Jonas slung an arm around Benji and pulled him against his side. “Let’s go get you a drink, babe.”
Babe? Wasn’t this their first fucking date? Oh, fuck. What if it wasn’t their first date? My heart clenched painfully. What if Jonas and Benji had already hooked up?
I stumbled back a step, unable to handle the visions trying to unspool in my mind and knocked into Benji’s friend returning with two cups of beer. One of them sloshed over my arm and into a puddle on the floor.
“Whoa!” She laughed, shoving one of the drinks at Benji. “Here, take this one. I’ll get back in line for a fresh one.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Oh, please,” she said with a smile, using a hand to swipe at the beer dripping down my arm. “It’s crazy crowded. If I can’t handle some spilled beer, I don’t belong here.”
“You should get her a new beer, Ace,” Jonas said with a grin. “You can jump the line.”
He wasn’t wrong. I owed Tracy for knocking into her, and I could get her a drink in half the time. I instinctively looked to Benji. We weren’t finished talking. We’d barely started.
I needed to tell him the truth. I just hoped I wasn’t too late, that he hadn’t gotten in too deep with Jonas under the mistaken belief that Jonas had proven he cared with all those gifts.
“You should go,” Benji said before I got a word out. “No need to worry about me. I’m good here with Jonas.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna take real good care of him,” Jonas added with a chuckle.
I didn’t care for his tone.
“I’ll be fine,” Tracy said. She kept looking between me and Benji and Jonas as if she could sense the tension arcing from person to person.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave Benji in Jonas’s clutches, but my sense of decency wouldn’t allow me to ignore Tracy. She was Benji’s friend, and I was the reason she’d spilled her drink.
“No, it was my bad. I’ll go with you,” I said.
We had a couple of kegs out back, and generally people lined up for refills. I could save her some hassle.
Before I went, though, I had to say something.
“But hey, Benji, I’d like to talk to you about something later, okay?”
He looked uncertain. “Um, okay…”
“Maybe just call him tomorrow, huh?” Jonas added. “It’s a bit loud for serious conversation.”
And with that, he grabbed Benji’s hand and led him into the next room, out of view.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.
“Got it bad for him, huh?” Tracy said beside me.
I whipped my head in her direction, a denial ready on my tongue but never making it past my lips. If she could see it so easily, could Benji?
She shook her head as if reading my mind. “He’s clueless.”
I swallowed hard. “Let’s go get you that drink.”
“Okay,” she said, not pushing me to admit to anything. “It’s just too bad that two guys so clearly into each other aren’t actually together.”
Did she know something I didn’t? Benji hadn’t been into me when I’d tried to kiss him. It was possible I’d surprised him, kissing him when we weren’t on a real date, but why would he then ghost me all the following week?
As much as I wanted to believe Tracy, I was afraid she was making assumptions without having the full story.
“Benji’s where he wants to be.”
Tracy glanced over her shoulder, at the throng of people amassed in the house. “I doubt that.”
I gave her a rueful smile. “I didn’t say it was where he belonged. Just that he wanted to be there.”
“For now, maybe,” she said.
For now.
Benji was with Jonas, for now. He wanted to date Jonas, for now. But it wouldn’t — couldn’t — last, could it? I still had a chance, didn’t I? If I could find my balls and tell him the truth.
This unrequited crush had gone on far too long. One way or the other, I needed Benji to know how I felt about him. I’d take a gamble and lay out my cards.
Going by Tracy’s reaction, I couldn’t bluff for shit anyway.
Benji
It’s funny how two people can be at the same party and yet be so far apart. Ace had walked off with Tracy, and I hadn’t seen him since. They were probably hitting it off. The thought made me uncomfortable, but Tracy was beautiful, and Ace was gorgeous.
That was a picture that made sense.
Me and Ace? That was never going to happen.
“Come on,” Jonas said, throwing his arm over my shoulders again. I sagged a little under it. As the night went on, the amount of weight that came with the gesture increased. Jonas had been downing two drinks to each of mine, and I was drinking more than usual for me.
As Jonas led me from crowd to crowd, laughing and joking, it had seemed necessary to survive the experience. I’d been asked about my major approximately ten times. Once they learned it was art, they either lost all interest or demanded I show them something. Apparently, I was supposed to carry a sketchbook in my back pocket. True, I did have one with me often, but it didn’t fit in my skinny jeans. My ass barely fit in my skinny jeans.
“You should go into tattooing!” a slender girl with long, bleached blond hair told me after I’d admitted I wasn’t sure yet what career field I’d go into after graduating.
“Yeah, man, I want to get a tattoo of our Greek letters on my arm. Could you do that?”
“Well, I don’t know how to tattoo, so—”
“You know what would be cool? A massive dragon. Could you do that?”
“Well, I could draw it…”
The tattoo talk shifted to everyone’s favorite tattoos and tattoo horror stories, and I let the conversation wash over me while guzzling down another beer.
“Not a fan of tats?” Jonas asked me.
I glanced at him. “No, tats are cool.” Not that I’d ever want to do them. Not because I didn’t respect the art form, but because I didn’t want to talk to my canvas. “I’ve seen some beautiful work.”
“You have any?”
“No. You?”
“Maybe you’ll find out later,” he said with a wink.
My heart turned over, but I was pretty sure it was anxiety more than excitement. Jonas was an okay guy, but did I want to end up in his bed on our first date? That was rushing things a bit, considering I’d never had a serious make-out session, much less a full-on hookup.
Another loud burst of laughter washed over me. I finished my beer and held it up. “Can we get another?”
Jonas tipped his cup up, gulping the rest of his beer. “Yup. Let’s go.”
I followed him through the house, breathing in deeply of the fresh air that cooled my skin as we stepped into the backyard, where the kegs were set up.
“Hang back,” Jonas said. “I’ll get the beers.”
The fraternity needed reasonable deniability, should anyone call the police out, so they purposely did not serve drinks to minors. Most people had gotten stamps on their hands after being carded once, so they could get drinks without constantly checking, but us under-21s had to rely on friends to get us drinks.