Page 21 of The One Decent Thing

This time tomorrow, I’d be so well fucked and satisfied that I’d wonder what the hell I’d been thinking.

Chapter Eleven

Sebastian

After Aidan ran into the house like he was being chased by a pack of hellhounds, it took me a few minutes to be able to move.

Had I just — licked him? It wasn’t on purpose, but had AidanthoughtI licked him on purpose?Oh God, oh God, I licked my straight roommate.With mytongue.

Aidan was probably in the bathroom right now washing his hands with antibacterial soap, and I didn’t even blame him. Like, if someone randomly licked me I’d be so grossed out. Not if Aidan licked me, though, because Aidan…I grabbed my hair in both hands and tugged hard enough to make my eyes water. It wasn’t enough of a distraction to clear my head of the thoughts of all the places I wouldn’t mind Aidan licking me, slowly and at length.

Not that I’d mind lickinghimmore, either. Just his thumb…callused and rough, but warm and firm and kind of like something else I’d be happy to lick. Slowly. And at length.

How much length? Probably a lot. Hopefully a lot.Oh, no, Seb, you are not speculating on Aidan’s…length.But I so was.

This was not porn, and I wasn’t that desperate gay kid who couldn’t find a boyfriend, had too many hang-ups for a hookup, and fantasized about big muscular straight guys suddenly discovering their thirst for cock. Okay, it definitely wasn’t porn. The other thing was probably true.

I had to get it together and pretend none of this ever happened. Nothing reallyhadhappened, right? It was a weird moment, but neither of us had to feel awkward about it. Awkwardness was kind of my baseline state, anyway.

Deep breaths and focusing on the lingering lavender glow of the sunset for a few minutes had me almost able to feel normal. I pulled out my phone and called in the pizza order, a deluxe with everything but mushrooms, and then I headed into the house.

I found Aidan on the couch with the laptop on his knees, shoved as far over into the corner of the couch as he could go. That wasn’t his usual spot; he tended to sprawl in the center, knees wide, big arms taking up space on either side. He was like the definition of a manspreader, and he never even seemed to notice.

So, message received: he wanted to keep his distance, and make sure I didn’t sit right next to him. That hurt a little, but I got it, I really did. He’d said some asshole things about my sexuality in high school, but since he’d been back in my life he’d been totally unconcerned about it, as far as I could tell. And I was pretty sure that if some girl he wasn’t attracted to had licked him, he’d want some distance from her, too.

“Hey,” I said, with breezy nonchalance. Go me. I dropped down on the other end of the couch. “Pizza’s coming in forty-five minutes.”

“Cool,” Aidan grunted, his eyes fixed on the screen in front of him.

What would a straight-guy roommate say right now? Maybe nothing? Would a guy like that just grunt in reply and pull out his phone?

“What are you doing?” Which made me sound more like a needy girlfriend than a chill roommate. Awesome.

Aidan fiddled with the laptop’s touchpad, scrolling through something. “Looking at job postings.”

I grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned on the TV. Netflix. We needed Netflix. “Anything good?”

A long pause. “Sort of.”

Aidan still hadn’t looked at me. I could take a hint, really. I looked through Netflix’s recommendations, but nothing excited me. MaybeFirefly? We both liked sci-fi. Aidan seemed to enjoy the ones with a lot of things blowing up more than the sciencey ones, but that was cool. Not everyone was a physics geek. And we always laughed at the same things, even the stuff that wasn’t really supposed to be funny.

The sound of a car pulling up in the driveway startled me out of my viewing-options fugue. “That was quick,” Aidan commented, and he set the laptop down to pad silently to the door. For such a big guy, he could move like a ninja.

The door swung open and I heard footsteps on the walkway.

“Oh my God, you’re him! You’re the guy! Where the hell is Sebastian?” Why was that Chris’s voice? Chris. Oh, crap. I’d had a bunch of missed calls from my best friend when I got out of my midterm, but I’d ignored it, figuring I’d get back to him after dinner. I was too damn tired for whatever drama he had going on this week. A guy he hooked up with never called him back? The restaurant he wanted to go to was closed? It was all an emergency.

“Right here,” Aidan said pleasantly, but there was a little thread of something else there. Warning, maybe, or wariness. “Who are you? And what guy am I supposed to be?”

“Where’s Sebastian?” Chris demanded again, and then there was another voice, asking something — Lucas, Chris’s roommate, saying something about calling thepolice?

My breathing sped up, my heart pounded, and Aidan’s back went stiff, the fingers holding onto the door going white. I rocketed off the couch and trotted over, peering over Aidan’s arm. Chris was flushed and nervous-looking, his dark hair rumpled, and Lucas, his very tall, very thin, and very geeky blond roommate, stood beside him. His phone was out, like he was ready to follow through on his threat to call 911. Chris was maybe five foot six, and he’d obviously brought Lucas as his muscle, which would’ve been a lot funnier if I hadn’t been about to throw up.

“Chris,” I gasped. “What the hell? What’s going on?”

“Oh, thank God you’re alive,” Chris said, with a dramatic roll of his eyes. “Sebastian, are you okay? Brody made it sound like this was a hostage situation!”

Brody. Of course it was Brody. Goddammit, I was going to kill him. Strike that, I was going to let Aidan kill him, and watch with a bowl of popcorn.

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