Chapter Text
Neil looks at the side of his cup. It has never borne his actual name, but this variation is just ridiculous. “Neigh,” he reads aloud, flatly.
Andrew doesn’t blink. “Ah,” he says. “Finally admitting that you’re a horse?”
“Eating oatmeal doesn’t make me a horse,” Neil is compelled to point out. Earlier in the week Kevin had been complaining about Neil eating the last of the blueberries with his oatmeal—apparently he had wanted to use some of them as part of a smoothie and Neil should have known that—and Andrew has been mocking Neil for his eating habits ever since, presumably because he has never eaten oatmeal in his life.
On the day of, Andrew had raised his eyebrows at them when they had gotten to the counter and asked Neil if they needed to add grain to their menu to make him feel more stable.
Yesterday, Andrew had informed him that oatmeal is not people food.
Today, he has apparently given up on any semblance of subtlety.
“Horses eat oats,” Andrew replies blandly, with all the self-confidence of a man who knows that he is right.
Neil narrows his eyes at him. He might have allowed himself to stay at the counter to argue with Andrew if Kevin wasn’t waiting for him at their usual table; Kevin gets antsy if left alone for too long, especially in public venues, and he’s already had to wait for Neil once today, though Neil hadn’t been able to control his class running late. “I’m leaving,” Neil tells Andrew with an air of finality, and steps away from the counter, determined to prioritize Kevin over a barista who’s been making horse jokes at him all week—
—and that resolve crumbles the second that Andrew says, “Wait.”
Andrew has never prevented him from leaving before, so Neil hesitates and turns back to him. Andrew’s hand is in a loose fist, palm down, and he is holding it over the counter in obvious invitation. Neil’s curiosity overrides his caution, and he puts his hand under Andrew’s, allowing Andrew to drop the object onto his palm.
Andrew says, voice low and expression carefully neutral, “You forgot your sugarcube.”
Neil looks at him, then at his hand, where a sugarcube rests, misshapen where its form had rubbed against Andrew’s skin. As far as Neil knows, The Foxhole does not stock up on sugarcubes; they have only packets of sugar. When he shifts his gaze to the counter, he spies the corner of a Tupperware container behind the tip jar—a Tupperware container with its lid resting on top of it rather than sealing it.
There is only one explanation, and it doesn’t make any sense.
Andrew brought sugarcubes to the coffee shop specifically to hand one to Neil for a shitty horse joke?
Neil doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or throw the sugarcube onto the floor, doesn’t know if he wants to tell Andrew how much he hates him or yank Andrew across the counter to kiss him, and the last is such a startling impulse that he just—turns around and walks away.
“Holy shit,” he hears Nicky whisper—or what amounts to whispering from Nicky, anyway. His voice is shaking with the effort that it’s taking him not to laugh. “Andrew, I think you broke him.”
Kevin hadn’t seen what had happened and doesn’t seem to have overheard it, either; he gives Neil an unimpressed look when Neil takes his seat across from him, and he takes out one of his earbuds to tell him, waspish, “It doesn’t take that long to get a cup of coffee.”
“Take it up with Andrew,” Neil says numbly. “He was being a comedian.”
Kevin sneers faintly. “He’d better stick to his day job.” Then his brows draw together and he leans back in his chair to look at Neil properly. “Why do you look like you want to die?”
Neil can see the counter from where he’s sitting; he always picks a spot where he has an unimpeded view of the entrance and the workers. There are no more customers for the moment, and Andrew has taken the opportunity to steal a muffin from the display case. He meets Neil’s gaze and raises an eyebrow in silent question, and Neil realizes that he’s still holding the sugarcube.
He opens his hand over the table, and gravity peels the thing off his skin. It’s more of a lump now than a cube, and it bounces a couple of times as it rolls to the side. “Because of this,” Neil says to Kevin, and, for some reason inexplicable to him, is still looking at Andrew when he licks the remaining sugar off his palm.
