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Andrew opens the door to his offices and instantly knows something is off. He stops still and scans the lobby. There aren’t any clients waiting, but Nicky is poised behind his desk with his phone in his hand as usual. It’s the same slightly too warm temperature it always is. The furniture is right where he left it—the not very comfortable chairs lining the wall, the generic desk and cupboard, the mounted TV playing Bravo on mute. Nicky straightens, guilt written all over his face. Andrew registers the look right before Nicky’s eyes dart towards Andrew’s office and there—there it is. The open door shows only a little of his office, but in that gap he sees the movement of a gently swinging leg.
“There’s someone in my office,” Andrew says, turning accusing eyes on Nicky.
“A client,” Nicky hurries to say. “A referral. He said—”
“Why?” Andrew demands. Nicky, of all people, should know better than to allow someone into Andrew’s space without his permission. He’d nearly gotten himself gutted enough times when he’d wandered into Andrew’s bedroom in Columbia.
“I…” Nicky lifts his hands helplessly. “He...asked.”
“He asked.”
Andrew starts calculating the probability that his visitor is armed or has broken into the gun safe in his office; he’s slowly going for the blade tucked along his left arm when his door eases open and a man leans against the frame. He’s lean, and not much taller than Andrew. He has a reasonably tidy pile of auburn waves on top of his head and his eyes—his eyes—are the most vivid blue Andrew has ever seen. He’s so focused on the impossible blend of shades in them that he only notices the half smirk on his face as an afterthought.
“Sorry,” the man says, not sounding particularly sorry. “None of the chairs out here face the door. And there’s a lot of glass behind them.”
Andrew resists the urge to twitch. He probably wouldn’t sit in his lobby either. He frowns, instead, and nods his chin towards his office, annoyed that he’ll be the new person in the room. “Go on,” he says, the edge of his voice as sharp as the knife he’s sliding back into its armband. “Make yourself at home.”
The guy settles easily back into the seat he’d left, like Andrew isn’t drilling bloody holes into him with his eyes. He waits while Andrew sits and takes his time rolling his chair forward, enduring the staring as though it’s a natural beginning to a conversation.
“I’m Neil,” he finally says. “Josten. I think I need personal security.”
“Where’d you get my name?” Andrew demands. Through his cracked office door he hears Nicky groan—Andrew mentally rifles through the 400 emails Nicky has sent him about “being nice to clients” and “having better manners” and “catching more flies with honey” and ignores them in favor of watching Neil’s face for movement.
“Kevin Day told me about you.” The corners of Neil’s mouth lift the barest degree. It should be an unassuming, polite smile. Should be.
Andrew isn’t convinced. He hums and leans back in his seat. “You know Kevin.”
“We go way back,” Neil explains. He’s not giving any signs that indicate he’s lying, but still. Kevin usually holds his liquor better than he holds his secrets but Andrew thought he knew everyone Kevin has known since Palmetto State and he’d remember if this guy had been in the Nest.
“He’s never mentioned you,” Andrew says.
“I rarely mention him,” Neil replies easily.
Despite himself, Andrew feels a chaotic tangle of emotions bubbling up in his chest. There’s irritation—that’s an easy one, as familiar as shifting the Maserati into a higher gear. There’s also desire—not as frequent a visitor, but certainly not a stranger. It’s easy enough to pin that to the bright spark of Neil’s eyes, the graceful lines of his body, the way his jeans hug his thighs. The touch of anger is so ever-present as to be barely worth mentioning. The worst of it is the interest he feels pricking him every time Neil says or does something unexpected. The way he calmly weathers Andrew’s weaponized silences, the way he answers rude statements as though they were polite questions, and definitely the way he’d assessed Andrew’s offices and picked the second most secure spot: across from Andrew’s desk, with a clear line of sight on the main door and the peripheral bonus of a view of Nicky’s computer screen. The way, too, that Neil had hesitated half a second before saying “personal security” in a slightly disdainful tone that suggests to Andrew that he couldn’t bring himself to say “bodyguard” with a straight face.
“Why?” Andrew asks. He watches Neil blink and consider the question, left deliberately ambiguous. Why doesn’t he mention Kevin? Why doesn’t Kevin mention him? Why does he need protection?
“I might need a little clarification,” Neil says after an impressively measured pause. Not so long it seems he was confused, not so short that he didn’t have time to think through the problem. “Why to which part?”
“Why do you need personal security,” Andrew specifies. He’s a little disappointed that Neil didn’t just start answering all of the potential questions, but he lets the usual shadow of bored disgust hide any hint of it in his voice.
“I’ve been getting some...hmm. Troubling threats.” He pauses, but before Andrew can point out the idiocy of being so vague, Neil continues. “I’m a writer. My second book just came out. I’m going on a book tour, and even though I’m pretty good at taking care of myself, it’s a lot harder to do in a series of unfamiliar places with crowds and my attention divided. Some of the threats seem specific and motivated enough that my agent thinks I should hire someone.”
Andrew flips through the files in his memory and emerges with a title. “Runaways,” he says. “I didn’t read it.”
“I’m not offended,” Neil says, smiling. “Sorry.”
The stubborn bubble of interest swells in Andrew’s chest until he can physically feel it, crowding uncomfortably against his ribs.
“Send me the details,” he says brusquely. He needs this to be over now, needs Neil to stop doing and saying things so he can process what’s already happened. “I’ll let you know.”
“I can do that,” Neil says, leaning forward to slide one of Andrew’s business cards out of its holder. “Thanks.”
And then he’s gone. Andrew forces himself not to watch him leave, keeping his eyes trained pointedly on his computer screen in case Neil looks back at any point between Andrew’s desk and the elevator. He figures it’s safe to look up again when Nicky pops into Andrew’s office, excitedly wringing his hands.
“Please tell me we’re going to take it,” Nicky says, tumbling the words out so quickly they almost fall over each other. “I mean, he’s hot. And he didn’t seem afraid that you were going to kill him. And he didn’t seem like he was going to decide you were “full service,” if you know what I mean. And I read his book. It was really good. It’s about this mother and son who—”
“I know what it’s about,” Andrew interrupts. He pauses, narrowing his eyes at Nicky’s enthusiasm, still visibly about to bubble over. “Did you recognize him before he asked?”
“Uh, no,” Nicky admits sheepishly. “He just...he said Kevin recommended us. And then he...asked if he could wait in your office. He looked really uncomfortable in the lobby.” His hands go up helplessly again, like ‘he asked’ is the sum total of what anyone could possibly say about the situation.
“Go away.” Andrew turns his attention back to his computer, opening his email in a window so he’ll notice as soon Neil’s details come in. “And teach your dick to say no to the clients.”
. : : .
He spends most of the rest of his day at work debating whether or not to call Kevin that night. He has information about Neil Josten that Andrew probably needs before he decides if he’s going to take him on as a client or not. On the other hand, calling Kevin usually means talking to Kevin, which is something Andrew dedicates a not insignificant portion of time to avoiding. Still undecided, he grabs a carton of ice cream and a spoon and drops onto his couch at home. Texting, he thinks, is a good middle ground. He grabs his phone and, with the hand not busy with ice cream, types “neil josten.
Three minutes later, Kevin’s name lights up his screen. Andrew hits the screen twice with his pinky to answer and switch to speaker, then waits for Kevin to start talking. It takes a minute.
“Can’t you answer the fucking phone like a normal person?” Kevin complains.
“Yes,” Andrew says. He can. He just doesn’t want to.
“Neil came to see you?”
This is a stupid question, so Andrew doesn’t bother to answer it.
Kevin sighs heavily. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Andrew says. “You’ve never mentioned him.”
Kevin adds about a hundred pounds to his next sigh. “It wasn’t a great time in my life. Either of our lives.”
“Kevin,” Andrew warns. He’s not going to coax Kevin through this explanation one tiny step at a time. He’s already done too much talking today.
“Neil’s family was connected to the Moriyamas. His father. Have you read his book?” Andrew makes a vaguely negative noise, which Kevin knows to take as an answer. “It’s mostly true, I think. I don’t know the details, but I know the story is...similar. He was supposed to be at the Nest with me and Riko, but his mother took him and ran. Something eventually went down with Neil and his father and the FBI and the Moriyamas, but I don’t know what it was. I doubt anyone but Neil and the Lord knows what it was.”
“That would have been news,” Andrew observes. “If the book was based on a true story.”
“None of it happened to Neil Josten,” Kevin hedges.
Andrew takes another bite of his ice cream and licks the back of the spoon to be thorough. Waiting out Kevin’s silence is child’s play. Even Nicky could do it.
“Wesninski,” Kevin says, finally, in a quick huff of breath. “Nathaniel Wesninski.”
That name—that’s one Andrew can unearth from the memory files of his criminology degree. Wesninski. The Butcher of Baltimore. Jailed, almost released, then dead. “The Butcher’s son took a creative writing class,” Andrew hums. “Interesting.”
“Look,” Kevin says. “I’ve never known him to ask for help. Usually he kicks help in the balls and runs away before it knows what hit it. If he’s actually asking, you should know it could be trouble.”
“Moriyama trouble,” Andrew muses. “He didn’t mention that.”
“Maybe,” Kevin says, exasperated. Andrew can easily visualize the shrug Kevin is giving his phone. He knows Andrew well enough to know that he isn’t particularly likely to pass up a chance to fuck with the Moriyamas. “Or maybe he has a run-of-the-mill stalker. I think—” he hesitates. “I think he’ll either be the easiest client you’ve ever had or you’ll end up killing him yourself.”
Andrew considers this. He hasn’t ruled out the possibility that both are true. “Okay,” he says, and carefully taps his pinky against the red button to disconnect.
. : : .
Neil’s email is waiting for him the next day when he wanders into the office mid-morning. The subject is “Fwd: Re: Schedule?” Andrew scrolls to the beginning of the chain: Neil telling someone named Allison that he’d talked to a security guy and he needs the “schedule detail stuff.” Very eloquent. Whoever Allison is, she sends back a PDF with a note asking if he is going to make sure the security is hot so she’ll have something to look at and, speaking of, has Neil ever seen the iconic Whitney Houston film The Bodyguard. Neil, apparently saving all of his words for semi-autobiographical novels, responds “I guess” and ignores the movie question altogether. And then, because he is some kind of walking disaster, he has simply forwarded the entire email thread to Andrew. He does not find this attractive. But he doesn’t exactly hate it, either.
He has to scroll back past both Neil’s “Here you go” forwarding email and his “I guess” message to Allison in order to click on the indented, greyed-out file attachment and open it. Kevin was right. Andrew is almost certainly going to kill this man himself.
The file itself looks like someone with at least a handful of brain cells has put it together. Most of it is standard book tour stuff—eight-ish weeks, about 20 cities, a lot of bookstores and Universities—but, somewhat interestingly, it includes some scheduled podcast appearances. Another two weeks have intermittent media appearances in New York. It seems Neil Josten’s debut novel was a real hit with the book club scene. The suburban set really goes for all that gritty tragedy. His publisher must have high hopes for the follow-up. Or, maybe, this is a full-on war to get ahead of a sophomore slump.
With his usual uncanny timing, Nicky pops his head into Andrew’s office. “Hey!” he says. “Did you already have coffee? Do you need anything?”
“No,” Andrew says, still considering the schedule, his finger tapping staccato on his mouse.
“Noooo you didn’t have coffee yet? Or nooooo you don’t need anything? Oh, speaking of, I brought you a present.”
Nicky ducks out again and then reappears, this time inserting his whole uninvited body into Andrew’s space and dropping something on the desk. Andrew blinks at it—it’s a novel, paperback. On the cover is a car, its details hidden in silhouette except for the fire pouring out of its windows, the smoke clouding the view of the beach behind it. Runaways, by Neil Josten.
“If we’re going to take him on,” Nicky says, dropping into a chair and leaning forward eagerly. “I figured you should read it. I know it’s not your usual thing, but I was totally into it. The relationship with the mother is really complicated, and I guess that resonated with me, but it’s also drenched in all this visceral, physical detail. And I know, I know the guy is a teenager the whole time, but I still kind of wanted him to sweep me into his arms and carry me away into the precarious safety of invisibility.”
The first problem with this, Andrew thinks, is that Nicky would be tragically awful at maintaining invisibility. The second is that Nicky has about seven inches and fifty pounds on Neil, so any sweeping off the feet would look pretty fucking ridiculous.
“You’ll have to check our schedule,” Andrew says, ignoring the book for now. “I’ll email you his itinerary.”
“Great!” Nicky beams. “Who do you think you want to put on him? You all have stuff, but it wouldn’t be too hard to shift someone’s bookings onto the rest of you and clear them up. I know Matt has one of our regulars a few times in the next couple of months, but probably they’d understand if you or Renee needed to step in instead—-”
“No,” Andrew interrupts distractedly, still scrolling up and down Neil’s schedule. “I’ll take him.”
“You’ll...take him,” Nicky repeats.
Andrew raises an eyebrow at Nicky, who immediately throws his hands up in surrender and stands. “Send me the details. I’ll see what I can move around.”
Andrew saves the document and closes out of it. He scrolls through the ridiculous email chain Neil sent him again, and then opens a new email of his own. He addresses it to Nicky, types Client Schedule: NJ into the subject line, and attaches the document to it before hitting send—the way a person with even a basic understanding of online communication would.
He tells himself that he doesn’t want Matt or Renee with Neil because this could potentially involve the Moriyamas. He tells himself that Neil is probably going to be a problem and the others shouldn’t have to deal with it. He tells himself that it’s not because he can’t even pin down an outline of Neil Josten, much less fill in any of the details. He tells himself, very firmly, that this fractured puzzle of a man isn’t the most interesting thing he’s seen in years.
. : : .
He goes to meet Neil and whoever the fuck Allison is at Neil’s place a few days later. The book tour starts in a couple of weeks and Andrew wants to get a look at these threats. He also wants to get a look at the inside of Neil’s place so that he’ll know how much of an idiot he’s working with this time.
The street isn’t what Andrew would have expected. It’s just wide enough for two slow-moving and courteous cars to drive down it at the same time, though it’s down to a single lane wherever someone has parked along the street instead of in a driveway. He slows the Maserati to a crawl and checks out the neighbors until the GPS alerts him that he’s arrived; the house is an old craftsman, pale gray and white, beautifully maintained. Already parked in front of it are a pink Corvette and an Audi A4 in a dark blue that’s almost black. Andrew parks a few houses down so he can get a better look at the neighborhood as he walks.
He’d figured that Neil, flush with all his new book money, would have bought a flashy condo or one of those severe modern townhouses. Instead, he’s here on one of Columbia’s oldest streets, with close neighbors and no shared walls. It’s the kind of neighborhood where strangers lurking around your windows would be quickly noticed. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where someone could lean casually and watch your house all day without raising suspicion. Andrew approves.
He approves even more when he reaches Neil’s tiny front lawn. He shoves his hands in his pockets and surveys the house. Unlike the neighboring houses with their traditional, glass panel doors, Neil’s is solid and metal, set into a metal door frame. He’s covered all of the multi-paned windows on both floors with security grates that mimic the outlines of the panes so closely as to be almost invisible. Neil is one paranoid son of a bitch. Andrew is almost impressed.
He walks up the path, counting the lights and cameras as he comes into view, but the door swings open before he even reaches it to knock, revealing a leggy blonde in spiky heels who’s taking up nearly the whole height of the door frame. “You must be Minyard,” she says coolly. She scans his body so openly and efficiently that he feels like a barcode. He assumes this is Allison, but he doesn’t address her. When he doesn’t answer, she steps aside and holds the door open. Andrew steps through, noting the sensors on the door and windows, but not seeing a conveniently placed alarm pad to control them. To his left is a staircase that leads straight up to the second floor. To his right, a long stretch of wall broken up by two wide, molding-trimmed openings at either end. From the front door, Andrew thinks, the layout of the house is a mystery. Once again, he finds himself approving.
Neil steps out of the opening at the end of the hall, smiling easily when he spots Andrew. “Hey,” he says, lifting the mug he has in his hand. “Coffee?”
“Depends,” Andrew says. He is disgustingly riveted by how vibrant Neil is against the tasteful neutrals of his walls and the bright white of his truly extravagant crown molding. “Will it taste like coffee?”
