“No snuggling?” Jasper pouted before sitting cross-legged on the bed near the headboard, and I supposed he was joking, but my inept sarcasm meter made it hard to tell as usual.
“Dude. You’re like…a cousin or something. Weird city. And besides, we don’t want to freak Alden out.” He gestured at me as though I were some sort of affection deterrent. And maybe I was. If I wasn’t along, maybe they’d hook up, the casual way guys like them always seemed to excel at. Me, I couldn’t manage a handshake without awkwardness, but as long as I’d known him, Conrad had always rolled from guy to guy, changing partners more easily than I changed out my card decks. Jasper didn’t have quite the same reputation as Conrad, but he’d had a regular boyfriend part of the previous year, and I was certain he hadn’t been celibate since.
“I don’t freak out,” I lied as I put my bags on the other bed.
“Yes, you do.” Conrad sat on the edge of his bed, digging in his backpack. “If we started making out, you’d squawk like my neighbor’s chickens back home.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I still took umbrage with his assessment. “Not wanting a…sex show doesn’t make me a prude.”
“Yeah, it does. Kind of the definition right there.” Jasper set several deck boxes on the bed in front of him. “Now, at tomorrow’s stop we’re supposed to film a casual game, partner style. Think you guys could be on the same team?”
“No,” Conrad and I said at the same time. I should have been insulted, but I couldn’t deny that no way were we suited to working together, hashing out a joint strategy. If Mr. Fly by the Seat of His Pants even had a strategy.
“Well, okay then. We’ll give you each a local. But you’ll want to make sure you’ve got a deck that melds well. How about I film each of you talking deck tech for that sort of match, and then we can send those clips to Professor Tuttle?”
The camera had a stand, and we didn’t technically need Jasper acting as a cameraperson, but I couldn’t deny that he was a good buffer. Making the videos and discussing decks, breaking down the cards that we’d included and why, took us all the way up until we were yawning.
“I’m showering tonight,” Conrad announced. “I probably still smell like soda.”
“Yeah, you do.” Jasper good-naturedly agreed, waving him toward the small bathroom while he and I cleaned up the cards and camera equipment. But even as I stowed my cards, my brain kept drifting to Conrad in the shower. I tried not to let the visuals distract me. Fantasy had never really been my strong suit, but my imagination was proving a new capacity as it kept calling up images of Conrad wet and soapy. And Conrad emerging some time later with damp hair and a T-shirt that clung to his back didn’t help at all.
Thus, it really was no wonder that I lay awake for hours, listening to the other two breathing and wondering about trivial details like whether Conrad had socks on and whether his bare foot might brush whomever he was sleeping next to and whether it was his or Jasper’s soft whistle of an exhale. I tried not to make too much noise rolling over, desperate to find any position that didn’t make the bed feel too big and my feelings way too small.
* * *
Somehow, I did manage some sleep with weird dreams of being in a crowded space and bumping into people, all of whom looked and smiled like Conrad. I’d set a phone alarm the night before, but it was actually Jasper’s phone bleating out multiple text alerts that woke us all up.
“Crap. Crap.” Bleary-eyed, Jasper scooped up his phone and headed to the bathroom.
“Guess I’m up too.” Conrad stretched, T-shirt bunching around his ribs to reveal a stripe of bare stomach. I looked away before I got caught staring. I supposed we should get dressed, but I preferred to do that in the bathroom, not in front of Conrad. Jasper, however, was still in there, and I could hear him on the phone, talking in low tones.
While I was going back and forth in my head, Conrad had no such issues, pulling a hoodie on over his T-shirt and switching his flannel pants for shorts. “There’s a free cold breakfast, right? Why don’t I go snag us some doughnuts or whatever they’ve got?”
“If they have cereal or something with less sugar, could you bring me a box?”
“You’ve got it.” Conrad gave me one of his easy smiles, the same type that never failed to distract me, and I waited until he was gone before I slid from bed and quickly dressed myself. I wanted a shower, but I wasn’t about to evict Jasper from what sounded like an impassioned conversation. He finally emerged from the bathroom right as Conrad came back with a stack of doughnuts in one hand and a prepackaged bowl of cereal and a carton of milk in the other.