Page 63 of College Town

“That’s very open-minded of you.”

She nods in gracious acceptance, as though he’s delivered her a compliment. “I was entertaining several admirers, and I could see the way some of the women looked at Tom. He’s very handsome,” she says, tone going confidential. She winks when Lawson nods and blushes even harder. “But then I realized that there was no mistress. He really was working late when he said he was. And he didn’t lookbackwhen women looked at him. He didn’t peer down anyone’s dress or let his hand drift too low when he hugged someone. He was aperfectgentleman.”

A sense-memory slams into Lawson, conjured byperfect gentleman: blunt nails scraping angry red lines in his neck, teeth sinking into his lower lip until he tastes blood. A fevered chant:Law, Law, Law, harder, please, I can take it.

He must be beet-red at this point his skin’s so flushed; sweat pops out on his brow and he dashes at it with the back of his hand.

Natalia smirks knowingly, then sobers. “I came to realize that he was a very sad man. Even when he smiled, he was sad. It was deep,” she touches her own chest, “deep inside of him, this sadness. I tried asking Noah about it, but…” She sighs. “I could tell he knew something, but he wouldn’t tell me.” She frowns, gaze going reflective. “He’s very stubborn. Both of them are. But Noah is…” She cuts herself off and shakes her head.

“I recognized the sadness,” she continues, after a beat. “Tom had this look just like my father after my mother died.” Her gaze lifts to meet Lawson’s. “He looked like a man who’d watched the love of his life die right in front of him.”

Lawson’s brain refuses to digestlove of his life, so it skips right over it. Focuses instead ondie. “His dad,” he starts, faintly.

But Natalia shakes her head again. “No. Not the love one feels for a parent.” She reaches into her slacks pocket and comes out with a sleek, pink-cased phone. She taps at the screen. “I found something in his closet. I wasn’t spying.” Tap, tap, tap. “We were going to a gala and he asked me to get his shoes from his closet because we were running late and he couldn’t get a client to leave his office. But I pulled down the wrong box, and I – yes, here it is.”

She turns the phone and hands it to him.

Lawson hesitates, loath to peek at whatever it is she found that pointed to him, afraid it will be too little, that it won’t even be abouthim. It’s been twenty years: surely Tommy found someone else to warm his bed…and his heart in that time.

Natalia waggles the phone, and he finally accepts it, and peers down at the screen, everything inside him braced for impact.

It’s a photo. It’s a photo of a photo: he can see the thick white border of a Polaroid, and the grainy, washed-out quality of the film. His palms remember the feel of his mom’s old camera, the sound of its shutter, the blinding flare of the flash. He remembers holding it out away from himself, because his arms were longer, the photos he captured that way tilted and off-center, out of focus half the time.

His breath leaves him in a punched-out rush when he realizes who the photo is of. It’s him. And it’s Tommy. It’s the two of them sitting on the hood of the Le Sabre, up McGarry road, the sun going down in a blaze of metal-bright gold over the hills behind them. Tommy didn’t want to take pictures, not ever, too afraid that, in his words, “someone might see.” Lawson thought he was ashamed of him, of their relationship, but he thinks now that maybe Tommy was protecting him; trying to keep him at arm’s length so that the horror of his family wouldn’t bleed over onto Lawson. But, finally, Lawson coaxed him into it. “Just a few,” Tommy warned, and then Lawson held out the camera, and said, “Flash them pearly whites, gorgeous,” and Tommy dissolved into giggles.

He's laughing in the photo, face scrunched with it, dark eyes turned to happy crescents as he turns his face into the side of Lawson’s, his hand gripped tight in the collar of Lawson’s shirt. Lawson beams at the camera, smiling with all his teeth, with his eyes, with his whole face. His hair’s windblown, and tousled from Tommy’s fingers, and where Tommy’s pulled down his shirt, there’s a hickey visible along his clavicle.

They’re fully-dressed, their pose innocuous on the surface, but Lawson’s never seen such a damning photo. Affection and familiarity and intimacy shine up out of the screen, blinding. Devastating. Lawson can see his own love in every inch of his smiling face. And Tommy…he knows what he wanted to see back then, and maybe it’s still wishful thinking, but Tommy looks like he loves him back. Like he’s delighted by his mere presence.

Lawson hears a whistling sound, and realizes it’s his breath, wheezing out between his clenched teeth.

He drops the phone onto the duvet, but the screen stays illuminated, his own smile pointing up at him. How did they ever look so young? Sohappy?

He covers his eyes with a hand, and chokes out, “He kept this?”

“He has a box,” she says, kindly, as though breaking difficult news so someone fragile. He supposes he is that, at the moment. “There are other photos, and some trinkets. Keepsakes.”

Lawson nods, though he doesn’t know what he means by it.

“When I saw that photograph,” Natalia continues, still so gentle, “I knew that the boy in it with Tom was very important to him.”

Lawson nods again, and when he uncovers his eyes, finds that the screen has gone black. It’s less of a relief than anticipated. He almost touches it to bring the image back, but nudges the phone across the duvet toward her instead.

“Did you ask him about it? When you found it?”

“No. Not until we arrived here.” She smiles, and tilts her head, hair cascading artfully across her back and over her shoulder. “Not until we walked into your coffeeshop.”

Lawson wants to look away from her, from her pleased, enigmatic little smile. It’s agotchasmile, but not in a mean way; like she’s letting him in on her secret.

“It’s not my coffeeshop. I just fuck up orders there for a few hours a day.”

She waves as if to saysame difference. “Did you know that Tom wanted to go to Starbucks? It was closer to the house, it was on the way to our meeting, but we drove past Coffee Town on our way the night before, and I saw the brick, and the little lampposts out front, and I said, ‘That place is cute. Isn’t it cute, Tom?’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ but he didn’t look up from his phone. He never does.” She rolls her eyes and pouts a little, for show. “The next day, when he told the driver to go to Starbucks, I said that I wanted to go to Coffee Town instead. I was very insistent.” She kicks up her chin, and Lawson has no trouble imagining her insistence.

“And we got there, and there was no drive-through window, and Tom was angry,” she says with a grin. “So I said I would go in, but he is a gentleman, so he came, too, and he went to the counter, and there you were!” She holds out her hands in ata-dagesture. “I knew it was you right away. And Tom – I’ve never seen Tom nervous! Not likethat. When we were back in the car, I told him I’d seen the picture, and I asked him about you.”

This is, far and away, the wildest story Lawson has ever heard. He couldn’t write something this unbelievable. He swallows, and says, dry and crackling, “I imagine that went well.”

“Not at all!” she laughs. “He was so red! So embarrassed.” She sobers. “And so unhappy.” She touches him again, two soft, light fingers over the pulse point in his wrist; she must be able to feel the racing of his heartbeat. “He misses you, Lawson. He misses you terribly.”

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