Boyfriend Material Read online

  Ethan scooped the trays off the table. I edged around the far side.

  “C’mon, Ethe.” Blake moved in. “I just want to talk to you. Gimme five minutes.”

  “Learn to take a hint.” Ethan used the trays to push Blake out of the way and dumped the contents in the garbage. The trays clattered on top of the bin.

  I was skulking toward the door, but I heard Blake say, “Fine. I’ll catch you at the game next week.”

  Game? What game?

  I pulled up my hood before pushing open the doors and escaping into the weak November sunshine.

  “Hey.” Ethan caught up to me less than five steps from the dining hall. “I’m sorry.”

  He hadn’t done anything wrong, so he shouldn’t have to apologize because his ex was an asshole. Except I was irrationally pissed off at him.

  Why did he have to push everything so hard?

  No wonder he and Makayla were such good friends. Neither of them had that essential bit of wiring in their brain that told them when to back off, to let things go. I didn’t want to meet his parents or go hang out with Makayla next Friday or see any more of Blake’s sneering face.

  Half a turkey on rye congealed into a cold lump in my gut, everything in me tightening, shrinking from the realization of the only way I could make all of that happen.

  Breaking up with Ethan.

  Chapter 2

  Of course, I couldn’t dump him right there. One, I needed to think. Two, that would have been the kind of attention-grabbing show I’d been trying to avoid by slipping away. Three, it was Ethan.

  I could rationalize my year-long crush on the picture of him Blake had had in the room as part of figuring out my sexuality. I could explain away the unfamiliar warmth inside when I looked at him as that sex chemical bonding stuff. But none of that could help me understand why the thought of hurting him felt way worse than my dread of meeting his parents. Why no matter what the spreadsheet said, I needed to be the one that made him smile.

  Like the way he was smiling now. “Let’s go. I’ve got work study at two.”

  A guilty conscience made me try to blow him right up against the door as soon as we were locked in his room. He stopped me from dropping to my knees, hitched me up against him with hands on my ass, and kissed the fuck out of me.

  Kissing Ethan didn’t just feel good. Yeah, it made my dick hard, my balls get full, made me want to hang on tight and grind and rub our cocks together. All the stuff kisses were supposed to do, I guess, not like I had any experience to judge against. My freaky looks had worked like Rudolph’s nose to make sure I didn’t play in any make-out games back in middle school.

  Our mouths working together did stuff to the rest of me too. Things sped up, making me dizzy, but at the same time, I felt strong, like I could beat the shit out of ten Blakes if even one of them tried to peel me and Ethan apart. I got hungry, not just for sex—though duh, there was a lot of that too—but for him, his breath, his taste, his stupid, frustrating pushiness.

  Maybe someday we’d do the kind of kisses I saw on TV, the kind where pressure built up slowly, but for us, the second our lips touched, our tongues were busy reaming out each other’s mouths in a way that I never wanted to stop.

  Kissing Ethan made me feel like nothing—no one—else mattered. And that was something I’d never felt before in my life.

  Thank God he seemed to like doing it as much as I did. We didn’t stop to breathe, didn’t separate as we stumbled toward his bed, my calves hitting it first so he landed on top of me. Our top halves twisted to fit while our legs hung off. But at least we were still kissing, his tongue rubbing hard against mine, like I wanted our dicks to be doing, if we could just get more of us onto the bed.

  I tried wriggling and Ethan tried shoving. His elbow thumped against the wall.

  He jerked out of the kiss with a yelp. “Fuck. My bed at home is a double. So much more space.” His brow furrowed, eyes going anxious as he looked down at me. “Not that we—I mean—my parents didn’t let—” His lips snapped shut, realizing he should stop digging.

  Like I said, trainable. But there it all was between us again. Thanksgiving break. Parents. Blake.

  Fortunately, there were also two hard cocks between us. Ethan shifted his weight, moving in a direction that suggested he was going to find something better to do with his mouth. I hitched myself up farther on the bed and cooperated with his efforts to get my jeans open. I lifted my ass and as he pulled them and my Fruit of the Looms down, I made a groan of relief.

  He smiled up at me. “I didn’t even start yet.”

  I told him the truth. “Yeah, but even you can’t say something stupid with your mouth full of dick.”

  His laugh huffed against the precome slick head of my dick, making me shiver. “Anyone ever tell you it’s not smart to trash talk a guy about to suck your cock?”

  I pushed up on an elbow. “Depends on the guy, right?”

  The way his eyebrows flicked up made me think I was due for some kind of revenge. When he put a sloppy kiss on the base of my dick, before drifting up the shaft with littler brushes from his lips, I knew it was going to be brutally slow. He made another careful trip back down, a little wetter, but still frustratingly light.

  I was so, so, so screwed.

  Then he dove onto me, hot, wet, deep. Halfway down and off with a tight suck, and then all the way—oh shit—all the way, tongue-lips-throat, scalding and pulsing on me.

  My hands gripped his comforter, nails digging into the seams of nylon thread, as I fought to keep back a moan they’d hear back in Thorpe Dining Hall.

