5

The next night, they meet Dana and Leo at Flanagan's for drinks, greasy burgers, and a vicious round of pool. They've been making a regular thing of it, and other patrons are starting to gather and watch on Fridays.

Tommy started the day sleeping fifteen minutes past his alarm, and woke groggy, sore as hell, shaky – and deeply satisfied. He didn't protest Tommy's help getting up; instead, he hummed a thank you and kissed his shoulder and swayed into his sturdy side, delighting in the way it left Lawson beaming. He stepped into his hands-free shoes once he was dressed, and sat at the kitchen table, cane beside him, unprotesting when Lisa packed him a lunch.

She looked between them, beaming, eyes sparkling, and said, "You boys sleep well?"

Tommy blushed, but didn't shrivel down into his collar. Nodded, instead.

Lawson said, "So well." And winked at him.

Work went by quickly, and he wasn't even bothered by cantankerous old Mr. Baumgartner who called at least once a week demanding his rate be lowered.

When Lawson picked him up at five, he took one look at his face and said, "Oh my God, I've created a monster. A happy, dick-drunk monster."

"Fuck you," Tommy said, cheerfully, as he buckled his seatbelt.

"No, fuck you. If you want."

"Later. After drinks. You should wear that jacket you got for Christmas."

Lawson laughed. "It's, like, seventy degrees out."

"Still. You should wear it."

"Fine. Don't have to tell me twice."

"But I just did. Have to tell you twice."

"Yeah, because I love listening to your dulcet, dictatorial tones and shit."

Tommy snorted. "And shit."

The jacket in question is a lightweight, dark denim with a brown corduroy collar that should have looked western and ridiculous, but somehow works with Lawson's build and wardrobe, and which makes Tommy's mouth water besides. Tommy rubs the pads of his fingers down the seam on the inside of the arm where it rests on the console, and thinks – fantasizes – about later.

For once, they're the first ones to arrive. Lawson hangs his jacket off a high-backed stool at their favorite table and Tommy snags the one empty pool table beside it. They've already got a pitcher of beer and two baskets of cheesy tots when Dana arrives, alone, dressed down in jeans and sneakers.

"Hi, boys." She kisses them each on the cheek. "Leo's running late. Term paper emergency, apparently." She takes a sizable slug from the glass Lawson pours for her and grabs a pool cue. "C'mon, Thomas. Warm-up round."

"What about me?" Lawson mock-pouts, swiveling his stool so he can watch them, beer held between the fingertips of both hands like a toddler with a sippy cup.

"You'll only slow us down, amateur," Dana says, lightly, and Tommy snickers at Lawson's overdramatic gasp.

Dana's already beaten him once, and he's already two-and-a-half beers in when Leo finally shows up, and Tommy's feeling pleasantly buzzed, and moving around the table with ease and a lack of self-consciousness. When he spots Leo arriving at the table, greeting Lawson – who is definitely eating all their cheesy tots, the jerk – Tommy aims the chalky end of his cue at him and says, darkly, "I need to talk to you."

Dana and Lawson share a look, and then crack up.

Leo's eyes bug, and he pauses, jacket halfway off, to say, uncertainly, "Hi, Tommy."

It's the first time since they met that Tommy hasn't greeted him with a handshake and exchange of pleasantries, and Lawson's enjoying it way too much.

"Oh my God," he snorts into his beer. "Leo, your face."

"Uh…" Leo says, gaze darting between them all. "Is something the matter?"

Sober, Tommy would feel bad about putting that look on Leo's face. But flush with beer and good company, he feels a smile threatening. He smooths it, and goes over to the table. If he has to use his cue as a makeshift cane, well, that's alright.

When he reaches the table, Lawson drags one of the tot baskets up to the edge, where a small pile of golden, cheese-crusted tots and a half-cup of dipping sauce await. "I saved you some."

"Thanks, babe. Leo." He fixes him with a stern, Tom Cattaneo sort of look that leaves Lawson snorting into his beer.

"Tommy, come on," he tries, laughing. "We talked about this."

Tommy gestures at him absently with his tot. "Shush, this doesn't concern you."

"What? Dude, this concerns me the most."

"Leo. Why the fuck did it take your buddy Keith seven months to respond to Lawson's email, huh?"

Behind him, Dana cackles.

Leo still looks wary, but relaxes a fraction. "Oh. Well. Seven months isn't that long considering the publishing industry."

Which is what Lawson's said all along, but Lawson has startlingly low self-esteem and doesn't expect his writing to ever take him anywhere.

"That's what I told him," Lawson says.

