Page 31 of College Town

His face warmed, and his heart hitched in his chest, and he gripped the bench until a splinter poked at the pad of his pinky.

“Damn,” Dana said, finally. “You guys–”

Fear spiked, suddenly. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want her to finish her sentence. Maybe he didn’t even want her to see him, the way she so obviously could. It would be better to admit to something than to submit to her assumptions and observations.

“We had sex, yeah.” His voice came out strangely flat, and he cleared his throat. “Or, well. Sort of.”

The bench creaked and shifted as she leaned forward to peer at his face. “How does a person ‘sort of’ have sex?”

He let go of the bench only to link his hands together between his thighs. “I dunno. Do blow jobs count?”

“Uh,yeah.”

“Then it’s not ‘sort of.’”

She waited, and when he didn’t say anything else, her tone gentled. “Law, if – if something happened that you didn’t want–”

“No,” he said in a rush, and the fear spiked again, that she would think poorly of Tommy. “No, no. Nothing like that.”

“Okay. Then why do you look like you want to cry?”

Did he? He blinked, and his eyes were dry, but he recognized that particular burn at the back of his sinuses, the way pressure was building at his temples.

He had cried, two days ago, in a move that had stunned and then embarrassed him. Hecouldcry now, if he thought about it too hard, if he allowed himself.

He remembered everything about that afternoon in a kind of crystalline detail usually reserved for his forty-seventh rewatch of a favorite TV episode, but with a boatload of warm and squishy emotions that made him feel as if his insides had been squeezed to a pulp.

The house had been quiet, both his parents still at work. The Nine Inch Nails CD they’d put on earlier, when they were still pretending to study, had reached the end of the last track, and the player had switched off automatically, leaving them in a ringing silence in which each tiny creak of the mattress and shift of cloth seemed magnified and deafening.

Tommy had shuffled down so he lay on his stomach, elbows winged out over Lawson’s hips. Lawson missed the sight of his lean, freckled torso immediately, but then Tommy put both hands on the fly of his jeans, and looked questioningly up at him, his breath warm where it stirred the fine hairs of Lawson’s treasure trail.

For the first time all afternoon, uncertainty touched his flushed face. He bit at his lip, and his fingertips skated featherlight over Lawson’s fly, where the bulge of his hard cock no longer looked ridiculous, but like something Tommy might actually want.

His voice came out soft, quavering. “Law? Is this okay? Do you want me to?”

Lawson felt a grab in his stomach that had nothing to do with his burgeoning arousal, and everything to do with the desire to touch Tommy. They were touching, but Lawson wanted him under his hands.

He reached down, and cupped his cheek; pressed his thumb to his kiss-swollen, dewy lower lip. It didn’t sound like his voice at all, the gentle whisper that left his lips. “Yeah, but only if you want to. You don’t have to.”

Tommy studied him a moment, stupid-long lashes fluttering as he blinked, and then a determined look crossed his face. He nodded, once, sure, and then unfastened Lawson’s jeans with precise, steady movements.

A noise not unlike an air raid siren started up in the back of Lawson’s head, drowning out the quiet purr of his zipper, and the shuffle of cloth as Tommy’s slender fingers plucked at the waistband of his boxers.

Their first kiss had been a shock, in no small part because it had been Tommy who initiated it, and Lawson had pined so long and so hard that he’d resolved himself to pining forever, because Tommy couldn’t possibly feel the same way. But hehad– or, at least, he’d wanted to kiss him, and then kept kissing him, every chance they got. The blinding, wonderful terror of the first kiss – were his lips chapped? Was his breath okay? Would Tommy like mashing their mouths together at all – had long since worn off. They’d become regular makeout champs, and then they’d started taking their shirts off, and that had progressed to a lot of heavy petting, and some over-the-jeans action. But now, Tommy was about to pull his cock out, and holy fuck Tommy was going to see it for the first time. Was going to put it in his mouth andtasteit. For the first time in his life, Lawson wondered if his dick had a scent, and if it would repel Tommy across the room.

Shit, what if he had a weird dick and didn’t know it? What if Tommy was repulsed, what if he…

He swallowed hard, dry throat clicking, and squeezed his eyes shut in a fit of pulse-pounding self-consciousness. If he could have willed himself to soften, he would have, but alas, Tommy’s cool, slim-fingered handwrapped around it, and pulled it out of his boxers, so there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.

Oh God, please don’t let him hate me. Please don’t let him laugh at me…

“Shit,” Tommy breathed, and his warm breath fanned across Lawson’s hard cock, and he almost came on the spot.

He cracked his eyes open, braced for the worse. But Tommy…

Tommy’s pupils were blown, nothing but deep, wide black edged with the thinnest ring of brown. The color in his cheeks had deepened, and he was breathing hard, panting a little, gaze trained on Lawson with something like awe. Slowly, experimental, but not hesitant, he traced his thumb up the underside of the shaft, and his brows twitched when a bead of pre-come beaded at the slit and then rolled down.

Lawson tried and failed to bite back a whimper, and Tommy’s gaze flicked up to meet his.

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