Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 (10 page)

Denny’s hips moved, the bend at the top of his thighs tucking right beneath Rafi’s ass because he was three inches taller than Denny. Denny cleared his throat. “No.”

Rafi understood. Dancing with girls always reminded him how soft they were. Even the skinny ones had bones more delicate than Rafi and Denny, who, like all rowers, were made of muscle. Dancing always made Rafi feel like his body was made of sex and elastic, but there was no possible way for Denny to mistake him for anything other than a man.

No, Rafi wouldn’t feel like a girl, even when dancing.

The music shifted, slowing to a languid rhythm cradled between the low notes of an accordion that led them deeper into the dance. The sun had drifted beneath the horizon and the floodlights kicked on, pushing the limits of the dock area into shadows. If anyone came upon them now, they would look like lovers dancing against the dark.

He wished they were.

Denny opened the hand on Rafi’s stomach and pressed him closer, his cheek against Rafi’s skin. Exhilaration fired through Rafi like booze flooding his veins after three shots of tequila. He was drunk on dancing, on falling into the bachata like falling into bed as Denny matched his steps finally, without thought, without effort. He turned in Denny’s arms and held his hands tight, dancing now with him, together.

The singer’s voice soared, slipping from Spanish to English and back again. A nudge on Denny’s right hand opened their dance space as Rafi pivoted. Denny fumbled the step for a second, but it didn’t matter. The rhythm held him steady, their hands gripping tightly to each other, dancing closer than they needed to.

God, we should stop.
Thoughts were tangled up in Rafi’s head, all his plans and good intentions tied up in knots of want and need and crave. Dancing with girls was energy and fun and high spirits. Dancing with Denny was sex and darkness and the edge of a cliff.

The words rose in his throat. “Denny—”

“Shhh.” Denny shook his head, smiling. “I’m dancing.”

Denny had been a boy the first time Rafi had looked at him and wondered what it would feel like to kiss him. A boy of seventeen years and eleven months, according to some arbitrary idea that boys turned magically into men on their eighteenth birthdays. Rafi had hung on to that idea to keep his own nineteen-year-old lust under control. Denny had been seventeen when he’d asked Rafi to kiss him, and Rafi had turned him down because Denny was too young, too innocent, too many things a brown boy from Chicago didn’t want to get tangled up in for the few weeks Denny had spent there.

He knew it had stung, that rejection. Rafi had hoped the sting would kill Denny’s crush too. But he knew all along, right up until that moment when Denny turned to him at the harbor, that Denny still wanted him.

He hadn’t realized how powerfully that moment had driven his decisions over the past two years until he felt the weight of it dissolve and slip away while he danced with Denny in a place where they both belonged. As equals. Where Denny was a little more equal, if anything, through knowing his way around and being more naturally at home, although Rafi was doing his best to force his way to acceptance.

Bachata being what it was, though, someone still needed to steer, and Rafi controlled the dance.

Denny noticed. He squeezed Rafi’s hands lightly. “I thought I’d be the one leading you here. Not dancing. I mean, at Carlisle.”

All Rafi could do was repeat what he’d already explained. “I need to meet you on my own terms.”

“I know.” Denny’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Rafi needs to be in control.”

“No, I don’t. Not always.” And this time Denny was the one to roll his eyes. Because of course that wasn’t true. Even this dance had been another way for Rafi to assert some control. He hadn’t put on music Denny would be familiar with and encouraged him to goof off. No, Rafi had chosen the music he knew Denny wanted to dance to, but didn’t know how. To create a moment where he—older, more experienced—was again the one who led instead of following. It had been unconscious maybe, but that’s what it was. “Sorry. We can stop.” He moved to drop his arms and step away, but Denny’s grip on his hand tightened as he pulled them close together again.

“Don’t you fucking dare.” He locked gazes with Rafi, who meant to nod and start dancing again. Who didn’t mean to move toward him, sliding a hand up Denny’s arm and then to the back of his neck. Didn’t mean to step into Denny’s body until Denny rocked back on his heels and clutched at Rafi’s shoulders for balance, fingers digging into the muscle so sweetly.

He didn’t mean to, but he pressed his lips against Denny’s, hot breath mixing between the two of them as they kissed in a sudden burst of heat, mouths open, inhaling each other. Denny tasted sweet, like the orange Gatorade he always chugged at the gym. Rafi licked at his mouth, need melting his spine until he lost track of time, space, everything except the sensation of Denny grinding and writhing against him.