Andrew’s expression goes blank.
Neil has seen this happen a few times, though he still hasn’t figured out what it means; it’s usually followed by Andrew telling him that he hates him. With that in mind, he taps two fingers to his temple in a mocking salute, mimicking one of Andrew’s signature gestures, before returning his attention to Kevin, who is looking at him with something akin to horror. “What?” he asks defensively.
“What the fuck,” Kevin manages to say after several seconds of his mouth moving aimlessly. “What the fuck, Neil.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that if you want me to understand you,” Neil reminds him, because sometimes Kevin forgets that he is not a mind-reader.
“Why are you flirting in front of me,” Kevin grits out, after several more seconds of wordless indignation.
“I’m not—” Neil cuts himself off. Looks down at the sugarcube. Looks across the room to Andrew, who is determinedly eating the muffin with one hand and fending off a suddenly delighted Nicky with the other. “I… What the fuck?”
“What the fuck,” Kevin agrees.
Neil opens his mouth, then shuts it. Opens it again. The only thing he can get out is, “What the fuck?”
The woman sitting behind Kevin tenses a moment before turning around to face them—or, well, Neil, since he’s the only one that she can see. “Excuse me,” she says, sheepish, like she’s sorry that she has to speak to them at all, though her eyes are blinking rapidly as she takes in Neil’s scars, “I’m FaceTiming my niece, and she might be able to hear you. Can you, uh, hold back on all the ‘fuck’s?” She winces at her own misstep, her cheeks flushing with color.
Kevin tilts his shoulder back but doesn’t move his head. She might be too close for him to feel comfortable looking at her; she might also have startled him too much for him to get his body to cooperate. “Of course, ma’am,” he says automatically in the voice that he reserves for strangers—upbeat and wholly pleasant, just Southern enough that it’s familiar and warm. “We’ll watch our language from now on. Thank you for telling us.”
“Thank you,” she says, with a glance toward Neil who just stares back at her, and twists back around, shoulders hunching as if to block them out.
Kevin and Neil gaze at each other, the flow and volley of their disbelief interrupted, until Neil says, “I’ll let you talk about your new song all you want if you don’t tell Jean and Jeremy about this.”
Kevin pointing out the flirting is bad enough. He wouldn’t mind Jean knowing about it, but Jean would tell Jeremy, and Jeremy knowing would be… well.
It isn’t that he doesn’t like Jeremy. He does like him. Jeremy is probably the only reason that they somewhat resemble functioning human beings; they had met him at a Panera Bread two days after moving to South Carolina, and through a series of events that confounded three of the four of them, Jeremy had become their first friend who had never been a part of a criminal organization.
Jeremy is bizarrely normal. He has a Facebook and a Twitter and a SoundCloud and a YouTube. He’s been playing guitar since he was thirteen and he picked up the ukelele at seventeen because he thought it’d be fun. He has a Netflix subscription. He has no problems eating desserts or greasy food. He owns an XBox and a 3DS. He says things like blanket burrito and I give that a good four out of five barks.
He is not anywhere on the aromantic or asexual spectrums. He also believes in true love. These two facts mean that if he catches word of Neil indicating interest in another person, he will want to know all the details, and he will want to tell Neil that he is very happy for him, and he will want to give Neil dating advice.
That is what he had done with Kevin eight months ago when Kevin had announced over dinner that he and Thea were a thing now.
Neil very much hopes to avoid the same experience.
Kevin squints at him but doesn’t question the negotiating. He is possibly thinking about the same thing that Neil is. “I won’t bring it up to them, but if they ask me directly, I’m not going to lie to them.”
That’s probably as much as he’s going to get from Kevin, considering that Kevin has idolized Jeremy ever since finding Jeremy’s SoundCloud and the fact that Kevin deals very badly with disappointing the people that he wants to impress, so Neil nods. “Fine, but once you say anything about it, I’m no longer obligated to listen to you.”
