The house sounded different at night. Not quiet, never quiet, but tuned. A stair creaked like a note played on purpose. Pipes ticked in the walls. Somewhere a stereo murmured the tail end of a mixtape, the drum fill riding out into tape hiss. The upstairs hall held the day’s heat and someone’s spilled cologne, and the carpet had a way of swallowing footsteps if you knew where to place them.
Ethan did. He placed them carefully, eyes on the thin bar of amber at the base of Eli’s door. He stood there longer than necessary, one palm flat to the panel, feeling the minute vibration of the box fan beyond. Then he knocked once, soft.
The latch turned. A slice of lamplight cut his shoes. Eli’s face appeared in the crack, a fingertip raised. “Hey,” he said, almost a breath, and the door swung just wide enough for Ethan to slip through.
It was the same room as the first time and not. Same fan rattling in the window. Same curve of light across the desk, a stack of folded shirts that never seemed to shift. But there was a new dent in the pillow and an ashtray perched on a Norton anthology, and Eli himself was looser, barefoot, shirtless in old gym shorts, the cocky set of his shoulders replaced by something that looked like relief.
“You took your time tonight,” Eli said, not accusing, not anything at all. He spoke over his shoulder as he crossed to twist the blinds closed.
“I had to get past Clay’s patrol.” Ethan nodded toward the hall. “Clipboard rounds.”
Eli’s grin flashed. “I almost forgot.” He flicked the lamp a notch lower. “You good?”
Ethan nodded as he leaned against the door until it shut, until the latch clicked the room into a sealed world. The week slipped off like a jacket. He crossed the two steps that were always two steps and put his forehead to Eli’s cheekbone, a touch that became a hug, then Eli turned his head and the point of contact became a kiss, hard, testing, the kind that asked, You here? and answered itself: I am.
They weren’t clumsy this time, except on purpose, like a joke they were in on together. Ethan’s fingertips trailed the line of hair at Eli’s sternum and Eli swatted at his wrist and said something low about cold hands, and then there was nothing to say. Shirts traveled the same arc as before, a careful toss toward the chair no one ever sat in. The fan kept its steady drone. When Ethan’s knee hit the mattress edge, Eli’s palm found the back of his neck and held, not possessive, not gentle. Familiar.
As Eli pinned him to the mattress, Ethan didn’t try to name the rush. He let it fill him. The week had been an unspooling of errands and cheap wine and the wet-throated bark of orders that rattled his bones; this was narrowing, the way the eye tightens to a single star. He let himself memorize the domestic smallness of it—the nick in Eli’s lamp shade, the faint detergent clean of the sheets, the cigarette resting in the ashtray sending up a ribbon of smoke without being smoked. He had the sudden absurd thought that if he cataloged enough of these details, the night couldn’t evaporate in the morning.
When Eli shifted, the mattress talked. When he laughed, it was quiet, a shape in his throat more than a sound. He kissed like he was teaching and learning at once. Ethan laughed once too—nervous, happy, both—and Eli hushed him by running a thumb across his lip. “Don’t wake the dead,” he murmured, then contradicted himself with a kiss that would have woken anyone attuned to it.
Reaching into the nightstand, Ethan said with a crooked grin, “I’ll try not to, but I can’t promise.” Soon Ethan was on his stomach, Eli slowly working him open Patient and sure.
“Fuck me,” Ethan whispered, no longer able to wait. Eli complied, pulling Ethan’s up by the waist slightly as he pushed inside. Ethan gasped then he felt Eli’s weight on top of him, almost suffocating as Eli began to move in and out. Arms wrapped tightly around Ethan’s chest, using his shoulders for leverage. Ethan groaned as he buried his face into the pillow, but he didn’t want it any other way.
They paused only when the room asked them to—when the house shifted, when a door shut down the hall and muffled laughter smothered into private sound. Eli’s eyes flicked to the knob. Ethan felt the flick like a static snap and watched the moment something armored slid back into place behind Eli’s face and then, just as quickly, slid away again.
After, they lay angled in the soft heat, the fan moving the smoke in lazy ellipses. Eli propped on an elbow, Ethan flat on his back counting the slow revolution of blades and the beat at his own throat. A car door slammed out on the Row. The house answered in muffled whoops, as if acknowledging a point in a game.
“Don’t—” Eli started, then stopped, thumb on Ethan’s jaw. “Just don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t,” Ethan said, because he couldn’t imagine telling anyone and also because the rule made it feel more real. A thing you kept was a thing you had.
Eli reached past him without looking and found the cigarette, drew once, then let the ember glow hang between them. He offered it with two fingers; Ethan took it, tasted the ash of Eli’s mouth on the filter, and balanced the butt in the ashtray again without cracking the quiet.
“Can you spend the night?” Eli asked, voice softer now.
“What about Mark?” Ethan whispered.
“He’s dead to the world right now, trust me,” Eli said a little too cockily.
“Don’t get used to this,” Eli added, too quickly, like he’d practiced the line.
