Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chris unlocks the front door as quietly as he can, turns the handle, and slowly, gentle on the old hinges, pushes the door open. It swings quietly to reveal a dark, silent house. Chris steps inside and listens just in case, motionless, his hand still on the doorknob. There's no sound, no movement. Empty.

He breathes a sigh of relief. It's never a certainty, on days when he gets home late like this—which, these days, is as many of them as he can manage. Between the newspaper (editor-in-chief this year), lacrosse, and the underclassmen he tutors, Chris can usually manage to stay at school well after the academic day is over. And now that his mom finally let him quit French horn—he likes music, but he figured out a long time ago that he's a better listener than player—he doesn't have to be home to practice.

He stops in the kitchen for a sandwich to take up to his room. Actually, that probably won't be enough. He's hungry practically all the time these days. It's because he's growing, he knows: He thought he'd be short forever, and then at the end of his junior year, suddenly he wanted to eat everything in sight and his shoes didn't fit him for more than a few weeks at a time. He's an inch shy of six feet and it hasn't really shown any sign of levelling off. He's fine with being tall; he just doesn't want to turn into Andre the Giant.

He rummages through the fridge. Some chicken that Mary, their cook, made a couple of days ago—that was good. He takes it out. That's another down side to this coming-home-late thing: He doesn't see Mary much anymore, and now that Julia's off at Sweet Briar, his mom only has Mary come in three days a week instead of five. Down side: not as much good food. Up side: His parents have stopped forcing everybody to eat together, which was bad enough with four of them and even worse with three. Chris's mom can be counted on to have had a few at the club every afternoon, and Chris's dad pretty much just ate and then went into his home office.

He's in early at Harvard, Chris reminds himself. Less than a year, and he's out of here. There's a gay group at Harvard. Well, not just gay. It's got about a million initials in the name. Gay and other stuff. Lesbian, bisexual, transgendered—probably a few more that he's forgetting. Jason, the senior he stayed with when he went to visit in October, told him what they all were. Chris has to duck his head and force back a smile when he thinks about Jason. He can't think about Jason, or about Niall from Governor's School this summer, where it's not private. His face will give him away—and, if he thinks about Jason too much, probably certain other things will too. Even though nobody's home, it's still not safe out here in an open area. Carefully, he blanks his mind.

Chris picks up the orange juice—there's about half left. It's the good fresh-squeezed kind, too. He starts to reach for a glass, then changes his mind and just sticks the entire thing into one of the side pockets of his backpack. He'd just wind up coming downstairs for more anyway. This way he can avoid that. He checks the crisper drawers and finds grapes and some apples. He takes some of both, balances everything, then turns off the lights and goes up to his room.

The first thing he does is strip off his school uniform shirt and today's installment in the neverending series of khaki pants. He's worn khaki pants or shorts just about every weekday since he was in kindergarten—that's the school uniform, khakis and either a long-sleeved button-down shirt or else the school-logo polo that's so dorky it makes Chris want to die—and among the many, many things he's looking forward to is never wearing khakis again. It would not make him less smart to wear jeans—or any kind of pants that don't make him look like a golfer—to school.

He wants to leave the clothes crumpled on the floor, but he just can't—it'll bother him all night, and even if he manages to ignore them, Angela, who comes three times a week to clean and dust, will just have to pick them up tomorrow. He puts the shirt into the laundry and hangs the pants back up. He takes the rubber band out of his hair. It feels nice around his shoulders—he will never in the world say this out loud, but he completely understands why girls wear their hair long. Plus, his parents hate it, so bonus there. There's not a school rule against long hair on guys—although he suspects that after this year they might instill one—but he ties it back during the day as a peacekeeping measure.

Now he feels a lot more like himself. He sits down on the rug and proceeds to spend the next half hour eating. And drinking—he does go through the rest of the orange juice. He'll have to take the dishes down at some point, but he'll do that late, after his parents are asleep. He stacks everything neatly in a corner and drapes his napkin over it; otherwise it'll bug him to have things sitting out dirty like that.