“Deal.” Kevin reaches around his laptop to retrieve his cup of tea and takes a singular sip before launching into a rant about his latest song. It’s for Thea, which shouldn’t be surprising but is; Kevin is possibly the least romantic person that Neil has ever met and has never written a love song before.
Kevin writes the music before the lyrics, a holdover from his time playing classical piano, and has gotten the basic sound down, though he used only one instrument to do it. He offers Neil the earbud that he had taken out when Neil had sat down, and Neil has to move his chair closer to Kevin in order to take it. The demo is as grand as Neil expects, heavy and resounding, with trills that peak and hint at something heavenly.
It’s not bad, until Kevin opens up NotePad to show Neil the first draft of his lyrics.
Neil can only make it to the bridge before he turns his head to look at Kevin and says, “What the fuck, Kevin.”
Kevin looks offended. “What? What’s wrong with them?”
“Literally everything. No, I’m serious,” he insists when Kevin takes a breath, clearly preparing to protest. “Literally everything about this is terrible. I mean, yeah, perfect meter, good job, but the end rhymes are forced and pretentious, you actually attempted to use alliteration—wow, see, I can do it too—and overall it reads like a history paper you mangled so that you could turn it in for a poetry class.”
“It’s not that bad,” Kevin argues. “‘The end rhymes’—for fuck’s sake—” With a guilty start, he glances behind him— “for heck’s sake, Neil, you know it’s ‘external rhyme’—and the internal rhymes are spot-on, by the way, as well as the allusions—”
“Kevin,” Neil says, “you literally use the phrase ‘the pirate of my heart’. Kevin.”
“Thea would appreciate it.” And—yeah, Kevin is officially sulking. “She likes pirates. She wanted to be a pirate when she was ten.”
Neil stares at him.
Kevin allows it for—Neil counts it—ten seconds before rallying, which takes the form of him leaning over the table, closer to Neil, and jabbing a finger at him. His most comfortable state of being is when he is bossing someone else around. “You try writing a love song!” he hisses, as if he wasn’t the one with the idea to make one in the first place. “I’d like to see you come up with something better!”
“Uh,” Neil says, “you do remember that I don’t have a partner, right?”
“But you do have a—”
“Kevin,” Neil warns.
Kevin huffs, but he subsides, settling back in his chair. “Regardless, here’s a new deal: you can only insult my song if you prove that you can do better.”
Neil’s automatic response is to tell Kevin no, just to be contrary, but he bites it back because—well. He likes to be realistic. He doesn’t think that he can actually come up with more than two good things about Kevin’s song, and the second good thing is perhaps unduly charitable, since it’s “the song was written by Kevin Day.”
In his defense, normally Kevin is a better songwriter than this.
Neil pulls his coffee toward himself and tastes it; it’s so bitter that it has to be his normal order, which is a pleasant surprise. Andrew has been on a campaign to get him to try every drink on the menu because, apparently, liking black coffee makes Neil uninteresting and disappointing. Perhaps the recent slew of horse jokes has been enough to amuse him.
When Neil sets his cup down, he’s gathered his thoughts. “I have two conditions.”
His tone makes Kevin straighten, his curiosity piqued. Neil is known for running his mouth, not using his brain. “Name them.”
“One: neither of us can seek help for our songs. That means no asking for input, nothing. So I can listen to you talk about your song, but I can’t say anything in response.” He waits for Kevin to nod before continuing. “Two: we can’t be the judges. We’re already biased against each other, so we need unbiased third parties to decide which song they like better.”
Kevin mulls over this. “Nice wording, there. Fine, they can go with their personal preference.” Neil privately thinks that personal preference is the only way that Kevin would win the contest, but he tugs the hair in front of his eyes to avoid saying so out loud. “But the judges have to include the people that the songs are for.”
Neil grimaces. “Only if we don’t have to tell anyone who the songs are for.”
Kevin rolls his eyes. “Somehow, I doubt that anyone will be able to mistake who you’re writing about.”
