Friday Night Lights Fic: The World Outside the Windows
For the first two months of college, Landry comes to visit her. He shows up on weekends and they go down to the Alamo Freeze and someone makes fun of him and he blows it off, so it’s kind of like nothing’s changed. Except that everything has.
Tyra doesn’t understand the extent of that everything, however, until the first time she visits him at Rice, and suddenly the words full scholarship and double major in literature and engineering mean something other than that he’s a nerd. He takes her back to his dorm room and his roommate (Geoff with a “G”) has four people over, and they’re all playing some video game and laughing a lot, and from the way they grin at Landry when the two of them walk in, it’s clear that they know a lot about her.
“Ooh, it’s Laundry’s lady friend,” one of the boys says. Later she will learn that they call him Dead Cow Mike. She will never know why.
Landry gives her an apologetic smile and drops her hand and someone lunges at him, and a minute later one of his friends is sitting on him and pushing an X-Box controller into his hand, and she’s still standing there in the middle of the room in a skirt that seems too short for the first time.
Within half an hour she understands that this is where Landry belongs, that this is who he really is. None of his friends think he’s just a geek. They see the same things in him that she does, and they can talk to him about Existentialism and Java compilers and there’s a girl with curly hair and a great rack who clearly wants to compile all over him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
Someone asks where she goes to school and he says, “State school, she wanted to stay near home,” and Tyra understands that he’s ashamed to say his girlfriend goes to community college, and she dips her head because she can still remember when that seemed beyond her wildest aspirations.
Tyra has been clear from before their first kiss that he was too good for her, but it had been ok somehow in Dillon. When the whole town hadn’t been good enough for him. Now she thinks of him back at Applebee’s last Sunday when he could have been here and feels herself as an anchor, dragging him back to somewhere he should never have been at all.
Finally Landry breaks free from his friends and the stupid shooting-people-in-space-suits game and offers to take her on a campus tour. It’s dark, and she can barely see the facades of the buildings in the yellow light of the streetlamps, but she tries to memorize everything, so she can imagine him here when she’s far away.
“I’m sorry about the guys,” he says in that wry self-deprecating voice she has always loved and wanted to argue with, and she just shrugs. She can’t think of what to say to this Landry. If she were him she would know what to say, and it would be sweet and funny and true. But she is Tyra Collette, whose big mouth has never gotten her anything but trouble, and her lips twist as she looks away.
“Hey, are you all right?” he asks.
She turns back at him and nods, smiling because she doesn’t trust her voice, but he can see the lie in her face.
“What is it?”
She shrugs again. “Oh come on,” she says, forcing herself into it because Tyra is a lot of things but she isn’t a coward, “you know I don’t belong here.”
“I’m here,” he tells her, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “You belong anywhere I am.”
“I’m no college girl,” she says. “I’m not -”
“Tyra, you can be anything you want to be.” He presses a quick kiss onto her lips. “But all I want you to be is my girlfriend. Can you do that?”
And how can she do anything but smile for real, and let him lead her off the path and into a dark-windowed building where he guides her up stairs and down corridors and finally into a tiny room with a couch against one wall and a table with three computer stations on the other (“got the key from my TA - said I needed somewhere quiet to study,” he explains). Landry sinks onto the tweedy couch and tugs at her hand, and she looks down at him through her hair.
“Why Landry,” she says with the mocking innocence of any good porn star, “have you brought me in here with designs upon my virtue?”
And she can hear the Tim Riggins in her head snort and say “What virtue?” but Landry only smiles the smile he saves for her and says, “I just want to feel you,” and Tyra might be the toughest girl in Dillon but she has no defense against that.
She kind of hates that she only knows what she’s doing with him when she has her hands under his clothes, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. As soon as their shirts come off it all feels comfortable again, and she still hasn’t gotten over the way he touches her, like he can’t quite believe he’s allowed to, like he can’t decide whether to take his time and learn every curve of her body or hurry in case it might be taken away. It’s cheesy and it kind of reminds her that he thinks she’s something that she’s not, but when she reaches into his pants he forgets to breathe, and she giggles when his face starts to turn red from lack of oxygen.
Afterwards, they sprawl together naked on the too-short couch, and he’s heavy on top of her but she likes it. She rubs a foot up and down his shin, and he traces the line where her breast rises from her chest, but in a way that’s more relaxed than sexy. His stomach is softer than it was last year when he played football.
“Do you mind being here?” he asks at last. His face is tucked into her neck like he’s maybe not brave enough to look at her face.
She sucks her lips into her mouth and reflects for a second, and it’s hard to think of anything beyond the blank windows fogged by their humid exertions, but once she starts the sharpness of the world comes back all too readily. “I don’t know,” she says at last. “I don’t - I guess I haven’t gotten used to it.”
“Next weekend I’ll come visit you,” he promises, and rubs a little impatiently at the skin of her side. “But I’d really like it if you come out again sometime… The guys are never going to believe I’m dating a girl like you unless you make some repeat appearances.”
“What, it’s so hard to believe you’d fuck a small town slut?”
His hands are on her shoulders suddenly and then she’s above him, looking down into his furious face. “Don’t you ever call yourself that again,” he tells her. “Ok?” She just stares at him. “I’m serious,” he says, voice sharp but somehow still kind. “You’re a beautiful woman who could kick the ass of anyone at this school.”
Tyra tries to look away, because it’s a lie and they both know it, he has the blood on his hands to prove just how helpless she is, but there’s nothing to see except his face. “Bullshit,” she says, and he grins inexplicably.
“Not literally,” he explains, like this makes him happy, “I mean I have to admit some of the girls around here are pretty butch. But like metaphysically. In the throwdown of pure awesome. You are like the heavyweight belt holder.”
There is no way not to kiss him for this, so she laughs into his mouth and the world outside the windows goes away again.
Tyra is not a college girl, but she’s dating a college boy, and for a moment she thinks she can do this for him.