It had been like this for the past four nights.

The anemic light emitting from a clock radio did little to help Peter Harrington fall asleep that night. Blaring back 1:07am, the wisps of blue illumination felt more like a buzzing neon sign in some noir film; driving the protagonist mad with how it blinked and buzzed amidst the nocturnal expanse.

Next to him laid his husband Robert Simmons, who for the first time since coming back from San Lorenzo was finally regaining some sense of peace, and with it some relatively healthy sleep habits. Sure, he tossed and turned, and every now and again he'd talk in his sleep when the dreams were all too vivid. Nonetheless, it was still a far cry from being ensnared in insomnia's clutches and going through the day a cranky, emotionally volatile shell of himself…a fate which now, ironically enough, Peter worried would befall him.

With a resigned and somewhat bitter sigh, Peter rose from his bed and quietly shuffled down the stairwell of their new home. As he prepared a pot of chamomile tea, the mustachioed man retreated to the living room where he gently ran his index finger across the spines of the books in their modest library. Like the arrow on a raffle wheel, his digit suddenly stops on a large black hardcover one would have been mistaken for an empty space were it not for a golden cursive engraving on the spine: Thicket Valley High. Class of '71.

As if being a military brat wasn't hard enough, what with calling parts of the US his childhood home at one point or another, Peter grew up with a nagging knowledge that he was somehow different from the other boys in his ever-fluctuating peer group; words like 'sensitive', 'zesty', and 'artsy' got tossed around amongst his parent's social circle, while those in his age group addressed him with less than pleasant euphemisms. But it was his teenage years in Thicket Valley where Peter addressed, acknowledged, and accepted his truth.

The Peter Harrington Thicket Valley last saw was a very handsome man balancing between the tightrope of rugged and cultured. Page after page after page served as a testament to the man's attempts at adaptation to the crucible of homophobia that was his High School environment. His taste for stereotypically non-masculine pastimes such as opera and poetry were well known, combined with his profound lack of interest in sports. Despite this, while all the men tried out for the football team, Peter instead elected to join the swim team (albeit under duress), and ironically set several high school records with only one ignominious loss to Miriam Weeks of Teddy Bear, South Dakota.

A now adult Peter continues to flip through the almanac of his adolescence. Upon reaching the section dedicated to that year's prom, the pain and sorrow he had hoped to overcome from his childhood in this town finally envelopes him. One photo in particular causes his eyes to well with tears.

It wasn't enough for Peter's bullies that he wasn't some limp-wristed Nancy-boy they could easily torment. Not only could he dish back sassy comebacks or hold his own with them in a fight courtesy of his swimming and weight-lifting, what made them all the more steamed was how easily he had the girls under his spell. When Prom came for his graduating class, who Peter Harrington would be taking had all the historic gravity of who would be the next Pope. In the end, that honor fell to Roze MacNeille, one of the few girls who he could genuinely call his friend and didn't treat him as some sassy accessory or token member of their clique.

"I should drop her a line." He thought to himself. "She's still here after all; married now to some guy named Longfellow."

Glancing out the window at the horizon, Peter forlornly sighed remembering how he spit in its direction once Commencement ceremonies drew to a close. He was going to Walla Walla College, he was going to live a life of adventure and romance in a city somewhere, leaving this town and all the pea-brained rubes that called it home in the proverbial rearview mirror along the highway of life.

*fwump*

As Peter puts back the yearbook, in the process wiping away a steady stream of tears and suppressing a sniffle, he slowly returns to the bedroom and sees the slumbering frame of his beloved husband. His love for Robert outweighed his contempt for this childhood town. And Robert without teaching was like France without the Eifel Tower, or a cured meat and piquant cheese Charcuterie board without a good Barbaresco.

Crawling back beneath the sheets, Peter demurely kisses Robert's cheek before lying back on his side of the bed and waiting for sleep to find him.

"It's for the best." He tells himself. "It's for the best. It's for the best. It's for…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."