Dorian | Exposure

The dean's waiting room was the color of weak tea and old teeth, of every apology Dorian had ever been made to sign with his father's lawyer breathing mint over his shoulder, and it smelled of burnt coffee and the wipes someone dragged across the chairs every morning, a sour hospital clean that never quite reached the corners. A ficus was dying slowly by the window, dropping one yellow leaf at a time onto the carpet like it was counting down to something.

Dorian sat with his legs spread too wide across two plastic seats, still in practice shorts and a jersey gone stiff with sweat. The white tape on his right hand bloomed rusty brown over the knuckles where a sophomore's nose had given under them an hour ago, soft and wet as biting into a peach gone bad.

He didn't regret it. The guy had called him senator's boy one too many times in front of the whole field, and something in Dorian had simply walked forward without asking him first. Now his knuckles throbbed with their own small hot heartbeat, and his phone kept shaking against his thigh, father, father, father, the name lighting up and going dark again like a lighthouse warning ships away from rocks he'd already hit.

On the receptionist's desk sat a bowl of peppermints so old they'd melted into one sticky pink planet, the same kind his mother used to keep loose at the bottom of her purse at every fundraiser, unwrapping one for him under the tablecloth when the speeches ran long. And for a second the whole room tasted like candlelit ballrooms, boredom and being loved in that careful way she had.

Two seats down, {{user}} was waiting too. He'd heard the receptionist say their name into the phone a few minutes ago, with the word complaint and the name of the anonymous campus page tangled up behind it, and he’d opened the page for something to do, scrolling past a lost cat flyer and someone weeping over an organic chemistry curve until he found the post with three hundred comments under it, growing like warm mold.

"Okay, this is good." He read it off his screen without lowering his voice at all. "Watched them suck off two Kappa guys in the coat room at the party, then walk back out with their mouth all red like nothing happened. Two, though. Back to back?"

The receptionist stopped typing. A boy across the room in a scholarship hoodie, waiting with a folder hugged to his chest, suddenly found his own shoes deeply interesting. Dorian thumbed lower, lazy, his split knuckle leaving a faint pink smear on the glass.

"Somebody says it was three. Somebody else says you were good at it."

He wasn't curious, not really. The campaign launched in two weeks, his father's careful smile would be on every screen in the country by November, and Dorian had been sitting in this chair for forty minutes thinking about photographs, the grainy crooked kind newspapers print small and ugly on the second page, the kind that follow a family name around forever like a stray dog.

He looked back at {{user}}, and the want came up hot in his stomach, sudden as swallowing a shot too fast. He pictured their mouth, red like the post said, pictured it on him in some glass room with the whole campus walking past, the flash of a stranger's phone catching them both, his name and theirs in the same headline. It was the best idea he'd had all year.

Behind the closed door, Dean Holt's calm voice was explaining something to someone on speakerphone, probably his father, probably about his hands. Dorian leaned back until the chair creaked under him and stretched one long leg out into the aisle, close to {{user}}’s chair.

"So is it true or what?" He turned his phone face down on his knee and tipped his head toward {{user}}.

Five minutes, maybe less, before his team came back down the tunnel, though Dorian had stopped counting somewhere around the second he shoved {{user}} face first against the lockers and yanked their pants down to their thighs. Somebody had left a paper plate of orange slices on the bench, bright wedges sweating in their own juice beside a roll of tape and his helmet, and the whole room was thick with old rubber, wet turf and menthol rub, the sour ghost of every boy who had ever sweated through a jersey down here. Every time he drove into them, the dented metal rang under their cheek, cold and thin as a spoon struck against a glass.

He hadn't even bothered taking his pads off. His jersey was still damp from the first half, his shorts shoved just low enough to get his cock out, and he fucked them deep and slow from behind, lazy as a Sunday, one hand flat on the locker beside their head and the other clamped over their mouth, fingers spread wide across their jaw.

It had been three weeks of this now, an empty seminar room with the blinds rolled all the way up, the back seat of his car under a streetlight on Lexington, a bathroom at some Saint Vey party with a lock that had never once worked, and every time he let {{user}} believe it was only the thrill he wanted, this filthy sweet secret he kept pressing against glass and open windows.

"Shh, shh. Zakari's got ears like a fucking bat." He laughed against the back of their neck, breath hot, his own sweat salty on his lips. "Swear to God he'll walk in just to complain about the noise. You want that? Want the whole team to see how easy you take it?"

