College Town

Tommy stands, but he grabs Lawson by the face. “What do you need?” he asks, very seriously.

Lawson closes his eyes and presses his forehead to Tommy’s chest. “For this to be real,” he admits.

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College Town, a standalone M/M romance, is now live in all the usual places, links for which are provided above. This was the first time in a looooong time that I've written a self-contained story, and I enjoyed it so much I can't wait to do it again. 

Look for a debrief in the next week or so, and until then, happy reading. I'm posting chapter one under the cut below so you can check it out. Thanks so much, everyone, and reviews are love! 

Warnings for language and self-conscious angst... 

1

 

Growing up is shit.

It sucks.

Not because adulthood itself sucks all that much. It does…I mean, it really does…but the problem isn’t the achy back, or the fuzzy short-term memory, or even the crushing anxiety of thinking you might have to declare bankruptcy. None of that.

No, it’s realizing that the person you thought you’d be when you were a kid never manifested. The beautiful house, the flashy car, the high-paying, prestigious job. You didn’t wind up with any of those things. And worst of all, the absolute gut punch of it all, is the crushing truth that, as an adult, once that sugar-sweet high of adolescence has worn off, there’s no such thing as true love. There’s love, sure: all sorts of love. But that bone-deep, blistering, clean-scouring and soul-transcending sort of love you read about in books and watched unfold in movies? That’s not real. The tooth-rotting love you felt as a kid fades in the face of the real world; it slips away.

The best you can hope for, then, is something like contentment.

 

~*~

 

“Welcome to Coffee Town, the only place you can soar with the Eagle Espresso. Can I interest you in one of our fresh-baked Danishes?” Lawson deadpans, features schooled to match.

“Pffft.” Dana leans across the counter and socks him in the arm. Hard.

He cracks. “Hey!” Laughing, he rubs at his arm. “Jesus. See if I ever offer you quality customer service again.”

“Offer me an Americano and go on break so you can keep me company.”

“No can do, chica. I lost break privileges.”

She lifts her brows, disbelieving. “You what?”

“I’ve” – he lifts his hands to do air quotes – “abused them, apparently.”

Her gaze drops to the counter, then lifts again. “Are you writing on your breaks?”

“Well…” He tries not to cringe, but fails. “It’s just,” he rushes to say, “coffee house, computer – that’s a peanut butter and jelly match made in heaven right there.”

“Yeah, but you writing in public isn’t,” she says, and raps her red-painted nails on the marble. “Come on. They can’t deny you breaks – that’s like, I dunno, an EEOC violation or something. Americano.” She points at him, then over her shoulder. “Join me.”

“But–”

“Now, Law,” she says over her shoulder, and wends her way through the crowd toward a table.

Lawson pouts, but only a little. Takes the next order, then begs an unimpressed Megan to take over at the register, pulls Dana’s Americano, snags a cookie for himself, and makes his way to the prime window table she’s procured for them.

“You could at least sit in the corner by the bathroom,” he says as he folds his long frame down into the chair and slides her coffee over. “It’s bad enough my manager’s gonna be pissed, now we’re taking up, like, the best table.”

She makes a face of faux affrontery. “I’m a paying customer. I can sit where I want.”

Lawson puts his elbows on the table and hunkers down over his cookie.

“Sweetie, don’t slouch. Your manager’s not gonna say shit while I’m here.”

That’s true, and hearing it honestly helps a little.

By virtue of the fact that Lawson is almost forty and a failed novelist, working the counter at his home town coffeeshop, his manager, Kyle, is younger than him. A lot younger than him. A little floppy-haired tyrant who walks with his ass on his shoulders, running Coffee Town like it’s a place that matters, and not the shop nearest campus and the busiest by simple virtue of walkability. Kyle screams if Lawson fucks up the machines; screams if he has to recount the till after close every night; screams if he gets so absorbed in writing that he eats three cookies instead of his allotted one and lets his break run three minutes over the allotted fifteen minutes.

Lawson hates him, but, well, it’s not like he has any other job prospects at the moment.

Look at me now, he thinks in the direction of the kids who’d harassed him in high school. Even more of a fuckup than you all thought I’d turn out to be.

Dana, though, golden hair braided in a princess crown on top of her head, all of her glowing with good health in the radiant sunlight beaming through the window, is very much not a fuckup. She’s anything but. His best friend – real tried and true, since they were in diapers, blood brothers and die-for-each-other BFF kind of love between them – started college the summer after high school graduation, right here in little ol’ Eastman, and got her bachelor’s in three years. Then her masters after that. Then opened her own accounting firm, just one block down from the sun-warmed table where they now sit. Dana is a practical person. A shark, he tells her, laughingly, so she’ll shoot him the bird and then smirk. She was never cursed with romantic passions and creative streaks; was never crippled by the sorts of big dreams that have held him and weighed him down, iron shackles around both ankles.

