Page 39 of Dire Straights

He hummed a noise of assent, sitting across the room from me, tapping his black-painted nails on the dark bedspread. “You play Federation of Fables?”

I vaguely knew what the game was, mostly from Ren mentioning it here and there. I knew it was something he, Aspen, and Che all played together.

“I’m not really a gamer.”

“You should try it. Ren would love if you played with us.” When I hesitated, thinking of how much I sucked at video games, Aspen went on. “He watches football now, for fuck’s sake.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Besides the fact that football is lame and boring?”

“Ren seems to like it okay.”

“He just likes you,” Aspen pointed out. He tilted his head a little, watching me intensely. “You like him too, right?”

“Obviously. I wouldn’t bring someone I don’t like home for the weekend, would I?”

He shrugged. “Just saying, there’s a lot of you sport-o frat boys that love to use other guys as an experiment, then dip when you decide it’s too much for you.”

“You think I’m using Ren for dick?” I repeated flatly. I wondered if Aspen had maybe seen Ren’s dick at some point or another. If so, I could kind of understand why he’d think that. But I really, really hoped he hadn’t seen it. The thought of that made me feel irrationally jealous.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“No. That’s stupid.”

“Alright,” he retorted, shrugging.

“And I’m not in a fucking frat,” I added belatedly. I despised frat bros.

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

Annoyed with the implication that I would ever use someone like Ren for any reason, I opened my mouth to tell him off, but at that moment the door opened and Ren stumbled in, balancing a basket of shower stuff in his arms.

“Oh, hey!” He greeted me happily as he put down the basket next to his bed. “I didn’t know you’d be done with practice already!” Then after another moment, he seemed to recognizethe tension in the air. “Is everything okay?” He asked, glancing between Aspen and I.

“Everything’s fine,” Aspen answered smoothly. “We were just talking.”

“About what?” He asked, furrowing his brows a little. He was so sensitive to tension. It was probably because of his dumb bitch ex-girlfriend.

“Federation of Fables,” I stated quickly, only because I couldn’t stand that worried look on his face. “I’m, uh… I’m going to download it. So I can play with you guys.”

“Really?” As expected, he perked up pretty much instantly.

“Yeah,” Aspen cut in. “I was saying how he’s probably going to suck, and feed the enemy super hard while we’re teaching him how to play.”

“That’s okay,” Ren chirped, happy as a clam. “We’ll totally just play casual mode while you’re still learning.”

“Great,” I said, forcing a smile on my face. When he turned around to put some stuff away in a drawer, I saw Aspen smirking smugly at me from his bed with one eyebrow raised like he’d beat me in some kind of contest. Asshole. He reminded me a little of Caelyx. I put my middle finger up at him, but his expression didn’t change.

The bus ride was uneventful, but not too bad. We holed up in the back corner the whole way, and no one paid much attention to us. I probably would have spent the time people-watching, pointing out bad hair and lame outfits, but Ren was way too nice for that. So we mostly just talked about life in general, and played against each other on a trivia game app on our phones. I whooped him in sports, but he had me in pretty much everything else.

When we were close to our destination, I brought up the subject I’d been thinking about how to word for a while.

“So, just so you know, my dad is kind of… Overbearing,” I decided on the word, though I wasn’t sure it was exactly what I was trying to say.

“How so?” Ren asked.

“He just has really high expectations of me and wants me to do everything a certain way, so… If you could just not mention how I’m not exactly getting along with the guys on the swim team or whatever.”

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