It takes a second for Neil to interpret that, but his face quickly splits into a wider grin. “No,” he says, amused. “Allison makes me stock a bunch of dessert creamers and a weird number of sugars.”
He ducks back into the doorway at the end, leaving Andrew and must-be-Allison to follow him. Andrew stops and sticks his head into the room on the other side of the first opening. It’s a formal dining room that looks like it hasn’t been used at all since the furniture was dutifully placed into it. Tucked partially behind a plant on the wall to his right, however, is the inconspicuous alarm panel he’d been looking for in the foyer.
To his left, he sees the layout of the home open up. You can move from this formal dining room into a cozy living room and finally into what looks like it must be the kitchen. Rather than following Allison through the blind spot that is the foyer hallway, Andrew takes this route. All of the rooms are outfitted with newish, catalogue-matching furniture, but the living room at least looks comfortable and homey. He discovers that the third room he enters is, in fact, the end of the kitchen and the door onto the back patio. To his right is a tiny dining nook; to his left is the back end of a kitchen that sports white cabinets, rich gray walls, exposed brick, subway tile, and a profusion of shiny stainless steel appliances. Neil is in the process of transferring three bottles of creamer and about five kinds of sugar onto the little island bar Andrew has found himself on the other side of.
“Well,” Allison says briskly. “You must be Andrew. Neil, this is ridiculous. He’s smaller than you are.”
“He’s not,” Neil argues. “Only a little. And only vertically.”
“Please,” Allison scoffs. “Those boots are giving him at least two inches.”
“You must be Regina George,” Andrew says, as pleasantly as he is capable of. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Neil cocks his head to the side, looking confused. “No,” he says slowly. “This is Allison. My agent.”
“Shut up, Neil,” Allison says. She narrows her eyes at Andrew and makes a point of looking down at him from her perch atop her ridiculous heels.
Andrew prickles a little on Neil’s behalf, but Neil just shrugs and goes back to searching through his selection of coffee mugs. “Allison,” Andrew says blandly. “My mistake.”
“Neil tells me a friend recommended you.”
“He tells me the same thing,” Andrew says.
He hears Neil sigh and then a mug of coffee rises into his field of vision. He keeps his eyes pointedly on Allison another second, then turns them towards the mug. It has a simple line-drawing of rolling farmland and says “Behold! The field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and thou shalt see that it is barren.” He blinks at this, then at Neil, who is looking entirely too satisfied with himself. Andrew doesn’t fully manage to bury the smile that tries to break onto his face. He accepts his mug graciously, as though it is not ridiculous, and turns his attention to the array of things Neil has put on the counter for him.
“Ugh,” Allison says. “You two are perfect for each other. This is going to be a nightmare.”
. : : .
Neil's body language is defensive as they gather around his table and start going over Allison’s file of threats. “So,” she says, handing over a very thick stack of clipped pages. “This first stack is your pretty standard death threat. These are all on social media, but we have had a few particularly ambitious people send paper letters to the office.”
Andrew pulls the papers in front of him and starts flipping through them. There are a lot of them. Many more than he’d have expected. And the contents don’t seem in any way related to Neil’s novel. “Why?” he asks. “Why are there so many of these?”
Allison rolls her eyes in Neil’s direction, but it looks fond. “I know he seems all shy and quiet, but he can actually be a real asshole.”
Andrew turns his gaze to Neil, whose answering shrug tells him everything he needs to know. There is obviously a fundamental part of Neil that Allison has completely missed.
“There are a lot of people who need to hear that they’re wrong,” Neil says. “They don’t always embrace the new information.”
It’s not like Andrew disagrees, but he questions the wisdom of wasting energy on such a futile mission. “Show me,” he says, holding his phone up to unlock it before he hands it to Neil. “Wherever you share your wisdom.”
Neil takes his phone and quickly pulls up his Twitter profile. When he hands it back, Andrew scrolls through his posts quickly. There seem to be three main categories of Neil tweets: the ones that start @[someassholepolitician] and are impressively vicious, the ones that ramble on for several posts and absolutely roast opponents on the other side of whatever social issue he’s decided to adopt, and a fair smattering of generally misanthropic observations that Andrew finds he’s pretty much in agreement with.
“Okay,” Andrew says briskly. He hits Follow and flips his phone face down on the table. “That explains it.”
Neil grins at him.
“Anyway,” Allison says. Andrew reluctantly looks away from Neil and back to his agent, who’s tapping her glossy nails on the next stack. “These are the letters we’ve gotten. They’re along the same theme, but a lot longer.”
Andrew gives them a cursory glance when she slides them over. There are a couple that threaten Neil’s family with graphic violence—a little late for that, Andrew thinks—and several that offer to inject Neil with various diseases (Hepatitises, HIV, and, creatively, Rabies) since he’s so into vaccines. There are a few turns of phrase he admires, but for the most part they’re boring. He shoves them to the side haphazardly and ignores it when Neil stacks this pile neatly atop the Twitter pages.
Allison slides another stack over, but hesitates before she takes her fingers off of it. “These are...more troubling. It seems that some people have taken Neil’s first book maybe a bit too seriously.”
When she doesn’t move her fingers even after another long moment, Andrew tugs the papers out from under her. He’s not sure if Allison knows the book is mostly real or not, but these messages read like someone definitely does. They’re not as flowery as the letters and not as enraged as the tweets—they’re cold and direct and that’s part of what makes them so unsettling. Most of them are addressed to “Junior”; one of them details what a disappointment he would be to his father. Andrew spots a mention of Neil’s mother—apparently his pen-pal would like him to remember that even she couldn’t protect him. A couple of them enthusiastically suggest ways of skinning Neil alive like it will be a fun group activity. He flips back through them again and, this time, registers that they’re all emails. The first half are to innocuous-looking email addresses that Andrew assumes belong to Neil. The second half went right to Allison, all with some variation of “pass this along to our boy” in the subject line.
“You weren’t responding,” Andrew guesses. “They wanted to make sure you were getting the message.”
Neil nods, but he doesn’t quite meet Andrew’s eyes. Andrew wonders what else Neil might be keeping to himself.
. : : .
Before she leaves, Allison pulls Andrew aside and informs him, in hushed tones, that Neil has so far been insisting on driving most of the legs of the tour. “Try to talk him into planes, okay?” she says.
“Sure,” Andrew says. He has no intention of doing any such thing.
He returns to the kitchen, where Neil is rinsing out the cups they’d used. He looks up when Andrew leans on the island and stares him down.
“Show me,” Andrew says simply.
Neil nods and hands him a tablet. “5309.”
Andrew enters the code. The tablet opens to reveal a single app; when he taps it, it opens a grid of security camera feeds. He can see himself on two of them. “Motion sensors?” he asks.
“Some of them,” Neil says. “The doors, the yard, the sides of the house. Moscow kept setting them off and it got annoying. And it lost its sense of urgency.”
“Moscow?” Andrew asks.
Neil leans over and taps open the camera that shows his bed and the bedroom door. There’s an obscenely fluffy cat curled up on the pillows. Andrew taps his way through the rest of the cameras, evaluating the coverage. It’s solid. There’s a definite emphasis on the entry points, but good coverage on the interior areas.
“What else?” Andrew asks.
Neil seems to consider him for a moment, then comes to some kind of decision and nods. He opens a kitchen drawer and pulls out a wrapped bundle of knives—they’re not kitchen knives, but they’d be perfect for throwing and/or maiming. Andrew flips the bundle open and admires them. They’re beautiful, with gleaming blades and perfectly weighted handles. He’s so busy with his admiration that he almost misses it when Neil crouches down and opens a cabinet. There’s a safe mounted at the top of it. Andrew’s eyebrows hike high when Neil puts his thumb against the glass screen and the safe pops open. They lift a little higher when Neil pulls out a Sig Sauer. He keeps it pointed safely away from Andrew when he sets it on the counter. Andrew picks it up and double checks, but he already knows it will be loaded. This model doesn’t have a safety, but Neil has left the chamber empty in a gesture towards responsible gun ownership.
Andrew takes a moment to admire the shape, heft, and cleanliness of the gun, but he’s mostly spinning, trying to reconcile this new information with what he already understands about Neil.
“Is this it?” he asks.
“No,” Neil says. Andrew can’t decide if he sounds sheepish or amused, but he hands the gun back so Neil can replace it in the safe. “Follow me.”
Neil leads him to the living room, where he shows Andrew a bundle of knives tucked discreetly between the arm and the cushion of the couch. One of the sections of books on his shelves turns out to swing open and conceal another gun safe behind it. At this point, Andrew isn’t particularly surprised when Neil leads him upstairs and shows him a similar stash in his office and another one in his nightstand, though the bedroom also sports a second, much larger gun safe in the closet that holds a couple of shotguns and a lot of ammo.
Andrew stands in the middle of Neil’s bedroom and slowly turns his eyes from the arsenal to the cat stretching blissfully on the bed.
“Well,” he says, after a pause even he realizes is awkwardly long. “I guess your book wasn’t all posturing.”
Neil laughs, which surprises Andrew more than the six guns and two dozen knives Neil has just shown him. Andrew returns the full weight of his attention to him. Neil is leaning casually against the wall by his closet. The position pushes his hips forward and emphasizes the musculature of his thighs. His hair is messier this time, falling over his forehead, but his blue eyes stand out more in contrast. Andrew feels the slow fizzle of desire in his gut spark into something hotter. He carefully memorizes the drape of Neil’s shirt against his hips so he can imagine curling his hands around them later
“Is this why you didn’t tell anyone about those first emails?” Andrew asks. He gestures vaguely towards the guns.
“What are my agent, editor, or publicist going to do about it that I can’t?”
“You are an idiot,” Andrew says. “You can’t watch your own back. That’s basic.”
“Well,” Neil says lightly, “I’ve been told you can hire someone to do that.”
Andrew is definitely going to kill this man. He’s going to keep Neil’s stalker far away from him and then he’s going to kill him himself.
. : : .
The first stop on the tour is in Columbia. This makes sense to Andrew; people always do love a hometown boy. Overall, the whole thing is uneventful. Neil goes out for the reading in snug jeans, a button-up, and a cardigan that Allison had handed him when they arrived. Andrew appreciates her efforts but he thinks he’d put Neil in something a little tighter.
The only thing worth mentioning, in Andrew’s opinion, is his first glimpse of this “shy, quiet” version of Neil that Allison brought up. Those aren’t the words Andrew would use, but he can see how someone with limited insight might choose them. Neil reads a few chapters of his book in a quiet voice. He pronounces each word carefully, calmly, but with a depth of emotion that surprises Andrew. Even from the limited excerpt, Andrew knows that this isn’t the sophomore slump that he’d theorized earlier. The novel focuses on the son of a sadistic cult leader who’s being groomed to assume the pulpit someday. Andrew supposes Neil has enough experience to fuel dozens of books about murder and fucked up family dynamics.
Afterwards, when they’ve moved him to a table for the signing, Andrew positions himself behind Neil and listens to every word said even as he schools his face into idle neutrality. Neil accepts the effusive praise and occasional invasive question graciously. There’s a quiet kindness to him with these people that seems innate, if not practiced. A natural talent he hasn’t been trained to master. It’s a version of Neil that could be boring if Andrew didn’t already know that this man they’re all cooing over keeps a loaded handgun and a bunch of knives in every room of his house that he spends time in.
They head out for the rest of the tour the next morning. They’re taking Neil’s Audi because he insisted the miles go onto his car and not Andrew’s, so Neil shows up outside Andrew’s house at the grotesque hour of 7:30 in the morning. Andrew’s already on his porch, smoking, and he makes Neil wait until he finishes and puts out his cigarette before he goes and dumps his bag into the popped-open trunk. He closes it, pausing to admire the glossy finish of the car. It’s not what he’d choose, but it is nice.
He lets his hand trail over the curve of the car’s top as he walks around, then drops it to the driver’s side door handle and pulls it open. Neil, in the driver’s seat, blinks up at him. Andrew swings the door open wide and waits silently. He spent way too many years stuffed into the passenger seat of his life. These days, he always drives. It doesn’t take Neil long to understand; he unbuckles his seat belt and climbs out of the car, looking bemused but not annoyed. The easy acceptance sparks a hint of irritation in Andrew. It fizzles away into something harder for him to define. Not important. The leather of the seat is still warm when Andrew slips into it. He pulls it forward a few inches and tweaks the placement of the wheel while Neil jogs around to the passenger side.
The GPS is already set for the bookstore in Charleston, so all Andrew has to do is swing out onto the street and head towards the Interstate. He pushes the car a little, testing its acceleration, how it handles corners, how good the brakes are. He experimentally hugs the bumpers of the cars in front of them and, once they’ve merged onto I-26, weaves rapidly in and out of traffic for fun; when they hit a stretch of empty road, he floors it and gets a feeling for the the smooth, steady ride of the car even when it’s pushing 100. Not bad. He prefers the Maserati, of course, but he can work with this.
Satisfied with the test drive, Andrew settles back into a speed that will require a little less of his attention to maintain. He looks over at Neil, who’s been sitting calmly in the seat beside him while Andrew indulged in driving like a madman. He hasn’t complained. He hasn’t even grabbed for the handle above him or pressed his feet forward to brace or reach in vain for the brakes. Instead, he’s chewing absently at his thumbnail while he flips through things on his phone.
Neil is already an easy, comfortable presence. Something in Andrew’s chest briefly flutters and then calms.
“Well?” he asks. It’s open-ended, designed to get Neil to divulge whatever he’s chewing his nail about.
“Trying to decide on music,” Neil mumbles. “I can’t figure out what we might both like.”
“We don’t both have to like it,” Andrew says.
Neil gives him a wary look.
“I’m the driver,” Andrew clarifies, “we listen to what I want.”
“You’re the driver because you carjacked me,” Neil counters. “It’s still my car. And my phone is plugged in.”
“You probably have terrible taste in music.”
“It doesn’t have to be music.” Neil looks thoughtful. “We could listen to a podcast.”
“You probably have terrible taste in podcasts.”
“Fuck you,” Neil says easily. “True crime? There are dramatic and comedy options.”
“Haven’t you done enough of your own suffering without having to get off on someone else’s?” Andrew asks. “Or are you hoping for tragedy fodder for a third book?”
Neil flips him off without looking away from his phone. “There’s this whole weird genre about diseases.”
“Diseases,” Andrew repeats. He trusts in the absolute flatness of his voice to tell Neil what he thinks about that option.
“You don’t seem like you’d want to listen to celebrities talk about their feelings.”
“Feelings,” Andrew repeats in the same flat tone.
“Exy?” Neil asks, with wistful hope in his voice.
“I will crash this car.”
He catches Neil’s quiet smile out of the corner of his eye but refuses to indulge himself by looking at it.
“There are all these fiction ones,” Neil muses. “All different genres. Like radio plays, I guess.”
Andrew doesn’t waste energy on the stupidity of that suggestion.
“Okay,” Neil says, rallying. “Audiobooks?”
Andrew considers. He doesn’t have anything against audiobooks, even if it is a poor substitute for the immersion of reading with your eyes. What he doesn’t like is the idea of sitting in silence next to Neil for hours, both of them focusing on some third person who isn’t even in the car with them.
“Put on your terrible music,” Andrew says blandly. “I can skip the worst of it.”
Neil’s silence suddenly feels dangerous. Andrew glances quickly at Neil to find him watching Andrew’s profile sharply. It’s a little disconcerting. He flips through the reactions Neil could possibly have had to what just said and figures out the (worst) most likely option.
“That was not a challenge,” Andrew warns.
“It kind of was.”
“I am a very angry person,” Andrew says. “I can make you regret having ears.”
Neil huffs a laugh. “Uh huh.” He seems to be on the hunt for something specific on his phone now, though, and a moment later a song starts playing over the car’s speakers.
“Rihanna,” Andrew says.
Neil shrugs. “Skip it if you hate it.”
Andrew levels a scathing glance his way and turns up the volume.
. : : .
