Confide/ant - 2. Chapter 2

A bunch of us are arguing heatedly over the correct walking bass line for classic rock and roll as we exit the main auditorium. About the only music classes we have to leave our building for are big technical lectures. I’ve filled ten pages with notes about the stylistic fingerprints of rock and roll versus metal and indie rock, and made myself a pretty long listening list which will keep me going for at least ten hours. Leon spins around, walking backwards and holding forth about his unshakeable conviction that The Beach Boys are the greatest band of all time. A split second before it happens, I see who he’s going to walk into.

Leon is hardly a big guy, but he’s wiry and strong and he always gesticulates like a madman when he gets onto something he’s passionate about. Catching Hrishi around the head as he moves, he continues stepping back knocking the skinny nerd to the floor. Tripping backward over him Leon ends up on his arse. A bunch of the guys’ laugh, like it’s funny, but Leon turns as he gets up and snaps at Hrishi.

“Fucking look where you’re going, stupid fucking fairy.” He scowls angrily, but Hrishi simply looks up at me with this expression, which says ‘well go on then, do something.’ I can’t even get a single syllable out of my mouth, but Leon has noticed. “Take your damn faggot lust and shove it some place where it’s welcome.” He rolls his eyes, and I think if we weren’t in the man college building he would spit. “C’mon, let’s get back to the common room and have a jam.”

I want to punch him, and he’s my oldest friend; or stop, say something, push Leon off his feet and tell him he’s wrong. I want to go back and pick Hrishi’s books up off the floor, wrap an arm around him, kiss him, apologise for being friends with a sweet, funny guy who can also be a total arsehole when the mood strikes him. But, I don’t do any of these things and simply follow along with my friends. We are not quite out of the building when one of the other guys frowns at Leon.

“Dude, was that really necessary?”

Leon shrugs it off, like he didn’t just verbally abuse another student, and I am painfully aware that Hrishi is watching my back as the automatic doors close behind us.

*

We very rarely go the main cafeteria because the music room has its own little snack and sandwich shop in the common room. I love that we have our own space. There’s always someone picking at a guitar or re-stringing a violin, easy conversations about music and lyrics as we laze around, feeling far more important and talented than we are. Leon and the guys grab their lunch items and take over three dilapidated leather sofas in one corner. I stand with a sandwich in my hand and Leon raises an eyebrow at me.

“Marty? You wanna go get the guitars and we’ll have ourselves a little riff off?”

“I’ll join you.” Ben, whose defining feature is his shock of bright ginger hair and an Ibanez bass with a custom paint job, springs to his feet. He’s a good bassist and a nice guy, but I feel sort of sick.

“Sorry, I gotta go.” I try and smile at Leon, but I can’t quite manage it. “Gonna end up in detention if I keep failing my computing assignments.” I feel fractionally better for not lying to my best friend: the standard of my work is so poor, sometimes I think Hrishi might be right to assume I’m a dumb jerk with a guitar instead of a brain.

I am dreading what Hrishi will say to me in the computer lab. Part of me thinks he won’t say anything at all. He probably won’t even be there, because fuck knows I wouldn’t want to have a conversation with someone who’d just stood by and let Leon say those things. It kills me this isn’t the first time I’ve seen people pick on him. He’s little, and nerdy: an easy target. But the way he looked at me in the shower, the way he sneers and speaks like I’m an idiot for even showing up and breathing, and the way he demanded my orgasm as though somehow it belonged to him. None of these things fit with the image of the geeky little Indian boy with his computer science books and shiny leather shoes.

And it makes me so turned on.

The computer lab isn’t busy, but it’s not deserted either and I spot Hrishi straight away. He sees me coming over the top of his monitor, and for a moment, his dark glare sends my confidence into my shoes. Then he looks away and ducks behind his computer screen. By the time I’ve come around to the station next to him, I swear he’s blushing. I sit down heavily, but Hrishi won’t look at me.

“So….” I begin, not really sure what I want to say to him.

“You’re an arsehole,” he states shortly in a tone so abrupt I stare at him with my mouth open. “You always sneak up on guys and sexually harass them in the showers?”

“No.”

“So when were you planning on telling me you liked guys?” He pauses for my answer, then frowns. “C’mon Marty, I haven’t got all day. Some of us actually work around here.”

That’s a low blow. “Oh fuck you!” My voice is low enough that we’re not overheard, but my tone is all too clear. “Not all of us get to be class-A nerds with books instead of friends.” I take a breath, trying to calm down. “I wasn’t actually. This morning wasn’t exactly what you’d call planned.”

“No shit.”

I clench my fist under the table. Hrishi is being the cocky argumentative bastard I see so often in class, putting other people down for not having their shit together. I can’t help it, but I’m getting hard under the table.