“Get fucked.”
Kevin looks behind him again, mouth pinching as if he wants to apologize to the woman FaceTiming with her niece. “Besides, what would happen if he found out later that it was about him? It’d be better to let him know from the start.”
That… is a good point. Andrew does not particularly enjoy surprises, and he dislikes not knowing things, especially things that he deems important. Being the subject of a love song probably falls into that category.
Dammit.
“Fine. Yeah. I’ll let him know. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Neil is going to regret this.
Surprise: it’s been twenty minutes, and Neil is already regretting it.
Kevin had been torn between continuing to talk about Thea and forcing Neil to get started on his own song, so he had compromised: Neil took out the pocket-sized notebook in his backpack that he used to write down ideas, and Kevin lectured him on what makes a love song tolerable and what makes a love song great.
Neil has been slowly sipping his coffee to prevent himself from saying anything. He has also moved his chair back against the wall so that he won’t be close enough to swing at Kevin with the pocket knife that he keeps in his waistband.
Nate is still tempted to fling the blade at him, but as long as Neil is using both hands to hold his cup, he can’t.
His new vantage point means that he notices Andrew approaching him bearing two cups of coffee; he rarely offers Kevin refills, apparently enjoying making Kevin have to ask for it, so Neil assumes that the second coffee is for Andrew. Andrew sets the cups by Neil’s elbow and snags a chair from the woman’s table; she jumps, severely enough that she bangs her leg against the underside of the table. Andrew doesn’t apologize, just drags the chair over by Neil’s and takes a seat.
Normally that would make Neil itch—the quickest escape route blocked, his body penned between the window and another person—but when it’s Andrew, he doesn’t mind.
Kevin had faltered when Andrew had arrived, which had given Neil the opportunity to peel his hands off his empty cup to retrieve his new one (he had thought that it was unmarked, but Andrew had drawn a horse on the side), but he recovers after glaring at Andrew for scraping the chair legs across the floor. “If you mention coffee in your song, you won’t have a leg to stand on if you want to insult mine,” he tells Neil. “This isn’t advice. This is a fact.”
“Our deal only stops me from insulting your song, not from insulting you,” Neil reminds him before turning to Andrew. “What do I have to do to get you to look at Kevin’s lyrics and tell him what you think?”
Andrew considers this. He’s the only other person who calls Kevin pretentious—Neil thinks that Kevin had mentioned having an English class with him—so he must have some idea of what exactly Neil wants him to experience. “You have to finish your drink and give me a tip for it,” he decides.
That means that this coffee isn’t his regular order. Neil tastes it and makes a face; it’s so sweet that it makes his teeth ache, but it’s not the worst thing that Andrew has inflicted upon him. “Fine. It’s gonna be a shitty tip, though.”
Andrew shrugs in acceptance and taps his fingers on the table. “Kevin, lyrics.”
Kevin gives them a sour look, but he clicks the screen a few times before turning his laptop toward Andrew. He’s pulled NotePad up again, though he hasn’t made it full screen, letting them see the music program in the background. Andrew tugs the laptop closer to himself to read the lyrics.
It doesn’t take him long, although he reads the whole song, unlike Neil.
A muscle in Andrew’s jaw tenses. He lifts his head to level Kevin with a look that plainly demands to know how he is still alive. “You can wax poetic about Shakespeare, but this is the best you’ve got for your girlfriend?”
“Thea likes pirates,” Kevin insists. “Neil, tell him.”
Neil only knows that because Kevin had told him maybe half an hour ago, but he lifts a shoulder and tells Andrew, “She wanted to be a pirate when she was ten, apparently.”
Andrew raises his eyebrows and takes a slow sip of his coffee. “And Kevin wants to let her relive her childhood dream?”
“It’s romantic,” Kevin persists. He is really set on describing Thea as a pirate, apparently. Neil will have to mention this in the group chat later; Dermott and Alvarez will love this piece of information and will happily tear into Kevin for it. “It’s better than anything Neil will be able to come up with. He’s never been in love before.”