They hit the coast of South Carolina. The Charleston event goes much the same as the Columbia one had, though the crowds are bigger and, because it’s in a bookstore instead of the small University theater they’d been in last time, there are more angles of approach that people could use to get at Neil. Andrew sees that awareness reflected in the tense set of Neil’s shoulders and the way he jerks back to attention and scans the room between fans. He wants to lay his hand on the back of Neil’s neck as a reminder that he has Andrew here to protect him, but that’s an absurd idea so he dismisses it. He dismisses it every time he thinks about it.
It’s only three o’clock when they get done. They go and check into their hotel—into neighboring rooms—and don’t bother to unpack. Andrew sits in the middle of his bed and stares blindly out the window. Usually he’d relish the opportunity to spend a few hours alone. He could read a book. He could go walk along the little beachfront and see what touristy drivel they have for sale. He could shut the drapes and take a nap. None of these things sound appealing. He feels restless and itchy.
He’s still skirting well around the idea of going to Neil when the man himself texts: want to go to a distillery? A second message with a link comes through—some place that offers tours and tastings.
Andrew has such a strong urge to say yes that he almost says no out of sheer stubbornness. He types the letters but pauses before he sends them. This is their first night away together. It sets a precedent. If he declines, he’s setting them up for a whole lot of sitting alone in adjacent hotel rooms. Or, he supposes, for Neil to just go on his own; Andrew wouldn’t technically have to follow him as part of the job, but the idea of Neil wandering off alone in strange cities makes a court-sized field of red lights flash inside Andrew’s head. If he says yes, though, he’s setting them up for nights of hanging out together between tour events. Dinners, drinks, touristing—something maybe a little too close to dates.
He deletes the word no very carefully so he doesn’t accidentally send it and stares at the blank message field. How often does he even have this problem? How often does he enjoy spending time with someone enough that he even thinks about saying yes to unnecessary socialization? What would Bee say about this? Probably something grossly supportive, like it’s okay to say yes to things you want or I’m so proud of you for stepping outside of your comfort zone.
Suddenly, he realizes there are probably three floating dots pulsing on Neil’s phone screen. He sends when?
His own dots appear and then: 6?
He stares at this and realizes he’s unreasonably relieved that Neil doesn’t want to leave right now. Andrew has a couple of hours to process how much he likes the idea of sitting across a table from Neil and watching his cheeks flush from liquor. He has a couple of hours to decide he can’t handle it and back out completely. It’s even almost enough time to decide what to wear.
Belatedly, he remembers he hasn’t actually answered Neil. He types ok and sends it, then turns the screen off and puts the phone face-down a little too firmly on his nightstand.
. : : .
The thing about Neil’s beauty, Andrew thinks, is that he’s completely indifferent to it. Not oblivious. It’s not like he hunches around trembling with crippling insecurity. Andrew’s not having a One Direction moment here. Neil just seems to not care. He doesn’t use it at all. He takes no advantage whatsoever of the fact that people like looking at him. Andrew has watched a handful of people put out feelers on this trip to the distillery, but Neil’s apparently not having any of it. Andrew thinks he may have missed a few of the subtler ones, but he blandly and efficiently shut down the one or two that were overt. Instead, Neil had stuck to Andrew’s hip as they tasted samples, bought a few bottles of what they’d each liked, and then hit up a couple of the food trucks.
He’d been right about the flush on Neil’s cheeks, though. They’d stuck with samples, but there were enough that Andrew got pleasantly warm and Neil visibly tipsy. Then they’d found a couple of brightly colored adirondack lounges well away from the action to sober up in. Neil has been watching a group of hipsters play corn hole. Andrew has been watching Neil.
Long strings of bulbs sway above them and the sound of music and laughter drifts over to the peace of their anti-social corner. Andrew watches the flickering light play across Neil’s honey skin. He looks content, relaxed. He doesn’t look the way new people usually look when they’re this close to Andrew.
Andrew’s thoughts crash at the intersection of stop looking at him like that and who even is he? Abruptly, he says, “The Moriyamas.”
Great. He is a brilliant conversationalist. Fuck.
He watches Neil turn towards him and raise an eyebrow. Neil pauses, his mouth pursing, and then he says, “Which ones?”
Which is, perhaps, as revealing of an answer as Andrew could have hoped for.
“You tell me,” he says.
Neil watches him steadily for a minute and then nods. “Here? Now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Neil sighs, picking up his neglected bottle of water to take a long sip. “I didn’t know much about them for a long time. Eventually I caught on. I found out my father was going to get out of prison, so I called the Moriyamas and made certain assurances. Then I called the FBI. As far as I know, the main branch and I are good.”
“And the other branch?”
Neil hesitates, then says very carefully, “I am under the impression that we currently have nothing to do with each other.”
“Currently.”
“I have been told,” Neil explains, no less carefully, “that when I was much younger, I was supposed to be a gift to Riko and the Master.”
A gift. Andrew’s plenty familiar with that concept as it pertains to the Moriyamas. He wrinkles his nose in distaste. He’s not great with sympathy, but he really hates the idea of Neil slowly ground down under Riko’s thumb. He wonders how far Riko would have had to go to manage it.
“They got lucky,” Andrew says. “You’re a nightmare.”
Somehow, incredibly, because he is like no one Andrew has ever met before, Neil laughs.
. : : .
In the car on the way to their next stop—Savannah, Georgia—Andrew turns down The Weeknd, takes a steadying breath, and says, “I owe you.”
“Owe me what?” Neil asks.
“A truth,” Andrew says. “You told me about the Moriyamas.”
“You asked,” Neil says, sounding baffled.
“And now you can ask.”
“Just...ask something? Anything?”
“Anything,” Andrew confirms. There are things he’s not ready to tell this relative stranger, but these are things Andrew is rarely ready to tell anyone. It’s easier this way. It becomes a matter of principle and not one of vulnerability.
Neil is silent for a moment, then says, “Okay. The Moriyamas.”
“Which ones?” Andrew shoots back. He’s gratified when Neil laughs. “I’d never heard of them before Kevin. He brought Riko trouble with him, mostly. Kevin broke his hand—”
“Riko broke Kevin’s hand,” Neil interrupts. “Anyone who’s ever met him should have been able to figure that one out.”
“Riko broke his hand,” Andrew continues. “He came to PSU and asked me for protection. I kept Riko away from him until that psycho made enough bad moves that the main branch stepped in. Kevin has a contract with them now.”
“That was mostly about Kevin. What do they think of you?”
“They don’t,” Andrew says. “Except Riko probably gets off thinking about killing me.”
“So, you know more about Riko than the Lord. And I know more about the Lord than Riko. We’re a good team.”
Andrew gives him a hard sideways look and turns the music back up
. : : .
The Savannah thing is the smallest one yet. If it wasn’t for the podcast Neil is recording, Andrew would think the stop was a waste of time. Neil seems to like it, though; he’s the most relaxed he’s been at one of these things and he actually stands around talking to the milling people after the signing. Then Andrew drives them to some townhouse and they pile into some guy’s garage; the guy has about $5,000 worth of equipment in the garage and a car three or four times that value relegated to the driveway. Priorities, Andrew supposes.
The podcast is generally boring, which Andrew expected, but he does get to watch Neil lie to someone, which is fascinating. He’d wondered what Neil would say when asked about his background—now he watches Neil tell a laughably diluted version of his life story. Very smoothly, Neil delivers lie after bald-faced lie about the well-meaning but unstable parents who moved them around a lot and the exposure to violence he got from the rougher neighborhoods they lived in. Andrew shamelessly glues his eyes to Neil’s face and clocks every lie he spills, memorizing what deception looks like in his eyes, on his mouth, in the lines of his body.
Really, it’s all been so easy that Andrew has gotten complacent. His client sticks close and generally moves like he’s being hunted, which is helpful. All the events are full of people who have only nice things to say, and Neil is so careful to keep out of touching range that Andrew hasn’t even had to scowl threateningly at anyone.
If it weren’t for all of Neil’s guns and those emails, Andrew would think this job is a waste of his time.
After the reading and the podcast, it’s a little late for them to do anything touristy other than dinner at some local restaurant. Their rooms have a connecting door this time, which Andrew tells himself is only pleasant because it means he doesn’t have to leave his room if he needs to tell his client something.
Andrew is replacing his work knives with his casual knives—Neil shouting descriptions of restaurants to him through the open door—when the phone rings. Andrew looks at his, but it’s dark, and anyway, Neil is in the other room saying “Hello?”
It takes a minute for the silence to register as wrong to Andrew. Uneasily, he paces to the threshold between their rooms and hovers there. Neil is standing, absolutely still, with the phone to his ear. Andrew hesitates—he doesn’t want to come into this room uninvited if Neil is just listening to some innocuous hotel survey—but then Neil turns towards him and Andrew sees. The color has drained from Neil’s face. His knuckles are white where they’re gripped around the phone. He looks like a prey animal in the moments before it’s eaten.
Andrew crosses to him quickly and peels the phone away from him so he can press it to his own ear instead. At first, he’s not sure what he’s hearing—it just sounds like someone’s accidentally dialed and they’re being treated to the ambiance of a room full of people talking.
Then he focuses on the words and he realizes: this is a recording of Neil talking to people at the book signing in Charleston. Andrew remembers every single word of this. The audio is crystal clear, sounding like a high quality mic was placed right next to Neil—but there hadn’t been. There’d been nothing on the table but pens and books. He listens to Neil talk to his readers, pleasantly, quietly answering their questions and confirming the spelling of their names. Andrew’s rage rises volcanically until it feels like it’s trying to force its way out of his throat.
In his peripheral vision he sees Neil’s hands start to shake. He blindly grabs for Neil’s wrist and holds tightly until the shaking stops.
Andrew listens for a few more minutes, waiting to see if it’s going to cut off and someone’s going to breathe heavily or say something creepy, but the recording just keeps playing. He gets through one more of Neil’s goodbyes before he can’t take it anymore. He hangs up the phone very carefully and lets go of Neil’s wrist when he realizes his grip has tightened into something uncomfortable.
“Bugged,” Neil says. He looks fucking terrified and Andrew hates it. He wants the wry, cutting, watchful Neil back. “They had to be there to get that. They had to plant something—”
“Stop it,” Andrew orders. “They’re pathetic. This is pathetic.”
“Fuck,” Neil says. His hands are shaking again. His eyes dart around the room like he’s going to make a run for it, but his breath is coiled so tightly Andrew thinks he’d probably pass out before he could reach the door. He curls his hand over the back of Neil’s neck and pushes him down, hard, until he sits heavily on the bed.
“It’s playground taunting,” he says sharply. “It’s creepy but it can’t hurt you.”
Neil’s strangled breath isn’t getting any better, so Andrew pushes harder until Neil’s bent in half, his head between his knees. With his free hand he picks up the phone again and calls the front desk; they tell him that a man had simply called and requested to be put through to Mr. Josten’s room.
Andrew is furious. “You,” he says, lightly shaking Neil. “You booked these rooms under your real name.”
“Debatable,” Neil manages to choke out.
Andrew really does not have time for his stupidity right now. “Neil Josten,” he says impatiently. “You used your real fucking name.”
“Yeah,” Neil says. He still sounds strangled, but at least he’s focusing and answering Andrew.
“You are an idiot,” Andrew says.
Neil shrugs helplessly at him.
“Pick a restaurant,” Andrew says. It’s not a suggestion. “We’ll tell the front desk to hold calls. And we’re changing the other reservations.”
Just in case, though, he switches his casual knives back out for his work knives. He hates this stalker bullshit. He prefers it when the threat is right in front of him, so he can stab it.
. : : .
In the secret part of his mind where he plots extremely specific and subtle seductions, Andrew had planned to spend some of the four-hour drive to Orlando swapping more truths. He takes one look at Neil’s haunted face and decides that’s off the table.
Still, Andrew feels better once he’s tucked into the car with Neil beside him and the doors locked against the rest of the world. “We’re going to pick up a bug sweeper in Orlando,” he announces.
Neil nods. He’s still all twitchy. He’d been twitchy through dinner, twitchy when Andrew insisted on leaving their connecting door open all night, and twitchy over shitty bagels and eggs at the hotel’s breakfast. Andrew still fucking hates it.
He frowns at the cars in the rear view mirror. “You’re supposed to be some kind of expert on evading murder.”
“I’m—” Neil hesitates. “No one has actually killed me. I mean, not yet.”
Andrew gestures dismissively to indicate that his conditional agreement was excessive. “Good enough,” he says. “It’s the apocalypse. What do you do first?”
Neil says nothing for what feels like a very long time. Andrew’s fingers tighten on the wheel, but otherwise he feigns indifference. If Neil never answers, when is the appropriate time to turn the volume up on the music? Should he just start giving Neil his own plan? Should he inform Neil that he should have known that Neil doesn’t think enough to plan and would just die jogging on day one? Should he—
“Well,” Neil finally says, very slowly. “What kind of apocalypse is it?”
Andrew exhales.
. : : .
Orlando and Miami go smoothly. Andrew thoroughly scans Neil’s podiums, the tables they set up for him, and every shelf within five feet of him before everything starts. He finds nothing. He doesn’t mention to Neil that someone could have been pointing a long-distance mic at him, but he does routinely survey the crowd and perimeter to make sure no one could be doing it again.
When the Miami signing is over they go to a beach-front restaurant to eat. Neil makes them wait an extra twenty minutes so they can have a table with an umbrella; Andrew tells himself that this is because Neil is spoiled and not because he knows Andrew will crisp up before they’ve even been served.
By the time dessert comes the heavy, wet heat has mellowed out and the sunset is easing onto the horizon. Just beyond the mounds of whipped cream on his cheesecake, Andrew can see Neil spinning his coffee mug in a consistent, if unconscious, rhythm. He ignores this obvious sign of Deep Thoughts in favor of experimenting with which bits of his dessert he puts on his spoon together.
“You know,” Neil says thoughtfully. “The end of the book was true. With the beach and the car.”
Andrew stills the spoon with the perfectly-proportioned bite he’d been about to shove into his mouth. He thinks about killing his own mother—however grudgingly he uses that term—and wonders how it would have felt if he’d loved her. What if Aaron had had to handle the body? Would those scars be worse than the ones on his own arms, or the ones he’s seen peeking out from under Neil’s hems and sleeves?
“Different beach,” he says, finally, instead of any of that.
Neil laughs softly. “It was a long time ago. I guess it’s one of those sense memories. Waves and salt and sand.”
“You didn’t kill her,” Andrew says. “The guy who did got his.”
“He did,” Neil says with grim satisfaction. “Twenty-six times. With a sharpened toothbrush. Close enough to a knife, I guess.”
Andrew fights the urge to grin maniacally at Neil. “It’s my turn. To ask you a question.”
“Oh,” Neil says. “Are there turns? Is it a game?”
Andrew knows there was absolutely no way for Neil to know he’d intended to carry it on, but he still gives him a look like he is the dumbest person Andrew has ever encountered. “Nine hours in the car tomorrow. Do your vocal warmups.”
He shoves the bite into his mouth and savors it: the creaminess of the cheesecake, the airy smoothness of the whipped cream, the sweet crunch of the crumble topping. Across from him, Neil smiles into his coffee. Andrew feels something crack and flood him with a warmth so powerful that he wants to grab a knife and carve it out of himself.
. : : .
When he took this job, Andrew thought the 5-6 day gaps between legs of the tour were going to be his salvation—recovery time from the stress and annoyance of spending long days in forced proximity with another person. Now, three days into the first break, he finds himself wanting to turn to Neil to make scathing comments about the people who wander around obliviously and get in his way. Nicky sends him a funny post about a cat and Andrew’s hand starts to lift to show the screen to Neil before he catches himself.
It’s fucking stupid. Andrew is aware and kind of proud of how incredibly gay he is, but usually he stays in the lust lane and never merges into the crush lane. Not that this is a crush. Crushes are stupid. If you want someone, you tell them you want them, and then you either hook up or you don’t. Running around feeling things about someone and not even blowing them is a time-wasting hobby for idiots. Andrew is not an idiot. He forwards the cat post to Renee, instead, and focuses his attention on the paperwork Nicky emailed him to complete.
He’s curled around his coffee and sluggishly typing things on his laptop when his phone vibrates with a new message from Neil: someone broke in. Andrew squints at the time—it’s 9:13 in the morning. Who’s breaking into a house at this hour on a Wednesday? Another message comes through: can send video when I get home.
