The Misery Trent
Trent found himself standing in his doorway talking to Daria about something that seemed rather surreal to talk about at his age.
The death of a classmate.
He tried to keep his cool, rather easy considering the three joints and the six pack he had consumed in the last hour.
However with a sharp cookie like Daria on your tail, it was normally a safe bet that she'd read you like a book.
But she was wonderfully distracted, a rarity if Trent had ever seen one.
Then Daria asked a question that he wished she hadn't.
"Would you say that it really makes you think?"
Trent bottled up all of his emotions and lied flatly, "No."
There was a pause and Daria replied, "Thank you for that."
"Huh?"
Daria turned to leave, but Janie needed her more than he, Trent, required her gone.
So he threw together a story on the spot and managed to get her up the stairs, where Janie was and they could sort things out.
As soon as he heard a door open and close, Trent sighed and flopped on the living room couch, the ceiling all spinney, but his memories crystal clear.
Tommy's beautiful face, before his nose was destroyed, the way his eyes shined in moonlight, the taste of sweat and musk on his skin, and how his calloused hands felt soooo good on the shaft...
Trent hissed, not realizing that his hands were slipping into his baggy pants.
But the memories of happy clandestine meetings in the shadows and behind closed doors faded, as Tommy had been sucked into the Jock-boy culture of the Lawndale Lions.
How he turned from a sweet, caring guy and into a total jerk that treated everyone like crap simply because he was afraid to let anyone see the real Tommy Sherman.
Afraid that if the idiot masses learned that he, Tommy Sherman, loved a stoner dude, emphasis on dude, like Trent Lane that his football fame would be taken away forever.
The meetings had stopped being romantic and became purely about getting off, about Tommy Sherman sating his shameful need to have Trent inside of him.
By senior year, if it hadn't been for the weed, and the booze, and the music that he and Jesse were making together, Trent believed that he wouldn't have been able to cope.
Then graduation came and went, Tommy Sherman stopping coming altogether.
He went off to college.
Trent stayed in Lawndale.
To take care of Janie, to make a band worth playing in, and to find someone to fill the void in his heart.
Of the three, he barely managed to make the first one work.
Mystik Spiral sucked, even if he'd never say it aloud.
As for the void, well it was easily filled in a physical sense by a string of girls and guys; the only one that stuck around was Monique.
But even in a drugged up stupor, Trent was able to see that it was nothing but good fucking between them.
There had been that tiny ray of hope in his heart that, somehow, someway, that the Tommy he had known was still in there, somewhere and would come back to him.
Now... It wasn't ever going to happen.
"Wheresss the boozzzeee?" Trent slurred to the empty room as he lay on his back on the couch, on the verge of passing out.
It was better than facing a world without Tommy Sherman.
FIN