“I’m not out.”

“Obviously.” Hrishi shoots me a look which tells me without words, he has not even remotely forgotten or overlooked my reaction to everything Leon said. “You’re a pitiful excuse for a decent human being.”

I make the snap decision that the only way I’m going to get out of this conversation alive is to fight just as hard as he is.

“And you can’t defend yourself because of what, breaking the stereotype?”

“I’m a pacifist.”

“Which doesn’t stop you from talking back,” I snap. “Clearly, you’ve no problem with saying shit to me.”

Hrishi looks unhappy with this fact and folds his arms over his narrow chest. He stares at his computer screen, his eyes half closed. The boy has unfairly long eyelashes. He chews his lower lip in thought, and I want him fresh all over again. Under the desk, I move my leg so it’s touching his; the heat seeps through our clothes.

“I don’t like you,” he says eventually.

“OK.”

“You left a damn property of stamp on my neck y’know.”

I know. I can just see the edge of the bruise under the collar of his shirt. I wish I’d bitten him higher up, so he couldn’t hide it so easily. I wonder what his other virgin-nerd friends said when they saw it. I want to say something bold and cocky, and probably quite stupid, but Hrishi turns to me in his seat with a grin.

“I’ll be leaving you one soon enough.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, because the big, strong, rock star is the only one allowed to dictate sexual encounters? Fuck you, Marty.”

This conversation is not going at all like I thought it would.

“Maybe I’ll fuck you instead,” I growl, hoping to wipe the smirk from his face.

“And maybe if you prove yourself to be anything other than a total waste of plasma, I might let you.” Hrishi turns back to his screen and pulls up a window full of complicated looking code, I don’t recognise. After a moment, his eyes slide back to me. “You can fuck off now Marty, I’ve got to get this natural language parser building by the end of the day.”

Feeling like I’ve been dismissed, I get up, and leave the room without glancing back.

*

My week is filled with false starts, bad timing, and frustration. Suddenly, Hrishi seems to be everywhere I look until I’m faintly terrified of leaving the music building, the last safe haven on campus where I know he has no excuse to be. Every time he crosses my path, I’m tense because the sight of him brings back every texture of his skin in the shower, and the way I touched his cock when he came. It was hands down the most intimate experience of my life, but whenever Hrishi glares at me, I somehow feel greasy; I can tell he knows his effect on me. The sudden swelling of my dick in his presence, which used to be some kind of illicit joy, is now bordering on painful and hard to hide. By the time Friday comes around, I’m quite seriously considering locking myself in the bathrooms and jerking off just to get through the rest of the day.

Leon comes to find me in the common room after our independent music practice session, guitar still slung over his shoulder. I have my acoustic sunset-cherry Hummingbird over my knees, tuning the strings even though I know it’s perfectly on pitch.

“Dude! Where were you this morning? We all went into town for breakfast.” Leon flicks a plectrum at me. I swipe it away in annoyance. “Seriously, Marty, where the hell have you been?”

“Sod off Leon.” I feel like a total dick, because Leon and I have been mates for a long time, but I don’t think I can explain myself to him at all. I know what he means because I’ve been present, but my head’s not been in the music. We had band practice yesterday and I strummed my way through every song, but there was no heart in it. Leon glances at the notebook between my feet, the one I use for the sole purpose of lyric scribbles, and sighs.

“You’ve been thinking too hard again, haven’t you?” He nudges my lyrics with the toe of his shoe as he sits cross-legged in front of me. Leon knows better than to look, because lyrics I give to him for us to work on are always copied out of the book. “What’s up, Marty?”

I pluck the strings of the Hummingbird, and rub the rosewood fingerboard without seeing it.

“Why did you say those things to Hrishi?”

“Who?”

I grit my teeth.

“Hrishi, the Indian kid you knocked over on Monday.”

“Fuck, Marty.” Leon grins at me, and irrationally I want to hit him. “You expect me to remember something I did on Monday?”

“You’re a dick, Leon.”

“Yeah, but you love me.”

I blanch, frozen in place, looking down at Leon sitting at my feet. Terror shoots through my body and kills the semi I’ve been plagued with for the last two hours since I saw Hrishi on the way from my car into the music building. Leon knows, he must, and my heart thuds erratically for a moment then stops altogether for what seems like an age. And Leon is still looking at me. I must have fucked up, said something or done something to give myself away, and I wish I could just crawl into a hole somewhere and rid myself of the shame of lying to my best friend for years. Leon on the other hand, just grins, pulls a sheet of paper from his bag and lays it over my guitar.

“New piece for you to work your magic on. It’s hot and punchy, but you know how awful I am arranging lyrics. Sort it out for me, and we’ll practice on Saturday, yeah? I’ll come to yours.”