When he gets home? Where the fuck is he, if he isn’t home? Or did it happen last night and Neil just hadn’t bothered telling Andrew until it was ‘business hours’ again?
He scowls at his phone and types where are you?
The answer comes back quickly, but it is in no fucking way reassuring: hospital.
Andrew immediately taps the little picture of Neil at the top of his phone and calls him. It rings through to voicemail so quickly that Andrew knows he’s been declined. He scowls harder and calls again. Right to voicemail.
sorry, the next text says, nurse is here. give me 5
Andrew grabs his keys and half-jogs to his car, tapping angrily at his phone until he figures out which hospital is the closest to Neil’s house. He’s almost ten minutes into the drive when his phone lights up with Neil’s call.
“Which hospital?” Andrew bites out as soon as he picks up.
“Lexington,” Neil answers. “Why?”
Why. Why. “I hate you,” Andrew says. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“You don’t need to. I’m—”
Andrew hangs up on him. He knows Nicky would tell him you shouldn’t yell at someone who’s in the hospital, so he will have to wait until Neil has been discharged to tell him exactly how fucking stupid he is.
The nurse at the Emergency Room desk is a little hesitant, but Andrew has honed his “I’m supposed to be here and you should listen to me” affect into a precision weapon, so she quickly escorts him back to a curtained-off room and holds the drape back for Andrew to walk in. Neil is there, tapping away at his phone; he’s in distractingly tiny running shorts and one of those performance shirts that clings to his chest and stomach. He actually does look fine, other than the loose wrappings around his feet.
“Hey,” Neil says, looking up at Andrew’s entrance. “You really didn’t have to—”
“What. Happened.”
“Oh, um.” Neil clears his throat and turns his eyes back to his phone. The tips of his ears redden. “I went for a run and when I came home, I realized someone had broken in while I was gone.”
“Your alarms?”
“I,” Neil clears his throat again, “I didn’t take my phone with me.”
Andrew closes his eyes and squeezes the top of the guard rail on the side of Neil’s hospital bed in a bid for control. The constant beeping and whirring in the background is not helping him maintain his cool. “Start at the beginning,” he says. “Everything. Coherently. Or I will hurt you.”
Neil looks up and then back at his phone, so Andrew takes it away and tosses it towards the foot of the bed.
“Fine,” Neil sighs. “I went for a run. Sometimes I bring my phone and sometimes I don’t. This time I didn’t. I was going upstairs when I realized all of the frames on the wall had the glass smashed. I went back for the living room gun and went upstairs but there was no one there. There was just an old picture of me and my mom on the bed.” Neil shudders.
Andrew has a lot to say about all of that, actually, but he starts with the most obvious information gap. “Your feet?”
“Oh,” Neil says, looking down at them. “I’d already taken off my shoes. I tried to avoid the glass, but I still got some in my feet.”
“You went upstairs,” Andrew says. “Barefoot.”
“Yeah. Moscow was—”
“Stop,” Andrew interrupts, frowning. “You were on the stairs. There was glass. You knew someone had broken in very recently. You went downstairs, got a gun and then went back upstairs, barefoot and alone.”
“Uh,” Neil says. “Yes?”
“Did you call the cops?”
“No.”
“Did you drive here?”
“Yes?” Neil says, more confused than sheepish this time.
Andrew opens and closes his mouth a few times, but all of the talking parts of his brain have been taken over by the stabbing and shaking-someone parts of his brain. He turns on his heel and walks out, finding a reasonably out-of-the-way wall to lean against. The hospital, like most of them, is some malevolent mix of bright and dreary. Someone somewhere is moaning. It seems like an excessive response, if you’re asking Andrew. He needs a minute, but the fucking emergency room is the exact opposite of quiet. He digs his phone out of his pocket and viciously texts Nicky, uber to lexington hospital need you to drive a car. He texts Matt, free today? need you to install security bolts on client’s house. They both text him back quickly in the affirmative, well in time for Andrew to follow someone in a lab coat back into Neil’s room.
He waits patiently while the doctor extracts all the shards and splinters of glass from Neil’s feet, stitches the deeper cuts, and bandages them tightly. Well, actually, he leans against the wall and glowers at people while the doctor extracts the shards and splinters of glass from Neil’s feet. Once everyone finally leaves, Andrew figures out the mechanism of Neil’s bed and lifts him totally into a seated position. There is something he needs to do, but he knows it’s weird, and he knows there’s not a reasonable explanation for it, so he points warningly at Neil and says “Shut up. Can I touch you?”
Neil cocks his head to the side. “Yes?” He looks very confused but doesn’t resist when Andrew, as clinically as possible, examines him for damage he logically knows isn’t there.
“I’m really fine,” he starts, but Andrew cuts him off with a glare.
“I said shut up,” Andrew says.
Neil presses his lips closed but cooperates as Andrew turns his arms over, runs his hands over Neil’s torso, and checks the back of his head for damage. He has just about satisfied himself when Nicky says “knock, knock” and opens the curtain enough to duck in.
“Oh, hey!” Nicky says brightly. “Neil! Wait, why are you in the hospital?”
“He’s an idiot,” Andrew says, but he does let go of Neil’s head and lets him slump back into the bed.
“I stepped on some glass,” Neil explains. “Nobody needed to come.”
“He’s going to drive your car back,” Andrew tells Neil. “Give him your keys.”
This is a new look on Neil. Andrew thinks he’ll call it “utter bewilderment.”
“I—” Neil starts, but Andrew cuts him off again.
“He’s driving your car. Keys.”
Neil points at a little pile of stuff on the counter. Andrew digs his keys out from under his wallet, book (he grabbed a book?), and a thin, blood-stained mesh towel. He considers the keys for a moment, then pries the car key off the ring and tosses it to Nicky.
Nicky looks back and forth between them a few times. Andrew dares him with his eyes to make even a single comment about any of this.
“Oookay,” Nicky says. “I’ll just, uh, drive Neil’s car to his house and leave the keys in the mailbox. And then I will go home and mind my own business, I guess.”
Neil thanks him, still with that look of utter bewilderment on his face, then turns to Andrew once he’s gone. “Why are you doing this?”
“You need a babysitter,” Andrew says. “You’re hopeless. You’re not paying me enough for this.”
Andrew can see the effort it takes for Neil not to say, yet again, that he definitely didn’t ask Andrew to come. Good. He’s learning.
. : : .
It takes forever for the bureaucracy of the hospital to give Neil a piece of paper that basically says “keep your feet clean and sit down for a while.” By the time Andrew has bundled Neil into his car, picked them up food at the drive-through, and reached Neil’s house, Matt’s enormous blue truck is parked in front of it, blocking an impolite amount of the street. It’s not the same one he had in college. It’s somehow even worse. Brighter, wider, and louder.
“Wow,” Neil says. Andrew follows his gaze and sees Matt descending from the truck like some kind of viking in basketball shorts.
“Matt,” Andrew explains. “He works for me.”
“Okay,” Neil says. He chews on his bottom lip like he wants to ask about a hundred more questions, but wisely holds his tongue.
Andrew manages to shuffle both idiots into Neil’s house—Neil hobbles carefully while Matt makes excited conversation about the audiobook version of Neil’s first novel. He leaves Neil sitting on the bottom step talking to Matt while he slips up the stairs to check out the bedroom. Glass crunches beneath his boots to accompany the sound of his grinding teeth. The drops of blood on the stairs turn into smears and prints as Neil’s trail advances. Andrew picks up the expensively framed photo on the bed and stares at it. It’s Neil, maybe five years old, with a woman who must be his mother. They don’t look much alike other than their similar coloring, though Neil’s hair was much redder then than it is now and his mother’s was dark. Little Neil is paler than Andrew’s Neil, probably either because he hadn’t been let outside much or because someone had been very vigilant with the sunscreen. What really catches Andrew’s attention is the eyes—they’re both smiling but their eyes are wide and haunted. Neil’s mother has managed a plastered-on pageant smile, but this Neil is too young to fake it convincingly. Andrew resists the urge to smash it all the same way the pictures in Neil’s hall had been smashed.
He sets the picture face-down on the bed very carefully and gets back to the landing in time to hear Matt say, “It’s amazing that you’ve spent so much time with the bossman and haven’t fired him. Or killed him. Or died, I guess. You’ll have to write a how-to book.”
Neil’s profile is only partially visible from this angle, but it creases into an immediate frown. “Andrew’s great,” he says.
Matt throws his head back and laughs loudly, like Neil has just told an amazing joke. “You know, we used to call him the Monster in college.”
Neil’s frown deepens. “Why?” he asks, confused, in the voice Andrew has come to recognize as more ‘why are you saying something so obviously wrong?’ than ‘what do you mean?’
“Oh, you know,” Matt says. He waves his enormous power drill in the air casually, like it doesn’t weigh twenty-five pounds.
“No,” Neil says bluntly. “I don’t. I don’t get it.”
Matt lets the drill drop to his side, looking nonplussed. “Uh, I mean.” He reaches up with his free hand to scratch self-consciously at the back of his head. “He had the...knives. And he was always kind of angry?”
Neil’s shoulders stiffen, his spine straightening, and Andrew supposes he appreciates the misplaced loyalty, but he’d also really like for Neil to stop making things swirl around in his chest. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he interrupts. Listening to Neil go on a Twitter-style rant in defense Andrew’s character has its temptations, but he’s not sure he can handle it right now. “He’s a monster too.”
He’s hit with the full wattage of the answering smile Neil turns on him. It freezes him on the top step, so far from the small, forced thing on the face of the child in the portrait. Andrew wants to smash everything. “You’re a disaster,” he says.
“Hey,” Neil protests. “I’m not doing anything.”
Andrew shrugs. As far as he’s concerned, they’re not mutually exclusive. He carefully crunches his way down the stairs again and tugs at Neil’s arm. “Couch,” he says. “You’re supposed to put them up. Can’t you read?”
It takes a while to get Neil set up on his couch. He protests the help, protests the placement of pillows under his feet, and protests when Andrew brings him a bottle of water and the remote. Andrew simply pretends that Neil is neither conscious nor speaking. Neil flustered is way better than the stifling gratitude most people would vomit at him.
Once he’s satisfied with Neil, he locates a broom and dustpan and carefully sweeps up the glass. The soundtrack of Matt drilling into the metal is grating, but Andrew kind of likes it. It grounds him back into the status quo of comfortable irritation. He finishes sweeping up the shards and mopping up the blood and has moved to carefully taking each busted frame off the wall when he realizes he hasn’t heard the high-pitched grinding of the drill for a while. When he looks up, Matt has finished installing the heavy-duty bolt on Neil’s front door but is just standing there watching him instead of packing up to move to the back door.
“What?” Andrew asks.
“I like him,” Matt says.
“Congratulations.”
“He likes you,” Matt points out.
Andrew stares at him.
“I mean,” Matt rushes to say, “I like you. Lots of people like you. It just usually takes longer. A lot longer. Not that you’re not likeable, you just have to grow on people, right?” He laughs a little desperately.
“Shut up.” Andrew sighs. “I know you like me.”
“But more importantly,” Matt says. “You like him. That almost never happens.”
When his glare has no effect on Matt, Andrew lifts an arm and points emphatically towards the back door. He doesn’t stab Matt when he passes by laughing. Personal growth.
. : : .
Walking away from Neil’s house is only possible because he’s going to meet up with Renee to spar. Otherwise, he thinks, he might go back in there and yell at Neil about how stupid he was to go upstairs alone, how he should have called Andrew or, failing that level of intelligence, called the police. They’re never a good option, but at least one of them could have gotten shot at instead of Neil if there was someone waiting upstairs for him.
Instead, he drives to their gym, parks well away from the other, shitty cars, and stares at his hands as they clench on the wheel. He and Neil leave to head midwest-ish in two and a half days. For now, all he can do is hit things until he’s exorcised at least half of what he’s feeling.
Renee is already wrapping her hands when he goes in. Her hair, twisted into a bun on the top of her head, is a deep purple twisted through with shades of pink and blue. It looks like a galaxy. “Hello,” she says. “You look like you’re having a day.”
She holds her hand out to Andrew and he takes it, efficiently finishing the wrapping. “Now you’re psychic?” he asks.
“Just an expert on you,” she says sweetly.
Andrew glares, but holds out his hand when Renee dangles a hand wrap at him in an offer to do it for him. “A client,” he says grudgingly.
“Neil Josten?”
Andrew glares more accusingly.
“I hear things,” she explains. “Nicky says you like him. Matt says he likes you.”
“He’s the worst,” Andrew says. “I’m going to kill him.”
She smiles, ducking her head to watch her work more closely. “We can start with sparring and when you feel you’ve lost enough we can switch to the bags.”
Andrew could make some shit-talking comment about her cockiness, but the truth is that he knows she’s right—all he wants to do right now is hit things as hard as he can. She’ll be able to play him like a fiddle. He doesn’t care. He just wants to get on with it.
Renee waits until he’s (finally) managed to land a blow before she picks her questioning back up. “Why is he the worst?”
He lets his head fall back against the padded floor and stares up at her. He’d landed the blow, yes, but she’d immediately used it to flip him onto the ground. Her head floats upside down in his field of vision. Andrew squints up at her, considering all of the answers he could give. Eventually, he says, “He thinks I’m funny.”
“You are funny.”
“Your club only has two members.”
Renee beams at him. “Is that all? It’s hardly a killable offense.”
Andrew doesn’t move. “He thinks I’m—” not nice, exactly. What is it? “Safe,” he decides. “He thinks I’m safe.”
“Aren’t you?” she asks. “For him?”
Andrew still makes no move to get up. “I don’t even know if he likes men.”
“Have you asked?”
No, he hasn’t fucking asked. And he saw Neil shut down both men and women in Charleston, so that isn’t any help.
Andrew shakes his head. “He’s interesting. It’s better when people are boring.”
“It’s easier when people are boring,” Renee corrects softly. “It’s more comfortable.”
Andrew doesn’t know how to say I think I might want all of him in a way that doesn’t sound completely ridiculous. Instead, he says, “He was about to rip into Matt for calling me a monster.”
He blinks up at Renee when she walks around and offers him her hand. “Good,” she says. “I think I’ll like him too.”
People often think Renee’s sweetness means she couldn’t possibly be brutal. They think wrong. She thoroughly and efficiently beats him every round. When they’ve had enough of that, Andrew claims a heavy bag and hits it until his hands are aching and he’s blinded by his own sweat. The catharsis is profoundly appreciated. By the time he gets home, showers, and flops on his couch with ice cream, he’s feeling better. He’s feeling good enough, in fact, to text Neil, send video. He hesitates, then sends, and proof of life.
He shouldn’t be surprised that, instead of isolating the twenty or so minutes the masked asshole had been in Neil’s house, Neil simply sends him the last 24 hours of video from all of the cameras. Andrew’s initial impression had been right: Neil is a walking disaster. He has sent Andrew hours that probably contain Neil doing embarrassing and/or naked things all over his house, including his brave and frankly moronic stroll into what could have been an ambush.
Right after the video files, though, Neil sends him a picture of the bottom half of his body lying on the couch, his feet up on the arm, and his absurdly fluffy gray-blue cat curled up on his stomach. Andrew stares at it for a while. It’s the furthest thing from a sext he’s ever received, but for some reason it sparks a flame of desire that shocks him in its intensity. Eventually, once he’s memorized the slight bend of Neil’s left knee, the sliver of skin exposed where his cat has pushed up a bit of Neil’s shirt with its paw, the elegant hand loosely threaded through gray fur, he sends, try not to die.
. : : .
This time, when Neil pulls up in front of Andrew’s house to head out, he climbs out of the driver’s seat and meets him at the trunk. He’s walking better, Andrew sees. Still careful of the healing cuts and stitches on his feet, but more confidently putting weight on them.
In the car, Neil hands Andrew the cord to plug his phone in; he does so, quickly sets the GPS for where they’re going, and picks a playlist before he closes it up in the center compartment. A few more taps on the console and Halsey fills the car; Andrew absolutely did not put together a playlist specifically for driving with Neil. Any thematic consistency between these songs is a coincidence.
“So,” Neil says, as Andrew reverses aggressively out of the driveway. “I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse.”
