Now, nine months later, standing beside Alice in the parking lot in front of his dorm, Neil brushed a tear from Alice’s cheek and said, “Mom, you know I hate it when you cry.”
“They’re happy tears,” she lied, and Neil groaned.
“Right.”
“Let me have my feelings, Neil.”
“All right.” She’d always let him have his feelings. All of his anger and rage, all of his love for Joshua. He’d itched with helplessness his whole life, and she never told him he was wrong for it. “But don’t feel them too long.”
Alice laughed through her tears. “You don’t get to tell me how long I get to wallow in my empty nest.”
Neil loved Alice’s laugh and big smile, and despite his best comedic efforts, they were far too infrequent in his opinion. He tucked her long brown hair behind her ear, kissed her wet cheek, and said, “Okay, Mom. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes. You have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
Alice nodded, threw her arms around Neil, and squeezed him so tightly that it hurt to breathe.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he said awkwardly, patting her back. “This will be good for you.”
She huffed a laugh, pulled back, and looked up at him before forcing a bright smile. “Okay, kiddo. Just remember, you can always come home. No matter what.”
Neil felt a strange tug in his chest, and a small lump came to his throat. He coughed and kissed her forehead and backed away as she got into her car. He didn’t watch her drive off, hustling back to his new dorm room to get his papers ready for the meeting. But when he walked back through the parking lot on his way to the professor’s office, he suddenly wished he’d hugged her one more time before she’d gone. And then he shrugged it away.
He’d see her again soon enough.
Chapter Eight
October 2030—Atlanta, Georgia
The first timeNeil had sex after having been forced to endure childhood and adolescence all over again, he was eighteen years old, and it was with his roommate.
It came as a pretty big surprise to Neil, too. He was under no illusions about his physical attractiveness. He was bony and looked young for his age. It’d been the same in his first life, too, when he’d been nearly twenty-five before he’d grown into himself. Neil remembered that when he was Neil Russell, sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday, he’d had no trouble getting laid, but before that it’d been a parade of disturbing blowjobs with closeted jocks and bullies. At least he’d skipped that particular brand of misery this time around, even if he’d been so horny that if itwaspossible to go blind from masturbating, as his first mother had informed him decades ago, he absolutely would have.
His third year at Emory had started out well enough. Neil was rarely around, and his newly assigned roommate, Derek, was a huge improvement over the prior year’s asshole. At least Derek was gay, which took away the burden of having to worry about whether his sexuality would be a problem that might result in injuries.
Neil had never told his first two roommates because he’d never felt entirely safe to disclose that information. They were both raging heterosexuals, and jocks to boot, so he’d always been a little concerned that they’d find his homosexuality threatening and kill him in his sleep during some steroid-fueled panic attack.
It wasn’t like being up front with anyone about his sexual preferences mattered much those first years. He was an underage, scrawny genius; no one wanted to fuck him anyway, and he’d been far too absorbed in his actual work to risk his life to get laid. His hand had never failed him yet.
Then Derek came along. He wasn’t just ‘out’; he was ridiculously gay. He moisturized and had gobs of hair gunk sitting all over their communal sink. He didn’t flap around much, but he said things like, “That’s my bitch,” and he spoke openly to anyone who would listen to him about his endless hunt for sex on the various apps available. And since Derek often mistook Neil’s silence for ‘listening,’ Neil heard about Derek’s craving for cock a lot.
Neil thought Derek was a good-looking guy. A little skinny, maybe, but he had cheekbone-length dyed black hair that fell down over his dark eyes, and that contrasted nicely with his pale skin. Neil only admitted to himself after the first time they fucked that he’d ever noticed any of these things about Derek’s physical attractiveness. At first, they’d just lived together, and that was that, and that was fine with Neil.
But one night, after hours and hours in the lab, working out some kinks for the next stage of the upcoming nanite trial, Neil came home to find Derek sitting on the sofa in nothing but a pair of loose yoga pants, his cock out, jerking off to some porn on the wall-sized screen that Derek’s parents had provided.
Neil shut the door behind him, surprised that Derek didn’t stop what he was doing or act at all ashamed. Instead, Derek motioned at him.
“C’mere. You top, right?”
Neil nodded. Yeah, he preferred to top. He remembered that from his prior life—the clench of a guy’s ass around his cock, the grunts a guy made as he’d thrust inside. Neil was hard before he could even turn the lock on the door and drop his bag to the floor.
There was no preamble. Derek had condoms, and he wanted to be fucked. Neil wasn’t about to argue with that. As Neil’s cock sank into Derek’s tight, gripping ass for the first time, his eyes rolled back, and he groaned in pleasure; his nipples ached, his balls drew up, and he got four thrusts in before he was filling the condom with his jizz. It didn’t matter, though. It had been so long for him, and it was so good. For once his youth was on his side. He quickly got another condom in place, while Derek wriggled his ass in open invitation, and then Neil fucked him hard enough that Derek scrambled at the carpet, cried out, and threw himself back onto Neil’s slamming cock in happy abandon.
They went at it over and over for four delirious hours. Neil’s balls ached, and his legs shook when he tried to stand up afterward. Derek smiled, limp and drooling, as he lay facedown on the carpet beside the sofa, his ass still up and his hole clenching at air.
Neil was covered in sex and wanted to wash it off, get some water and food, and then rest—alone, in his own bed. He hoped Derek wasn’t the cuddling type. Neil tried to convince his legs to do their job long enough to make it to the shower, but he collapsed against the sofa before making it three steps. His dick was still twitching and his balls twanged hard as he panted there, gaining strength for another push toward the bathroom.
Oh God, he suddenly realized—he hoped Derek didn’t expect anythingrealfrom this. He groaned as the thought dawned on him and reality finally overrode his lust-addled mind. He’d fucked his roommate; things could get awkward now.
“Jesus, you’re hung,” Derek murmured. It was the first thing he’d said aside from ‘more,’ ‘harder,’ ‘please,’ and ‘fuck’ since he’d asked if Neil topped. “I feel like you turned me inside out, man.”