“Er…” I glance down at the scrawl of chord progressions and riffs. Leon is a great front man, but the boy writes music about as well as I write analytic computer programmes. “Sure... I gotta go to computing.”

“Ergh…!” Leon pulls himself up as I stand. We sling our guitars into matching shoulder positions, and I stow Leon’s music inside the cover of my lyric book. “I’ll walk with you. I’m supposed to go to the office and see someone about security for the radio booth. Some jerk lost the key or something, so we’re getting new locks.”

The college radio booth is the pride and joy of the music department. We run it, almost totally independent from the staff, and the various DJs get to share music with the public areas of the college in all of the major buildings as well as the local long-wave radio. I operate the late shift on a Wednesday, but the radio station has been down all week for maintenance and the installation of a new mixing board. It’s safe to say, we’ve all missed it.

Leon and I manage to talk normally as we cross the road and enter the secondary mixed building, which houses the computer labs, library, and several dozen teaching classes, offices, and small seminar rooms. And of course, Hrishi is crossing the main foyer as we enter. Leon spots him, pauses, and arches an eyebrow at me.

“Him?” his voice is stage-loud in the general quiet. It’s always loud in the music department, but without the ambient background of the radio booth playing, it seems nearly silent here. “What did I do to the nerd?”

I glance helplessly at Leon, then turn to Hrishi wanting to explain, though I’ve no idea what to say to him, only to see him duck and turn away hurrying off down the corridor. The computer lab is in the other direction.

“Leon!”

“What?”

I am already following the route Hrishi took as Leon calls after me. “What did I say?”

He's waiting for me around the corner before the door to the computer lab. With his arms folded over his chest and one foot propped back against the wall, he suddenly no longer looks like the geeky little kid Leon obviously sees him as. Hrishi jerks his chin at me as I stop in front of him.

"I'm sorry."

"It's not enough." His tone is sharp and flinty, like asphalt grazing the skin.

I don't know what to say. I'm angry at him for not standing up for himself, for pretending to be a weak and wimpy nerd when surely that must be a façade, because I doubt anyone else in his social circle of nerds would be able to grip my hair and tell me to come in such a commanding tone. I open my mouth to rebuff him, but I don't get a chance because Hrishi yanks the front of my t-shirt and pulls me wordlessly into the room across the hall. It's a tiny seminar classroom maybe big enough for ten people, and it’s dark with the blinds drawn. When the door shuts behind us, I can only make out Hrishi's shape because he's practically standing on my toes.

"Hrishi?"

"Shut up," he grunts. His other hand runs up the back of my head until he finds the longer length of my hair, and he pulls me down to his mouth.

Startled, I don't move for a long moment as his lips meet mine with force. My mouth is open and within moments, his tongue has invaded me, warm, wet and strong. When I hear a gentle groan, I'm surprised to find it's me who's made it. Hrishi kisses like a freight-train, but it doesn’t take me long to recover, wrapping my arms around the small of his back, bringing our chest's together, and kissing him back with a week's worth of pent up frustration and rampant teenage horniness. Only when I feel him desperately seeking air, do I release his lips and we both stand there in the dark, sucking down oxygen like nectar.

I lick my lips. Hrishi tastes somehow sweet and savoury all at the same time and I want to kiss him again just so I can examine the flavour further. Apparently, I'm not the only one feeling this way. Within seconds, I'm the one being pressed back into the door behind us as Hrishi ravages my mouth. The force of him is overwhelming, and I slump against the closed door allowing my feet to slide out from under me a little bringing our lips to about the same height. Hrishi steps into the space between my feet and we kiss for what feels like hours. The next time we break for air, I manage to locate my voice box.

"I thought you didn’t like me."

"I don't. Shut up." He bites his lip in a manner I think is adorable, and I reach out to rub my thumb over the smooth line of his jaw. He grabs my hand, yanks my arm, shoves the sleeve of my jacket aside, and bites down hard on the inside of my bicep. I grunt in pain and surprise, clench my jaw and resist the desire to tear him off as he marks my skin. His teeth and lips are efficient. And my skin is much, much paler than his own: when he leans back with a smug smile, the hickey on my arm stands out like a fresh brand.

"Jesus H Christ!" I examine the bruise with a scowl. "Fuck's sake Hrishi, how am I supposed to hide that from my parents?"

"Wear long sleeves; I don't care." Hrishi shrugs, but he looks smug. I suddenly realise how my expression in the shower might have been perceived: that slightly presumptuous, predatory sort of look I see in the mirror when I jerk off and think about Hrishi naked.

I'm still examining my new hickey when he takes my chin once more and we kiss again. This kiss is all warm, wet, and open, slower, softer, and I want to melt against him. The noise of students moving in the hallway distracts me from the desire to turn into a happy puddle.