“I already am,” Ethan admitted, before he could stop himself. He felt the flinch and knew better next time.
They slept for a few hours or they didn’t. Time went shallow. When the thin blue of morning came up behind the blinds, Ethan woke to the soft rasp of laces pulled tight. Eli’s hair was damp, combed. He tied each shoe like he was cinching himself into armor, pulling until the leather creaked. His expression was already smoothing to nothing, the mask sliding on piece by piece. Ethan thought it was like watching a door slam shut in slow motion.
“You should head out,” Eli said. His voice sounded normal, practiced, like asking for toothpaste.
Ethan nodded, trying to get used to this. He found his shirt by touch. He left his voice on the pillow and took his feet to the door. Eli opened it just enough to cut a wedge into the hall, then stood there until Ethan stepped past him, both of them holding the small, ridiculous fiction that the move was casual.
The hallway smelled like spilled beer and Pine-Sol—the concentrated kind pledges used before alumni came to town. Closed doors held back islands of private weather. From one came a scratch of chairs against the floor, from another the soft pop of a lighter and a cough that wanted to be a laugh. The composite at the far end of the corridor had a cracked glass pane someone kept forgetting to replace. Ethan took the stairs on the tread that didn’t squeak, because he knew it now.
Back in McClintock, the radiator sang its thin winter note. Mark snored on his back, one arm flung over his eyes. Ethan stood at the window for a few breaths, watching the yellow square of the Row fade into day, then lay on his own mattress and stared at the ceiling. He could still taste smoke. He held the quarter in his pocket until the sharp edge left a crescent in his palm.
Weeks slipped forward like this. Study hall under fluorescent lights. Line-ups without warning. Endless errands at impossible hours.
One Thursday evening Ethan sat at the long table under buzzing tubes, copying notes he didn’t understand because his eyes kept going soft-focus and remaking letters into shapes. Connor nudged him.
“You’re out of it,” Connor whispered. “You do a self-brain last night?”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” Connor grinned and closed one eye in a conspiratorial way he’d picked up from somewhere. But the grin slipped a half-second too late. “You hear who got waved upstairs?”
“Do I want to?”
“Probably not. Tyler, for one. Trav’s room. Then later Jason’s. He’s everywhere at once, that one.”
Ethan stared at the mitochondrion sketch in his book until it doubled. “Why do you care where Tyler goes?”
“Because some of us have goals,” Connor said, quieter now. “And one of mine is to know what the hell happens behind those doors.”
Ethan didn’t say, I know one door. He didn’t say anything at all. He held the quarter in his pocket and imagined it was warm because of meaning and not because of his palm.
Back at the house, instead of the regular Thursday lineup, Clay ran a carousel of humiliation conducted to the tempo of his clipboard taps. This was the last home football game of the season, the final party weekend before Hell Week and Thanksgiving. The brothers wanted the house spotless.
Bleach stung eyes, and the long mops only moved the dirt from one end of the hall to the other. Ethan got yelled at for hanging the composites in the wrong order and again for using the wrong coolers. He got sent to fetch a bag of ice and returned with the wrong kind. He moved through it all submerged, taking the hits like weather, as if a storm could be offended by rain.
“Head on straight, Harris,” Clay barked, blocking his path with the board. “You’re here to serve, not daydream.”
Ethan nodded, eyes down. A line of water had worked under the tongue of Clay’s boot and left a crescent dark mark. Easier to focus on that than the fact that he almost said Yes, sir, slipping onto an old autopilot.
By nine the next night, the house was a hive again. A Waverly pair with glossy ponytails appeared like they’d been conjured, laughing too loudly at something Luke said. The Kingston crew swept in, but Catherine was absent. Eli leaned against the doorframe with two hometown brothers, laughing harder than the jokes earned.
From the sidewalk, Ethan watched for the flicker that meant recognition, half a second too long on his face. He saw nothing. Then he did: a glance so clean it could have been a blink, then gone.
Mark slid up beside him. “The circus is back,” he said. “You ever notice we do the same night in a thousand little variations?”
“Maybe that’s what makes it a tradition,” Ethan said, wanting to ask about Catherine but deciding to let it go.
“Maybe that’s what makes it jail,” Mark answered, and they both laughed, too pleased with themselves to stop.
Upstairs the order of the house became a map if you knew how to read it. Travis’s door meant volume and inertia: you went there to be swallowed by noise. Luke’s door was currency—his laugh a passport, his couch a throne. Colton’s door was sanctuary, always closed, a church that only opened to insiders. Jason’s stayed ajar just enough to suggest anything could happen; Tyler and Marco drifted in and out because they were decoration the house liked to show off. Connor hovered outside all of them, laughing too loud, wanting in. Clay belonged nowhere except the chapter room, where rules gave him oxygen. Ethan walked the hall like a cartographer, noting which doors were never meant for him.