First period tomorrow is English, and he needs to finish Huckleberry Finn. Which, yawn. It's not that he doesn't like the book, but he read it on his own when he was ten, and again when he was twelve. (Who doesn't want to pole their way down a river with their friend away from their stupid parents?) Harvard's got a literature requirement—and math, and science, and everything else—but you can fulfill it with courses on things like folklore and archaeology. As opposed to reading Huck Finn for the third time.

He arranges his pillows and crawls into bed, where he prefers to read. Which possibly was a bad idea, because he's full and suddenly a little sleepy. He was up late studying for a history test this morning; then he had lacrosse practice after school. Maybe he can close his eyes for a few minutes. Just a few minutes.

He sets the book aside and turns over. The pillows are soft under his head, the covers warm. He remembers lying in bed with Jason, remembers the contours of Jason's head in his hands when he'd been (oh God) going down on Chris. How scary and strange and completely and utterly thrilling it had been to do the same to Jason, how he'd tasted, how Jason had licked the taste of himself out of a shocked Chris's mouth afterward, everything. Chris hasn't exactly asked around, but he's guessing that most people don't lose their virginity on their college visits to people they'll never see again; still, he's glad he did it. He didn't want to go to college a virgin, and unless he decided to have sex with a girl (which would be pointless, and unfair to the girl), it was prospective-student open house or not at all, since his parents would probably kill him or send him to some kind of mental institution if he did something like that here and they found out.

It was risky enough with Niall over the summer, but they didn't get together until fairly late in the program, and they were always careful not to be discovered. And they never took off any clothes, anyway. It was enough, Chris thinks, remembering, nestling a little farther into his bed, starting to fall into sleep. He remembers one afternoon when his roommate was gone—he and Niall had locked the door (there were complicated rules about open doors and feet on the floor and all kinds of things when a boy and a girl were in a room together, but nothing for boys and boys, or girls and girls) and lay down on the bed, shy and close. They hadn't done anything but look at each other, touch each other's faces, kiss. Miraculous. They hadn't gotten any further than that: There wasn't time, and just looking, touching, being able to look and touch, was overwhelming enough.

He falls asleep with the memory of Niall's fingers—tentative, tender—in his hair.

A sharp voice wakes him. It's not quite ten o'clock.

"I don't wear that perfume, Richard!"

He can't hear his father's reply, if there is one.

"Don't lie to me! You come home late at night, smelling like sex and that cheap whore—"

Chris buries his head underneath the pillows, but this time he hears part of his father's response. "—you and that golf pro?"

His mother's voice is higher and louder, penetrating the cotton and down. "It wouldn't be any worse than what you've done since the day we were married, you cocksucker!"

Chris is already reaching down beside the bed for his headphones and Discman—that plus the pillow over his head should do it—but, again, he's not quite quick enough to miss the next shot. His father: "That's rich, darling, coming from you. Do we actually know anyone whose cock you haven't sucked?"

Chris's hands want to tremble with some sort of deep, roiling emotion he's not sure he can name, but he steadies them. What his parents do isn't his concern. He will not get upset just because they can't control themselves. Steady. He breathes out. Steady. He's not shaking anymore when he slips the headphones on and pushes play.

Oh, I miss the kiss of treachery, the shameless kiss of vanity…

Robert Smith is a freak, Chris thinks. He dances around and wears makeup and sings about being sad and is kind of fat—and he's also rich, and he has a rock band and a wife who loves him, and he's famous all over the world.

Chris doesn't even want to be a freak. He just wants to be who he is and still be a normal person. He thinks it must have been harder for somebody like Robert Smith, because there's no way that he's ever going to be a normal person—but he's still got a pretty good life.

September sixth, Chris thinks. That's the day the Harvard dorms open for freshmen, at seven a.m. He just has to make it until then.

Just one more and I'll walk away…

He just has to make it until then.