Page 13 of College Town

They plopped down at a table to finish their drinks, and Lawson propped Hello Kitty up against the little cardboard standee in the center that advertised hot wings and beer on Parents Night.

“You’re right: you’re not much of a tomcat,” Lawson said, and squinted at Tommy, pretending to inspect him through a lens framed out by his raised fingers. “Hm…you’re like…” He grinned. “A little kitten pretending to be a big cat. All puffed up. Like Oliver fromOliver & Company.”

Tommy frowned dramatically. “Fuck you, I’m not a kitten.”

“You sure? You’re cute as one.”

Too late, he realized what he’d said. Boys didn’t call each othercute, not in a platonic, giving-each-other-shit way. Not in any way. He’d been teasing, his grin shit-eating and his tone playful, but when Tommy’s face blanked in surprise, the bottom fell out of Lawson’s stomach.

As he sat, hands frozen, face frozen, breath frozen in his lungs, he saw Tommy’s face slowly color, cheeks a dark purple beneath the blue and pink lights overhead.

“I…” Lawson started, panicking, and Tommy turned his head away, brows lowering, mouth pinching to a flat line. “I was only kidding. You know: talking shit. Like I always do.” He coughed out an airless laugh. “You’re not actually cute. I think you’re butt-ass ugly, dude.”

Tommy glanced back, his scowl deepening, and said, “Fuck you, Iamcute.” When Lawson gaped at him, a smile tipped up the corners of his mouth, and the knot in Lawson’s chest unraveled.

“Oh, you wish,” he said, smiling, and internally he said,oh thank God, thank God I didn’t ruin anything, I couldn’t bear for you to hate me. “You’re not half as cute as me.”

Tommy rolled his eyes dramatically. Pressed his hands to the table, as though he meant to get up. “If you think I’m gonna sit here and take this slander–”

Lawson whipped Hello Kitty at him.

Grinning again, Tommy snatched it from the air – and then settled it into his lap, gaze skirting out across the arcade, toward the rink. He sighed, smile quieting; still there, but less bright, more introspective.

He got like this sometimes: thoughtful. A little withdrawn, a little melancholy. Laughing and bright-eyed one minute, and then sober and fading away the next. Lawson wondered if it had to do with his father, but hadn’t been brave enough to ask. Tommy mentioned him rarely, and then with a careful sort of hesitance that said he didn’t want to dig too deeply, that the wounds were still fresh.

So Lawson sat with him in companionable silence; joined him in surveying Stardust’s neon interior.

It was the couples’ skate on the rink now, kids skating slowly hand-in-sweaty-nervous-hand beneath the revolving mood lighting, the Backstreet Boys begging you to quit playing games with their hearts.

Lawson spared a thought for Tommy’s fine-boned hand in his; would it be clammy? Would he lace their fingers together? Or, more accurately, would he yank his hand away in disgust and call him names? Familiar thoughts, lately, ones that left him swallowing a hot lump of shame, while his gut burned with a hunger that left his teeth gritted and his pulse throbbing quick and painful in his fingertips.

Lost in his spiraling thoughts, it took him a moment before he realized that the couple who’d just passed were familiar. That he knew the girl’s golden hair, and the boy’s broad shoulders.

“Shit,” he breathed, jerking upright the same moment Tommy gasped.

They turned to each other, eyes wide, then back to the rink, then each other again.

“That’s–”

“Did you–”

“Dana,” Lawson said.

“Noah,” Tommy returned.

“Didyouknow?” they asked each other at the same time. Shook their heads, and looked back out at the rink.

The lights spun pink, and green, and blue, and purple, and Dana turned her head to gaze up at Noah, her profile beatific.

7

Here’s my two cents: regret doesn’t taste nearly as bitter as fear.

~*~

Lawson wakes the next morning with cottonmouth, a throbbing headache, and a streak of panic down his spine when he realizes the sun is coming up and he’s lying face-down on Dana’s couch.

He pushes up on his hands and swallows against a wave of nausea. He blinks, and his vision stays blurry, because he slept in his contacts. “Fuck.”

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