Andrew gestures for Neil to continue, a yes, of course wave of his hand.
“Shoe stores,” Neil says. “Not first, not even third, but definitely the top 10. We’re going to go through shoes real fast.”
The corner of Andrew’s mouth turns up just a little. He doesn’t even bother trying to flatten it. “You would plan on running everywhere,” he says. “Junkie.”
Nashville goes well. Andrew scans everything again and patrols the area behind Neil’s table with such intensity he knows people are watching him and wondering what his deal is. Good.
He’s low-key thrilled when the whole thing goes off without a hitch and, more importantly, is over. He’s not going to say he missed Neil, but he had four days of being with Neil most of the time and then five days of not being with Neil at all, basically, and it’s only a little disconcerting to realize which of those he preferred.
Neil is shameless with the lame things he wants to do in these cities they’re only in for one night. He says it’s because he’s been to dozens of places and barely left the cheap apartments or houses they were squatting in. Andrew should hate it, but the thing is that Neil just shows him things and then asks if he wants to go and Andrew knows he actually has a choice. Neil wants to do something; Neil asks if Andrew is interested. Neil takes a no as a no. Andrew remembers vividly how disbelieving he’d been when Nicky had said ”he asked” over and over again on the day Neil had walked into his office. He thinks he gets it, now.
His absolute certainty that Neil will drop things the minute Andrew declines leads him, ironically, to say yes to almost everything.
Tonight, they’re going on a ghost tour. Neil asked if Andrew wanted to spend 90 minutes following around behind some guy (who will probably be in a Victorian costume) and listening to him tell exaggerated stories about dead people. And Andrew said yes.
On their way to what is supposed to be one of the best burgers in Nashville, Neil ducks into a liquor store, moving so fast Andrew has to backtrack a couple of steps to follow him in. He spots the dark red gleam of Neil’s head already down one of the aisles and finds him standing in front of a selection of flasks. Neil picks up a black one that says ‘Holy Water’ and shows it to Andrew questioningly. Andrew shrugs but watches with interest as Neil picks up another one, this one in the shape of a cowboy boot. He wrinkles his nose in distaste when Neil shows it to him. When Neil’s hand goes for a bedazzled option that you’re supposed to wear as a bracelet, Andrew reaches out fast and blocks the box.
Neil laughs, but relents. He scans the options again, brightens, and grabs a simple metal option that says ‘Definitely not a flask full of booze.’ In response, Andrew scowls at him, which just seems to make Neil happier with his choice.
“Come on,” Neil says. He points towards the part of the front wall that has all the mini bottles on it.
Andrew is...intrigued. He follows lazily and watches as Neil makes a pathetic attempt at Vanna White flourishes.
“Pick something,” Neil says.
The lurid pinks and yellows of the flavored vodkas are a turn off. Andrew wanders towards the ambers and browns and picks out a whiskey he likes. Neil does quick math on how many bottles they need to fill the flask, and they cram into the tiny bathroom together once he pays so they can rinse out the flask and fill it with booze instead.
Neil presents him the flask without a flourish, this time, and beams when he takes it. “Thank you,” he says. “For going on a stupid ghost tour with me.”
Andrew feels...something. Something heady. He doesn’t look at it too closely. Instead, he blinks at the flask in his hand, still warmed from Neil’s grip, and then tucks it into his jacket. “This is a wise investment,” he says. “Drinking heavily makes it easier to deal with you.”
This time, he’s not nearly as surprised when Neil laughs.
. : : .
St. Louis is as terrible as Andrew could have expected. It’s not that anything bad happens at the reading, but it doesn’t have to. They’re in Missouri. It’s even worse than South Carolina. Even Neil is listless, unenthusiastic about the city’s offerings of botanical gardens, baseball, and casinos. He scrolls blankly through pages and pages of local restaurants on Yelp until Andrew plucks it out of his hand and announces that they’re going to the Friday’s next door.
The restaurant is that weird mix of chaotic minimalism that newly-sleek chain restaurants have these days. They’re playing sports channels on at least half the TVs. He sees Neil scan them, but none of them are playing Exy. There’s a moment where they make the hostess uncomfortable because they both want the seat with the clearest view of the front door and neither of them will readily give it up. Instead, they stand there, communicating silently with their eyes until Neil finally sighs and drops into the other side, angling himself at the end of the bench so he at least has eyes on the side door.
Neil may think it’s revenge when he orders Andrew a shockingly pink cocktail with a puff of cotton candy floating in it, but Andrew never backs down from a challenge and, besides, it turns out to be delicious. He sips delicately at the thin rim of the glass while Neil nurses a beer, drinks about a pitcher of water and talks enthusiastically about books. His excitement had been a little more tempered to start, but then Andrew mentioned he’d already read the Silo series that Neil has picked up, and now he has his hands full with a very eager redhead who has apparently only just discovered sci-fi.
It’s a date. Even Andrew it’s a date. He knows when their feet bump together under the table, when Neil watches him with bright eyes over the rim of his glass, and when they bicker over the bill at the end of the meal. The problem is, he’s not sure if Neil knows that it’s a date. And if Neil doesn’t know, then it just...isn’t. However much it may look like one.
On their way back to the hotel they’re stopped, waiting for the walk light to turn green, when a laughing woman runs into Neil’s back. She’s drunk, wobbly on her heels, and she clutches at Neil’s shoulders for balance, slurred apologies spilling from her bright red lips, her dark hair falling into her face and catching on her lipstick. Andrew is already reaching for a knife when Neil turns around to steady her and—goes rigid with fear. His whole body shudders and he shoves her, scrambling away so desperately that he almost throws himself onto his back in the middle of the road.
Andrew manages to hook a hand into Neil’s shirt and haul him forward before he gets flattened, but he can’t figure out why Neil is freaking out and the girl’s companions are yelling at him for pushing her and the car Neil has almost stepped in front of is still blaring its horn down the block. Andrew ignores the women in favor of studying the trembling that’s taking over Neil’s entire body. His eyes are huge and he’s frantically trying to peel Andrew’s hand off his shirt, probably because he wants to run back out into traffic like an idiot.
“Hey,” Andrew says sharply to the group of drunk girls still yelling at them, waving the knife through the air in front of them like a flag. They snap to attention at the blade and stare at him in gratifyingly wary silence. He tugs Neil a little closer to him and steps between him and the girls. “He has PTSD. You can fuck off now or I’ll have to help you.”
“What are you?” one of the blondes asks. She towers over both of them. “His bodyguard?”
“Literally yes,” Andrew says. ”Get lost.”
One of the more sober looking women frowns at Neil. She must be with it enough to realize that he’s in a full on panic attack, because she grabs at her friends and starts them walking in another direction. Andrew watches to make sure they’re really gone and then turns on Neil, who’s still pale and hyperventilating but has at least stopped trying to dislodge Andrew’s grip on his shirt.
He still doesn’t understand the pattern of Neil’s fear. How is this the same man who happily crunched his way barefoot through 40 feet of glass to go check on his cat? How does that guy lose his shit over being bumped into by some drunk woman? The only answer is that there are things Andrew simply does not know about Neil. That is as infuriating as it is unacceptable. He scowls and steps close.
“You’ve been keeping secrets,” Andrew says. He doesn’t let go of Neil’s shirt yet, just in case, but he does tug him back to the corner and presses the crossing button again. “But not anymore.”
He pulls Neil into the hotel and onto the elevator, but stops before pressing a button. They could go to the third floor, where their rooms are, but instead Andrew presses the button for the top—the 5th. By the time the doors ding and slide open, Neil seems to have a precarious hold on his shit. Andrew stalks the hall until he finds the stairs that take them up to the roof access. The door is locked; Andrew starts examining it for ways to jimmy it open, but Neil says, “Hey,” and pulls a set of slim lock picks the size of a credit card out of his wallet and crouches in front of the door. Andrew’s rage ebbs and flows again—why the fuck can he never predict Neil Josten?
He watches Neil finesse the lock with practiced ease. It clicks open and Neil uses a hand on the knob to heave himself back up before opening the door.
Andrew gestures impatiently for Neil to go out. He pauses for a steadying breath and, when he follows, he spots Neil already retrieving a stray block to prop the door open. He watches Neil heft the weight with interest—he’s angry, but not so angry he doesn’t appreciate the flex of Neil’s forearms as he handles the concrete.
He leaves Neil to deal with that and makes his way to the edge of the roof, tapping his cigarettes against the waist-high wall to dislodge one. He’s lighting up by the time Neil makes it over and settles in next to him, his hands tucked in his pockets, his gaze trained out over the riot of neon lights that glow up at them from the city below.
Andrew turns his back to the view and watches Neil instead, waiting.
And then he waits some more. He’s not sure if Neil is avoiding the conversation, doesn’t know how to start the conversation, or just isn’t aware that they’re supposed to be having one.
Andrew finally cracks and says something. “What the fuck, Neil.”
Neil shakes his head and stares at the lights a little while longer before he sighs and digs his hands into his pockets deeper. “For a second,” he says, “She looked like—I thought she was Lola. One of my father’s people.”
“Is she the one coming for you?”
Neil shakes his head again. “I don’t know. I hope not. She’s the worst-case scenario, her and her brother. I think I could handle it if it was anyone but her.”
He thinks he can handle it. Like any of the other sadistic fucks it could be will somehow improve the moment of his murder. Or, maybe they would. What the fuck does Andrew know?
He waits. He doesn’t know what he could miss out on by directing the conversation, so he simply waits to see where Neil will take it.
“She does—did his body disposal,” Neil says. “Except they’re not bodies anymore by the time she gets done with them. She doesn’t usually do the fun part, but she branched out for the sake of my education.”
Branched out. The fun part. Of course Neil became a writer. He had to do something with all these euphemisms he has for torture and abuse.
“Your education?” Andrew asks.
“Yeah.” Neil grimaces. “She missed her calling.”
Andrew has seen the scars peeking out when Neil pushes his sleeves up too high or when he stretches and his shirt rides up over his stomach. He does the math. Neil had been eleven-ish when his mom had taken him and escaped. Andrew had thought—hoped, maybe—that the scars were from a life on the run.
He grinds out his cigarette and turns fully towards Neil, gesturing at his torso. “Can I see them?”
“My scars?” Neil asks.
Andrew nods and keeps his face impassive, trying to put as little pressure on the question as Neil does on all of his ridiculous suggestions for things to do at night.
“Sure,” Neil says. He starts shrugging out of his hoodie. “I used to be really weird about them, but I was a lot younger then. I don’t mind.”
He hands his hoodie to Andrew, who takes it and drapes it carefully over the edge of the safety wall. Neil keeps his shirt balled up in his hand once it’s off and then he’s standing there, topless, on the roof, in front of Andrew. There’s a cold breeze making its way steadily over the rooftop and Neil shivers a little in it, his nipples pebbling.
Andrew takes a half-step forward so he can see better. Neil’s chest and stomach are an encyclopedia of the kinds of damage people can do to each other. Andrew decides to start at the top—he lifts his hand and holds his fingers a few inches away from the scar in the unmistakable shape of an iron on Neil’s shoulder.
Neil says, “You can touch,” before Andrew has to ask. He settles his fingers onto it and rubs over the dots left behind by the steam holes.
“I was four, maybe five,” Neil says. “The cops came by. I didn’t sit still enough.”
The bubbling heat of rage surges in Andrew’s chest. He schools his face into perfect bored indifference and trails his fingertips across the looping scar on Neil’s collarbone and over to the rough edges of the puckered circle that Andrew knows all too well is a bullet wound. There’s a wide patch of smooth scar tissue running from Neil’s shoulder to his bellybutton; Andrew flattens his palm on it and looks up to find Neil watching him closely. “Jumped out of a moving car,” Neil says.
Crisscrossing stab wounds spread over the rest of his chest and abdomen. Some of them were treated so poorly and hastily that Andrew can see the cross-hatches where the stitches were. He touches each of them, carefully tracing lines and gouges with his fingertips, like memorizing what each of them feels like will help him understand Neil better.
He thinks about all the things people did to him. Those scars are internal—the visible ones on his arms are ones he gave himself. He wonders which is worse—to hold all the damage inside where it can be overlooked, or to have it painted on your body so no one will ever let you forget it. Of course, scarring on the skin isn’t mutually exclusive with scarring on the soul. Neil obviously didn’t get out of this without any issues—he has a lot of fucking issues. Andrew wonders what Neil would say if he was asked which of them had it easier. He can picture the way his eyes would focus on Andrew as he said something like, neither. Nothing was easy for either of us.
When he’s finished imprinting the shape and feel of Neil’s scars onto his memory he steps back, reaching for Neil’s hoodie and handing it to him once his shirt is pulled back on.
“You make my job harder when you don’t tell me things,” Andrew says. “I need to know.”
“I know,” Neil says, ducking his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry is a waste of time. Start being honest.”
After, he drops Neil off at his room, listening at the door until he hears the door guard engage before he walks next door. He flops onto his bed and stares at his ceiling, willing the riot in his head to sort itself out. One thing he knows for sure is that he very much hopes to meet Lola. The Butcher can’t be resurrected for Andrew to kill again, but he can make his peace with venting his rage on the second-best option.
Killing Neil’s demons won’t heal him. Andrew wasn’t fixed when Drake died. But maybe, he thinks, killing demons can give you a little bit of space to heal yourself.
. : : .
Andrew is expecting a wide range of moods from Neil in the morning: angst over his panic attack, embarrassment about showing his scars, terrror at the very real possibility of one of his father’s people showing up to torture and kill him. Instead, Andrew opens his hotel room door to Neil, already packed and waiting; he smiles brightly at Andrew and says, “You ready?”
Neil, it turns out, is ecstatic that they’re heading to Chicago. He tells Andrew a longish story about staying there a couple of days while his mom got them new identities. He’d apparently been in love with the L, in love with the lake, in love with their exy team, in love with all of it.
In the car, Andrew puts on a tastefully curated playlist of girl pop and endures the traffic until he can get onto the freeway.
“Why not Chicago?” he asks, once he can focus on conversation. “Why Columbia?”
“Oh,” Neil says. He rubs the back of his neck, looking a little embarrassed. “Um. Kevin.”
“Kevin,” Andrew repeats.
“Yeah, he—well, I met him right before my mom and I ran. We played exy together, me, him, and Riko. Then we watched my dad chop a guy to pieces for some reason. I didn’t know it was an audition until a lot later, but I got this idea in my head—it’s really stupid.”
“Everything you say is stupid,” Andrew prompts, when Neil falls silent. “It never seems to stop you.”
Neil rolls his eyes but grins sheepishly. “I was really jealous. For a long time. He got to stay and play exy. I had to run and hide. When I found out I was supposed to stay with them, I got a little obsessed, I guess. The FBI let me choose where to live so I picked Columbia. USC was right there but it was still close enough to PSU that...I don’t know. I guess maybe it felt like picking up the life I could have had again, if we were in basically the same place.”
Andrew considers. “You’re right,” he says. “That is stupid.”
“Thanks,” Neil says dryly.
“Kevin couldn’t stand on his own then. You should have picked a better role model.”
Neil shrugs. “I got over it. But he really is a great exy player.”
Fantastic. He has two obsessives on his hands now.
Andrew places his hands precisely at ten and two on the wheel, gathers his breath to school his voice into complete innocuous blandness, and asks, “Are you into him?”
“Into him?” Neil asks. “Like, do I want to date him?”
“Yes,” Andrew says evenly.
“Ew,” Neil says. “No. Gross. Definitely not.”
“Are you into anyone?” Andrew asks, because he desperately wants to know. He doesn’t have any justification beyond that.
He expects a simple answer, but Neil hums thoughtfully and pauses before speaking. “I’m usually not. I know that’s weird, but it just—it just wasn’t something we did. I was always moving schools and my mom would beat the shit out of me if she thought I was interested in someone. When she died, sex wasn’t anywhere near my list of priorities. Then there were the Moriyamas and the FBI. And then I did my first year and a half of college online because I was terrified of leaving my apartment.”
Neil pauses again, apparently thinking, and Andrew takes the moment to process. There’s a lot to process. Neil starts again, “Maybe five or so years ago I started living something like a normal life. I went on a few dates and tried a few things. It seemed like I should. Everyone else was.”
