Page 9 of The Amazing Alpha Tau Fratmas Experience
“Change of plans.” Scout examined the cuff of his blazer. He was wearing a disdainful expression, as though he’d found one of Squirrel’s hairs clinging to it, and his tone was bored.
But I’d been dating Scout for a while now, and one thing I knew was that his family didn’t change their plans. If the airport was on fire, Mrs. Talbot-Smith would just signal for more ice in her cocktail while they waited to board.
Scout glanced up at me, and beneath his normal cold stare I caught a flicker of something—uncertainty, maybe—and that was when I knew he was full of shit. But I also knew him well enough not to call him out in front of everyone, so I just said, “Okay.”
Meanwhile, Marty was pulling a series of frantic faces like a kid in class contorting himself in an attempt to get the teacher’s attention. When I looked at him, his eyes grew as big as Squirrel’s when he spotted steak, and he mouthedSee!at me.
Yeah, I saw, and so would the entire room if Marty didn’t rein it in.
“Okay, so Scout will have one set of keys to the house, and the rest will be put in the safe,” I said. “I’ll have the only other set, so if anyone needs anything from the house over the break, you’re shit out of luck.” And then I relented, just in case there was an actual emergency. “If anyonedoesneed anything, call me and not Scout, because he’s not flying all the way back from Vienna to let someone in.”
Scout’s expression tightened.
Yeah, there was definitely something going on.
We wrapped up the meeting, and Scout shot out of there like a scalded cat—well, he walked at a moderately brisk pace, which for Scout was the same thing.
I was about to follow him when Marty grabbed my sleeve. “Trey?”
The rest of the guys trailed out of the room.
“What?”
“Bro, there is something super up with Scout! You see it, right?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“So go and fix him!”
“Come on, Marty. You know how it is. Scout’s—” I hesitated. “Complicated. I can’t just come out andaskhim what’s up.”
Marty snorted. “Not with that attitude.”
“I mean it, Marty.” Scout didn’t talk about his feelings. Hell, he barely admitted to having any. Which was why we’d hooked up for an entire semester before he’d asked if I wanted to date—and why I’d waited for him to figure out he wanted more in the first place. I’d been all in from the moment he’d flipped his comforter down in an invitation to join him in bed, but Scout had taken a while to get there.
The wait had been worth it.
Marty huffed out a sigh. “Why can’t he just be normal?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Careful, Marty. Don’t throw stones from inside that glass house of yours.”
“I don’t even know why you’d build a house out of glass,” Marty said. “People would be able to look in and see your junk when you were in the shower, so that saying makes no sense.”
“Obviously, you’d have curtains,” I said before wondering how I’d gotten sucked into the inherent Marty-ness of this conversation. “It’s a metaphor, Marty. Look, I’ll go and talk with Scout, but I’m just saying it’s not as straightforward as asking him, okay?”
Marty nodded, chewing his bottom lip with worry. “Yeah.”
I clapped him on the back. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay.” He fist-bumped me.
On my way upstairs, I was waylaid briefly by Knox, who wanted to check what date I’d be back. We ended up chatting for a while, so by the time I made it back up to the third floor, I’d given Scout a head start of about twenty minutes. Which it turned out was long enough for him to think I wasn’t coming straight up, so he’d started packing. His open suitcase was lying on our bed, and he was placing his folded clothes neatly inside.
And it only took me a second to see he wasn’t packing for a vacation. Unless he was planning on celebrating Christmas in Vienna in a suit and tie, that was. Which, honestly, wouldn’thave been totally out of left field when it came to Scout and the Talbot-Smiths, but we’d been dating for a while now, and I had learned to tell the difference between a business suit and a dinner suit. And those weretieshe was packing. So either there was some international dress code I wasn’t aware of or Scout wasn’t vacationing in Vienna.
“What’s this?” I asked while Scout stared at me like a critter caught in a porch light. “Planning on interviewing for jobs in Austria?”
“Uh.” Scout Talbot-Smith was only rarely stuck for words, and since I hadn’t just sucked his brains out through his dick, I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
