7
The Consolation Prize
TJ
I’m a ponderer.
Every spare minute I’m asking myself questions.
Like right now.
Did I hallucinate or time travel to eight-thirty tonight when I hoped to bring Jude back to my place and have my wicked way with him?
Because . . . why the hell is he sitting on my couch?
“Hi, Jude?” It’s a question. Or really, it’s a slew of questions that all spill out at once. “What are you doing here? Why are you in my flat? Aren’t we meeting later? How did you get a key?”
Behind all those questions is the mother of them all, sitting leaden in my gut. I wish it were the dreadful coffee and not the feeling that I know the answer already to this question.
Are you the queer-friendly non-smoker I’m living with for the next year? Because I never got your name, and please, please, please tell me this is a giant mix-up or maybe a hilarious practical joke we’ll laugh about later.
“I’m here because this is the flat I’m sharing with . . . someone named Terry?” Jude sounds as if the floor just fell out from under him too.
I groan and rub my face with my free hand, still standing on the threshold. “24News used my real name with the flatshare?”
“Seems they did.” Jude hasn’t moved either. He’s still spread out on the couch, one arm casually draped over the cushion, looking too fucking good to be my roommate.
Stepping inside, I shut the door and face the inevitable. “So, you’re definitely . . .?”
I can’t even finish.
“Your new roommate?” Jude asks, going up at the end like maybe, possibly, this could be a case of mistaken identity.
“Do you think maybe there’s a misunderstanding? Like maybe it was another flat in this building?” I offer.
“That could be it,” Jude says, hopeful, then he grabs his phone from his pocket.
I set down my coffee and do the same, swiping to the email from 24News. I read off the address.
So does Jude.
This building.
And at the same time, we both say, “Flat 5E.”
I open the door and check the number, just to be certain. This is undoubtedly 5E, and we both have keys that work. Ergo . . .
Jude slumps into the couch. I slump against the wall.
“The universe is fucking with me.” I wince at my word choice; it seems insult to injury when my forecast has plummeted to zero percent chance of boning.
“I’m not fucking with you, Terry.” He grimaces and I’m guessing his boning app has the same grim prediction. “I’ve been living an hour away, trying to get a place in the city for a long time. This came through from the flatshare service, and it’s a total steal. I need this apartment.” He sounds a touch desperate.
It dawns on me that maybe he’s worried I’ll bail and he’ll have to pay the freight until the flatshare service finds someone else. I don’t know how these situations work—24News handled the lease and is covering my rent.
Which is why I can’t move out. I don’t want to rock the boat at work, especially not when I’m just twenty-three and building momentum up the ladder. “My company rented this for me,” I say to Jude. “I can’t tell them I was going to . . .”
The sentence dies unfinished. This setup won’t work for me because I planned to fuck my roommate makes me sound as douchey as I did in the coffee shop.
But the idea’s about the same. I wanted my roomie to purge my steam wand with his mouth.
I offer a sanitized version. “I can’t go back to 24News and say I need a new place because I want to date my roommate,” I say, and I squirm a little inside from the discomfort of that honesty. I wanted to sleep with him, and I wanted to date him.
But doing either of those while we’re living together would be a huge mistake. What if we bang once, and it’s terrible? Or, what if it’s great and we don’t stop? Until we do stop—because eventually, we will.
That’s just how things go.
They end.
Then, our daily lives would be comprised of awkward tiptoeing around each other while he sees someone else, and it would mean kicking myself for getting involved in the first place.
Thank fuck we didn’t even really kiss.
“Right. We can’t live together and go out,” he says. I wonder if he just went through the same thought process. If he saw the exact ending I watched play out in my head.
“Right,” I repeat.
Jude pats the couch. “So, it’s just you and me, living here. Just reprogramming my brain,” he adds, tapping his temple. “Roomie, roomie, roomie. Not hottie, hottie, hottie.”
I give a small smile that disappears in a second. “Guess we aren’t meeting for that drink.”
“Or that presuming.”
“There will be no presuming.”
“Shame, that,” he says, but he’s not cheeky Jude now. He sounds resigned to our new reality.
The sex genie is going back in the bottle. I’m not sure how to rank this on the bad-news scale, but on the bummer scale, it’s damn high.
We’re both quiet for a minute, then Jude breaks the silence. “So, the T is really for Terry?”
I sink to the floor in despair, then wrap my arms around my knees. “Yes,” I say dully. “But don’t call me that, please. No one does. I hate it.”
“You made that quite clear. But what does the J stand for?”
I meet his gaze head-on. Gorgeous blue eyes twinkle with mischief like they did when I met him.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ve been TJ for a long time. TJ Ashford. I do everything I can to avoid my given name.”
Especially after I was incessantly mocked for it when I was younger. Kids can be such jackasses.
Jude nods. “I’ll stop pressing you.”
That’s another thing that won’t happen—Jude using his ways to get my name out of me. I was looking forward to learning how long it’d take for his tongue to get me to break. With those lips? Probably a minute, tops.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Though, I’d be a lot happier if I could introduce you as Terry, the guy I’m shagging, not TJ, my new roomie because fate decided to fuck me without lube.”
I level a steely stare his way. “Jude, I would never fuck you without lube.”
We both crack up, breaking into peals of you’ve got to be kidding me laughter.
Eventually, we catch our breaths. “I guess we’ll have to be friends,” I say, then I stand and extend a hand.
Jude rises and shakes. “To friendship. But I do have one question. What if I like Led Zeppelin?”
I shudder. “Then I am going to teach you about music.”
That’ll be the consolation prize.