The afternoon ended with my pockets padded with frat-boy cash and my brain buzzing from too many Cokes and bummed cigs.
Going heavy on my bet for the final game had been risky—there was no way I would have been able to cover the cash if I’d lost. I would’ve had to sell the Vespa, which was the only thing of value I had. Well, I could have bartered my body but I think that would have been weird for everyone involved. That kind of thing was definitely on my mind as I followed Wyatt up the creaky, narrow back stairway to his room.
Pool play had broken up for the afternoon and we were going to get Wyatt’s stuff so he could study later. He’d offered to give me a ride to wherever I wanted to go, and then he had a “study date” at the library after.
I staggered a bit as I hit the narrow hallway’s wall. “Shit,” I mumbled.
“Okay?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah. A little close in here.”
He stopped at a door at the end of the hallway and looked at me. “Tell me about it. Gotta walk this hall single file.” He turned a key in the door’s lock—he must not trust his housemates very much—and shoved the door open.
He gestured for me to precede him and I stepped forward. The Cokes were gurgling in my gut, a trembly, nervous flurry that wasn’t necessarily bad. There was something about entering someone’s private space for the first time…
I walked in, preparing myself for a glimpse of Wyatt Kelly’s soul—a peek at his inner sanctum, a whiff of his skank, a listen to his most secret whispers.
I stopped just inside the door. “Um.”
“What?” he asked, stepping around me.
“It’s really fucking clean.” And it was. The place was less revealing of Wyatt’s personality than my hotel room was of mine. Nothing hung on the white, white walls. A single bed was set precisely in the center of the far wall with blankets and sheets and pillows tidied into perfect smoothness. A desk was placed kitty-corner to the bed, the surface pristine except for a row of perfectly aligned textbooks. The textbooks were propped up with bookends in the shape of the Lincoln Memorial.
The hardwood floors were shiny and clear of any rascally dust bunnies, and the small area rug was fluffy, like it had been recently washed. The only thing that was remotely out of order was an old wrought iron coat tree in the corner of the room. Hats and jackets and a couple pairs of jeans dangled neatly from its hooks.
“Yeah.” Wyatt shrugged. “I gotta keep it this way. Otherwise, my head gets all jumbled when I try to sleep or study. It’s a control thing.” His smile was sheepish. “The house can be pretty claustrophobic. Clean space helps me deal.”
The bed’s razor-sharp lines had me picturing alignment with yardsticks and Wyatt down on his knees surveying angles and bouncing coins off the tightly tucked blue wool blanket. “Where’d you learn how to do this?” I asked. He was watching me, his hands shoved in his pockets.
“Um, my mom, I guess. Military woman.” He said the last words in an exaggeratedly deep, clipped voice.
“Ah.” I wanted to know more, but his mouth was twisting in a self-conscious way that made it seem as if he wasn’t really up for questions. I could relate.
A gust of dizziness blew over me and I braced my feet against the floor, widening my stance so I wouldn’t hit the deck. Really should have had something to eat at the diner today. Come to think of it, should have had something to eat yesterday too.
“You wanna sit?” Wyatt asked.
“On the bed?” My eyebrows rose. It seemed too tidy for me to sit on. Maybe the blankets would reject my skinny, rumpled cotton-covered ass and toss me off.
He laughed. “Yeah. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
“There’s the desk chair,” I said, wishing my brain would stop stalling and starting in such jolting bursts of speed and slowness. “And the floor.”
“I’ll sit at the desk. And you…” He stepped directly behind me. He put his hands on my shoulders. My spine went tense and I closed my eyes. The warmth of his body had my nerve endings singing arias, high, clear and definitely in the soprano range. On the backs of my lids I could see the vibrations jacking high and quivering, as if they were being displayed on one of those music wave visualizers. He dropped his hands and stepped back. “Take a load off for a few minutes.” The chair’s legs made a shushing noise as they slid across the shiny floor. “I can work here for a while.”