"I said shush." When Tommy gestures again, the tot flies out of his hand, and Lawson dissolves into laughter. To Leo: "It's bullshit, is what it is. I thought he was your friend? I thought he was going to actually look at Lawson's manuscript."

"He – he is. He did. He'd actually like to meet Lawson–"

"Yeah, but will that meeting lead anywhere? Or is this just setting Law up for disap–"

A heavy arm hooks around his neck and drags him sideways so he's leaning between Lawson's open legs, hip braced against the edge of the stool. "Okay, okay. Easy, tiger. Pom-poms down." There's a laugh still threaded through his voice, but in the back of his mind, Tommy recognizes a note of seriousness.

But Tommy's angry, he realizes. He's angry. He thinks of Lawson last night, gaze skating away from Tommy's while he see-sawed his hand to demonstrate Keith's indifference. Thinks of all those times Lawson shakes his head and says it'll never happen about his books. And why not? Because a bunch of pedantic, elbow-patched professor types who've never written a damn thing themselves say so? Because Lawson doesn't fit in their snooty little box?

Yeah, he's pissed.

It's not Leo's fault – he knows that, beneath a haze of alcohol that he's now realizing was a big mistake on an empty stomach – but Leo's the one who's here, so Leo's where he directs his anger.

"He couldn't move Lawson to the top of the pile as a favor? What's the point of sending a cover letter if he's not gonna do a favor for a friend? What kinda douchebag is this guy?"

Leo's gone pale.

"Jesus Christ," Dana sighs. "You're swapping to water."

Tommy draws breath to continue, and Lawson's face is suddenly crowding into the side of his. His hand squeezes at the back of Tommy's neck. "Chill, baby," he whispers, right up against his ear. Not unkind, but firm.

Tommy's never handled being told to calm down well.

He elbows Lawson in the chest and pushes away from him with a glare. He wobbles, because of course he does, traitorous legs shivering and rippling with pins and needles; Lawson's hand falls to the back of his shirt, and grips tight, and is all that keeps him from crashing over on his side.

The beer buzz has dulled his usual shame and embarrassment, leaving plenty of room for continued anger, and indignation. The stumble doesn't slow him.

Instead, he snaps at Lawson, "Shut up, I'm trying to get you a fucking career." He turns back to Leo, who looks inexplicably sad, now, gaze shifting between the two of them. "Does Keith know how many shitty books are on shelves right now? How many shitty books go viral? There are books out there that are sloppily-written, amateurish, steaming piles of horse shit, and Keith has time for them, but not Lawson's? Are you fucking kidding me?"

Leo's brows knit together. "Tom–" he starts.

Dana swoops in on Tommy's other side, expression furious. Her voice is low, and sharp. "Hey, asshole. What happened to apologizing, huh? What happened to ‘sorry?' You're being a dick, and you need to drink some fucking water and back the fuck off."

No one ever could stand up to Dana when she got like this, and Tommy's no exception.

He backs the fuck off.

He twists away from between the two of them – "Let go," he mutters at Lawson, batting his hand away – and heads for the restroom.

Halfway there, he realizes that his legs are shaking, not from weakness, but from adrenaline, and he left his cane back at the table. He presses on. If he falls, he falls. Like hell is he turning back, or calling to Lawson for help.

He makes it down the hall, through the swinging door, and fetches up hard against the sink, gripping its edge with white-knuckled fists. He stares down into the drain a moment – for a dive bar, the sink's pretty clean – catching his breath, winded as though he sprinted here.

When he lifts his head, he recoils from his reflection. His brows slant sharply downward, and his eyes are tight, lined at the corners. His mouth is a harsh, flat line, lips pale where they're pressed together, and his jaw is set, chin jutted like when he used to argue with Frank, or lay down an edict at the head of the Cattaneo table. His hair's longer, and his clothes are different, but he's not Tommy Granger right now, and he…he isn't quite sure how to slide back into his skin. What he thinks of now as his real skin…but has perhaps been a costume for an angry, bitter man all along.

By the time he sees the door swing open through the mirror, his breathing has picked up another notch. He's nearly wheezing. Lawson enters the bathroom with a deep frown on his face, unfairly handsome in his clinging v-neck tee and jeans. His expression is reminiscent of Before the Shooting, not hi, baby, but what the fuck now? A fitting match for Tommy's mob face.

But then he freezes, and the door swings shut behind him, and he meets Tommy's gaze in the mirror. His frown twitches, and the lines on his forehead smooth beneath the overlong flop of his golden hair, and he approaches the sink slowly, like he's walking up behind a wild animal he doesn't want to spook.