Denny’s fingers sneaking under the elastic waistband of his shorts woke him up from the daze of kissing. His own hands gripped the muscles of Denny’s ass like he’d been dumped out of a boat in the river and someone had thrown him a life ring. Rafi drew his head back, gasping.

We have to stop.

“Don’t. Don’t say it.” Denny touched his fingers to the corner of Rafi’s jaw, stopping him as he pulled away.

He doesn’t kiss like a boy.
Because Denny wasn’t. He hadn’t been a boy for a long time now. He kissed like a man who’d done all kinds of things with other men, and wanted now to do them with Rafi.

And God, Rafi wanted that too.

The singer’s voice floated over them:
You and I, me and you, on and on.

“This isn’t dancing.” A nonsensical protest, but the gears in his brain weren’t catching right yet.

“This is better,” Denny murmured, capturing his mouth again. His hands fell to Rafi’s hips and pulled as Denny spread his legs to straddle Rafi’s leg and grind his cock against Rafi’s thigh. The moment where Rafi could have told him to stop dissolved away into the night.

A shout of surprise erupted from the darkness that soaked the grounds surrounding the spotlit entrance to the boathouse. Rafi’s heart stopped.

“Knock it off!” A girl’s voice, laughing, protesting.

He whirled around, heart pounding, fists clenching, only to find no one there.

“Easy, killer.” Denny stroked a hand down his bare arm, and Rafi had to control himself to keep from pushing Denny’s hand away.

“Who was that?” he demanded, chest tight.

“Austin wasn’t the first guy to bring a hookup here.” He could hear the laughter in Denny’s voice, and wanted to shout at him.

Two people tripped and stumbled into the light as they hit the end of the path and stepped onto the concrete apron. Before they had a chance to do more than stop in their tracks, Rafi strode back into the workout room, cursing his hard-on, which wasn’t smart enough to recognize Rafi had had the shit scared out of him.

“Dudes. Hey.” He recognized that voice. It was the jerk from the shower. Booger the douchebag. “What’s up?” Rafi didn’t even turn his head to look.

“Hey. We were just heading out. Late workout,” he heard Denny answer calmly. Rafi crossed to the docking station and yanked his iPhone free, shoving it in his bag. An oily snake of nausea curled in his belly
. What the fuck were you thinking?
He knew he’d already popped on this asshole’s radar, and yet he hadn’t thought twice about trying to suck Denny’s soul out past his tonsils, standing right out in the open under a damn spotlight, for Christ’s sake.

“Jesus.” Rafi pressed a hand against the painted cement block wall and dropped his head. How dumb could he get? The semester was barely a month old, and this was what he let happen? Dancing? Making out right out in the open, where anyone could see?

By the time he headed outside, Booger and his girl were nearly at the door. The tall, dark-haired girl smiled at him and chirped a greeting, but the rower only lifted his chin silently. Rafi nodded without comment, hearing the door close and lock behind him.

Looked like Booger was smarter about planning his hookups than Rafi was.

You need to stop calling him Booger, even in your head, before it slips out by accident. Also, you didn’t plan shit, so he’s not better at it than you.

Jesus Christ. Now he was getting into imaginary seduction competitions.
You really need to let some of the testosterone go, dude.
He walked over to where Denny waited for him at the edge of the path that led to the road back to campus. They had walked to the river for their workout, in no particular hurry. Rafi hadn’t let himself acknowledge there was no reason they couldn’t have worked out at the gym on campus, closer to both their dorms, instead of walking all the way down to the deserted boathouse.

He hadn’t acknowledged it, but he knew damn well what had drawn him here, and guessed it was the same thing that had kept Denny from questioning where they were going. The isolation, that feeling of being far away from everyone who knew them and all the crap that hung over the interactions of hundreds of college students living on top of each other. Teammates or friends or none of the above.

“I don’t suppose we’re heading back to your room or mine to finish what we started?” Denny’s voice was full of regret, like he could read the answer to his own question on Rafi’s face.

“We can’t.” He shook his head. They started walking.

“We totally can, you know.” The farther they moved away from the lights of the boathouse, the darker it got. The lights on the path were spaced wide, leaving plenty of shadow between them. Denny’s arms swung as they walked uphill from the river, brushing Rafi’s as if by accident. “I’m just saying, if we’re taking votes, I cast mine for maximum naked time.”

There was no such thing as accidental touching between them anymore, Rafi knew.

“You can stop talking now,” he muttered, trying to sound like he was teasing. He wanted to smile at Denny’s eagerness, but the idea of what he was doing, what he was turning down, made Rafi want to bite off his own tongue and swallow it before he could get the words out. “I can’t, even if you can.”