“You weren’t interested.”
Neil shrugs again and says, “I don’t actually like most people. Every time I tried dating it took like fifteen minutes to figure out I really couldn’t stand the person. Doing something physical with some self-centered, ignorant, my-life-is-so-hard asshole holds no appeal. How am I supposed to get from wishing someone would shut up and go away to wishing they’d put their hands down my pants?”
There are probably dozens of websites Neil could visit for exact terminology on this kind of shit. Andrew assumes Neil, with his typhoon-level Twitter presence, knows all about these.
Right now, Andrew needs to think hard about what Neil has just told him and exactly how he’s said it, but he also can’t be awkwardly silent without it getting weird.
“I see the problem with Kevin, then,” Andrew says.
Neil laughs and scrubs at the back of his neck again. Andrew is an expert at trying to say a lot of things without using any of the actual words, so he pays very close attention when Neil puts on his most careful and precise voice and says, “I had never met anyone I could be interested in like that. I figured it was just never going to happen.”
Had never. Past perfect tense. Andrew’s memory lets him flip back through the exact words Neil had used in his explanation. If it was anyone else, Andrew would assume he was reading too much deliberation into the way Neil had phrased his answers, but Neil isn’t anyone else. Neil is Neil, and Andrew thinks he understands him perfectly.
“Your turn,” Andrew says into a gap in the music. He prepares for Neil to ask him something as intensely personal as that exchange was—about his own sexuality, maybe, or even about Drake or Aaron.
Instead, what Neil says over the opening chords of the next song is, “Is this Taylor Swift?”
Andrew isn’t really sure he’s been let off the hook when Neil starts interrogating him on how he’d rank her last several albums.
. : : .
The degree to which Neil is excited for this Chicago stop becomes even more evident when the GPS announces they’re approaching their hotel. Andrew turns off of Michigan Avenue and sees the 19th century building rising above them as they approach. They’ve been staying in nice enough places—bright, clean, well-designed, and at least appeared not to be splattered with bodily fluids. This time, though, Neil has obviously been a little pickier.
When they make it into the hotel, Andrew admires the high ceilings and original details, but mostly he watches Neil admiring them. The pineapple motifs everywhere seem a little out of place to him, but he guesses he can’t fault them too much for the branding. Neil checks in under a new fake name and practically vibrates with excitement as they take the elevator up to their rooms.
“You have no chill,” Andrew informs him. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Neil just grins and presses the button for the ninth floor again.
Andrew has to admit, once he’s tossed his bag into his room, that it’s nice. It has more character than their usual lodgings and the view is fantastic. He changes quickly and heads next door, knowing that Neil is dying to get out into the city. Neil is topless again when he lets Andrew in, loudly stumbling over from his suitcase to get the door, but he starts talking to Andrew about their restaurant and tourism options even as he tries to get his shirt smoothly over his head. It’s a very different vibe than it had been on the roof last night. Andrew lets himself admire the lines of Neil’s back as it flexes. He’s trying to put his head through the arm of his shirt. He is intolerable.
“We can walk to the bean,” Neil is saying as he turns around, finally tugging the shirt on right and pulling it down over his stomach. “Then we have to pick a restaurant. We should probably do pizza, right?”
They end up just walking. Well, they wander around Millennium park for a while, looking at the art. Andrew refuses Neil’s attempts to get him to wade into crown fountain. Neil spends a long time staring at himself in the curved surfaces of the bean. Andrew leans and smokes and tries to read the look Neil is giving his reflection.
When he’s had enough of it he tugs Neil away by his sleeve and they walk a few blocks for pizza. The whole mood of the night is different somehow. More charged. Andrew knows he’s going to make a move. He thinks he may have actually made one earlier, on the drive, and he also thinks Neil made one back, and now they’re just waiting for one of them to work up the nerve to take the next step.
And yet, somehow, Andrew isn’t in a rush. Neil buys him ice cream and they wander back to their hotel along the Riverwalk, mostly talking about which celebrities would be worth recruiting during a zombie apocalypse and which would be catastrophically unhelpful. He watches Neil lick the drips of his neglected sorbet off his fingers and wants him with an intensity that seems out of place in the quiet glow of the night.
Neither of them even mentions grabbing a drink in the hotel bar. Andrew’s a bigger drinker than Neil is, in general, but he doesn’t think he could drink enough whiskey to ease the tight feeling in his chest and, anyway, he’d rather not have whatever may or may not happen be clouded by alcohol.
He’s so busy trying to figure out where and when and how and maybe even if he should do this that he doesn’t realize they’ve stopped in front of Neil’s room until he says, “Do you want to come in?”
Andrew has to stop forgetting that Neil is probably the bravest person he’s ever met.
He nods, following Neil in and turning back around almost immediately to watch him close the door behind them. Neil doesn’t have much room to move once he turns around; he leans back against the door instead, watching Andrew.
Andrew’s stomach tightens. His mouth is dry. He swallows hard around the thickness in his throat, but manages to take a half step forward and say, “I want to kiss you. Yes or no?”
It’s not until he feels Neil’s exhaled “Yes” as a puff of breath against his lips that he realizes how close they’ve gotten. Neil’s hands are tucked safely behind him, but Andrew takes his last moment of coherent thought to smooth his hands down Neil’s arms and mumble, “No touching.” Neil’s nod drags his mouth against Andrew’s and then they’re suddenly pressed together, breathing the same air, Neil’s mouth opening under Andrew’s.
He fills his hands with Neil, splaying them over his ribs, smoothing down his sides, wrapping his fingers around Neil’s hips and finding with satisfaction that his thumbs notch perfectly against Neil’s hip bones. The first tiny noise Neil makes hits Andrew like a spark on kindling. He gathers Neil to him, one arm tight around his waist, the other on his jaw, angling him so Andrew can get closer, can remove the last gasp of distance between them.
Neil uses the shift in position to adjust his arms, clasping his hands behind his back. The simple fucking trust in that move sends a wave of heat over Andrew so intense that it makes his hands shake. He’d thought he knew what it would be like if they eventually kissed, but he was wrong. He didn’t know this was a way you could feel kissing someone. When he stops—when he has to stop because they’re gasping for air and Andrew is so hard it’s starting to ache to not be rubbing on Neil—he pulls away only enough to bury his face against Neil’s neck, breathing in the heady mix of sweat, of the lake, of whatever Neil’s body wash is. He feels Neil push off the door enough to unclasp his hands, flexing them a few times before carefully folding his fingers into the pockets of Andrew’s jacket.
His back must be sore, Andrew thinks. He slides a hand up to rub soothing circles between Neil’s shoulder blades and realizes, with sudden, blinding clarity, that he will kill before he allows someone to take this man from him.
He breathes until he can breathe, rubs until Neil’s shoulders relax, and then makes himself peel off of Neil.
“I need to go,” he says. Neil looks at him with perfect understanding and nods, and Andrew is so fucking grateful for the way Neil accepts him as he is over and over and over again that he slides his hands onto Neil’s jaw and kisses him again, then again, and, helplessly, one more time before he can pull himself away.
He barely makes it into his room before he’s shoving his jeans down. He falls into the bed and takes himself in hand, coming hot over his knuckles before he can even think about a rhythm.
. : : .
He’s worried it’ll be awkward in the morning. They had their first kiss and Andrew promptly ran away. It proves to be as much a waste of time as worrying always is, though, because if Neil is feeling anything unusual? It’s bummed about leaving Chicago so soon.
To distract him—purely to distract, of course—he allows Neil to read advice column letters out loud. Sometimes one of them has a very strong reaction (he makes his girlfriend pee in the sink because he monopolizes the toilet for hours every day??) and rants about the obvious solution (immediately dump that guy) but most of the time they amuse themselves with giving the worst advice they can think of. Andrew can be cutting in his brevity, but he’s oddly delighted to discover how outright vicious some of Neil’s more elaborate advice is.
The signing is fine. It’s the same as usual. Andrew impatiently watches Neil read, impatiently watches Neil sign, and impatiently drives them to a restaurant that Andrew selects for its proximity to their hotel.
They’re on each other as soon as Neil’s door swings closed behind them—Neil stepping into Andrew’s reaching hands and saying “Yes, yes,” before he can even ask the question. He grabs Neil’s arms before he can tuck them safely away and pulls them to his shoulders. “Here and up,” he says, then pulls Neil down and kisses him the way he’s wanted to all day.
Neil’s hands are almost reverent when they skim across his shoulders and up to thread through his hair.
Andrew knows exactly where he wants them to be . He pulls Neil close and spins them, walking him backwards a few steps towards the bed. He gets all of “Can I—” out, mumbled against Neil’s mouth, before Neil says, “Yes,” again and pulls Andrew’s head too close to talk. He gets his hands around the backs of Neil’s legs, just under the curve of his ass, and picks him up, swallowing Neil’s surprised moan.
He drops Neil closer to the center of the bed and crawls on after him, but stops to appreciate the sight of Neil under him, his lips already red, his chest heaving. It’s been action action action since they got their hands on each other and now—now Andrew takes a moment to indulge in all the touches he’d refused himself earlier. He smooths the mess of Neil’s hair off his forehead, traces the line of his jaw with his fingertips and then his mouth, flattens his hand on Neil’s back to pull him closer.
Andrew is usually very task-oriented in bed, a hard-ass cartographer who knows where everyone is and should be at any given time. He gives blowjobs with military precision, closely supervises any reciprocation, and dismisses his partners without debriefing. There’s never been any of the much vaunted “letting go”, not even with the few people he’d kept around a while as something like boyfriends. Ultimately, he trusts very few people to internalize his boundaries enough to respect them in the heat of the moment—the heat of their moment, at least, because a part of Andrew is always patrolling the perimeter. With Neil, though, it feels different. He’s not letting go but he thinks he can loosen his grip and trust Neil to hold up the other end.
They kiss and kiss and kiss until Andrew can’t remember what his mouth used to feel like. His hands have worked their way under Neil’s shirt and Neil is gasping and a little too warm beneath him. He’s dangerously close to pulling Neil’s knee over his hip and dry humping him like a teenager. Andrew tears his mouth away from Neil’s and puts it somewhere safer, pressing open-mouthed kisses to the fabric covering Neil’s shoulder.
He stays there, kissing innocent, clothed parts of Neil and enjoying the feeling of Neil rubbing lightly at his scalp.
Of course, calming down means he calms down enough to overthink. He has to find a way to balance his need for space with his need to be touching Neil as much as possible. He knows he needs a minute here, needs a little space, but how does he get it without making it weird or hurting Neil’s feelings? He could get up and go to his room again, but the sun hasn’t even set yet, so then he’d probably be stuck there wishing he could come back over. He could just get up and go to Neil’s bathroom, but that would probably give a weird jerking off impression—and possibly not incorrectly.
Before he can pick one of several imperfect options, Neil solves his problem for him. He drops both arms onto the bed and huffs out a satisfied breath. “I’m going to hit the vending machine,” Neil says. “Do you want anything?”
“Yeah, Andrew says, rolling onto his back. “Everything.”
Neil must take it at face value, because he comes back about fifteen minutes later with so much candy and junk food he’s been forced to turn his t-shirt into a pouch.
“You do know we just ate dinner, don’t you?” Andrew asks as Neil dumps his haul on the bed next to Andrew. A few bottles of juice and water and a couple of sodas roll towards him and come to an abrupt and very cold stop against Andrew’s side.
“I have great faith in your ability to eat your body weight in candy.”
Andrew raises a very heart-felt middle finger at Neil, but he still sits up and starts picking through the selection.
“If you don’t have work to do,” Neil says, “I could rent something terrible on Pay Per View.”
A quick glance at the clock tells Andrew it’s only 6. Tomorrow they go to West Virginia and Andrew has already cancelled their hotel reservation for the night—he knows Neil believes the Moriyamas have nothing to do with this, but Andrew can’t stand the idea of him being in their territory any longer than necessary. That makes this their last night on this leg of the tour and Andrew—well, Andrew is getting a lot more comfortable admitting to himself that he just likes being around this guy.
“Give me the remote,” he says, deciding. “I definitely don’t trust your taste in movies.”
. : : .
Despite Andrew’s many reservations, their Charleston, WV stop is fine. He triple-scans everything within ten feet of Neil for bugs, prowls the perimeter of the room while he reads, and hovers so closely at Neil’s table during the signing that a few people ask him to help them take pictures with Neil. None of them can weather Andrew’s flat stare of denial for very long, which is actually kind of reassuring, considering he spends so much time now with someone who has never seemed even a little concerned about Andrew’s propensity for violence.
He herds Neil into the car as soon as they’re done and doesn’t really relax until they’ve put West Virginia in the rear-view mirror.
The ride passes mostly in comfortable silence, at least until they stop for a late dinner and Andrew makes the mistake of stretching out his shoulders where Neil can see it. After that, Neil seems to take it upon himself to make sure Andrew is awake and not bored for the last couple of hours. He tells Andrew stories about him and his mother on the road, mostly sticking with the stranger-in-a-strange land aspect of their time in Europe.
The sound of his voice, the rumble of the engine, and the quiet roll of pavement soothes Andrew into something like a trance. He listens to Neil talk about the many embarrassing things he’s accidentally said in foreign languages and watches the road disappear under the tires. Eventually it’s almost midnight and they’re pulling up in front of Andrew’s house.
Neil has the door open and has popped himself out of his seat before Andrew has even turned the car engine off. Neil’s not great about sitting still for long periods of time. Andrew’s almost surprised that he doesn’t take off on a run around the block.
Andrew climbs out too and leans against the side of the car, lighting a cigarette and watching with interest as Neil stretches in some particularly suggestive ways. He’s still smoking when Neil finishes and leans against the car next to him.
“Kevin’s team is playing in Charlotte next week,” Andrew says. He scrutinizes the end of his cigarette instead of looking at Neil.
“Are you going?” Neil asks. “Don’t you hate exy?”
“He always reserves me tickets. It’s stupid.”
“Optimistic?” Neil counters.
“Do you want to go.”
“To Kevin’s game?”
“Yes,” Andrew says, even though this is a dumb question.
“With you?”
What has he done to deserve this? “Yes,” he says again, patiently.
“Uh, yeah. Yes. That would be great.”
Andrew drops his cigarette, grinding it out with his foot. When he turns, Neil meets him halfway—he starts to ask this time, but Andrew interrupts him with an impatient “Yes” and kisses him once, lingering over it, before he goes inside.
. : : .
“You’re going on a date,” Nicky says gleefully when Andrew tells him to confirm the tickets with Kevin. “An actual date.”
“It’s not a date,” Andrew says. “I’m consolidating disasters.”
“Are you going to kiss him? Have you kissed him?”
Andrew glares.
“Oh my god,” Nicky breathes, ecstatically, like the face of the Virgin Mary has just revealed itself to him in his latte. “Oh my god, you have.”
Andrew says, “I will kill you.”
“No you won’t.” Nicky practically flings himself into one of the chairs across from Andrew’s desk and steeples his fingers together. “Tell me everything.”
“I will tell you nothing,” Andrew says. “But I will not stab you if you leave right now.”
“You seem different,” Nicky says. “I think you really like him.”
“I tolerate him,” Andrew corrects.
“Yeah,” Nicky snorts. “You tolerated your tongue into his mouth. A little more tolerating and you’ll probably tolerate your hand into his pants.”
Andrew says, “I hate you,” but he can’t really argue, because Nicky isn’t really wrong. “Go away.”
“I’ll go,” Nicky says airly. “I have to activate the phone tree anyway.”
He wonders if there’s a threat he can make to Nicky’s life or property that could get Nicky to keep his mouth shut. No, he decides. There probably isn’t.
“Leave me out of it,” he says. “If I hear even one word about it I’m cancelling all your favorite channels.”
Nicky beams and sails out of the office triumphantly. Dammit.
. : : .
Neil’s Audi is very nice. Neil barely takes care of it, because Neil is a disaster, but it’s still a very nice car. What it is not, however, is any kind of competition for Andrew’s Maserati.
Andrew is a little—no, that’s not right. Andrew is a lot satisfied with himself when he gets to pull away from Neil’s street with him in the passenger seat.