You okay? Tommy expects to hear, and clenches his teeth against it. He's not dizzy, exactly, but all his edges are blurred, and he's angry, and his head feels light, and he wishes he hadn't been drinking on an empty stomach, but thinks the alcohol might take the edge off his temper – at least with Lawson. He won't be mad that Lawson asks if he's okay this time.

But instead, Lawson moves to stand just behind him, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets, and says, "Are you for real?"

Tommy glimpses his own face go slack with surprise before he looks back to Lawson. "What?"

Lawson huffs a sigh, turns away, and shakes his head. "I told you – I told you just last night, and a dozen times before that – how publishing works. How querying works." He turns back, and his frown says come on, man now. "And then you're gonna yell at Leo? Leo? In a bar? When it's not even in his control what happens to my book. Seriously?"

Indignation flares. Tommy tightens his grip on the sink until his knuckles crack, until his ring makes a quiet chink against the porcelain. "Leo encouraged you to write that–"

Lawson's brows fly up. "Write what? That book you don't like? That snotty bullshit?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you don't like it." Lawson's voice is tight with anger, but controlled in a way Tommy's never associated with him. He looks disappointed. Maybe even disgusted. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and props them on his hips, angles his head so he's looking down at Tommy via their reflections. "Right? You think it sucks."

"I never said that." Tommy's heart throbs quick like raindrops in his throat and fingertips. Somehow, he's losing control of this encounter; feels like the floor is titling and like he has to hold on for dear life. "You know that I think that–"

"That everything should go your way all the time? Yeah, I noticed."

"I don't–"

"You spent how many years playing mob boss? Big mansions, penthouses, flashy cars." He ticks things off on his fingers. "Expensive clothes. Anything you wanted, whenever you wanted it. Dudes would stand guard outside an office while you got fucked if you wanted." Here his upper lip curls back, and Tommy doesn't think he's remembering their encounter, but imagining all of the others like it Tommy had in the past.

"Law–"

"And now," Lawson barrels on, raising his voice to be heard above his protest, "you think you're supposed to be magically perfect after you got shot and almost died."

"Would you stop fucking interrupting me?"

"No." Lawson steps in closer, until his breath rushes harsh and hot against the back of Tommy's neck, and his chest bumps into his shoulders. His voice vibrates with barely-leashed anger. "You can be a dick to me if you want, but that out there" – he jabs a finger toward the door – "with Leo? Way over the line, man."

Man. It's not that they don't call each other that. They do, rather frequently. But in this context, it draws a decisive line between all the husbandly pet names Lawson doles out like Trick-or-Treat candy.

The sound of it tightens Tommy's jaw another notch, like a winch cranking. He sees the leap of it in his cheek, the flicker along his temple. "Leo said he could get you a publishing deal." He sounds petulant, but worse than that, he sounds nasty. Petty.

Lawson makes an are you kidding sound in his throat. "Leo said he would pass my manuscript along to a friend. He didn't promise me shit."

"Seven months, Lawson!"

"So fucking what?!"

"Don't you care? Don't you want Leo to give Keith a nudge?" In the mirror, his brows are up, forehead creased with lines like a stack of pancakes. Jesus. When they used to argue like this, they were smooth and round-cheeked with puppy fat; and now they just look haggard.

"A nudge…Jesus." Lawson shakes his head, rakes a hand through his hair, big-eyed and disbelieving with an angry-set mouth. "You don't shake down a publisher, Tommy. This is the real world, not the goddamn mob."

The words hit Tommy like a slap. "I was never a–"

"Oh yeah, buddy," Lawson sneers, "you totally were. Pinstripe suit and everything."

Tired of the mirror game – tired of seeing his own anger-mottled face – Tommy whirls. Totters is a better approximation. He stumbles, grips the sink like a lifeline, and leans back against it hard once he's face-to-face with Lawson. This close, he has to tip his head back an infuriating amount to make eye contact.

"I'm trying to help you get a career. Do you not even care?"

Lawson wore his heart on his sleeve as a kid. He went still and shocked and terrified the first time Tommy kissed him, but Tommy wasn't nervous, because he'd known long before he finally swooped in and pressed their sun-chapped lips together that Lawson loved him. And after that kiss, something broke loose in Lawson's face; his love shined out of him, undisguisable, a light source all its own.

When Tommy arrived back in Eastman, when Tom Cattaneo walked into Coffee Town and almost had a heart attack, the Lawson he encountered had learned a helluva a lot about poker faces and putting up walls in the intervening twenty years. Post-shooting, post-marriage, those walls came right back down, and it's felt like having the old Lawson back ever since.