Denny sighed. Loudly. “I know. You told me on day one. You don’t want the title
Denny’s boy
. Which you wouldn’t be, by the way.”

Rafi worried that Denny didn’t get it, because Denny talked like saying something made it so, when Rafi knew exactly how little wishing changed what people thought of him or how they talked about him. “I’m not trying to make any waves.”

The touch of Denny’s hand at his elbow, calluses hard against Rafi’s skin. “I get it. Really.”

They walked on in silence, stepping onto the grassy verge as headlights approached from behind them and a car zoomed past at a speed that seemed dangerous for these twisting roads. The sound of the car’s engine faded away.

“I’m not saying I don’t think you’re nuts, though. Just to make that clear. Lots of dudes would kill for that title.” Denny’s voice floated out of the dark in a gap between streetlights.

Denny’s boy.

“Oh, I’m fucking crazy. I know it.” And he did, truly. With every step he took back to campus, Rafi told himself he was making the right call here. He had new friends in his suitemates, and would find a way to navigate the knotty competitiveness among the rowers with time. And maybe then, when he felt like the ground was stable beneath him, maybe then he wouldn’t mind so much…being Denny’s boy.

Those words though—
maximum naked time
—Rafi would hear those words echoing for the longest time while trying, and failing, to fall asleep late that night, the noises of the dorm rumbling around him.

Chapter Five

C minus.

Rafi burst out the doors of Chapin Hall, face burning so hot bystanders must be able to feel it.

C minus.
And a note from the professor saying she’d given him some leeway on this first paper at Carlisle—and didn’t that burn, knowing she pitied him already because he came from somewhere that obviously hadn’t taught him shit about how to write a decent paper—but that he’d want to do some better work supporting his argument, and proofreading his grammar, in the next one. She added something about a writing center, but he’d hardly been able to read her chicken-scratch handwriting, especially through the blurry rush of embarrassment that made his vision all watery.

Holy fuck. He was going to flunk out of college in his first semester.

Because this
was
his best work. Rafi had never worked so hard on a paper in his life, trying to figure out what he wanted to say and how to say it properly. Watching his grammar and the squiggly underlines of the spell-check. Making sure his margins and title page looked like they were supposed to.

But it didn’t matter if your paper looked right, or if you managed to get through the whole damn thing without a typo—which was a fucking miracle as far as Rafi was concerned and ought to get him some kind of bonus points—none of that mattered if your paper was covered in red ink. Notes everywhere calling out poorly structured sentences, vague claims in his argument that “lacked support”, whatever the hell that meant, and places where he’d “failed to push his thesis to its full potential”.

Jesuchristo.

The adrenaline made his hands shake with the need to take off, to go somewhere, anywhere, far away.

“Rafi! Wait up.”

He spun in place, groaning at the sight of Denny jogging toward him, backpack bouncing on his wide shoulders. If there was one person he didn’t want to see until he had his humiliation under control, it was Denny.

“Hey, whoa. What’s wrong?” Denny put a hand out, but Rafi jerked away before they touched.

“Nothing.”

“Bull. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nothing’s wrong.” He tried to shove the crumpled paper into his backpack without drawing attention to it.

“Bad grade?” Denny grimaced and shook his head. “I hate getting these first papers back, before you’ve figured out what the professor is looking for. It’s like a crapshoot sometimes.”

Rafi zipped up his backpack, listening hard, but not looking Denny in the eye.
Is it really hard for him too sometimes?

“You know, if you ever want someone to read your stuff before you turn it in—”

“No fucking way.” God, twenty-four hours ago, he might have taken Denny up on the offer. Rafi shuddered at the thought. Now that he knew how crappy his writing was, he couldn’t help being grateful he’d never shown anything other than his Carlisle entrance essay to Denny.

“I don’t mean like I’m some kind of… Some people are good at art. Some people are good at math.” Denny’s explanation wasn’t helping.

Let me guess. You’re good at everything.
Rafi knew his resentment was unearned, but sometimes it felt like everything came so easy to Denny. And he knew that wasn’t true, but the part of Rafi that felt like a victim of his public school and resented it was punching out at the nearest target.

“I’m good at words,” Denny said. He lifted an eyebrow. “And even I get someone to go over my work whenever I can. Vinnie’s really good at proofreading, even if he can be kind of a prick about punctuation. He’s got a vendetta against extraneous commas.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Fine. You can always go to the writing center too. They’re slammed at the end of the semester, but it’s easy to get in now.”

