Page 120 of College Town

Tommy twists around to straddle his chair and folds his arms over the back of it, chin propped glumly on his fist. Now that Mom and the album and the cheery mood are gone, he looks exhausted and drawn. “Sorry,” he says, words muddied by the way his chin is smooshed into the back of his hand. “I said I bet she had some funny pictures of you. I didn’t mean for all of that to happen.”

Lawson shakes his head. “Nah. She was gonna find some reason to get the album out. If you kept coming around.” He doesn’t mean for the last to come out hopeful, but he thinks it does.

Tommy’s brows quirk. “I do have a standing invitation for dinner, after all.” His smile is the barest upward twitch at the corners of his mouth, but it tugs hard at Lawson all the same.

He turns back to the sink, and refolds the towel there unnecessarily. “You need more coffee? Some water? I don’t know if you’re good to drive” – he hears the chair shift as Tommy gets up, and presses doggedly on, ignoring the way his pulse shifts, too – “but your guys are still waiting. I guess. I can go–”

Hands frame his waist and he falls silent. When Tommy tugs at him, he turns around. He is but a man, and he can only resist so much; it’s a resistance that grows thinner and thinner each time he and Tommy meet.

He tilts his face down, expecting a kiss – but instead, Tommy loops both arms around him and fuses them together, front-to-front, in a clinging, melting hug.

Oh, Lawson thinks, and hugs him back. Noses down into his hair where he smells like shampoo, and the bar, andhim, right at his scalp.

Tommy pets across his back, right above his waistband. “Your dad okay?”

“Yeah, he’s good.”He wants me to confess to you. Mom does, too. They want me to give you a reason to stay.“He was asking about you.”

“Yeah?” Tommy asks, muffled against his shirt. The movement of his lips tickles through a screen of fabric.

“Yeah. He wondered why you stopped eating your vegetables, since you’re so stunted.”

Tommy pinches him, hard, and he yelps a laugh. “Ass,” Tommy accuses, but presses his face more firmly against his chest.

Lawson jostles him, lightly. “Don’t fall asleep down there. You gotta go home.”

“Yeah.” He sighs – a big, gusty sigh that moves his whole body – and draws back, mouth tucked sideways with clear regret.

“Be safe.”

“Yeah.” He looks so glum that Lawson cups his chin and lifts his face so he can kiss him.

He tastes like coffee, now, and peanut butter, and his smile, when he finally pulls back, is sweeter than both.

Lawson watches from the window to make sure that a suited guard gets behind the wheel of the Navigator. He stands and waits as both cars back out of the drive, headlights sweeping through the kitchen. And then he stands and waits some more, the tick of the clock marking each beat of his love-swollen heart.

30

Most of the people Lawson and Dana went to school with left town right after high school. Lawson doesn’t blame them: it’s what he tried to do, after all. It’s not a bad town – though selling heroin is quickly revising his opinion on the state of the city where he grew up – but there’s something innate to adolescence about leaving the place you were raised. A need to get away from Mom and Dad, to explore, to make your own mistakes, spread your seed, all of that jazz. (He’s aware no one says “all of that jazz” anymore and feels ancient because of it, even if he only says it in his own mind.)

A handful remain, though, still earthbound in Eastman.

Ninety percent of their graduating class (Go Raiders! Not to be confused with the Eagles of Eastman University. Why no one fused the two schools with a uniting mascot, Lawson will never know) is spread across the country, and of those ninety, eighty percent have RSVP’d to this confounding reunion which he feels should be cancelled on account of all his personal bullshit.

Dana’s determined, though, and so he meets her at her office one evening after closing, a bag of going-stale muffin tops from the shop and cold lattes in tow, so they can camp out at her desk and make follow-up phone calls to those former classmates from whom they haven’t yet heard.

“Okay, well, sorry you won’t be able to make it,” she says sweetly into the phone. “Good to talk to you!” She hangs up, and says, “Ugh. I never could stand that bitch.”

“You’re so good with people,” Lawson says, and she shoots him the bird across the desk. “Who’s next?”

“Let’s see.” Dana runs the end of her pen down the list, and then recoils, lip curling.

“What?”

“Mark Walton,” she says, in the same tone someone would use to sayday-old roadkill.

It takes Lawson a beat, and then he mimics her expression. “Jesus.ThatMark?”

“The one and only.” She sets the list down, and then prods it away from her with her pen, like it might bite. Or, like the man himself, sneer and call her a name in front of the whole class. “Oh, and look at the address: he’s still local.”

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