"We're going to be late," I mutter into the tiny space between our lips. "I thought you didn't like me."

Hrishi steps back, and I wonder when he crossed the intangible line between soft and pliable, and hard edged, mean, but downright sexy.

"I don't." He grins as me as he speaks. "But you are kind of hot."

"Only kind of hot?" I arch an eyebrow at him knowingly. I might not be the best looking guy in sixth form, but I'm also under no illusions about how I look. Guitars, sleeveless t-shirts, leather jackets, and straight leg jeans suit me very well: I'm in a band, and I look it.

"Fuck, you're a cocky bastard." Hrishi looks amused by this fact. He reaches out and squeezes my erection through my jeans. I love and hate the whimper of need, which issues from my throat. "Have you been thinking about me, Marty?"

"Y-yes." We've been kissing, pressed up against each other for a while, but I know what he means: I've thought of basically nothing else for a week.

Hrishi leans in close, and my fingers trail in the small of his back. His hand is still pressed over the conspicuous bulge of my erection wedged between our bodies.

"Well, keep thinking." He breaks away, yanks open the door without a backward glance, then pauses framed by the light. "Don't be too late to class."

*

By the time I arrive in the computer science lab, our lecturer is in full flow, and I slink towards my preferred workstation feeling overly visible. I still have my guitar slung over one shoulder, I left my jacket in the common room, and even though I have my arm pressed to my side, all I can think about is the bruise Hrishi's mouth has left there. Usually, I sit by myself. No one else in the entire college apparently chose programming as their extra non-specialist subject. I sort of understand why now, so it's just me by myself with a buffer of free computers and then the nerds. When we're asked to work on group assignments, you can see the resentment in their eyes, as they feel forced to pick up my slack.

But today, Hrishi is sat at the computer next to mine and I'm not sure what to make of his sudden move from across the room.

There's no time to talk to him because our teacher pauses and Hrishi interjects with a ready smile.

"But we've only really just gotten to the point where machine learning has become accurate enough that the mistakes are getting interesting. Even two years ago, there wasn't anything smart enough to pick a human face out from a monkey, though television would like us to think that there was."

"Accuracy is improving all the time," one of his other buzz-cut-hair-and-glasses friends chips in, "the more data analysed, the better the systems are going to get. It's just a case of exposure."

The attention in the room shifts back to Hrishi.

"Unless the program is learning wrong." His gloating smile gives him away. "These systems are so at risk from even tiny amounts of adversarial input. It's really very easy."

"Do I want to know how you know that?" asks the lecturer warily.

"Probably not," Hrishi admits.

"Well...." There is a long drawn out silence. "Except for Mr Sethi, who is playing with fire and possible arrest, the rest of us are going to take a look at a couple of machine learning algorithms and see if we can't build a few vision processing systems of our own." There is a noise of pleasure from everyone except me. "From scratch, no base code allowed." Now there is a moan of disappointment from everyone except the still smug looking Hrishi. "There is a visual learning library of images I'd like you to use. Sorry boys and girls, no porn in this one. "Hrishi," his tone drops as he comes to stand near us, "since you're ahead of the game, I wonder if you could assist our friend here." He sounds like he wanted to say 'interloper'. "It would be nice if he could hand in something completed this side of Reading Week."

"Oh, sir...." Hrishi sounds like he was just asked to clean out the toilets in the changing room, but the lecturer has moved on. He rolls his eyes as he looks at me. “Just great. I suppose I can kiss my ninety-eight percent average goodbye.”

“Fuck you, Hrishi.”

“Not yet.” His tone is so level; I almost miss his words before he snaps at me. “You can’t tell a deep neural network from a damn calculator, Marty. You expect me to be thrilled working with you?”

I’m pissed.

“Hey, I read enough ACM articles to follow what you’re saying.” Most of the time…some of the time. “And, I know you’ve been crafting some poisonous inputs if what you told sir was true.”

Hrishi shrugs, a liquid motion, which instantly makes me want to strip him naked just so I can see every single line of muscle and smooth skin. It’s infuriating to be so close to him, and yet know he has the advantage. This is Hrishi’s home turf, and I’m not as smart as him.

“We’re going to need to put some hours into this at the weekend. I’ll come to yours tomorrow. Give.” Hrishi doesn’t wait for my permission, but takes my phone from where it sticks out of my pocket. He jabs the buttons as though angry at them. “Text me your address.” He’s already calling up some reading and a sample program on my computer screen. “Read that. See you.”

Hrishi walks away, laptop already in hand, to discuss something with the other nerds who look at me like I’m litter in the street. I’m left wondering how much of what happened was a ruse just to give me his phone number.