He was reluctant to expose his own ignorance, but he bit the bullet. “To read my paper and tell me what I’m doing wrong?”

Denny shook his head. “Way before that. You go in when your papers get assigned. They can help you work on picking a topic, research, everything.” He paused for a moment as if calculating the impact of his next words. “If you ask Cash, he’ll tell you the writing center saved his ass. He used them all the time.”

And that did ease the stiffness in Rafi’s chest, knowing his mentor had struggled with academics at Carlisle as much as he was.

With that casual way he had, Denny threw his arm around Rafi. “Come on. Let me take you to the campus center and buy you a burger. Shut up,” Denny warned before Rafi could even protest. “Everybody earns a consolation burger when they get a crappy grade. It’s the law.”

“It is?” Students were converging on the building behind them for their three o’clock classes. A short girl with a shaved head, whom he recognized from his dorm, waved at him, and he nodded in return.

“Yeah. Ask anyone.”

He leaned into Denny’s arm and the warmth of it, the solid muscle bracing him, felt so good Rafi let go of his anxiety for once and turned into Denny’s chest, wrapping his arms around him and hanging on tight. Without a word, Denny hung on right back and they stood there for a full minute, silent.

“Thank God,” Denny finally whispered into his neck, his voice tight like he was trying to smile but it hurt. “I was starting to think you were never going to touch me first. Not even for a hug.”

Rafi shook his head, rubbing his face on Denny’s hoodie. “I’m sorry. I’m such a mess.”

Denny turned his face to press a casual kiss to Rafi’s cheek, and Rafi didn’t even look around to see who might be watching. “Yeah, but you’re my mess.”

I so am
. He didn’t know what he was doing with Denny right now. If it was flirting or half-assed dating or simply trying to rebuild a friendship. But that connection was strengthening, whether he’d planned it to or not.

“Let’s go. Your burger awaits.” Denny squeezed him tight for a moment, and then let go.

Rafi dug deep to find some matching generosity of his own. Maybe instead of retreating to his room to recharge, he should try doing that with Denny. Their late-night gaming sessions had always been a mood elevator. Why not invoke that closeness now? “How about I buy us a six-pack and we fix my shitty mood with some
Call of Duty
?” He smiled and saw the rising happiness in Denny’s face.

“That’d be awesome. We can—shit. We’ve got double practice today.” Denny’s face fell.

Coach Lawson had decided their pacing for the first 500m split of the 2000m practice races was dragging, so they were buckling down until they nailed it. The psychological and physical advantage of controlling the race at the 500-meter split was immense, and the focus of all their work at the moment.

So instead of beer and virtual violence to soothe the soul, Rafi spent the afternoon reacting to Austin’s surprisingly loud, shouted commands. That clipped-short voice steered them from the racks holding the boats all the way to the water and beyond.

“Waist, ready, up!” Lift the boat from its low rack to their waists.

“Shoulders, ready, up!” The signal to lift the boat up and onto their shoulders.

“Heads up.” Called out every time they passed through a doorway or near other teams on the dock, warning them that a crew was coming through with a shell.

“Hands in!” They grabbed the ribs inside the shell, ready to roll it off their heads.

“Shoulders, ready, down!” Lowering the boat into the water under the eagle eye of both the coach and the cox, ready to bark at them for any lack of smoothness. When a couple of freshmen bobbled their boat, everyone was stuck practicing the transition from land to water until Coach was satisfied.

No scratching the twenty-five thousand dollar racing shell, amigo.

By the end of practice, his arms were burning worse than if they’d spent the entire time sprinting on the water. After putting the shell back in its rack and suffering through another set of erg sprints, for shits and giggles apparently, all Rafi wanted was to shovel three bowls of pasta into his mouth and try to stay awake long enough to make it through his American Lit reading assignment.

Tomorrow. He would call the writing center tomorrow.

Definitely tomorrow.

But Wednesday his arms were so sore he could barely make it through morning practice without crying. And the TA in Spanish was riding his ass on pronunciation so hard, still, not even Bree’s exaggerated scowls and sticking out of her tongue every time the guy’s back was turned could cheer him up.

No way was he up to a session with a writing tutor that was bound to make him feel dumber than he already did.

Thursday. He’d call the writing center on Thursday.