“This is really nice,” Neil says. Andrew is pretty sure he’s only saying it because he knows how much Andrew loves this car, but Andrew is willing to accept the compliment in lieu of credit for educating him about fine Italian automobiles.
“We’re getting really good at road trips,” Neil says. “But we should talk about the next two legs.”
“The South,” Andrew says. “And the west coast.”
“It’s ten hours to New Orleans. Then Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Denver. They’re much longer drives.”
“Then Seattle,” Andrew adds.
“Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, and Phoenix.”
“Then New York,” Andrew says, remembering the schedule. “For a few days.”
“I kind of hate airports. I went through a lot of them with fake IDs, so they make me nervous. I was planning to fly to New Orleans and rent a car. Same with Seattle. But if you want to fly this time, I can book flights.”
“I don’t like flying,” Andrew says. “I’ll think about it.”
“Okay,” Neil says, then turns in his seat and smiles widely. “Can we talk about exy now?”
“Absolutely not,” Andrew says. He turns the radio up over the sound of Neil’s laughter.
. : : .
Bringing Neil to an exy game was a terrible idea. Andrew had been generally aware of that going in, but there had been no way for him to predict the magnitude of how terrible of an idea it was until Neil stepped into the stadium and looked at Andrew with a feverish gleam in his eyes.
“Oh. No,” Andrew says as the full weight of his bad decision hits him. “I changed my mind.”
“No way,” Neil says. He grins so sharply that Andrew is pretty sure he’s about to set up a shell game or start conning people out of their life savings. “We need merch.”
Instead of leading them to the stands with Kevin’s green and gold, however, Neil beelines for the home team’s store. He searches through the jerseys until he finds one with Charlotte’s best striker on it and buys it, grinning wickedly.
“Don’t worry,” Neil says, looping the bag onto his wrist. “I won’t embarrass you by wearing it during the game. Just when we say hi to Kevin.”
“Wear it,” Andrew says. “I’m not working. Get your ass beat if you want.”
It gets worse when the game starts. Andrew had not allowed Neil to talk at him about exy before this. Maybe if he had, he would have been aware of the frightening depth of knowledge and analysis Neil brings to the fucking viewing experience. By the time they’re fifteen minutes into the first half, Neil has befriended the two women next to him and they appear to be greatly enjoying dissecting the performances of both teams. Sometimes this means they leap up in unison (with about a quarter of the rest of the stadium) and shout at something one of the players has done—or not done, Andrew isn’t really keeping track. He does, however, enjoy this performance the most whenever Neil gleefully skewers Kevin for a misstep.
He does not find Neil’s obsession with this sport attractive. But he does find this excited and blisteringly critical thing attractive. Once he starts ignoring the game and the actual words Neil is saying, it’s not a bad way to spend some time.
Kevin’s team wins. This will either make Kevin easier to deal with or much, much worse to deal with. Andrew ends up hooking a finger through Neil’s belt loop and towing him along through the crowds as Neil wrestles his new jersey out of the bag and onto his body. It would be easier if they stopped walking, which is why Andrew doesn’t let them stop walking. After a number of failed attempts, Neil manages to pull the damn thing over his head. He throws the bag away and straightens the jersey just as they arrive at the access door. He grins at Andrew, smoothing at the fabric.
“How do I look?” he asks.
“Your hair is a mess,” Andrew says, eyeing the tangle of auburn that was tidy before Neil tried several times to put his head through each of the arm holes. Because Andrew is very weak when it comes to Neil, he reaches up and fixes it, combing the hair off his forehead and back into some sort of order.
“Better?” Neil asks.
Andrew hums, like he’s considering this question seriously. Neil rolls his eyes and points at the guard behind them.
“Come on,” Neil says. “Let’s go see your boy.”
“My what?”
Neil grins, undaunted by Andrew’s really very serious glare. He glares a little harder, just to make his point, then turns and gives the guard his name so they can get this over with already.
The literal second they see Kevin’s face, Neil starts in on him. “Was that a pass at minute 13 or did you trip over your own feet?”
Kevin, predictably, bristles. “I’m surprised you even remember what a pass is. Considering you haven’t made one in years.”
“They definitely covered it in little league. Though now that I think about it, what you did out there was exactly the way it looked in little league. I’m very sorry. I take it back.”
“I like your jersey,” Kevin says, gesturing dismissively at the blue and black. “It would have been awkward if I’d had to ask you not to sully one of mine.”
“Asshole,” Neil says, almost fondly, and then Kevin is pulling him into a hug.
Andrew has been watching them bicker like it’s a tennis match and he’s so surprised by this development that he’s reaching out instinctively to stop it before he realizes he doesn’t even know which one of them he was moving to protect.
“Can you take that off before you come back?” Kevin asks, pained. “Not everyone has a sense of humor.”
“You must fit right in, then,” Neil says, but he does peel off the jersey and abandon it over the handrail on a nearby ramp.
Something that feels like three hours goes by before they walk back out the doors of the stadium. Neil has been loaded up with signed merch he hadn’t asked for—apparently someone had passed his book around and they were thrilled to bestow their crap upon him. There’s still an hour and a half drive ahead of them, so Andrew stops short of the car and hooks his fingers through Neil’s belt loops again. “Yes or no?” he asks, even though he knows the answer is in the way Neil is already leaning towards him.
They kiss again in front of Neil’s house. Neil fists his hands in the front of Andrew’s shirt and Andrew gets both of his hands into Neil’s hair to keep him close.
It’s too late for Neil to invite him in without it being a very obvious play for orgasms. Andrew wants to, very much wants to, but it’s probably way too soon for both of them. He pulls away when it starts to get too heated and just breathes against Neil’s mouth.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Neil mumbles. “We have stuff to talk about.”
The tour, Andrew remembers. They need to figure out what to do for the rest of the tour.
“Don’t wake me up,” Andrew says. “I know you run at sunrise.”
Neil grins and kisses him again. Andrew thinks about it the whole way home.
. : : .
Andrew wakes up at 10:30 to a text from Neil that says, would you prefer to yell at me by text phone or f2f?
He immediately calls Neil. “What did you do?”
“Uh, it’s more what I didn’t do,” Neil says vaguely.
“What didn’t you—no. I’m coming over.” He hangs up without saying goodbye and scowls his way through brushing his teeth and putting on clothes.
He takes enough time to send 20 minutes. I want food and coffee before he speeds out of his driveway.
Neil is waiting for him on the front porch with the same ‘Behold’ mug he’d given Andrew weeks ago. He takes it and resists the urge to smash it on the ground. “Explain,” he says. “And feed.”
“I’m making omelettes,” Neil says. “And I’m sorry.”
Andrew gestures towards the door with his mug so roughly the coffee slops over the edge and burns its way down his hand. Neil, finally fucking doing what he’s told to do, goes; he closes the security bolt behind them and follows Andrew back to the kitchen.
“So,” Neil says nervously. “When we got back from West Virginia—the next morning I got a weird text.”
“Weird?” Andrew prompts. If he has to hopscotch Neil through this whole thing he’s going to lose his shit, so he hopes he’s going to start hearing something real very soon.
“It was a number,” Neil says. “I didn’t think much of it. But then the next day I got another number. And then another one, the day after that.”
Andrew narrows his eyes. This story is not as informative as it needs to be.
“Here,” Neil says. He unlocks his phone and hands it to Andrew. He doesn’t even have the Messages app open. Once again, he’s just giving Andrew full fucking access to his shit like that’s not a dangerous thing to do. Andrew is suddenly furious with him.
He opens the app and there, right at the top, time-stamped 6:13am, the number 26. He opens the thread and sees, right above it, the rest of the countdown: 27, 28, 29, 30.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Andrew asks flatly.
“In my defense,” Neil says, “I didn’t really know it was a countdown until Monday.”
“And now it’s Wednesday,” Andrew says. “I would have known it was a countdown Sunday.”
“I didn’t—” Neil starts, then shrugs, the tips of his ears turning pink.
“You didn’t what?” Andrew asks. He would really love to hear what idiotic thought process Neil stumbled his way through to get to the conclusion that he should not tell Andrew about this.
“We were going to the game Tuesday,” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to ruin it.”
He doesn’t mean the game. Andrew doesn’t have the highest EQ in the world, but even he knows that. Still, he says, “You can’t ruin exy. It’s already terrible.”
Neil shrugs again, his shoulders rigid, and keeps his attention tightly focused on the omelette he’s mixing.
“Neil,” Andrew says, his teeth gritting. “I want to keep you alive. That’s a lot harder when you don’t tell me shit like this.”
“I know,” Neil says, still in that very quiet voice. “But I checked the calendar. Day zero is on an off week.”
“An off week,” Andrew repeats blankly.
“You’re supposed to be security for the tour.”
“You—“ Andrew stops and rubs his hands on his face hard, like that will somehow make him less angry. He hadn’t stopped to shave. The stubble is rough against his palms. “You are the stupidest person I’ve ever met.”
“Thanks,” Neil says, but at least it’s not in that terrible, quiet voice.
“I’m not letting anyone touch you,” Andrew says. He feels like he’s going to explode. He puts his coffee down so he doesn’t give in to the temptation to throw it at the wall.
“I don’t want you involved,” Neil says. “These are dangerous people. They could hurt you.”
“I’m dangerous people,” Andrew says. He’s using every ounce of control he has to keep his voice even. “And I am involved. I couldn’t be more involved.”
“Andrew,” Neil starts.
“No.” Andrew holds up a hand. “I know what they want. And I don’t care. They can’t have it. They can try and take you from me but they will lose.”
“Andrew,” Neil says again, but Andrew has had enough.
“You’re acting like a child,” he snaps. “You were afraid of this bitch as a child and you’re behaving the same way now. Why are you trying to make their jobs easy? Do you really think any of those fucks have survived what we have?”
Neil gapes at him, the fork in his hand still other than the egg dripping off of it.
“They just told us when they’re coming,” Andrew says. “That’s how cocky they are.”
“I...I don’t want you to die,” Neil says helplessly. “I can’t get you killed.”
“I don’t die that easy. I just didn’t write a book about it.”
“Okay,” Neil says eventually on a long exhale. “Okay. I should—I don’t know. I should add your fingerprints to the gun safes. I should give you remote access to the cameras.”
Yeah, Andrew thinks. That’s a great start. It’ll make everything more convenient when he moves into this fucking house.
. : : .
He can’t bring himself to leave right away, so he stays instead. They walk around the house adding Andrew’s prints to every safe, then testing them a few times to make sure it works. Neil sits him down on the sofa and puts his cat on him and hands him the remote and brings him a grilled cheese sandwich like he is nine fucking years old. He sort of objects on principle, but after an hour of watching old episodes of Brooklyn 99 with a ball of fur in his lap, his rage has settled to a low simmer.
Around the half-hour mark, Neil had brought him a handful of cat treats and flopped at the other end of the couch with his laptop, narrowly avoiding Andrew’s feet. He’s been typing and ignoring the TV. Andrew shifts his gaze from the Halloween heist to Neil and watches him frown at the screen while what must be thousands of words a minute flow from his rapidly typing fingers.
“What are you doing?” he asks, because Neil with the internet can be a deadly weapon and Andrew is really in the mood to minimize the number of people who actively want to kill his client at the moment.
“Writing,” Neil says absently.
Andrew stares, because that much was already pretty fucking obvious.
Neil must sense his eyes, because he shrugs a little sheepishly in Andrew’s direction and says, “I’m thinking about my next book.”
Good, Andrew thinks. That means he plans to be alive to write another book.
“The southern leg,” he says. “I’ve decided.”
Neil turns his attention fully to Andrew, flexing his fingers and stretching his arms out behind his head.
Andrew says, “You had a not stupid idea. We’ll fly out to New Orleans and back from Denver. The rest we drive. Same for the next leg.”
“Okay,” Neil says. He goes back to typing rapidly. “I’ll make it happen.”
Making it happen is usually Andrew’s job. He thinks about how proud of him Bee would be, relinquishing control like this. He makes a mental note to call her soon, but for now he casually slides his toes under Neil’s thigh and goes back to watching TV.
. : : .
In New Orleans, they sit at Café du Monde until well after midnight, eating plate after plate of hot, sugary beignets.
In Houston, they last all of 10 minutes in a country-western bar before Neil throws up his hands and says, “Okay, fine. You told me so!”
In Dallas, Andrew insists they go on a JFK Assassination and Museum tour. He entertains himself by pointing out ways the assassination could be improved upon, much to the horror of the others on the tour. Beside him, Neil tries valiantly to keep a straight face, but ultimately ruins it for everyone (except Andrew) by outright laughing in the middle of what the rest of the group was treating as a moment of silence. They’re pointedly shunned after that.
In a hotel room in Austin, Andrew palms Neil through his jeans and asks, “Yes or no?”
After, his knuckles sticky, his cock aching, he bites down gently on Neil’s shoulder and tries to organize the chaos of leave and stay and touch and don’t touch in his mind. Neil says, “Do you want me to?” He gestures down, but Andrew’s face is pressed tight to his chest so he feels it more than sees it.
“No,” Andrew says. “I—no.”
He does want it. He wants it desperately, but all that desire is woven through with an intense fear that it will be too much, that he’ll panic, that it will break whatever it is they’re doing there. He’s winding himself up to react, knowing he’s probably going to say something dismissive or abrasive or hurtful, when Neil kisses him firmly on the jaw and starts sliding out from under him.
“I’m going to go clean up,” Neil says. “I’ll come back later.”
Every time Neil does something like this—anticipates what he needs and delivers it like it’s no big deal—the gratitude Andrew feels threatens to break him.
Before he can even deal with that clusterfuck, Neil has tugged his jeans closed and is walking out of Andrew’s door, only looking back to smile at him quickly. And then he’s gone. Andrew braces his forearm against the bed, reaches down and jerks off with his eyes closed so he can imagine that Neil’s still there, some safer, incorporeal version of him.
He showers, puts on pajamas, hastily rubs the duvet clean, and puts on a cooking show to stare at while he waits for Neil to come back. He’s still keyed up the first 20 or 30 minutes, not ready to talk but desperate for Neil to be there anyway. Neil has been incredibly patient, but Andrew knows this will push him over the edge at some point. It always does.
Two episodes of the show trickle by before he hears a quiet knock at the door. Even with Andrew’s memory, he couldn’t tell you a single thing that had happened on the show. He assumes they cooked.
The door opens to Neil in pajama pants with little exy sticks all over them and an old USC shirt that Andrew doesn’t immediately want to throw in the trash. An improvement over what he usually sleeps in.
Neil is wearing real shoes and the reason for that becomes apparent when he lifts the bag in his hand—Andrew can see the Ben & Jerry’s logo through the plastic, made translucent by the melting ice on the container.
“Bribes,” Andrew says. He tries to sound unimpressed, but he could really use that entire pint of Chocolate Therapy.
“Bribes,” Neil agrees. He hands the bag over when Andrew lets him in and quickly toes out of his shoes and drops his hoodie on top of them. Andrew hands him the incredibly lame pint of citrus misery that he finds in the bag.
He knows he resolved to talk about this, but the ice cream will melt if he leaves it too long, and anyway, Neil is already settling cross-legged on Andrew’s bed and watching the cooking show with interest.
The chocolate is soothing and by the time he’s finished it off—and Neil has abandoned his half-full pint on the nightstand—he’s more settled. If Neil had a major problem with any of this, he wouldn’t have sat there for the last 40 minutes getting so into Chopped that he started critiquing it like an exy game.
Andrew clears his throat. “I know it’s weird,” he says, staring resolutely at the tv. “That I can’t...”
“It’s not weird,” Neil says firmly, when it becomes obvious that Andrew isn’t going to finish his sentence. “It’s what you need.”
And—yes, that’s true, but it’s also weird that he needs it, he knows this.
He opens his mouth to speak and finds that he has no idea what to say, so he shuts it again.
Neil sighs and flops back onto his back on the bed. “I want to touch you,” he says, easily, not even in that super careful voice he sometimes uses. “But I want to because I want to make you feel good. If it makes you feel not good, then I don’t want to do it.”
“Maybe,” Andrew says slowly, “soon. Definitely eventually.”
“Eventually is fine,” Neil says. “Soon is fine. Never is fine.”
