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How did a guy talk to his best friend about his epically failed relationship when that friend was in one that was working like a charm? Where did he even begin?
“Noah was a student in my performance class, and as part of his training, he had to have individual lessons. He was assigned to me for those, which meant we spent a lot of time together.” He swallowed some beer. Why the hell was this so hard to talk about? “I was attracted to him from the beginning, but he hadn’t turned twenty-one yet and I was in a position of authority over him. There should have been nothing between us. It was unethical and dangerous for both of us.”
He took another mouthful of beer, searching for a way tocontinue.
“We’ll come back to the last part of that in a second,” Jim said. “But first, which of you made the first move?”
There was no hint of disapproval in his friend’s tone, but neither was he salivating after salacious details. Jax appreciated that. Jim understood him and knew how difficult it was to bare his soul, to make himself vulnerable.
“He did at first, after a Halloween party for the students. Once I came to my senses after that make out session, I made sure it didn’t happen again. I figured he’d get over his crush. Then the students performed at the first concert of the college year, and he’d played beautifully. Standing ovation and all. After the show, he called me over to introduce me to his dad. They invited me to dinner, and I said yes. That was probably not a smart thing to do, but I figured I was safe because his father was there.”
He had blown off his colleagues who’d wanted to take him out for drinks, telling them he could have a drink with them anytime, but spending time with their upcoming star and his dad was important for the college’s reputation. A satisfied parent could do a lot not only forhisreputation as a professor, but also for the college as an institution. He had convinced them that this was an inexpensive way to build trust and hopefully draw attention to the college’s efforts to improve on diversity and inclusion.
He’d known he was lying to himself and to his colleagues. He just wanted to be near the younger man, to bask in the beauty of his smile and his passion for music, to enjoy his quick-witted sense of humor and his sharp intelligence. He wanted to be closer than their student-teacher relationship allowed, especially after that Halloween kiss. If Noah’s dad was giving him the only chance he’d likely ever have for that to happen again, he wasn’t going torefuse it.
“So whathappened?”
He’d gotten lost in his memories and forgotten he was telling Jim the story.
“Dinner was great. Noah is his father’s son … warm, friendly, open. Mr. Santiago was so proud of Noah; it was impossible to miss. He told me stories about how he discovered that his son preferred playing the piano and violin to playing baseball. How he scrimped and saved to send him to music lessons, how his teachers said he would go far and pushed him to enter the state’s competitions. How he and Noah had pored over colleges, when he first started high school, to see which ones gave the best scholarships, and how he had spent all his down time pushing Noah to practice harder, to sharpen his skills, to decide which instrument he preferred and do the most work with that.”
“Wow! What it must be to have a dad like that behind you!”
“You’re right. By the time Noah was a junior in high school, he’d chosen the five schools he wanted to attend and had been working on his college essay for a while. He got into all five schools, including Curtis.” At Jim’s puzzled frown, he explained. “That’s the most exclusive music conservatory in the country. It’s really small and tuition-free.”
“Hell! Why didn’t hego there?”
“He didn’t feel comfortable. The Latino student population was small in an already small school, and he didn’t want to stick out. Our school was much larger, so it would have been easier for him to disappear, if he tanked. Apparently, he thought he might disappoint his dad, and he didn’t want the trauma of doing that in the college version of a small town. Where everybody knows your name and everything about you, was how he put it.”
Jim chuckled. “I’ll bet he hated living inthissmall town then. Anyway, I’m still not hearing how things went from professional to personalwith you.”
“I drove them home … his father back to the hotel where he was staying and Noah to his frat house. But on the way to his place, he asked me to pull over because he needed to talk to me.” Jax huffed out a laugh. “I had no idea what he could want to talk about that he couldn’t say in front of his dad, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might still feel the same way about me that I felt about him.”
“Jax, buddy, I hate to break it to you, but this just sounds like you were dumb as a box of rocks and didn’t read the room. I’m assuming he told you again that he was attracted to you?”
“Yes. And he gave me some pretty explicit descriptions of what he wanted to do to and with me. But he knew it wouldn’t be right, so could he please just have one more kiss to remember me by, and then he’d ask to switch tutors for his lessons. That way, I wouldn’t have to see him at all except in orchestrapractice.”
Shock was insufficient to describe the emotion that Jax had felt when Noah had dropped his bombshell. And the thought of not seeing him again outside of a large group, of giving up the closeness they had been cultivating during his lessons, of relinquishing control of his performance to someone else had made Jax see red. Hell fucking no! Noah was his to train and his to have and he’d be damned if he let anyone else close to him like that.
“That was when it hit me how gone I was for this guy, so I said yes, but only to the kiss. I had only gotten to know him properly as more than my student over the previous three months, and I wanted more. So once we stopped making out like teenagers—though granted, he was way closer to the teen years than I was—I told him we would do whatever he really wanted.” He glanced over at Jim, before adding sarcastically, “That was me being so mature that I was giving him a reason to change his mind. I knew if I didn’t agree, he would rethink his decision, and I wanted him to be the one to choose me over any hesitation he wasfeeling.”
Suddenly the club chair he was sitting on was too hot and he needed to get up and walk around. He put the beer down and went to stand by the railing for a beat before starting to pace. He should never have given Noah any opportunity to pursue him. He should have nipped that attraction in the bud. Woulda, coulda, shoulda … if he’d been a better man, he would have done it then. The hurt that Noah would have felt would have been nothing to what Jax had inflicted on him when he broke things off six months later.
“So why exactly was it dangerous for the two of you?”
Jax sighed, running a hand across the back of his neck and turning to lean his hips against the railing so he was facing his friend.
“Noah got a full ride scholarship to the college, and he could lose it if there was even a hint of any impropriety. They could accuse me of rewarding him for servicing me and accuse him of soliciting me for higher scores. We could both have been dismissed from thecollege.”
“But you took the chance anyway. What made you pull back? And how did hetake it?”
“We were together at a concert and almost ran into some of my colleagues who would have realized at once that we were on a date if they’d seen the way we were together. I just couldn’t keep doing it. So I broke things off, switched him to another professor whose hours were different from mine, and got on with my life. Needless to say, I broke his heart. I broke mine too. We managed never to see each other again unless it was at required concerts, and we avoided each other as much as we could even then too. I could tell he wasn’t doing well physically, but he kept up his grades and graduatedsumma cum laude, the star of his class.”
Jim got up and went to stand next to him. He felt the action like a warm hug, even though his friend wasn’t touching him.
“How long, Jax?”
Jax understood what Jim was asking him and he hoped he could keep the pain out of his voice when he answered. “Eleven years.”