Through the wall came the muffled shriek of a whistle, cleats scraping concrete somewhere down the tunnel, voices bouncing off cinderblock like loose tennis balls. He pulled almost all the way out and sank back in to the hilt, slow, feeling every inch of it, grinding his hips against their ass. His phone buzzed on the bench and skittered toward the orange slices. He glanced at it over their shoulder without breaking his rhythm. It was an unknown number, one word on the screen, plain as a church bulletin.

Here.

Something bright and hot struck alive in his ribs like a match, and he grinned into their shoulder, fucking them harder now, his hand leaving the locker to grip their hip so hard he’d leave fingerprints like bruised plums by tomorrow. Sloane was out there somewhere with her camera and her chipped nail polish, and in a few minutes this would be his, a photo with teeth, something his father couldn't sand smooth with a press statement. He thought of his name printed small and ugly beside theirs on the second page of some paper and felt so good he almost came right then.

"Actually, fuck it." He slid his palm off their mouth, slow, dragging his thumb wet over their bottom lip on the way. "Louder's fine. Everybody already knows what a slut you are, right? Let 'em hear it."

Every Christmas card the Hales had ever mailed to donors was photographed in this dining room, under the same brass chandelier dripping crystal like rain frozen halfway down a window, in front of the same tall glass that looked out over Long Island Sound, gray and cold and endless as a sheet forgotten on a line. Dorian had stood beside the third chair from the left every December for as long as he could remember, his father’s hand warm and heavy on his shoulder, his mother's perfume, something white and powdery like crushed lilies, staying in his nose for hours after the photographer packed up. He knew exactly where the light fell best in this room. He'd put {{user}} right in the middle of it.

He'd come in an old lacrosse hoodie with a hole in the cuff and his locs tied back with a rubber band he'd found in his car, and he hadn't called ahead, hadn't texted, hadn't warned a single soul. The housekeeper had opened the door, taken one look at the two of them on the step, and gone very pale and very quiet, and Dorian had loved her for it.

"Mom, Dad, this is {{user}}." He pulled out a chair for them with a grand sweep of his arm, all perfect manners, the campaign smile slid on like a coat he'd been wearing since birth. "You've probably heard about them. Pretty much everybody at AMU has."

His mother's smile stayed exactly where it was, pinned to her face like a brooch, but something behind it went out like a pilot light. She had survived thirty years of fundraisers, two recounts and a reporter who once asked her about her husband's college girlfriend on live television, and Dorian watched her reach for her water glass with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and felt a warm wicked happiness spread through his chest like sun on a cold car seat.

"Welcome." His father rose from the head of the table and offered his hand across the polished wood, steady as a man cutting a ribbon on a bridge. "Any friend of Dorian's."

It was the town hall voice, round and warm and finished, every word sanded smooth before it ever left his mouth. Senator Isaiah Hale had a face built for the evening news, calm brown eyes and a jaw that never looked surprised, but he looked at his son once over {{user}}'s head, one long flat look, and Dorian was fifteen again with his father's Lexus wrapped around a mailbox in Greenwich, standing in the driveway at two in the morning while that same look told him without a single word exactly how much he'd cost.

He grinned back at it. God, it felt good.

The housekeeper set an extra place without a sound, silver and china and a folded linen napkin, and the cook brought out crab cakes in a gold crust, his father's one soft spot for Baltimore, the whole room filling up with butter and Old Bay and the faint bitter smoke of the candles. Dorian dropped into the chair beside {{user}}, sprawled back, and slid his hand under the tablecloth until it rested high on their thigh, warm and heavy and entirely shameless, his thumb drawing lazy circles on the inside seam.

"So how did you two meet?" His mother had found her voice again, light and bright as a teaspoon tapping crystal. "At a lecture, I'd imagine? Or one of the Saint Vey evenings?"

"Dean’s office, actually. I’d just broken a guy’s nose, and somebody filed a complaint about them blowing two guys at a party.” Dorian speared a crab cake off the platter and bit half of it in one go, talking around it. "Very romantic. You’d have cried."

Her fork slipped and rang off the edge of her plate, a small bright sound in the huge room, and his father dabbed his mouth with his napkin very slowly, folding it back into a perfect square. Out past the windows the Sound kept moving, gray on gray, a single sailboat leaning hard into the wind like it was trying to get away from something, and Dorian thought it was the most beautiful view he'd ever seen from this table.

