Disclaimer: Rent is Jonathan Larson's.
Though he had no key, the locked door proved no deterrent. He stepped lightly onto a scruffy blue carpet and paused to examine his surroundings. He was in a living room with unmatched, overstuffed chairs; a coffee table covered in art books, dog-eared copies of Fear and Trembling and the Pensees, and Penguin Classics; and a Game Cube hooked up to a TV. The bookshelves were half stuffed with books and half dripping with framed photographs.
After giving the room a thorough looking-over, he nodded and moved to the nearest bookshelf. He touched one of the photographs: it showed a couple on a couch he recognized as the one across the room. The couple in the photo had their arms around each other and one man was whispering something apparently hilarious to the other.
He knew immediately that the joke was a distraction to keep the second man from knowing their picture was being taken. He smiled and moved to another picture.
This one showed seven people in Sheep's Meadow. A skinny Latina girl tickled a sulking man with pierced ears. A busty woman was all but stripping for the camera while a second woman watched her with a smile pasted on for the camera. There was a man so pale he was almost albino and a couple so involved in making out they seem oblivious to the photographer.
The intruder smiled and moved away from the bookshelf. He wandered into the next room, but that was a kitchen and he had no interest in food. He found the bathroom next. In the cupboard were bottles with chemical names he could not identify, prescribed to someone he knew, a long time ago that felt like yesterday.
In what appeared to be a dual office he found stacks of essays, most badly-written and marked over and over in red ink, and neatly kept tax portfolios.
The bedroom was last. He smiled at the nightstand cluttered with joints, condoms and paperbacks. There was a pair of reading glasses that could have belonged to the stranger but, he knew, didn't. They belonged to the man he knew a long time ago.
He heard an echo of broken glass and grinding metal. It made him wince even then, even knowing it was a sound over a decade gone.
He opened the third drawer of the dresser. It contained, as he knew it would, clean and folded shirts. He smiled. Some anarchists liked certain things not to change. He lifted one of the shirts with monumental effort and smelled it. In years that smell had not changed, the same sweat and nicotine, same marijuana, same deodorant. He inhaled it deeply. He missed that scent and the crushing hugs it accompanied.
At the sound of keys in a lock he raised his head. Shit. Half a second until the door opened.
When Thomas B. Collins, computer genius, anarchist, irreverent professor and soon-to-be forty-year-old man stepped into his apartment, he was surprised to see his ex-boyfriend lounging on his couch, reading a student's essay. He blinked, pinched himself, then tossed down his backpack and said, "Hey, Benjamin."
Benny looked up. He nodded. "Thomas."
"So, uh…" Collins pulled off his jacket and dropped it on top of his backpack. "Haven't seen you in a while."
"Yeah."
"Not since the accident."
Once again Benny was overwhelmed by the smell of burning rubber and the screeching and shattering, the blaring horn. "Let's not talk about that," he replied, his words tripping over one another. "Let's talk about you."
Collins laughed. "Been twelve years now," he said. "I didn't think I'd last this long. The new drugs are incredible. I remember when it was 4H."
"Is your boyfriend…?"
"No." Collins shook his head. His smile faded slightly. "He's negative."
Benny understood what this meant. It was the guilt and worry, the knowledge that someone very much loved would one day, because of the mistakes of that loving person, be left very much alone. It was having seen other crippled by being left behind. "He knows about Angel and… everything?"
Collins nodded. "He knows everything," he confirmed, which Benny understood to include Angel, Benny and everything before and after including things Benny himself did not know.
"You still miss those days."
Again, he nodded. It was not just Angel. It was everything: youth, idealism, love, all the things that make the world burn brighter.
"Thomas." For the first time, Benny peeled himself off the couch. He sauntered over and touched Collins' cheek. "You feel empty and alone, but you're not. The past twelve years have been a gift. I know you think an era's ending. I know it hurts. You can't do this to yourself, Thomas. Life goes on. Pick up your address book—tell me you don't but I know you keep one. Throw a party with all your old friends. Everything you had together still happened."
"But it can't come back…"
Benny shrugged. "Semantically. Time doesn't end."
"Eras do."
"Eras are established in the future to study the past. This is just time moving."
Collins couldn't help but smile. If anyone asked which of his friends in those days had been the least emotionally perceptive, he would have chosen Benny, yet here he hit the nail on the head. Collins felt like he was drowning inside himself with the weight of everything he had been and everything he hadn't done. His birthday three weeks away felt like the end of the world.
He licked the roof of his mouth, suddenly gone dry. "Ben… the acci—"
"Let's not talk about the accident," Benny insisted. "Let's talk about everyone who loves you and all the memories you're blocking out because of some imagined grief."
Collins half-laughed, half-cried. "Since when did you get perceptive?" he asked.
"Twelve years is a long time."
He nodded. "Yeah," he agreed. "You know Maureen—"
Benny rolled his eyes. "Maureen getting herpes was no surprise to anyone," he replied. "Whereas you settling down with a tax accountant…"
Collins nodded sarcastically. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "I love Sam. He loves me."
"And work…"
"Tenure," Collins supplied. He indicated the essay in Benny's hand. "Same students who can't string a sentence together taking my class for the gen. ed. Same insecure freshmen coming to office hours."
"Any Rogers or Marks or Bennys?" Benny asked.
Collins shook his head. "Sure," he replied, "but…"
Benny nodded. He understood that the age gap became too much between babies whose biggest losses were quadrupeds and men who had watched the world die. "Tom, you know so many people who went through that time. All you have to do is reach out."
Collins nodded. "I miss you more than I thought I would."
Benny laughed. "Did you think you would?" he asked.
That set Collins laughing. Without a thought he leaned closer. He cupped Benny's cheek, feeling suddenly warm all over, and leaned in to kiss him as he had not done in nearly fifteen years. It was like his first kiss all over again, the way the past came rushing back to him, the way his eyes closed of their own volition, the way Benny's lips felt lighter than butterfly wings against his.
"Tom?"
Sam opened the door and walked into the apartment. He stopped when he saw his partner, eyes closed, in a deeply intimate moment with thin air. A three-page essay marked with red ink fluttered to the ground.
the end
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