  Not slow. Fast. It was almost worse. Sensation already had me shaking. Ethan was enthusiastically ruthless; coordinated bobbing, swirling tongue and a hand making sure my balls weren’t feeling left out. I shoved the back of a fist against my teeth to try to muffle the sounds.

  The warning signals started to go off. Pathetically soon. Ethan gave me a break, slowing for an instant. I thought this would be the torture, to push me hard and fast to the edge and leave me there, but all he did was take me all the way in again, throat working me over. The orgasm boiled up again so fast I couldn’t do anything to warn him. I came. First a sharp dip at the top and then sweet long jerks of it. He swallowed against me, hands stroking over the tops of my thighs while I felt my come slip smoothly between my dick and his tongue.

  My head was still spinning but a prickle of pride demanded I get control of my breathing and prop myself on an elbow to get a look at him. He wore a smug grin as he gently lapped at my wet, softening dick, then rubbed his face against the crease of a thigh and groin.

  I reached back for his pillow and smacked him on the head. “I have a tutoring session later.”

  “So?”

  “Wipe your mouth somewhere else.”

  “S’your jizz, you know, but okay.” He lifted my shirt and kissed across my belly.

  “Not there either.”

  He climbed up to squeeze in between me and the wall. “Maybe I want to keep you from getting too close to your tutoree. I know how intense you can get when you’re...tutoring.” The tone was teasing, and he followed it up with a shrug, but his eyes weren’t laughing.

  He couldn’t be seriously worried that I’d try to hit on someone else.

  I tried to brush it off. “Yeah, nothing says sexy like ‘nonhomogeneous linear equation.’”

  Ethan’s hand moved toward my hair like he’d push it off my face, but then he shoved the pillow back into place. “It’s in your eyes,” he mumbled.

  I shook my hair to the side so both my dark brown and genetic-mutant bright blue eyes were visible. “Yeah. This gets me all kinds of hot action.”

  He pressed his back into the wall to get a good look at me. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  I tried to find his hand. H
e let me pick it off his hip but holding it felt awkward so I let it go. Sex I was figuring out, but the whole casual touching because we were boyfriends was somehow more complicated. It seemed like I’d spent all my life avoiding touch. Good or bad.

  I had to fall back on words. “I’m not interested in anyone else. Just you.”

  That did the trick. I got a smile.

  Then he ducked his head. “I know I’m being kind of annoying about Thanksgiving. But after what you told me about what it was like for you at home, I didn’t want you to have to go there.” Ethan didn’t have problems touching. He settled next to me, arm holding me on the bed. His dick was still hard, pressed against my hip, but he wasn’t trying to grind off on me or anything.

  “My parents are really cool. They’d want you to come even if you weren’t my boyfriend.”

  I held myself very still. “Wait. What did you tell them?” Was this some charity invitation?

  “I told them Blake and I broke up and that I was seeing someone new and I wanted to bring him home for Thanksgiving.”

  Ethan actually appeared to be one of those nice guys who smiled at store clerks in a way that didn’t come off as creepy and opened doors for old ladies and for all I knew helped them across the street. I liked who he was. That didn’t mean I didn’t know he was practiced at slapping a yellow coat of paint on a dog turd and calling it gold.

  I waited, giving him room to dig himself another hole.

  “They want to meet you,” he assured me.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s low-key. Just my family.” Ethan, like me, didn’t have any brothers or sisters.

  I thought about Blake’s parting remark. “What about the game?”

  His eyes made a telling shift to the left. “Oh, it’s this traditional thing. High school football rivalry. They play in the morning on Thanksgiving Day.”

  That didn’t sound like anything to get shifty over. Why was Blake so sure Ethan would even be there? “I didn’t know you were into football.”

  “It’s just this thing every year. One cousin or another is always on the team, and my aunt is the cheerleader coach and one of my uncles—”

  My post-orgasm happy balls shriveled up tight. I wished I could too. “When you say ‘just your family,’ what the fuck does that mean?”

  “My Aunt Pam is hosting this year. Which means we’ll be able to leave if you’re bored.”

  “Ethan.” I fought the urge to shake him. “How many people are going to be there?”

  He chewed on a lip in concentration. That was not a good sign. “Uh, twenty-one.” He threw on a smile along with another coat of shiny paint, but I could smell the dog shit. “Twenty-two counting you.”

  I could not do this.

  We wouldn’t necessarily have to stay broken up, right?

  Chapter 3

  Uncle Owen saved my life again. Well, inviting me to come spend Thanksgiving break with him wasn’t quite as big a deal as when he’d come to see me in juvie and told me if I got my shit together he’d help me out with college. Still, when I got Uncle Owen’s email the next day, complete with the attachment of a printable bus ticket, it was like a boulder being rolled off my chest. I’d been running out of time to find a way to tell Ethan I’d rather break up with him than be dragged home to meet twenty members of his family.