Andrew flicks Neil a look, maybe remembering that one of the first things that he learned about Neil was his sexuality and wondering why Neil would be writing anything about love, but Neil ignores it to sit up in sudden realization. “Wait. Is that why you’re writing a love song? Because you want to make a grand gesture before telling her you love her?”
Kevin nods, expression softening a little. “She’s… so different from Riko. The way I feel about her—I know, now, what real love feels like, and… I want to tell her. She’s waited this long for me.” Some of Neil’s disbelief must show on his face, because Kevin narrows his eyes at him, dark and suddenly triumphant. “And you know how Jeremy feels about grand gestures. He’s going to vote for me.”
“Fuck you,” Neil says automatically, though there is no real heat in the words. “Tell me the last time I said I loved anything. He’s going to vote for me, and then he’s going to tell me that he’s so proud that I’m finally ‘connecting with my emotions’.”
“Fuck you,” Kevin parrots back at him. He has probably forgotten his promise not to swear while the woman FaceTimes. Neil is not going to remind him. “He’s going to be proud of me and he’s going to tell me that I just took a step forward in ‘healing from my past trauma’.”
“Wait,” Andrew interrupts. They have been regulars for long enough that all the workers are aware that Neil and Kevin can argue about anything for a significant amount of time if left to their own devices. Andrew is here on his break; he does not have the time to listen. “Let’s rewind. You’re writing love songs as a competition?”
“Kevin tricked me into it,” Neil mutters into his coffee, studiously avoiding Andrew’s gaze.
Kevin rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a child.” He pulls his laptop back to his side of the table. “Neil can only insult my song if he writes a better one. We’re going to make it an event—we need judges, after all. Maybe I can ask Wymack if we can use the shop after hours?” He glances around, as if speaking of his biological father and owner of The Foxhole might make him appear. “You and your group should attend. Renee can bring her girlfriend. The more, the merrier.”
“You are making a novice at romance write a love song just so that he can spit on yours,” Andrew says, summing up the situation. He drums his fingers on the table again. “Oh, this might be interesting.”
“I live to be interesting,” Neil quips.
“And how often you disappoint.”
“Do you see this?” Neil points at his face. “This is me caring.” He looks blankly at Andrew.
Andrew huffs in what might be a laugh, for him, and grasps Neil’s chin to turn his face away. He lets his fingers linger for a few moments, silently commanding Neil to stay put, before he retracts his hand.
Neil has never been a good listener, so he immediately looks back at Andrew and smirks at his expression. “Here’s something interesting,” he offers, spontaneous, and is intending to say you can be the first one to listen to my song because it might be less embarrassing to let Andrew know that it’s about him after he’s already written it, but what comes out instead is, “I could write my song about you.”
Well.
Getting permission to write about him is good, too.
Andrew goes very still and very blank. His elbow is resting on the table, wrist limp, and he carefully repositions it so that his forearm is resting on the edge of the table, his hand hanging off. He does not look away from Neil. “You don’t swing.”
It is deliberately neutral. This is a fact that Neil has given Andrew. He knows that there is now a question underlining it.
Neil wants to bring his cup back to his mouth, make a barrier between them, but—it’s Andrew. The clumpy remains of the sugarcube are still on the table. He can taste the sugar on his tongue. “I don’t swing,” he agrees. He wants to be as deliberate with his words as Andrew is. “But I think that you’re the only person I could write this kind of song about. I want to write it about you. For you. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
It’s the truth. It’s—not a game, exactly, but it’s something they do. Unspoken, implicit: I do not lie to you.
“You want,” Andrew says, “to write about me.”
“Yes.”
For a long moment they simply gaze at each other. Andrew is searching for the answer to a question that he will not voice, and he must find it, because he finally lets out a breath and all his subtle tension and says, “Go ahead. It’ll probably be terrible, anyway.”
