Page 110 of College Town

Leo’s brows go up in alarm.

But Dana and Lawson die laughing.

That’s what they used to do. What they’ve always done. Tommy started the night jingling his keys and chewing his lip, but he’s comfy, now. At home in his own skin, and in their company.

“Now you’ve done it,” Lawson tells Dana, wiping at his eyes. “You went and pressed his Fight Me button.”

Tommy swings around. “Fuck you, too,” he tells Lawson, and Lawson bursts into fresh peals of laughter.

Shit, maybe he’s feeling the booze, too. He sips at his water…but, really, it’s just Tommy. It’s having him back, and feeling like things are normal again.

“I’ll cheerlead if I want to,” Tommy continues, stabbing him in the arm with a finger. He’spissed, and it’s adorable. “You should be published.” His brows fly up. “Shit, you’regoingto be.” He gestured to Leo with his other hand, and continues stabbing Lawson with the first. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeats, outraged.

Lawson nudges his half-full water glass toward him, but of course Tommy is beyond hint-taking, glaring him down and licking the end of his mudslide straw into his mouth without looking. Jesus. “It’s not a big – okay, okay,” he says, placatingly, when Tommy takes a huge breath to argue. “Let’s go with it’s notcertain. Okay? I have to finish writing the thing, and there’s no guarantee that any friends of Leo’s friend will like it.”

Tommy cuts a look Leo’s direction.

“It’s really good,” Leo assures.

Back to Lawson, gaze narrowing. “What’s it about?”

Leo has no idea what Lawson usually writes – or used to write, more like – but Dana’s familiar, and Tommy, once upon a time, was even more familiar. He used to read Tommy’s sci-fi stories aloud when they were squashed in bed together, while Lawson hid his blushing face and Tommy kept interrupting himself to say, “Stop being a baby, it’s good, you idiot.”

“Am I an idiot or a baby?” Lawson would ask.

“Both.”

Now, Lawson shrugs. “It’s just…life, I guess. Musings.”

“Musings,” Tommy repeats, as though he’s never heard the word before.

“It’s very high-brow,” Dana assures, and Tommy’s frown deepens.

“You don’t do high-brow.”

“Thanks, man. Appreciate it.”

“No.” Tommy waves like he’s dispelling smoke. “No, I mean – you writecharacters. Andaction. And…”

Lawson tries to snag his mudslide from him and Tommy clutches it to his chest with an affronted noise.

“There’s characters,” Lawson says. “And action…of a sort.”

“Okay, then what’s itabout?”

Lawson sighs. “The unbearable burden of being alive. There. Happy?”

“No.” Tommy sucks down more mudslide. “What happened to your space opera?”

Lawson’s written many sci-fi stories, mostly throw-aways that wind up in a box at the top of his closet, a few that made it into online magazines in the past few years, but never reached a wider audience. But when Tommy saysspace opera, there’s only one story he means: the sprawling, grand epic that Lawson started when they were still in school together. The one that began as stacks of notecards covered in blue pen scribbles, and which graduated to spiral-bound notebooks, and then, finally, the old Mac in the living room that puffed and wheezed like a faulty AC unit.

Before Tommy left, Lawson realized it was going to be an epic undertaking, a fat doorstop of a book that ran multiple parallel story lines, featuring not one, but several romantic pairings. He talked about it with breathless excitement, overwhelmed, but in a good way, thrilled by its possibilities, and Tommy joined him in that excitement, tossing fantasies back and forth with each other: what would happen when Lawson sold the book; what would happen when he hit theNew York Timesbestseller list; what would happen when the book was adapted into a movie, becauseof courseit would be, Tommy assured him.

But after Tommy left, even thinking of the “space opera” put an icepick through his heart. It was his story, his characters, his ideas, sure…but at the height of his grief, he realized that he’d poured Tommy, and his love for him, into every romantic moment. Into every page. All the time he was writing, he asked himself, unconsciously,what will Tommy think of this? Will he laugh at this part? Will he shed a tear here? Will this scene scare him?

He packed it away.

He brought it out over the years, now and again, when he felt brave, when reading or watching someone else’s space opera left him itching to get back to his own.

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