Today, Dana wears a simple, perfectly-tailored white shirt, and a black skirt, both understated enough to tell him they’re expensive. Diamond studs wink in her ears, and he knows for a fact that her tasteful nude lipstick is seventy-five dollars a tube.

He doesn’t know, honestly, why she’s still here. In Eastman. In this college town with its odd mix of farmers and students. She’s not stuck, like he is; she could go somewhere bigger, somewhere as fabulous as she is.

But she sips her Americano and pins him with a look, and says, “Actually, I’m not here just for the coffee.”

“Aw. You’re here for my pretty face?”

“No.” She smiles, but small and tight, a sudden tension stealing over her features, and it sets a warning siren to spinning distantly in the back of his head.

He pauses with his cookie in front of his mouth. Slowly lowers it back to its napkin. “Okay.”

She hesitates a moment, trailing her nails down the side of her cup, a soft scratching sound. It’s not like her to waver, and it immediately sets his teeth on edge.

“What?”

She starts to bite her lip, white teeth poised above it, a girlhood habit he knows she’s tried to outgrow. She wins the battle, and lifts her gaze, a quick flicker up through her lashes, expression smooth, but braced for his reaction.

His stomach sinks.

Matter-of-factly, she says, “Our class reunion is in December.”

He knows that. Has known it for months – for almost a year, when the email hit his inbox with an innocuous ping, and then the bottom dropped out of his stomach. That little innocent tagline sitting at the top of his unread Old Navy promotions and Dell customer service surveys: It’s the Big Two-Oh, Eastman Raiders!

He was walking down the sidewalk, after a quick Seven-Eleven run to grab more Equal packets for the tables, mindlessly scrolling, and the email leaped off his phone, grabbed him by the throat, and shocked his heart into a wonky two-step. He halted, slumped sideways against the rough brick of the wall, actually touched the fingertips of his free hand to his chest and felt the jackrabbit hitch beneath his breastbone.

Had it really been twenty years? Twenty? Since he plucked the mortarboard off his head, turned it in his hands, and wished it had felt like a victory, instead of the end of something?

Yeah, it had. That tracked. He was thirty-seven, so the math added up.

But still. Twenty years. Twenty years in which, he realized, standing on the sidewalk with his pulse throbbing in his throat, he hadn’t moved on even a little bit. Still caught in an ugly, childish hope, burdened by the defeat of knowing it was a hope that could never be realized.

He gave himself a solid thirty seconds to grieve. Then he thumbed the email into the trash, pocketed his phone, and pushed off the wall. Love wasn’t real – not the kind he’d thought he’d been in back then. And nobody really went to their reunions, save cheerleaders and quarterbacks.

So he knows about the reunion, but he’s tried very hard not to think about it.

He’s shocked it’s Dana bringing it up, of all people, considering she knows the exact shape and flavor of the bitterness that sat on his tongue on graduation day.

He sits back in his chair and folds his arms. “What about it?”

Her brows jump. Calm down. “You know how Harmony is the president of the Reunion Committee?”

“One.” He lifts a finger from the crook of his arm without unfolding. “Why the fuck is there a ‘Reunion Committee?’ And two: how could I possibly have known Harmony was the president?”

“Uh, maybe because Harmony is our friend?”

He stares at her, unblinking.

“Maybe because she sends out, like, weekly update emails about her kids, and her pottery class, and her, frickin’ new favorite HGTV show?”

He shrugs. “I don’t check my email,” he lies.

Dana makes a face, because she knows he’s lying, but doesn’t call him on it. Instead, she does something much worse. She takes a deep breath and says, “You know how her sister’s pregnant? The sister who lives in North Dakota?”

Before Lawson can ask what the hell that has to do with their reunion, he realizes where this is headed, and his stomach locks up hard, like the cash register when he can’t get the key to work. He sets the cookie down for good, and shoves it over to her side of the table. Folds his arms, and says, “No.”

She lifts a hand and says, “Now, hold on. Let me finish.”

“No.”

“Lawson.”

“Dana.” His heart hammers, and his palms prickle with sweat where they’re stuffed under his arms, and every part of his being is going no, no, no, no, no. He can’t go to a reunion, can’t even be involved in planning it, sending emails, checking names off lists, ordering fucking cheap champagne, because a reunion means a homecoming, and a homecoming means…could mean…no. Just no.