Neil relaxes at that; he didn’t realize that he had tensed. “Not more terrible than Kevin’s.”
“We’ll see.”
“Now that you’ve got that sorted out,” Kevin interjects, brisk, “maybe you should give each other your numbers already.”
Neil had, for about a minute, forgotten that Kevin was present. He is not particularly happy to be reminded, but he is not displeased enough to refuse to pull out his phone. He opens up his contacts app and slides his phone over to Andrew; they have the same phone model, so he doesn’t feel the need to do it himself. “Have at it.” He pauses as a thought occurs to him. He keeps his fingers on the edge of his phone and adds, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Andrew’s mouth twitches. He pulls the phone from Neil’s hand and picks it up. “Oh, my. Weren’t you protesting that word earlier? Don’t tell me you think that it would behoove you now to get used to it.”
“More foal you,” Neil says, which is a terrible pun, but: “I live to be unpredictable.”
“You live to prove neigh-sayers wrong,” Andrew corrects.
“Maybe I’m a two-trick pony.”
Andrew dumps his phone back into his hands and changes the subject abruptly. Neil doesn’t know if it’s because he’s fed up with the puns or if it’s because he wants to laugh. “Congratulations, Josten, you now have seven whole contacts.”
Neil frowns, although he isn’t particularly offended. “How many do you have?” he asks, half because he is genuinely curious and half because—well. Andrew is something of an acquired taste.
Andrew gives him a look like he knows what Neil is thinking about him. “More than you, and certainly more than Kevin.”
“I actually have friends,” Kevin says indignantly.
“And we don’t?” Neil raises an eyebrow, daring Kevin to challenge him. “Oh, look at this. Here I am, typing in the group chat, informing them that according to you, we are no longer friends because I don’t have them.”
Andrew leans toward him to see his screen, shoulder brushing against Neil’s. Neil tilts his phone and increases the brightness to give him a better view. “This is a terrible chat,” Andrew observes. “Why were you arguing about kale?”
“Because Kevin and Jean expect the rest of us to eat it,” Neil explains. Neil has had kale smoothie three times. There is never going to be a fourth. “I would sooner pull out my intestines.”
Kevin takes out his phone to launch his counterattack against him. “You’re an instigator and I hate you,” he informs Neil. “Jean won’t care, but Jeremy’s going to make me that disappointed face again and I’m going to have to make positive affirmations about you until he’s satisfied.”
That catches Andrew’s attention. “Do tell.”
“Jeremy thinks that because of our ‘anxiety’ and ‘attitude problems’—” Kevin actually uses air quotes around the words— “we might be reinforcing each other’s negative feedback loops when we argue, so when we say something that he thinks may be a damaging point to drive home, we have to… demonstrate our friendship?” Kevin looks disturbed by his own phrasing.
Andrew in contrast seems amused by it. “With positive affirmations?”
“Let’s all take a turn,” Neil says. “Kevin, I consider you one of my closest friends. If I were to die tonight, I would not demand that you get rid of my body and my things. I would allow you to arrange a funeral for me.”
Kevin actually appears touched until he realizes that Neil is looking at him expectantly. With a sigh, he turns to Andrew. “Andrew, I would let you sit in the front row at Neil’s funeral. I acknowledge you as… a friend...” His mouth pinches. “To both of us.”
“I don’t acknowledge you,” Andrew tells him, then obligingly redirects his gaze to Neil. “Neil. I am allowing you to write a song about me. If it is not better than Kevin’s, I will have overestimated your capability.”
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me,” Neil notes, smiling.
“Don’t expect it to continue.” With a glance toward the clock on the wall, Andrew gets up and pushes the chair so that it is no longer blocking Neil into the corner. “Remember: you have to pay for that drink.”
“Of course.” Neil pauses, then calls after Andrew: “I don’t break my oats.”
Andrew flips him off without looking behind him.
“This,” Kevin mutters, resigned, “is a nightmare.”