The rubberband-y feeling in my knees snapped from stretchy to limp. That seemed to decide it. I would sit for a few minutes. I carefully, carefully lowered myself down to the scruffy blue wool—
Wyatt snorted. He stood next to the coat tree where his computer bag was hanging. “It’s okay if you mess it up,” he said, smiling crookedly. “I’m not to the point where I’m OCD and need meds to deal. Yet.”
He retrieved his laptop and carried it to the desk. I tried to look more relaxed than I felt. The room was small and when he sat, his hip was just a few inches away from my bent knees.
“Dave has some OCD issues,” I said. “Can be pretty scary sometimes, because I don’t know always how to help him with it.” It was an unexpected thing to say so I wasn’t surprised when Wyatt’s eyes went wide.
I smashed my lips together, regretting that I’d blurted something so personal. Also, talking about Dave and anything related to Tom right now was pretty much the last thing I felt like doing. Before I could say anything to gloss it over, Wyatt said, “You hang out with him a lot, then? A babysitter-friend kind of a thing?”
“Yeah…it’s a little complicated, actually.” The room was quiet and Wyatt’s eyes were that calming cool, leafy green. He’d be a good listener. I could tell him the whole story, trust him with the key to opening up a few of the spaces I’d been keeping locked tight.
I wrenched my gaze away from his and focused on the partially opened window. My family stuff was such a downer. When I tried to explain it to people I didn’t know, or even people I did know, it freaked them out or made things weird.
Lately my life had all kinds of conversational mines and time bombs that people could accidentally step on or that I could accidentally detonate. So it was best just to avoid all those hazardous areas by keeping quiet.
“Dave seems like a good kid,” Wyatt was saying. “Seeing you and him together reminds me of my little brothers.” He rubbed at his earlobe, nodding down at me, his expression thoughtful. Maybe he didn’t think my stop-start convo had been weird at all. He smiled in a way that made his lips look super soft. “I miss them like hell, but don’t tell anyone I said that.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Thanks.” His smile widened.
My brain sorted through the giant thought-jumble clogging my neurons, trying to find something not too insanely nuts to talk about. To my dismay, heat grew behind my eyes and my throat prickled.
“You look wasted,” he commented. “In the wiped-out and not-so-fun kind of a way. Maybe you should take time out for a power twenty. It’s actually pretty quiet here this time of day. Safe.”
My eyelids blink-blinked. Safe. Interesting word choice. I wanted to ask him about it, but my thought jumble refused to uncoil. “I, uh, haven’t slept in a while.”
“The surviving-on-caffeine look is familiar around this place. I’ve got plenty of shit to do.” Wyatt nodded toward his laptop. “I’ll wake you if you start drooling on the pillow.”
He smiled in a way that made me feel comfortable and not stupid for being here and for flaking out (in more ways than one) on his bed. I did feel safe…safer than I had in a long time. His gaze traveled down to where my hands smoothed over the rough wool, stroking again and again. I stifled the motion and he turned away, opening his laptop.
I bent to unlace my boots and the warmth and fresh laundry scent rising from Wyatt’s body was soothing. I could hear birds and boys calling from the lawn outside the window. The throb of a bass line from a song being played in the room below tingled against my sock-clad feet. God. I could sleep for days.
I fell back against the bed, shifting my legs up, curling on my side so my cheek rested on Wyatt’s pillow, adjusting my position so my tired eyes could watch him as he did stuff on his tidy desk.
“I like your bookends,” I said. “Very cool.”
“Thanks. They’re…handy.” Could’ve been my imagination but I was pretty sure he blushed a little.
His ear was a slice of shell pink poking from his shiny hair. My fingers clenched his pillow. I wondered how his skin would feel against my lips, how it would taste on my tongue.
My eyes refused to stay open and I let sleep grab me.
