Oh, I wish he’d have worn clothes for this.

Would that have been too much to ask?

“Finley…” The teasing, singsong way he drew out my name had me blushing. “You’re not paying attention to me. Naughty, naughty boy.”

Shit.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and told myself he would behave if I stopped reacting. “Sorry. It’s been a long week.”

Conner’s giggle said that hadn’t been as believable as I’d hoped.

Aiming for mature and not too distracted, I opened my eyes and did my best to make immediate eye contact with the half-naked troublemaker.

Shoot.

Was there an altar I was supposed to pray at so I could thank some god for gray sweatpants season?

I mean, I didn’t have enough in the size department to enjoy firsthand knowledge of the experience, but I could definitely appreciate them.

But even as I ogled and tried not to get caught, I had to wonder…who wore gray sweatpants and no underwear to an interview? Sure, it was just to see if he could rent a bedroom in my house, but still, everyone else had clearly put some effort into their choice of clothing.

No, nothing in the ad had given anything away about me. I’d been careful with that. I wanted to at least get to know someone a little before I talked to them about anything personal.

The fantasy was supposed to be anonymous.

It wasn’t—not to me, anyway. To anyone else, it would seemed completely random, and there was nothing the professor was reading that would give away the identity of the person. Hell, they didn’t even say if they were a man or a woman, just that their roommate was a guy. A sexy guy who, in the writer’s words, looked like he should be in a motorcycle gang, not going to college.

If that had been the only thing to sound familiar, I wouldn’t have even thought twice about it. Just because my roommate’s friend had asked me what bike I rode when we’d first met didn’t mean anything.

There were a lot of guys on campus who didn’t look as upper class as people expected to see at a college. But there was only one person I knew who rambled on when they were nervous and who looked so vanilla it was almost painful.

It was a rough bar in an even worse part of town and I couldn’t figure out what the little twink was doing working there. Well, I had an idea, but nothing that made sense. I had to be wrong. It’d been a few weeks, maybe longer, since I’d stopped in, but I knew I would have remembered him if I’d seen him before.

BJ’s was technically named after the original owner, but it was also a really big clue about what someone might find going on in the backroom most nights. It’d been a gay bar as long as anyone could remember, and most of the customers had come out in a time where you were either tougher than the bullies or you stayed deep in the closet. Most of them looked like they’d just gotten released from the state pen, even though I knew they all had regular jobs and were actually upstanding citizens.

However, when they walked into the bar, most of the trappings of civilization fell away. So I wasn’t sure what the hell Jake had been thinking when he’d hired the little twink. Pushing away from the wall where I’d been watching for the last few minutes, I headed toward the bar. I found an open spot in the corner and waited for Jake to wander over.

“You are so fucked up.” Shaking my head at my reflection, I stared at myself. “What kind of freak gets turned on by his bully?”

Kind of a bully…maybe a bully?

I couldn’t tell.

Sure, Kyle teased me and called me names all through high school, but there was something about the way he called me “shortie” and “little guy” that made my stomach knot and my dick stir. It wasn’t as bad when his friends chimed in, but that delicious burst of humiliation made everything tingle when they teased me, too.

If my parents had ever found out about the teasing, they’d have had a fit. The couple of times a teacher had heard a few of the remarks, it had taken some quick thinking to keep it from being reported as bullying. There had been a problem at the school a few years before I’d gotten there, and they’d gone overboard to prevent anything similar from happening again.