Right now, though, in a bar bathroom that smells like cheap air freshener, Lawson is as guarded as he's ever seen him. His face closes off. His eyes go flat and cold. If he's hurt, he's hiding it expertly.

In a low, dispassionate voice, he says, "I have wanted to publish a book since I was old enough to read one. It's the only career I've ever wanted. But I understand it might never happen, and that even if it does, it won't happen quickly. And even if it happens slowly, there's no guarantee I'll be successful."

He cocks his head. "Is this about you wanting it for me? Or is this because you're sick of living in my old childhood bedroom and think a fat advance could go a long way toward living like you did as Tom Cattaneo?"

Forget slapped – Tommy feels steamrolled. He lurches back against the sink and nearly falls. All of his anger, mounting and mounting and burning like coals in his belly, evaporates. "I don't – I – Lawson–"

Lawson's lips curve in a small, unhappy smile. "Yeah. Thought so. Why don't you think on that. I'll be in the car." And he leaves without a backward glance.

~*~

In the first five minutes after Lawson's departure, "thinking on that" is more or less comprised of leaning heavily on the sink while white noise crashes through his skull. His left leg is holding, but his right is shaking, and anxiety has his breath coming in short little gasps, and he's not sure he can walk out of here under his own power.

Damn it.

As soon as he acknowledges that truth, the bathroom door swings inward, and a kitchen employee wearing a sauce-streaked white apron and a hair net enters, looking awkward. He's holding Tommy's cane.

"Um, are you Tommy?"

Tommy doesn't know if he wants to laugh or cry. He wipes a trembling hand down his face. "Yeah. That's me."

"This guy – your husband, he said – asked me to make sure you got this."

"Yeah. Thanks." Tommy manages to step forward without letting go of the sink and take the cane. "Thanks," he says again, face heating, insides going cold with regret.

The employee ducks out with a grateful-sounding exhale, and Tommy spends a few minutes unfolding his cane and deciding whether or not he can make the trek through the bar.

He risks it. Walking slow, and careful, and upright, like Dr. Wilson showed him, cane settling firmly on the floor with each step.

Dana and Leo are gone, which isn't a surprise. Someone else has their usual table, a five-person group laughing loud and hard and having a good time – which the four of them could have had if Tommy hadn't ruined it.

By the time he pushes through the front doors, he's jittery from unbalanced blood sugar, exhausted, and, worst of all, ashamed. Guilt weighs heavy on each shuffling step, and he wishes he had something better to offer than sorry. Again.

They nabbed a good parking place when they arrived, so he doesn't have to walk far. But he pulls up three cars down from theirs, struck by the scene that awaits him.

Lawson sits on the nose of the Subaru, uncaring if his jeans scratch the paint. He's wearing his jacket, collar bunched up around his neck with the way his shoulders are slumped. He has his head tipped back, staring up at the moon, a cigarette between his lips, smoke curling up in thin ribbons.

Tommy makes some sort of involuntary noise, too soft to be heard, too low to be a gasp.

The thing is, Lawson has never understood how damn beautiful he is. Even when he hit his tenth grade growth spurt and was all knees and elbows, he's always been the only person Tommy wants to look at it. Lawson calls him pretty, calls him handsome, tells him how hot he is, always discounting his own looks.

But the sight of him makes Tommy feel feverish with want. The long, long stretch of his legs stretched out before him, heels of his shoes resting on the asphalt. The strong column of his throat, bared to the night air as he tips his head back and exhales smoke through his nose like a dragon. And it's a good nose, too, just bold enough not to be "cute," but Tommy thinks it's cute anyway. He wants Lawson when he's working him over with strong hands, and he wants him when he's yawning into his morning coffee, hair impossibly mussed.

He wanted him when they were clumsy kids, and he spent twenty years trying to get back to him, so he could want him up close in person again.

And he keeps fucking it up.

The other thing is, he hasn't seen Lawson smoke since they got married, so tonight he's fucked up even worse than he thought.

He's still angry, though. Frustrated. Upset. All of the above.

He slow-walks his way up to the car, and Lawson sucks down the last of his cigarette before flicking it away and finally turning to regard him. There's enough moonlight to see his half-lidded, disinterested gaze, and to be stung and prickly about it.

Lawson stands without speaking, cracks his back with his arms overhead, and moves for the driver side door.

Tommy climbs awkwardly into his own side, struggling thanks to how close the neighboring car is parked to them.

Lawson doesn't offer to help.