Love Me Like A Rock Read Free

tossed out the window before he’d had a chance to lure Vinnie into them.
    By the time classes had started, Vinnie had already felt behind, what with not having had time to do most of the semester’s worth of reading before the first day. Stressed out, Vinnie disappeared into the library or his room and wouldn’t be seen again until he’d wrapped up at least one major paper, at which point he’d be ready for cocktails and cock, in that order.
    Austin sighed. He’d had such high hopes.
    Mindless sex with a random hookup it is. There will still be plenty of parties this weekend. We’re only a couple of weeks into the semester. Nobody except our uptight friend Vincent is too stressed out to party yet.
    When Knapp wrapped up the session with thanks to the model—Sean—and a reminder to the students that the next life drawing session was scheduled for two nights later, Austin was relieved, for the first time ever, to be heading out of a drawing studio. Normally he lingered, but between his perving on the naked dude in front of the class and his pissy mood, he’d just as soon book it back to their suite and fire up the tail end of the joint he’d smoked the night before.
    But before he had a chance to pack up, the professor was calling him over.
    “Hey, Austin, can you give me a hand?”
    Foiled in his race for the exit, Austin suppressed a sigh and followed Knapp over to where she needed some help returning the furniture they’d used during their session to its regular place along the walls of the studio. He liked Knapp, and would generally have been happy to help anyone who asked, but he especially wasn’t going to risk offending any art professor. Not after what the department had just set him up with the previous week.
    God forbid he did something to piss off a department professor and they rescinded their offer to give him his own show in the art museum right before Thanksgiving.
    After a couple of beers, or on the rare occasion when he smoked the whole joint, Austin might have admitted that he’d hoped to be one of the select juniors to get a solo show. But even drunk or high he wouldn’t have laid a hopeful claim to any expectation beyond getting squeezed in at the tail end of the year.
    That he’d been offered a spot in November made his heart swell with pride and his head grow dizzy with an unfamiliar anxiety that flooded back into his system whenever he put mental effort into figuring out what he wanted to show. He had an ongoing series of works in sculpture and oils that might do, but a gnawing in his stomach kicked in whenever he tried to imagine either of those scenarios.
    Let it go. This is supposed to be your chill time. You have got to unwind.
    “Did you see the op-ed in the Clarion last week, Professor Knapp?” he asked while carefully maneuvering his end of the sturdy table in a backward walk.
    “Don’t get me started,” Knapp growled. She gave up her grizzly-bear-on-the-attack face and smiled when he laughed, caught off guard by her vehemence. “Those people make me crazy.”
    “I don’t know. They keep things interesting,” he said, knowing he was baiting her.
    The op-ed had gone on at length about an imaginary mashup between the lecture given in the previous spring by a visiting professor on the history of pornography and the figure model drawing sessions. One of the models who’d been popular in the spring had been a very conventionally attractive young woman whose exhibitionist tendencies had led to a role in a film student’s senior project that had later been revealed to be pornography.
    Arty, protest pornography about the repression of gender roles, but any film with pegging in it was not going to go over well with the administration. The student hadn’t been rehired for any further figure modeling sessions, but the number of students on campus with nude drawings of her was…plenty.
    In any case, all of those different events had gotten mashed up in the op-ed author’s tiny