When I woke up the room was mostly dark. I didn’t startle or sit up gasping as if I’d been prodded by a slobbering, razor-toothed monster covered with green slime (which I sometimes did after sleeping in a strange place). I knew right away where I was.
The pale glow from Wyatt’s laptop turned the crisp white pillowcase lavender blue. I could almost feel the cool softness of periwinkle against the back of my hand. Flexing my fingers, I let my gaze travel beyond my hand, beyond the bed to Wyatt’s hip. He was sitting in the same spot. Had I been asleep for five minutes? Five hours? The fog in my head was still pretty damn thick. Nap-brain instead of zombie-brain.
I glanced up at his face and his gaze met mine. He looked good. The periwinkle glow floated between us, making my skin feel tingly and alive. It was like waking up to discover I was in a much better world than the one I was used to living in. A world inhabited by creatures I’ve always wanted to know or meet, instead of ones I wanted to hide from or holler at.
My lips curved, but Wyatt looked away, narrowing his eyes at the laptop’s screen.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Why are you sorry?” I had to laugh because I was the one who’d come up to his room and passed out on his bed. Pretty sorry behavior, there.
“Didn’t want to creep you out.” He fiddled with the touchpad. Light from the screen shifted, casting shapes in green and white and blue across the planes of his face. “Make you feel like I was watching you sleep or something.”
Another nervous-sounding laugh escaped my throat. “Were you?” I propped myself on my elbow. My arms seemed to be obeying brain commands. Good. Next on the wake-up agenda: test leg functionality.
“Nah.” His laughter matched mine. “Not really.” The sidelong glance he slanted my way had an interesting edge.
“Did you get much work done?” I sat, crossing my legs tailor-style, feeling relieved when I noticed my skinny butt had barely made a dent in the blue blanket.
His gaze flitted to mine and then back to the screen. “Yeah. Yep, I did.”
“Good.” I cleared my throat. The silence stretched into awkwardness again. “What are you working on?”
“Midterms. A bunch of shit,” he said vaguely.
I thought about making a joke about helping him some more with his gender studies research but I figured it would fall flat. Or maybe I was scared of taking the conversation in that direction. I stretched my legs over the side of the bed, using my feet to find my boots.
“So. I meant to ask you earlier—how did you rank a single room in this place?” I shoved my toes into my boots and bent to tie the laces.
“I’m the treasurer for the house. It’s actually quite a bit of work…and this is part of how council members get paid.”
“For real? Treasurer?”
“Yeah.” His shoulders tensed as if he was feeling defensive, ready for me to make a smart-ass remark.
Not wanting to be that predictable, I swallowed the smart-ass remark rising in my throat and said, “You must be a master at time and money management.”
He shrugged. “It helps that basketball season’s over.”
“Right.” For the first time I noticed that the room was quiet—all the background noise, except for the occasional swishing sound of a car going by on the street below—had faded to nothing. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
“There’s a dinner thing over at Delta Gamma tonight.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Shouldn’t you be there? You being on the council and all?”
“I, um, didn’t want to wake you.” He glanced at the laptop’s screen. “It’s over now anyway.”
I ran my hand over my hair. It felt as sticky and as mucky as my mouth. Ugh.
“You looked like you needed to sleep pretty bad,” he said.
“Yeah. Sleeping at normal times isn’t my forte.” I stood and my stomach growled. Loudly.
Wyatt laughed, leaning back in his chair. “I guess eating isn’t your forte either.”
My cheeks tugged involuntarily, my skin too weak to resist the appeal of his grin. The feeling in the room was shifting away from weird-uncomfortable and back to more interesting-friendly. A lot of this shifty stuff seemed to happen between Wyatt and me. I was getting used to it and it felt…pretty good.
When I shoved my hands in my pockets, my fingertips found the cash I’d scored off a few of his brothers earlier. Pulling out the satisfyingly thick roll, I grinned and said, “Looks like dinner’s mostly on Mike and friends tonight. You wanna join me?”
More laughter. “Hell yeah.”