Dana sighs tightly through her nose, and presses on anyway, despite the way he starts wagging his head back and forth exaggeratedly. “Harmony has to go out of town to help her sister, and she called me last night in tears, begging me to take over the Committee for her.”

He stops shaking his head to huff out an, “Ugh.” Harmony crying is a sad, sad, Disney movie affair, all giant eyes and hitched breaths and an uncontrollable swell of sympathy that leads people to do anything to stem the tide of tears.

“And, so…” She shrugs. “I’m now the de facto head of the Reunion Committee.”

He pulls an exaggerated face, one that normally makes her laugh.

Now, she frowns, and says, “I’m nominating you as co-head.”

Lawson takes a deep breath, and says, drawn out and slow, “Noooooo.”

Her posture collapses, from straight-backed Executive Woman in Charge, to something slumped and pleading that reminds him of high school. Of earlier. Middle school, elementary. Come on, Law! That’s not faaaaiiiir! No, life isn’t fair. He’s learned to live with it. Mostly. But not so well that he can do this.

He hitches up straighter in his chair and presses his clammy palms to the table edge. Fixes her with as steady a look as he can manage. “Dana. Honey. I would die for you, you know this.”

She nods, corner of her mouth curving upward in a smile.

“But I will absolutely not, under any circumstances, get within fifty feet of this fucking reunion.”

She considers him a moment, nails idly scraping the sides of her cup. “He won’t be there,” she says, finally, quietly, little more than a whisper. “You know that he – that the two of them won’t come.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Her head tilts, and the sympathy in her gaze sends his gaze skittering out through the window, where a woman tries unsuccessfully to drag a tantrum-throwing toddler past a window display at the gift shop next door.

He sees her hand cross the table from the corner of his eye, but still flinches when it settles against the back of his. He recovers fast, though, and turns his palm up to tangle their fingers. God, they’re holding hands in public; they’re those people.

“Well, I know some things,” she counters, voice supportive in a way he both craves and hates – hates that he needs that reassurance. That he isn’t stronger than this. “I know that I love you, and that you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I know that you’re going through kind of a shitty time right now–”

“Don’t,” he interrupts, a lump forming in his throat. “Just…don’t, Dana.”

She squeezes his hand and says, “I also know that those two shitheads won’t show up to our reunion, so there’s nothing to worry about on that front.”

He dares to glance back across the table at her, and sees a ferocious sparkle in her blue eyes. “Because they don’t give enough of a shit to come.”

“Because they know we’d rip them new ones and they don’t have the balls to come,” she corrects.

A middle-aged woman sits down at the table beside theirs, gaze going to their joined hands and lingering longer than is polite, open curiosity writ on her face. She probably thinks they’re lovers having a meaningful heart-to-heart.

Dana squeezes his hand once more, then withdraws hers, and Lawson folds his arms again. She takes a deep breath, and dons a businesslike air once more. “Come on. You’re better at this sort of thing than I am.”

He snorts. “That’s demonstrably untrue.”

“Stop selling yourself short.”

“Stop trying to upsell me.”

“Law.” She pouts. “Come on, Law, pleeeeeaaaassse!”

He has no natural immunity to begging; it’s always tripped him up. Please, Law, God, please. Hands twisted up in his shirt, breath hot against the base of his throat.

He squeezes his eyes shut against memory, not that it helps. He does things physically, sometimes, in the hope it’ll slam the door on harmful mental practices. It doesn’t, but he goes through the motions anyway.

“Fine.” When he opens his eyes, she’s grinning, and he throws his hands up. “Fine! Fine, I’ll help you run this fucking reunion!”

Dana’s grin widens.

The woman beside them lets out a shocked gasp.

Lawson turns to her, donning a grave face, and says, “Ma’am, don’t let her face and hair fool you: that girl is a Grade A demon.”

The woman rears back in her chair, baffled.

Dana laughs. “I love you!”

“Yeah, yeah. Keep that.” He flicks his fingers toward the cookie that still sits in front of her. “I’m suddenly feeling nauseous as all hell.”

She rolls her eyes, and opens her mouth to respond – and a shadow falls across the table. Lawson knows from the shape of its hair that it’s Kyle, just like he knows, before he turns his head, what sort of expression Kyle’s wearing: the pinched-brow, cat’s asshole mouth pucker of the truly self-righteous.

Lawson smiles sheepishly at him. “Hi, boss.”

Kyle jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Break room. Now.”

“Yes, boss. Right away, boss.”

When he glances back at Dana over his shoulder as he follows – trying to duck his shoulders so he doesn’t tower over Kyle quite so dramatically – she winks and sticks her tongue out at him. He shoots her the bird, and she smiles.

They’re okay. They’re always okay.

He just hopes he will be once this whole reunion business is said and done.