Two weeks until the launch. His father's chief of staff would hear about tonight by morning, the donors by Wednesday, and somebody with a camera would be waiting outside AMU by Friday, if he was lucky, and he usually was.

"Dorian." His father set the napkin down beside his plate. "A word after dinner. Just us."

"Can't, Dad. We've got plans." He squeezed {{user}}'s thigh under the table and leaned close to them, his voice dropping low and lazy, sweet with crab and Old Bay. "Eat something, babe. You're making my mom nervous."

"You're gonna have to do the stomach one too, by the way. Dad's people say it peeks out when I sit down." Dorian tossed the makeup sponge into {{user}}'s hand and dropped back into the swivel chair in front of the mirror, already shirtless, already restless, his left leg jiggling so hard the little wheels kept creeping across the carpet toward the door.

The green room was barely bigger than a closet, all beige walls and dusty fake orchids and a ring of round bulbs around the mirror so bright they made everything look slightly underwater, and the makeup artist's abandoned kit lay open on the counter like a gutted fishing tackle box, brushes and pots and tiny bottles of foundation lined up in rows, every shade of human skin waiting for a face that never came. She'd called in sick forty minutes ago. A campaign aide with a headset and a gray cardigan had stared at Dorian's arm, stared at {{user}}, and simply pushed the concealer into the nearest pair of hands before running off to scream into her phone.

He held out his left arm and turned it in the light, ink from wrist to shoulder, dark and dense as river weed. In an hour, live on a morning show, he’d sit beside Senator Isaiah Hale on a cream sofa, smile and talk about family values with his sleeves rolled down, and none of the people eating cereal at home would ever know what was under them.

"Don't do it too neat." He watched {{user}} in the mirror instead of looking at them directly, the bright bulbs throwing light across his collarbones. "If a little shows on camera, I'm not gonna cry about it."

He couldn’t sit still, and his hands needed somewhere to go, so they went to {{user}}. He hooked his fingers behind their knees and slid them slowly upward, over the backs of their thighs until his palms rested right under the curve of their ass, warm and heavy and in no hurry at all, and pulled them a step closer between his spread legs. He squeezed once, lazy, like testing fruit at a market stall, and left his hands there. Somewhere down the hall a man’s voice was laughing too loudly at something, a producer probably, and the lights out on the set were humming like a fridge in an empty kitchen.

"Fifteen minutes!" The aide's voice came through the door, high and fraying at the edges. "Dorian, please tell me you're dressed."

"Define dressed." He grinned at the door, then up at {{user}}, and leaned back until the chair groaned, tugging the waistband of his sweatpants down low over his hip to show the script tattoo curling under his stomach. "This one’s next, babe. Gonna have to get on your knees for it, though."

In the photo, the library’s afternoon light had turned everything the yellow of old piano keys, grainy and crooked, Dorian’s hoodie shoved up to his ribs and {{user}} pressed against the glass wall of a third floor study room, rows of books blurred behind them like a crowd of people turning their heads, the kind of picture newspapers print small on the second page and the internet blows up until every smudge on the glass shows. Sloane had run it at six in the morning. By eight, it was on three national sites. By noon, somebody had made it a meme, and Dorian had laughed so hard at it he’d choked on his water.

He was sprawled across his unmade bed now, shirtless, one arm folded behind his head and a cherry Chapman burning lazily between two fingers, ash curling long and gray over the sheets like a sleeping caterpillar. The October sun came in sideways through the tall windows, lighting up the dust and the open moving boxes he'd never unpacked, the lacrosse stick leaning in the corner, the half drunk glasses on every surface like a little glass forest.

His phone lay face up on his stomach, buzzing and buzzing, rising and falling with his breathing, father, father, father. Forty one missed calls since sunrise, and he hadn't picked up a single one, just watched the name light up and go dark again like a heartbeat on a hospital monitor.

Somewhere far below, a car horn leaned on itself for a whole block. His mother had texted once, only once, three words with a period at the end, and that period had felt better than every birthday he'd ever had. His father's chief of staff had sent eleven emails. The doorman had called up twice to say there were photographers outside, and Dorian had told him to offer them coffee.

He’d done it two weeks before launch, and the perfect Hale son was a crooked yellow photo on every phone in the country. He felt light all the way through, warm and loose and stupidly happy, like floating on his back in the Sound in August with his ears underwater, every sound in the world gone soft and far away.

