Page 38 of Dire Straights

“Thisweekend?” He asked after a stretch of silence. “Dad, it’s Thursday night. Have you considered that I have a life and might have plans?”

He might have had plans, but I was fairly sure those plans probably just consisted of studying and hanging out with me.

He sighed, and I could tell he was irritated. “Are the twins coming? … I’m going to be bored out of my mind the whole night.” He paused, tilting his head as if he was considering what his dad was saying. “Bring a friend?”

I sat up at those words, putting my face directly in his line of sight, wiggling my eyebrows at him. He snorted out a laugh, pushing my face away from him.

“Uh, yeah, fine. I’ll bring somebody… Uh-huh.”

From that point, the conversation consisted of the logistics of where he would pick us up from. I patiently waited for the conversation to end. When it was over and he’d hung up the phone, he took a deep breath.

“Alright, so my dad is having a party or some shit on Saturday and he says I absolutely need to be there, for whatever reason.”

“Are your brother and sister going?” I wondered. I hadn’t been able to deduce what the answer had been when he asked.

“Nah. When I asked, my dad said that I’m an adult now so there are certain things he wants me involved in. I have no clue what he’s talking about,” Maddy answered, honestly sounding perplexed. “Anyway, he said I could bring a friend. We’d take a bus over, he’ll pick us up from the bus stop, we’ll stay overSaturday night and then head back here on the bus on Sunday evening.”

“Oh,” I said, injecting a note of surprise into my voice. “AmIthe friend you’re going to bring?”

Snorting, he gave me a dry look. “Shut up. You know you want to come with me.”

“Of course,bestie,” I said, imitating him from earlier.

He laughed, reaching out to twine his arm around my neck, pulling our bodies together again. “Did you hold that thought, like I asked?”

“I held it very securely,” I answered. “It didn’t have a chance of escaping.”

Grinning, he shook his head at me. “You’re such a dweeb.”

I might have been a dweeb, but I was a dweeb making out with a smoking hot, half-naked guy. In his bed. After we’d already gotten each other off. Which was a hell of a lot better than most people were doing, even the socially competent, cool ones.

So all in all, I didn’t really mind being an awkward dweeb anymore.

MADDOX

SATURDAY MORNING, Iwolfed down my high protein, low carb breakfast with the rest of the guys on the swim team. We only had practice one Saturday a month, which had unfortunately fallen on today.

Nothing was out of the ordinary, other than the fact that in a couple of hours I’d be boarding a bus to have a weird little sleepover with Ren at my childhood home. Maybe it was the thought of him seeing my actual bedroom that gave me jitters in my stomach, but I wasn’t sure why I’d be so nervous about that. I didn’t have anything too weird in there. My room here next to the school was the one with the big dildo hidden away in my bedside drawer.

As I ate, the other guys talked about how excited they were for the trip that Coach Larson had announced for the team today. Our winter break was three weeks, and the trip would take up the first week of it. We’d be going to an out-of-state training center to practice grueling hours every day and living together for that time. It was maybe the worst thing anyone had ever said to me. Even worse than my parents telling us they were getting a divorce. At least that hadn’t been a surprise.

According to Coach Larson, the trip was supposed to help us bond and strengthen our relationships with each other. I was really not too keen on that idea, and frankly not too sure it was even possible. But everyone else seemed excited. For some reason.

When pushed by Garrison to answer if I was excited for the trip or not, I lied and said I was, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t fooled. I half expected him to bring up that Ren and I had been at the pizza place together, and try to bust my balls over that. They hadn’t acknowledged me then, but I was pretty sure they’d seen us. To my relief, he didn’t bring anything up.

The second I was done eating, I booked it out of there and headed up to Ren’s dorm. I’d already stored my weekend duffel bag in there, so we’d just head over to the bus stop from the school in a bit. I knocked on the door, but when it opened, I was greeted by obviously post-shower Aspen. He was still in the process of getting dressed, tugging jeans up his legs over his boxers.

“Ren’s still in the shower,” he explained, stepping back a bit. “But you can wait in here if you want.”

“Cool scars,” I pointed out, as I sailed by him and plopped down on Ren’s bed.

He glanced down at his chest before shrugging into a black t-shirt with some edgy band on it that I didn’t listen to. “Thanks. They were expensive.”

“Your family have money?” I wondered. Not that I knew anything about how much that kind of surgery would cost. But I was pretty sure living in a country like the one we lived in, they probably didn’t make it cheap or easy for shit like that.

Aspen scoffed. “Fuck no. I had to reach out to a bunch of foundations for donations and then a Kickstarter for the rest.”

“Nice. I didn’t really know that was a thing.”

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