(no subject)

[quigonejinn]

Junior year, Bush and his girlfriend and some of their friends go on a vacation: at the resort, there's a rock-climbing wall, and Bush and Tem are standing on the foot of it.

"I bet I could run up that," Bush says, grinning a little.

It's almost completely vertical; there's a bit of a slope to make things easier, but Tem looks at him with her eyebrows raised, and Bush takes that as a dare. So he goes and pays his ten dollars, gets strapped into the harness, and proceeds to horrify the operator, who gets paid $5.50 an hour to make sure that this doesn't happen, by tucking his hands behind his back and kind of running, full-tilt, up the face of the thing.

...

During the summer, Hornblower comes back to school. He gets a small apartment -- an efficiency, the smallest apartment in town, and despite the size of the place, Maria comes to live with him. She picks him up at the airport, helps him get settled into the place with furniture, and it's so awkward between them: Hornblower is determined to be kind, but they haven't seen each other for so long. It barely feels like they know each other, and they certainly haven't ever lived together before.

It's an efficiency apartment. Terribly small. She puts curtains in the windows, and at night, they share a bed that tucked against the wall. She makes a lot of stew with beans -- it's cheap and filling, and after six days, Horatio sits down at the compter lab in the library, rolls up his sleeves, signs in so that he can access the terminal, goes to the school directory website, does a bit of pointing and scrolling, then logs into his e-mail and sends Bush a note.

This is appended, automatically, at the end of the note:

H. Hornblower
Assistant Professor in Mathematics and Political Science
Packard Hall, Room 155
(251) 628-1821

He looks at it for a moment, studies the words, and then hits send.

...

And that is the start of this story. Hornblower has been in England for two years, getting a degree in mathematics and reading a good bit of political science. Bush has been at school, playing football and working in the summers at home. He is still dating Tem -- after that New Year's with Hornblower, he drove four hours back to school, got his fraternity pin out of his desk drawer, put it in his pocket, made the four hour drive back, kept it in his pocket, wrote a two page letter that he agonized over, agonized over some more, carried in his pocket next to the fraternity pin, even went to the library to look, rather shamefacedly, at books of letters like what he was trying to write. He finally asked Lisa to read over for him before sending it to Tem. When they all went back to school for the spring term, he asked Tem, formally, if she'd wear his fraternity pin.

And now, Horatio is back in America.

He has a teaching position, tenure-track, contingent on him eventually getting his doctorate and joining the faculty on a full-time basis. It's an unusual arrangement, but Horatio, as the hiring committee puts it, is an unusual talent.

The apartment is small. Even for an efficency, it is small, though it has a good deal of light. Maria has put down a bathmat in the bathroom, and the shower curtain is a pretty, cheerful yellow. The pots are clean, and the refrigerator is neat; she is still working on finding a way to cheer the mantle in the living room, as the fireplace has been bricked up for years, and she is looking in the thrift shops for a camera that she can use for photographs. Maria has already purchased a dozen frames, of varying sizes, and she keeps them in the closet, under the winter coats.

Horatio and Maria. Bush and Tem. Football and ambition. Bush has, at most, one more school year in this town; Hornblower wants to sepnd the rest of his professional life there.

...

The town has not changed, Hornblower thinks. He didn't expect it to have changed much during his two years away, but he did think that he might come back to it as a different person. It would look different to him, then, shouldn't it?

Hornblower arranges to meet Bush on a coffee place near campus, and when he gets there, Bush is already waiting at one of the corner tables. There's a bottle of water in front of him; he makes the furniture look small, and during the time when he doesn't yet know that Hornblower is there, when Hornblower is standing in the parking lot and looking into the place, he watches Bush take his cap off, smooth down his hair a little, then settle it back on himself. Backwards, with the flattened Chicago C over the adjustable strap.

Bush fiddles with the label on the bottled water. Bush looks out the window on the other side.

When Hornblower comes in, he jumps up, and he hugs Hornblower Hornblower. One large arm over Hornblower's shoulder, another around his back, and Bush is smiling and smiling at Hornblower.

"I hear you got roughed last year up by Robertson and those big boys they have down south," Hornblower says, once he's got his breath back. He'd long-ago decided that something like that was going to be the first thing that he said to Bush when he got back. He had evaluated a number of phrases, a number of openings, and before leaving his office, he had done taken a final look at the numbers from that game with Auburn to make sure that he'd remembered everything correctly, that it was the most appropriate element of that game to discuss.

Bush still has a hand on Hornblower's shoulder. It is disconcerting to be smiled at with such intensity. Bush has his head tilted a little to the side, and he squeezes Hornblower's shoulder.

"So you're a professor now," Bush says, grinning from ear to ear, as if he still really can't believe that it's his friend standing in front of him, and now his hand is lying on the back of Hornblower's neck, thumb just behind Hornblower's ear.

"And," Bush says, still grinning. "You've got an accent."

...

"Do you think you're going to be drafted?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

Silence from Hornblower.

"All right." Bush has that smile on his face again, much like when he was seeing Hornblower again. "Probably."

...

So yes, football is important to Bush.

Comments

[iansmomesq.livejournal.com]

*eyes widen* Is that your roommate's journal?

[quigonejinn.livejournal.com]

XD Yes. I love her dearly. Aside from the fact that we're both Chinese and female and riotously fond of yelling inappropriate things, we're so profoundly different that it's not even funny. She wears $200 jeans and has a pink IPod Nano and, apparently, really has trouble getting into porn unless she can project herself into it. Which completely boggles me to the point of almost being upset.

I am fascinated by football. The Bears quarterback looks like he's going to cry. :(