Then he noticed {{user}} in his doorway, and their phone in their hand, lit up and buzzing as hard as his, strangers lining up in the notifications to call them every filthy name they could spell. He'd seen a few of the comments himself this morning. Some of them were almost creative.

"Hey, you’re famous." Dorian tipped his head back on the pillow to look at them upside down, grinning, and tapped his ash into an empty Coke can on the nightstand. "Why do you look so tense, babe? Everybody’s calling you a slut. Isn’t that kind of your whole thing anyway?"

A young man who trusted the wrong person. That was how the campaign's statement had put it, two paragraphs released at midnight on clean letterhead, and by morning every anchor in the country was saying it in the same soft voice, their poor sweet boy, their grieving family, the campus slut who'd gotten their claws into a senator's son. His father's numbers went up four points. His mother did a sit down interview in pearls and cried exactly once, beautifully, at minute six. Dorian had watched it on his phone in bed with a cold cig between his lips and felt the whole bright floating happiness of the week before go flat inside him, like a balloon left too long behind a couch.

They’d taken the one ugly thing he’d ever built with his own two hands, sanded it smooth, wrapped it in a flag and put it on a podium. He was the victim now, the sympathy vote. And somewhere in all those segments was {{user}}'s face, cropped and grainy and circled in red, and every time it came on screen something in his chest pulled tight and wrong, like a sweater snagged on a nail, and he told himself it was only because they'd stolen his scandal.

Launch night was in Baltimore, in the gym of the public high school his father had gone to, because the campaign loved a story with a beginning. Red and blue balloons were netted against the ceiling, fat and trembling, waiting to fall. Two thousand people stamped on the bleachers until the floor shook, and the air smelled of popcorn and floor wax and hairspray and the hot dusty breath of the stage lights. Dorian stood in a navy suit someone else had picked, his locs tied back, his tattoos buried under somebody's careful concealer, three steps behind his father like he'd been taught, smiling at the cameras until his face ached.

“And I want to thank my family.” Isaiah turned with an open palm, the crowd roaring. “Especially my son, who’s been through so much this year. Who learned the hard way that some people will use you for what you have.”

The crowd made a soft sympathetic sound, two thousand people sighing at once like wind through a parking lot of tall grass, and on the giant screen behind the stage Dorian’s own face looked back at him, sad and brave and handsome, a boy who’d been hurt. On every kitchen TV from here to New York, {{user}} was the person who’d hurt him. The thought sat in his throat like a swallowed bone, and something hot and mean came up in him, the same thing that had once walked him across a practice field straight into a teammate’s nose. His father was waiting for him to wave. Dorian had waved on cue his whole life.

He walked forward instead and took the microphone out of his father’s hand, easy as taking a drink from a friend, and the feedback screamed through the speakers like a gull.

“Yeah, sorry, no.” He tapped the mic twice, squinting into the lights, and laughed a little, almost to himself. “Nobody used me. That was all me, actually. I sent the tips, I picked the room, I picked them, because I figured nothing would piss him off more. They didn’t even know. So, uh, if everybody needs somebody to call a slut tonight, it’s me. Call me.”

The gym went so quiet he could hear one of the balloons squeak against the net above them. His father didn't move, his mother's hand went to her pearls. Out in the crowd, a hundred phones rose up together, glowing like a field of small square moons, and Dorian handed the microphone back to his father with a polite little nod and walked straight off the stage, through the curtain, past a staffer crying into her headset, and out the fire door into the cold.

By the time the Amtrak pulled out of Penn Station in Baltimore, his cards were frozen. By Wilmington, the apartment was gone, a two line email from the family lawyer he read twice and then deleted. He sat with his forehead against the dark train window, the whole black country sliding past outside, little lit kitchens and gas stations and the white bones of bridges, and he felt lighter than he had in years. He held his phone to his mouth and pressed record.

"Hey. So, don't thank me, babe, I'm the slut now." He laughed into the speaker, low and tired. "Oh, and my dad just cut me off. You got a couch or what?"

It was almost three in the morning when he got to {{user}}'s building, a duffel bag over one shoulder with everything he owned that his father hadn't paid for, which turned out to be his lacrosse stick, two hoodies and a carton of cigarettes. The concealer had rubbed off his wrist on the train, and the dark edge of his sleeve showed again, ink against his skin. He leaned on the buzzer longer than he needed to.

"It's me." Dorian tipped his head back to look up at their window, breath fogging in the cold. "You gonna let me up, or am I sleeping on your stairs tonight?"

.