  Now I just had to break it to Ethan. A perfect time for it would be after sex, when he was pliable and sleepy. But scheduling slapped an error message on that. I had to work in the Butler kitchen all weekend, and Connor was locked in their room trying to finish up some big project he had to hand in on Tuesday. Russell, my new roommate, had some positive qualities, like not talking much and not being Blake, but he spent a lot of time in our room. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to just say Hey Russ, how ’bout you split for a while. I wanna funk up the room doing my boyfriend. Huh. For all I knew he’d just give me his usual blank stare and nod, but I didn’t feel like trying it. Even though Ethan had helped with the paperwork and then the physical lugging of my shit, switching dorm rooms was a serious pain.

  With my top option of sliding the information in between orgasms unavailable, I met Ethan out on the loading dock during a work break.

  I stepped out into cold, clear air, sucking it down to get rid of the disinfectant steam from the dishwashing station. Ethan was pacing around the cement slab, wrapped in a scarf, wearing one of those wool coats with big buttons like sailors wore. I pictured him with one of those folded white caps on his styled blond hair, waving from the deck as he shipped off somewhere.

  Realization hit like a tickle in the back of my throat and I coughed. I was going to miss him. Stupid. It’s not like we lived together and we hadn’t been doing this that long, but there it was. A funny feeling like I was going to have something taken away, just when it seemed like I could keep it.

  Ethan looked up at my cough. Under the floodlight, his face was pale, freckles standing out against his skin. He didn’t wait for me to talk. “It’s over, right? It’s the clinging thing, isn’t it? I was try—”

  I grabbed his head and kissed him. It wasn’t out of pity for his nervous fumbling, or even only to shut him up. It was for me. I did it because seeing those words on his lips—words I’d actually thought of saying—was like a kick to the nuts.

  I tried the careful kind of kissing, softening my mouth as I pressed it to his. But he grabbed me back, holding tight to my head, and just like that it was us again, kissing like our lives depended on it.

  He ran out of breath faster than usual, though. Maybe all that pacing. An exaggerated sigh heaved in his chest as he shifted his grip to my shoulders. I shook my head at him, fighting a smile.

  He studied my face with the kind of intensity he ought to be using to pass calculus. “Just to be clear, that means we’re still going out, right?”

  “Yes, Ethan.”

  He smiled and it was all puppies and lollipops again, but I couldn’t believe he’d gone there so quickly.

  I stepped back. “Do you really think I’d dump you, just like that? ’Cause Blake did?”

  “Uh—”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  He grabbed my arm. “I don’t think you’re like that. It’s just...sometimes it’s hard to know that you want to be with me.”

  It was impossible to stay pissed when he was looking so vulnerable. I guess because he seemed so sure of himself all the time, I didn’t ever think of him as needing me to say anything. “I do. I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  Which made the whole point of me asking him to meet me turn out to be a giant case of awkward.

  I dug my phone out of my pocket. “You remember I told you about my uncle.”

  Ethan nodded, then his eyes went wide. “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. So, he invited me to visit. For the break.”

  His feelings were as plain on his face as his freckles. A quick ah of understanding on his lips, his lashes dropping with a moment of disappointment, and then back to that focus. “He didn’t ask you last year, though.”

  “No.” I scrolled through my emails, but I could remember what he’d said. “He asked my mom about it and she said she didn’t have plans.” Reading between the lines of my uncle’s email, Mom had probably said something like Do whatever the fuck you want. You will anyway.

  “Is she going to your uncle’s too?” Ethan asked.

  “No, he just invited me. They’ve never gotten along.”

  Ethan nodded.

  I know he had a hard time with the concept, but I didn’t come from a long line of cheerleading coaches who traded off Thanksgiving hosting duties. I found the email and thumbed it open again.

  Ethan put his hand on my wrist above the phone. “Do you want to go?”

  He hadn’t asked me if I’d w
anted to go to his parents. Just told me they’d love to have me and that it would be fun and that he couldn’t wait. Well, to be fair, he had first asked if I already had plans, which I didn’t.

  I had to stop and think about his question. I mean, I was going to Uncle Owen’s. He’d sent me a ticket, which he’d already paid for, and he was the one helping me out, cosigning loans, giving the college an address to send stuff to. Plus, even though we’d only met for the first time when I was in juvie, I knew him. He had Waardenburg like me, except he was totally deaf. That was way preferable to the circus waiting for me if I went home with Ethan. But did I want to go?

  “Yeah,” I decided. “It’d be good to get to know him, I guess.”

  “Then you should totally go there instead.”

  “Huh?” I’d expected at least a full five minute persuasive oration. Maybe a PowerPoint once he’d had time to put it together.

  “It’s like you said. You should be where you want to be. But,” his voice dropped, “I’ll miss you.”

  I looked at his mouth. That wide mouth. His tongue. Shit. I had another three hours left to work. Wait, had I just been given some kind of reverse-manipulation? “You aren’t pissed that I’m changing the plans?”

  Ethan shrugged. “I really wanted you to come.” He licked his lips and now I knew he was playing me a little. “But...” his eyes got serious “...if you have family you want to see, they get you first.”

  * * *

  I should have known that was too easy.

  Tuesday night before break, we were in my room for a change. Russell had taken off for home already. Neither me or Ethan was leaving until the next day. He was taking a makeup quiz in calculus first thing in the morning. Apparently the calculus TA was as helpless under the effect of Ethan’s pleading eyes as I was.