Why the hesitation? Hadn’t they been kissing since that first day? Shouldn’t they have been kissing since that first day?
Had they been kissing from that day forward to all the days afterward?
Dante couldn’t remember. It was the dumbest thing. He could feel Cully’s breath mingling with his own, and as he opened his mouth to say, Cully, baby, how long we been a couple? a swirl of mist captured him, and he went tumbling into the past.
THAT first day….
Dante grabbed Cully’s stuff—the brightly flowered trunk and suitcases were hard to miss.
“Did I get everything?” he asked as Cully—with a carpetbag in deep magenta over his shoulder—came puffing after him, a box of fabric trailing pink plaid in his arms.
“Yes, but—”
“Good. You can’t stay with that guy.”
“He didn’t seem that bad,” Cully managed, and then they hit the stairs down to the first floor and were both involved with luggage and people and Dante not making an ass of himself by dumping the ginormous fucking trunk down the stairwell.
“But where am I gonna—” Cully began, but then Dante spied salvation.
“Jordan!” Dante cried, spotting his friend through the throng of people waiting for their room assignments, because Jordan was that damned tall. “Jordan! Man, we need your help.”
“Dude!” Jordan had a ground-eating stride and this way of making everybody disappear when he zeroed in on something. He cut through the crowd like a knife through butter. Dante had met him during entrance exams two weeks before. Dante had needed the entrance exams because his SAT scores had been dismal, although his grades had been up there because he knew how to sweat. Jordan had been going to talk to some of his professors about having tested out of their classes, to see if there was anything they thought he should read anyway, because Jordan was that sort of detail-oriented, and he’d been thrust into the entrance exams by a flunky who hadn’t understood the question.
Jordan had zipped through the exams—all the exams—in the time it took the rest of the people in the room to finish half of the first one. Dante had heard most of his exchange with the flunky because he’d been sitting near the door as the professor in the front of the lecture hall proctored the exam, and when he saw Jordan respectfully turn in his paper and then stride out of the room, he thought that would be the last he saw of the guy.
Too smart to hang with Dante, right?
By the time Dante had emerged, tired, cramped, and yawning from the mental exhaustion of taking the damned test, he’d been sure the interesting young man with the stellar brain would be long gone. But instead he was seated on a bench in the shade in the quad, face tilted upward to a filtered spot of sun.
“Did you get to talk to your professor?” Dante asked.
Jordan focused his attention on Dante and smiled, a tight, intense smile that normally would have made Dante uncomfortable. Not with Jordan, though—with J, all those smiles usually felt like a gift.
“Yes,” he said, scooting over on the bench. “I did. He asked me why I was late, and I told him about the entrance exam, and he called his TA in and demoted the guy. Made me his TA instead. I felt sort of bad.”
“Oh my God!” Dante stared at him. “Your brainpan must be big and swinging!”
Jordan chuckled. “Well, let’s say I took those entrance exams seriously, in case all the other stuff was a mistake somehow. You never want to take brainpower for granted.”
Dante let out a sigh. “Well, I personally have a little pea brain. Maybe we should get to know each other so I have a prayer of getting through school.”
Jordan snorted. “Standardized tests are biased and inaccurate,” he said. “You just haven’t found your strength yet. We play to your strength and you’re a genius.”
“Says you,” Dante said ruefully. “I’ve got a host of teachers and family members who can testify that no genius lives here.”
“We’ll prove them wrong.” Jordan grinned, and Dante may not have fallen in love, but he suddenly loved this young man fiercely. It wasn’t sexual—although Jordan had all the sex appeal in the world. It was bigger than that. It was that Jordan Bryne would go to the mat for a friend and not blink.
They’d gone out to lunch that day. Dante was coming up from SoCal, but Jordan had grown up in Nevada County. He knew Sacramento well enough to know where the rainbow district was and where the good lunch places were. After some solid teriyaki and a quick tour around midtown, Jordan took Dante to the dorms just long enough for Dante to pack an overnight rucksack so he didn’t have to spend his weekend there.
Dante had driven to Westwood as soon as the dorms were open for the semester. He’d come out that summer, and while his family wasn’t exactly hostile, they were uncomfortable, and it seemed easier to bail. But Jordan’s dads lived up in the foothills, about forty miles away from CSUS. Jordan was going to stay at the dorms during the school year to avoid the heinous commute—and, in his words, to have the chance to see if he could function without his super-supportive family—but he was absolutely candid about visiting his dads and his Aunt Bella as often as he could.
“You gotta understand,” he’d said, in the super-tacky linoleum-and-cheap-veneer atmosphere of the teriyaki place. “I’m a poster child for freaky peer interactions. I scare people. I need to figure out how to not scare people or I’m going to be a very lonely puppy!”
Dante had paused in midbite of a savory chicken concoction, surprised. “Dude, if you scare people, maybe they ain’t freakin’ worthy, you think?”
Jordan had waved him off, but a weekend with his family—who were charming as fuck, by the way—and two more weeks of knowing Jordan Bryne had not changed Dante’s opinion even a little. He loved the guy like a brother already, but given that his real brother had spent the entire summer whining about having to live with “one of those people” under his roof, Dante was pretty sure he loved Jordan more.
And Jordan’s dads, Asa and Sebastian, had given Dante his first real, in-person roadmap for a happy-ever-after for two fantastic men. Sebastian was a little high-maintenance, and Asa was bombproof, and since Dante’s crushes had always been a little high-maintenance and his specialty was maintaining, he could see that maybe, his family’s discomfort aside, he could have a happy-ever-after too.
So now, with his new vulnerable friend with the infinity-pool limpid blue eyes trailing behind him, he went searching for the one guy he knew who might be able to fix the problem.
“J, am I glad to see you. This is—uhm, what’s your name again?”
Big blue anime eyes gazed at him adoringly. “I’m Thomas Cromwell—but I like Cully better. It’s my middle name.”
Dante nodded. “So, this is Cully, and his roommate is a dick, and we need to get him with someone else, stat. You got a roommate yet?”
Jordan grimaced. “Yeah, and I like him. Bartholomew! C’mere! Meet Dante and—Cully, was it?”
They both turned to watch a slender figure with huge gray eyes and vulpine features peer at them from behind some seriously bedraggled luggage. For a moment Dante thought, Hey, Cully and this guy should room together—they seem sort of quiet, but then he looked at Cully, clutching that giant flowered bag, and thought maybe not. Cully’s luggage had enough personality bursting out the seams that there were good odds on him having plenty of his own left in his body once this crisis had passed.