Carrying a Taco Bell order, he passed Jason’s door and saw it ajar a clean inch. Tyler stood with his back to the hall, towel over one shoulder like the pretense of a shower had been rehearsed. Jason’s voice was low, amused; he reached past Tyler for something on his desk and his forearm brushed Tyler’s waist in a way that looked like a mistake made on purpose. Tyler didn’t move away. The door cut the scene off as simply as a card trick.
“Keep it moving, pledge,” Clay said behind him without looking up from his clipboard.
“Yes sir,” Ethan said this time, because it was easier, because the word fit the space.
He kept the picture in a pocket of his mind where it wouldn’t touch anything else. Not scandal, not proof, not even surprise—just another door in a house of doors, another invitation to a club that had its own rules.
Later, when the hallway thinned and the band downstairs knocked off for a smoke break, Ethan sat on the stairs to the second floor and pretended to mend a torn banner. He wasn’t waiting. That’s what he told himself.
Eli’s steps on the first landing came like they always did: light, even. He didn’t look at Ethan until he was even with him, and then he paused only long enough to scuff the toe of Ethan’s shoe with his own.
“You coming?” Eli asked it without question. Ethan was already moving.
This time, Ethan didn’t wait to knock. He pushed into Eli’s room with the urgency of someone who knew the path. Eli froze for a heartbeat, then smirked, half-pleased, half-annoyed at the breach of ritual, and tugged him the rest of the way in.
Inside the air felt cooler. Eli shut the door with his heel and leaned his head against the wood for a second, eyes closed, like he was bracing. Then the breath he let out was a laugh he didn’t make anywhere else.
“You look like you’re about to bolt,” he said. He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, half-daring Ethan to stay.
“I’m here,” Ethan said, steadier than he felt. He wasn’t sure when the fear had shifted from being caught to not being invited.
This time there was less sweetness and more heat. Eli moved fast, impatient, like he’d been holding his breath all day and finally let himself exhale. Ethan went with him, grateful, then caught off guard by how quickly Eli rolled away, how quickly he reached for the cigarette like it was the only way to end a thought.
“You good?” Eli asked after a while, a little too late to be only about what had just happened.
“Yeah,” Ethan said.
“Don’t get soft on me.” Eli said it like a joke, like locker room talk, like any deflection that kept a person from naming what they feel. He didn’t look over.
“Duly Noted,” Ethan said, and the word lodged like a seed.
They didn’t talk long. The house made its little night music on the other side of the door. The fan remembered to rattle. When a knock came, both of them went still. The knock wasn’t for them; a voice down the hall called someone else’s name and doors opened and shut in a choreography the house could have done with the lights off.
“Go,” Eli said at last, soft, almost apologetic. “Practice.”
“Practice for what?”
“For not being an idiot.” He smiled in a way that asked forgiveness for the line as soon as he said it.
Back in the dorm, Mark sprawled with his mouth open, the fan in their window clicking where the blade hit something it wasn’t supposed to. Ethan lay down and stared into the dark until the ceiling fan’s lazy revolution matched his pulse. He thought of the doors he’d passed and the worlds they hid. Travis’, full of laughter that had already curdled by the time it reached the hall. Luke’s, a low run of voices that could talk you off a ledge if you were the right person. Jason’s, closed now. Eli’s, where the lamp shade with the nick threw an oval of light that would be there when the room was empty, and when it wasn’t.
He knew the secret shouldn’t feel like belonging, but it did. He told himself it meant something because if it didn’t then he was just another boy walking a hall of closed doors with his hands in his pockets, pretending he didn’t want to knock.
The month turned on itself. Pledges lined up with books outstretched until their shoulders burned. The dorm phone rang at 1:11 a.m., 2:22 a.m., 3:33 a.m., because Clay had discovered a new joy in patterns. Ethan got sent for food he didn’t eat and cigarettes he didn’t smoke. He learned the pharmacy’s twenty-four-hour window.
He made mistakes too. Small ones. He knocked a tray of cups over because he was looking at the stairs. He forgot a brother’s girlfriend’s name because he was running through the steps it took to get to Eli’s door without brushing the wall and leaving a scuff Clay would notice.
Jason caught him once, hand closing around his elbow just as the stack of plates he’d fumbled began to tip. “Breathe,” Jason said, his voice meant for a different kind of crisis. “No one’s timing you.”
“Clay is,” Ethan said before he could stop himself.
Jason’s mouth twitched. “Clay can’t add.”
Ethan let himself laugh.
On the quad, the daytime life stayed staged. Eli in sunglasses he didn’t need, standing with Travis and Luke and a junior Ethan didn’t know, laughing a little harder than the joke earned. Ethan felt anger at the performance, and the wicked comfort of knowing the backstage.
The mornings never softened. Eli always up first, bent over his shoes, laces cinched so tight the leather groaned, face scrubbed raw into the day’s mask. “You should go,” he’d say without apology now, as if doing Ethan a favor.
One morning Ethan lingered, hand on the knob. “Does it mean anything?” he asked, too even, too brave.
Eli blinked once...
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