His afternoon lecture class with Professor Egan on Thursday was excruciating. Rafi kept telling himself that he was imagining it. That Egan definitely wasn’t staring at him more than other students in her class, eyeing him every time she asked a question about free will or determinism, as if waiting for him to say something. Where he’d occasionally spoken up before during debates—had even, once, gotten into a spirited argument with another student over whether religious morality was absolute or if context mattered—now he spent the entire ninety minutes of the lecture slumped low in his seat, wishing he were shorter so he could hide behind the doofus in front of him who spent the entire class watching porn on his cell phone.

When class ended, Rafi swept his notebook into his backpack and tried to book it out of there as quickly as possible.

“Mr. Castro, a moment, please.”

Rafi ducked his head, not wanting to look her in the eye. He pulled on his backpack slowly, hoping that most of the students would have left by the time he headed up to the front of the class for whatever corrective lecture the professor was waiting to deliver. Minimizing public humiliation…strategy numero uno.

Students lined up at the lectern to ask their questions. His tiny professor looked like a Goth chick in her loose black dress over black leggings and combat boots, hair held up in a sloppy pile with a pencil, dark polish peeling off short fingernails. She was popular with her students, maybe because she looked like she could be one of them.

“Are you coming to the department tea?” Professor Egan asked him when he was the last student left in the hall.

“I don’t like tea.” Which was true, but maybe not the nicest thing he could have said.

She smiled at him. “Me neither. But there’s coffee and soda and free food, which is pretty much a bribe. And I’ll go anywhere for black-and-white cookies.” She said it like the words were supposed to mean something to him. He didn’t get it. Cookies were cookies, right?

The prof was waiting to open the door, her messenger bag over her shoulder, like she expected him to say something else about the department tea. It felt like a trap.

“I’m not a philosophy major.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“But you might be,” she said, and tipped her chin down to look at him over the top of her glasses. “You seemed like you were really enjoying my class.”

“I was,” he answered automatically, and then corrected himself with a grimace. Better to offer the polite lie. “I am.”

She nodded and held the door open for him. He tried to get ahead of her, striding down the hall, and there was no way she should have been able to keep up, what with her legs being half as long as his. But she must have jogged after him, because her hand touched his arm for a second, which surprised him enough that he slowed down and looked at her. “I thought you might come see me after you got your paper back.”

Bug. Mat. Meet pin. Her stare was killing him.

“I’m going to the writing center,” he burst out after a moment, the only thing he could think to say to her.

“That’s great. They’re really good at working with students on how to structure an argument.”

“I can do better, I swear.”

“Mr. Castro, are you under the impression that I am upset with you?” She cocked her head to the side and looked up at him.

“I don’t know? Yes?” Back home, he’d mostly not given a damn what his professors at Malcolm X College thought of him. Either he liked them and their class, in which case he busted his ass and got recognized for it, or they were burnt-out bureaucratic assholes. In that case, he kept his head down, got his work done, and kept the fuck-yous inside his own head.

“Listen, I know what it’s like,” Egan said firmly. He looked at her, trying to keep the skepticism off his face. “I grew up in Worcester.”

Wooster? Like I know where that is.
He’d grown used to people saying things about cities and towns and colleges in New England and him not having any idea what they were talking about. Like how everyone apparently knew that Dartmouth was in New Hampshire and Yale was in Connecticut, something he’d had to Google after hearing his suitemates talk about road trips every other weekend.

His blank look must have sunk in with her. “It’s a blue-collar city in central Mass,” she explained. “I was a scholarship kid like you, coming from a high school that didn’t teach me how to write a paper good enough for college. It took me a solid two years before I wasn’t stressed out all the time about my grades. You’ll get there. And in the meantime, if you have questions about something—anything, not just philosophy—shoot me an email, okay?”

He shouldn’t have been so relieved just because someone offered to answer a handful of questions that were only going to make him look dumber than ever, but he was. And that made it easier to start now.

“Is there a school called something like Choke?” he asked, willing to risk looking stupid to find out the answer to this one question that had been bugging him for weeks. The name kept popping up in conversations among his suitemates and Denny.

Egan stopped at the edge of the green, shading her face with one hand as she looked up at him. “Do you mean Choate? The prep school?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He meant to stop at that point, figuring he could take it from there. Google to the rescue, again. Chote. Okay. Then more words spilled out of his mouth. “A prep school is like a high school, right?”

Because that was the question he really wanted to ask, but he knew that would reveal the total depth of his ignorance to his suitemates, so he’d kept his mouth shut. But Egan seemed like she maybe hadn’t known this stuff either when she’d gone to college, although she’d obviously gotten all the way into the system now.