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ain’t my thing.”
    â€œWell, shit. When you call it that, it ain’t my thing either,” Tom said and laughed. He dropped his head back down, but kept his eyes open. Reese reached for a strip of gunmetal gray fabric that turned out to be a stretchy headband and pulled it over his head and then pushed it back across his hairline, pulling all his chin-length ebony hair off his face. Tom realized he hadn’t actually seen Reese’s entire face before. He’d had half of it covered with that sweep of straight, dark hair until now.
    He was a good-looking kid. Probably got plenty of cock-first, kissing-second action, Tom thought and kept the grin off his face. But seriously, with that dramatically pale skin and the cheekbones, plus the puffy lips and the skinny but muscled abs he was showing off with the stretched out waistband of those sweats, he could have been a model for one of those clothing companies whose catalogs looked more like high-class porn than sales books.
    And now it was definitely time for that nap. That was more brain time devoted to how gay dudes probably wanted to fuck his young roommate than Tom was really comfortable spending.
    â€œI’m out, kid. C’n we take this up tonight?” He rolled over to face the wall for emphasis.
    â€œI do not, under any circumstances, hang out with homophobic jocks and their fuckhead buddies.” The kid was like a terrier with a bone, worrying it to death with tiny teeth.
    Tom told himself not to answer. To let the kid wind down. He couldn’t keep ranting forever.
    â€œWell, I’m not an athlete anymore.”
    It was too bad he couldn’t be convinced to take his own advice.
    â€œBut you were an athlete!” Reese practically pounced on him and said, Ah ha! like a cartoon villain. With his face to the wall and his eyes shut, for all Tom knew he actually had made some kind of melodramatic one-finger pointing accusation.
    â€œJesus, kid, shut up. I was a virgin once too, but everything changes. And I don’t have any fuckhead buddies here. Not anymore. So how about we keep it that way and you can ignore me and pretend I’m not here, okay?”
    No answer. Praise God. A lot of barefoot stomping, which wasn’t really a big deal since that was pretty quiet anyway, and some aggressive drawer opening and closing. If Reese thought that kind of nonverbal protest was going to drive him out then Tom would break it to him gently. Not a chance.
    He was almost out cold when he heard their door open and shut as Reese left.
    And Tom would have been a lot less relaxed if he’d understood what Reese said as he left.
    â€œSee if you can ignore this.”

Chapter Two
    Tom forgot all about Reese’s last throwaway challenge by the time he got back to their room late that night after a less than encouraging meeting with his advisor and a solid four hours in the library trying to catch up on the pre-reading for his senior seminar on Ethics in Business. Ha. As if he needed it.
    The professor was notorious for the blinding white lights of interrogation he shone on the students in his class on the first day. Anyone who made it through without crying or telling him to fuck off got to stay in the class. After that first hideous day, the prof actually morphed into a rigorous but compassionate teacher. Thinning the herd, he called it. Tom had thought he’d have plenty of time to check the texts out of the library in Boston, and that had actually been the easy part. But finding time to read about the social responsibilities of businesses to the communities in which they are located when he was spending every waking moment driving a cab to get his first semester paid up before the final September deadline for registration was harder than he’d thought.
    Of course, it wasn’t as if he were reading Playboy or Entertainment Weekly . Even an Econ major like Tom had a hard time staying awake over seven hundred pages of the