides in what appeared to be black permanent marker.

“Kinda interesting,” he said. “They’re all mean faces.”

I looked at the cubes in my hand. Sure enough, each side had a different type, which was repeated on the six sides of the other cubes.

“Almost like dice,” I said and stacked the curious little things in front of my computer monitor.

~*~*~*~

I was pretty miffed at Preston for this morning, but I guess it was for the best. I supposed the sooner I got this over with, the sooner I could work on getting myself straight.

Efrain meant a lot to me, but he had never indicated that he felt the same way. I really liked him, but I’d been too afraid of ruining what we did have to ask for more. I did a good job of pretending to be okay with our existing agreement, but the night before last made it harder to hide how I felt. Just sleeping with him wasn’t going to be enough.

If that meant we couldn’t be together at all, then so be it.

True to Preston’s arrangement, Efrain met me outside of the locker complex to walk with me to my truck.

“Preston is an interesting guy,” he ventured.

“He is,” I responded.

“You guys seem close.”

“Pretty much.”

We continued our walk in silence until we reached the truck and climbed in. I started up the engine and pulled out onto the road.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked after a bit.

I was thinking about how ironic it was that our relationship began and ended with me driving him home from football practice. But, I couldn’t exactly tell him this, so I gave a noncommittal shrug.

“Cory, how do you feel about what we’re doing?”

“I can’t really say.”

“I suppose not,” he said with a sigh. He was silent for a bit, and I assumed he was letting the whole matter go. But, then he spoke again. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless one of us drops the poker face.”

“Poker face?”

“I’m too chicken-shit to say anything, and you’re too chicken-shit to say anything, so nobody says anything, and we’re stuck with nothing. Right?”

He seemed to take my silence as agreement and pressed forward.

“Dude, I’ve been after you for a long time. This is the first time I’ve been in this situation, but I’m pretty sure that gives me the right to give a fuck about you.”

“I never said you weren’t allowed to care,” I said. “I just didn’t want to force you.”

“You’re not forcing me.” He rested his elbow on his side of the center console, and his fingers brushed against my hand. When I didn’t move away, he laid his hand on top of mine. “Indie said some really shitty things that I wish you hadn’t heard. If it means anything, I don’t think those things about you.”

His words did mean a lot, but I couldn’t find the right things to say in response. Instead, I turned my hand palm up, so our fingers laced together. He squeezed my hand and rubbed his thumb in little circles against the heel. I stole a quick glance at him, and he smiled. We didn’t let go of each other until I pulled into his driveway.

“Mind coming in with me to continue this?”

“Not at all.” I smiled, I mean really smiled, for the first time in days.

Once on the other side of the door, Efrain pulled me into his arms. He and I held each other in the foyer.

“You know, there’s one thing that Indie said that I liked,” he said after a while. “Actually, he said it quite a lot.”

My whole body went cold and I pulled away, but Efrain took my face in his hands and kissed me gently.

“Boyfriend.”

“Huh?”

“He called you my boyfriend.” He kissed me again, and I melted.

“I gotta say, I rather like the sound of that,” I said and kissed him back. His arms came up around my waist, and the gentle kissing gave way to something more intense and need-filled.

“If I’d known it would make you this deliriously happy,” Efrain said when we finally came up for air. “I would have called you the b-word sooner.”

“You mean bitch?” I joked as my mouth moved down to the sensitive spot just below his jaw. His fingers gripped me tighter when my tongue danced over it. “Preston calls me bitch all the time and it doesn’t make me happy.”

“I meant boyfriend.”

“I know.” My low voice breathed across his ear, and a hum of pleasure rose from his chest. “I just wanted to make you say it again.”

“I’ll say it as much as you want,” he told me. His hands roamed over my back all the way down to my hips and thighs before finally settling on my ass. He spread his fingers out over both rounded globes and grabbed me hard, grinding me against his burgeoning erection. “Fuck, I know it’s only been two days, but I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I answered. His mouth found mine again, and I was unable to catch my breath.

“So, how ‘bout we go make up for missed time?”

~*~*~*~

they made up. u can prob go home w/o getting ur ass kicked

I got Laurel’s text just as I was about to enter the office for the morning. I was not really happy about the development, but I guess if it smoothed things over with Efrain, then whatever. I was still making him pay to repair the hole in the drywall.

As I approached my desk, there was another offering left on the desk blotter. I set down my coffee and picked up the toy. This time, it was a small goofy looking snowman with buckteeth and some twigs coming out the top of his head like hair.

I was still trying to puzzle out what this thing was when Mike came in.

“Olaf! I fucking love Olaf!”

“Is that what this is?” I said, waving it at him.

“Didn’t you see Frozen?”

“I avoid Disney movies on principle.”

“God, you’re no fun,” he complained.

I put “Olaf,” or whoever the fuck he was, next to my pile of angry ice cubes.

“I’m plenty of fun.”

~*~*~*~