Disclaimer: I do not own anything of Jurassic Park.
Written while taking a break from studying for exams.
The first time Grant held Billy Brennan, really held him, he thought he might as well be holding a current in the ocean or a far off sonic boom. Billy's frame vibrated in his arms like a coiled spring of sustained energy, like an electron leaping from one atom to another. It was then that Grant knew Billy had such promise, such a future ahead of him. Grad school was the only thing holding him back from shooting out into the world like a firecracker. Billy was like a firecracker now, blazing so unexpectedly into his life, bright and fleeting.
It was just a summer fling, as easy as saying the word. But it simultaneously meant nothing and everything to him. Something less than a quick stop for coffee at the local place in Fort Peck and something distinctly more than a dark starry night murmuring silly painfully deliberate words under the hum of the electric generator.
It could only end with summer. It had to end with summer. He knew they would simply not endure through the school year when they would go step back into their old roles, he the professor and Billy the enterprising young grad student. Certainly it would be over far too soon and too suddenly.
But he's loved him without regret.
They hold onto each other tightly now, always in each other's space, squashed elbow to elbow in the dirt, and playing pool every Friday night at Hell Creek Grill with a single-minded religious ferocity.
Because they know if they ever drift the slightest bit, they'll snap like an old rubber band, slingshotting out of each other's personal orbits like comets. They won't just be parallel lines, working beside each other, teaching at U Montana together, letting old memories fade and never intersecting again. No, when they part, they'll repel like magnets to opposite ends of the earth, only hearing of each other sporadically in their lives through a conference or a research paper or a book. And that's when they'll think 'oh,' and 'I remember the time when we,' and 'I wonder what he's doing right now?'
Perhaps then he'll linger over the phone, debating whether to call him up, ask him how life is going.
But he won't in the end. Because that's not how it worked.
Sometimes he'll be brave enough or stupid enough or drunk enough to actually punch in the phone number and count the number of rings while his hands get damp and slippery, and he starts to feel the soundless emptiness of the apartment closing up around him.
Sometimes Billy will answer, say hello. Say, hello, is someone there?
That's when Grant will put the phone down. Because he can't bear to tell Billy he sounds exactly the same as he always has.
But he'll keep calling. And Billy will keep answering. A long perpetual prank call.
Because this is how they are, this has to be enough.
Because life taught them too soon about the feel of two hands reaching out for each other and just missing. About the bitter tangible shape of the space between.
END