Andrew eases himself back and onto his side so that he can stare at Neil’s profile. Neil, always somehow so attentive to Andrew’s moods, stares up at the ceiling and gives Andrew the ability to look all he wants, not scrutinized in return.
“Never would be fine with me, too,” Andrew says. He thinks he should make that clear. “If this is…not for you.”
“It’s for me,” Neil says. He sounds very certain. “I just needed it to be you. You need it to be on your terms. It’s not that different. We’re both complicated. We’re figuring it out.”
Andrew huffs. Neil is being very kind, but Andrew has spent years working on his sexuality with a parade of shrinks, so he knows it’s not that easy.
“I’ve gotten better,” Andrew says. “I was worse in college.”
“I hate that,” Neil says after a pause. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Andrew snorts.
“I’m serious,” Neil says. “You’re not defective. This isn’t a bug that needs to be purged before you launch as a person. It’s just a part of you.” He stops, but he looks like he’s gearing up to say something else, so Andrew waits. He knows that Neil followed the Foxes while Kevin was at PSU, knows Neil read the news stories about Drake and the murder and the trial. He knows that Neil must know that has something to do with the way he is now.
“Shit happened to you,” Neil says, finally. “And it affected you. But it didn’t ruin you. People can’t be ruined. You can experience something horrifically wrong, but it doesn’t make you wrong. Probably it’ll be easier for you to be touched at some point, five years, maybe ten. But that potential future person isn’t a better or fixed or more whole version of who you are now. It’s just an older version.”
Andrew can’t think of a single thing he could say in response to that. He’s heard some form of it half a dozen times over the years in therapy, but it was always tempered by the fact that he wasn’t fucking his therapists, so their acceptance was limited to the theoretical. Instead of responding, he reaches out and pulls Neil close so he can bury his face against Neil’s neck.
“I’ve done a lot of work on this,” Neil says sheepishly.
Andrew huffs out half a laugh. “You sound like my therapist.”
“I really hate therapists.”
“You need one.”
Neil sighs heavily. “I have one.”
. : : .
Dallas to Denver is a 13-hour drive, but instead of splitting it they drive straight through for the sake of having two days in the city. Neil is excited to run some trails, of all things, which Andrew immediately vetoes. After negotiation and a lot of googling, they compromise: a leisurely walk up a hiking trail and a night spent drinking and throwing axes. This is apparently a thing they do in Denver. Andrew can see the appeal.
Their first night, Andrew has Neil pressed beneath him on the bed, his shirt gone, his pupils blown enormous.
“I want to blow you,” he mumbles, mouth still pressed against Neil’s.
“Okay,” Neil gasps. “Yes.”
Still, he has to tap Neil’s wrists to get him to let go of his hair enough that Andrew can drag his mouth down. He lingers over some of the scars on Neil’s stomach, mouthing at the edges, gratified by the way Neil shivers.
“Touch or no touch?” Neil asks, breathless but admirably still as Andrew’s fingers work at the button on his jeans.
“Touch,” Andrew says. He feels a rush of exhilaration at the certainty of this answer. “My hair. But don’t pull.”
He probably doesn’t have to add that—even mid-orgasm Neil is careful with his hands—but he says it anyway. Maybe to reassure them both.
Andrew has been wanting this for so long that he doesn’t even try to fuck around with it. He’s pretty sure Neil isn’t prepared to dissect the finer points of technique, anyway.
Neil’s hands stay gentle and his hips stay still when Andrew swallows him down, even though he’s making the most incredibly wrecked noises Andrew’s ever heard come out of him. Andrew gets impossibly harder himself and pushes for a fast rhythm, the wet slide of his mouth and hand unyielding.
He ignores Neil’s “Andrew, oh god,” when he’s obviously close and pushes his free hand up to splay out across Neil’s chest as an answer: stay, don’t stop.
Stay, don’t stop is still echoing in his head when he swallows and pulls off. He surges back up to kiss Neil, hard, licking the taste of him into his mouth. His hands are shaking when he reaches down to undo his jeans, but not from fear. He feels confident about this. It’s freeing.
Andrew gets a hand around himself and strokes, desperately, aching with the need to get off now, here, with Neil warm underneath him and Neil’s hand still gentle in his hair and Neil’s lips on his neck. Neil kisses under his jaw, drags his mouth down the line of Andrew’s neck, and Andrew comes so hard that fireworks go off behind his eyelids.
When he can, he rolls off on Neil and onto his back. He stares at the ceiling and listens to Neil quietly get up and go to the bathroom to clean up.
Andrew turns his eyes to Neil when he hears him come back. He knows Neil is busy asking himself questions about what Andrew needs right now and if he should give him space and probably if he needs to go buy candy, so Andrew pats the bed next to him as an answer. Well, he flops his hand on the bed and hopes that passes for an answer.
He doesn’t know how he would have handled wanting someone this badly if they’d met when he was younger. He’d been so practiced in denying himself things that he’d denied himself the ability to want at all. He probably would have wasted a lot of time pushing Neil away instead of pulling him closer, where he should be, where Andrew wants him.
. : : .
On the plane on the way home, Andrew announces that he’ll be moving into Neil’s house.
“Um,” Neil says. “What?”
“We have better odds if there are two of us,” Andrew says, his tone inviting Neil to agree immediately and maybe even wax poetic about the brilliance of the idea.
“Yeah, but…”
“But?” Andrew says. “But you still think you can handle it yourself? But you think if I’m not there it’s more likely they’ll just kill you and leave me out of it? But you’re in the mood to martyr yourself like an idiot?”
Neil frowns. “It’s not martyring. I don’t want to spread my problems around.”
“We talked about this. You are my problem.”
Neil frowns harder.
“This is not a discussion,” Andrew says. “I wasn’t asking for your opinion.”
Neil opens his mouth to say something, then shuts it again.
“Good,” Andrew says. “You’re learning.
. : : .
The countdown is set to end right after the next leg of the tour, so Andrew sets them a schedule of preparation. He had Nicky run the burner phone, but of course they got nothing, just like with the emails. He’s not sure it would have helped, anyway. Neither he nor Neil trust the police or the feds enough to get them involved. Neil’s alarms don’t even connect to police dispatch—they just go to his phone. And now, of course, Andrew’s phone.
First up on his list is getting out all of the guns to take apart, clean, double-check, and put back together.
Second, they go to a gun range and practice and practice until they can hollow out the paper where the head should be. Then they go home and clean the guns again.
Third, Andrew follows Neil around the house and makes him walk every possible path—by degrees of inches—to make sure there are no blind spots in the cameras. Neil is patient with this process, even though it takes hours and Andrew ultimately only moves a few cameras by less than an inch.
Fourth, they argue about where and when and whether or not Neil will be going on runs. Andrew wakes up in his guest room the morning after moving in when his phone alerts him of motion in the front yard—it’s Neil, going out for a fucking jog at 7 in the morning because he is a masochist and an idiot. Andrew stomps downstairs after him, but Neil is so fast that he’s well out of sight before Andrew makes it to the porch. we’re talking about your running he texts Neil, then goes to make coffee and wait.
Neil’s pitch: he goes running on his own every morning like he always does.
Andrew’s pitch: Neil runs on a treadmill in a fucking gym where there is air conditioning and Andrew can sit and watch him.
Neil counters with: Andrew joins him on his runs but they go a little later in the morning.
Andrew counters with: Skepticism and reluctant agreement to a trial.
That lasts one day. Andrew nearly collapses in the grass when they get back to Neil’s house. He hasn’t been smoking a lot lately, but keeping up Neil, even at half-pace, is the worst thing he’s done to his body since exy.
The next day, Andrew drives Neil to a track and sits in the bleachers while he runs loop after loop after loop. After about the fifth time Neil passes him, Andrew digs out his phone and calls Bee. He also lights a cigarette in an act of protest against cardiovascular exercise.
“Andrew,” Bee says warmly when she answers. “It’s good to hear from you.”
“You don’t know that yet,” Andrew says. “I could be calling with bad news.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
Neil looks up at him and waves this time when he runs by. Andrew takes an especially long drag off his cigarette.
“Is it good news, then?”
“Yeah,” Andrew says. “I think so. It could be.”
“We can work up to it, if you like,” Bee says.
“I bought you a new figurine. In Denver. A squirrel.”
“I have just the place for it. Were you in Denver for work?”
The cigarette smoke is soothing. So is the sound of Bee’s familiar voice and the mechanical rhythm of Neil’s feet hitting the pavement.
“Yes,” Andrew says. “A client. He’s a writer.”
“Is he a writer you like?” she asks. Andrew knows she means Neil’s books—does he like Neil’s books. And he does. But he also likes Neil, and that’s the real point of this conversation.
“Yeah,” Andrew says. “He’s a writer I really like.”
Bee’s silence is comfortable. Andrew is taken back to their sessions at Palmetto State. The familiar, cocoa-scented air floating around him, the squeak of Bee’s leather chair, the precise lines of books and figurines on the shelves.
Eventually, she says, “Do you want to tell me about him?”
Andrew stares at the cigarette burning its way almost to his fingers. He grinds it out and tosses it to the grass beneath the bleachers and then lights another one.
“His name is Neil,” he says. “Someone is going to try to kill him soon.”
“Well,” Bee says evenly. “That sounds scary.”
“I’m going to beat them,” he says matter-of-factly. “They’re going to try to take him, but I won’t let them.”
“You’re very good at your job,” she says. “And I believe you. But, Andrew, I was referring more to who he is as a person.”
“He’s a disaster,” Andrew says immediately.
“Yes,” Bee laughs. “You do tend to like those.”
Andrew inhales again and watches Neil run steadily around the curve at the far end of the track. “The other day,” he says, keeping his voice completely neutral, “after sex. I needed him to leave. When he came back, he said I wasn’t broken.”
“Did you believe him?” she asks after a pause.
“He believed himself,” Andrew says. He thinks maybe that’s the important part. Andrew believing it himself is great and all, but it just means he doesn’t put up with people who don’t. Actually finding one who does and really means it—that’s the part he can’t control.
He hasn't seen Bee professionally for years, but he knows they’re tiptoeing along the line of therapist and mother-figure here. He’s just not sure he cares.
“What else does he say?” Bee asks.
“Stupid things,” Andrew says. “Mostly.”
She waits him out.
“He says I’m already a person.”
“You are already a person,” Bee says calmly.
“So you keep telling me.”
“It sounds like I have an ally in that?”
Andrew inhales and then exhales the smoke very slowly. “He should be impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“He can barely take care of himself.”
“But?” Bee prompts.
“But,” Andrew agrees reluctantly. “He gives me space when I need it. Even before I ask, sometimes. He keeps his hands to himself when he’s supposed to. He brings me ice cream. We do all these things on the tour. Stupid tourist things. They’re not as stupid when he’s there.”
“That all sounds wonderful,” Bee says. “It sounds like he sees you.”
“Gross.”
She laughs and says, “Do you think you’ll keep him?”
“I think I’m going to try,” Andrew says. And then, because he’s feeling brave, he gets to what he’s just realized is the real reason he called. “I just wanted you to know, I think. If it all goes wrong. If I lose and he dies or I die or we both die. I wanted you to know that, for now, I have this. And it’s good. I think it’s really good.”
Bee is quiet for a long moment. She sounds a little teary when she speaks again. “I am very happy for you, Andrew. I’m glad you have someone you trust. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer the option where no one dies.”
“Tell me about Wymack,” Andrew says. “Has Abby maimed him yet?”
. : : .
The days tick by until it’s time to leave for the west coast leg of the tour. Every morning, Andrew holds his hand out expectantly and Neil puts his phone into it so Andrew can look at the new number on the countdown.
Infuriatingly, Neil seems mostly calm about this. He looks at the numbers, shows them to Andrew, and then seems to put them out of his mind.
When Andrew asks if he’s stupid or just in denial, Neil shrugs. “I know what it means,” he says. “But I also know it means I have more time.”
More time, Andrew thinks. His left eyeball is twitching.
“It means,” Neil continues. “That they’re not coming today. I still have today.”
“Unless they’re lying,” Andrew says.
“Why bother sending a countdown if they’re going to lie?”
“To lull you into a false sense of complacency,” Andrew says, putting as much you fucking idiot into his voice as he can without actually saying the words.
Neil shrugs. “I don’t think so. I think they want me to watch it slowly wind down to zero. I think they want me to try to protect myself that day and they want me to fail.”
Andrew gives him his most skeptical glare.
“You don’t understand these people,” Neil says. “They enjoy the torture. They want it to last as long as it can. They could just shoot me in the head in a parking lot, but that’s not what they want. They want my fear to last as long as possible and then they want my pain to last as long as possible and then, when they’ve had their fun, they’ll kill me.”
“They will not,” Andrew grits. “Because I will kill them first.
Neil grins at him. It’s entirely inappropriate, considering he was just speaking of his imminent torture and death mere seconds ago. “I’m really, really looking forward to that.”
“I hate you,” Andrew says flatly.
Neil grins again.
. : : .
Seattle is fine. The flight to Seattle is terrible, but the city itself is fine. Neil seems to like it—Andrew supposes this is because he could run a lot longer there without getting heatstroke.
The space needle doesn’t even make it on Neil’s list of activities. Andrew’s acrophobia had come up on the trip between Orlando and Miami. Neil has never mentioned it again, but he also hasn’t suggested they do any of the panoramic view from the 75th floor bullshit, and Andrew knows that’s for his benefit.
Instead, Neil gleefully gives Andrew his two suggestions: Pike’s Place Market or the Museum of Pop Culture. They end up at the Market, where Andrew selects a very expensive restaurant and insists on paying for it. Neil agrees too easily.
By the time they leave, they’re both carrying way too many bags of sweet popcorn, mini donuts, pastries, candy, and souvenirs that Neil insisted on buying.
“This is excessive,” Andrew says.
“Car snacks,” Neil says. “It’s a rental. We can eat whatever we want in it.”
In Oregon, Neil drags them to some donut place he claims is world famous and proceeds to buy about 13 different flavors, including one that is, for some reason, dusted with chili powder and topped with a chili. It’s fucking delicious.
Andrew gets one shaped like a cock and balls solely for the sake of sending a picture of it to Nicky. He gets a series of very disturbing emojis in response.
That night, after he sucks Neil off, he pushes Neil’s hand down and says, “Yes.”
. : : .
Andrew pulls their rental car over onto the shoulder just before the “Welcome to California” sign. They both stare at it in silence for a moment.
“California,” Neil says.
Andrew hums.
“You were here longer,” Neil adds.
“You burned your mother’s corpse here,” Andrew says.
“Well,” Neil says after a moment. “At least it won’t be where we die.”
Andrew stares at the sign for another few seconds, flexing his wrists to wrap his fingers more fully against the wheel. Eventually, he puts his turn signal on to merge back onto the interstate. “It’s just a place,” he tells Neil. “Stop being dramatic.”
. : : .
In a gay club in San Francisco, Andrew pushes Neil against a wall just outside of the reach of the flashing rainbow lights and kisses him until his head spins. The music thumps behind him and the press of bodies in the room heats the whole place until Andrew is sweating, the back of his shirt damp. Neil crosses his arms behind Andrew’s head, resting them loosely on Andrew’s shoulders, and arches off the wall to press against him.
Andrew’s hands fit perfectly in Neil’s back pockets. None of the songs have beats fast enough to keep pace with his heart.
. : : .
Andrew isn’t paying attention to the check-in process at all until Neil’s voice starts to get loud. He tunes back in and looks to him, surprised by the agitated look on his face.
“No,” Neil is saying. “There’s a mistake.”
“There isn’t, sir,” the desk girl says uncomfortably. “Your rooms were upgraded last week.”
“We have two rooms. Normal rooms.”
“And then you were upgraded to a suite. It has two bedrooms, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s quite nice.”
“But I didn’t do that,” Neil argues.
“Um,” the girl says. She types away at her screen a little, occasionally looking up with a little furrow between her brows. “The notes say someone named Malcolm called and paid for it. He arranged for champagne, too.”
Neil pales. Andrew’s anger spikes.
“No,” Andrew says. “We don’t want that. We’re leaving. Neil.”
Neil looks at him, wide-eyed.
“We’re not staying in this hotel,” Andrew tells him. He turns to the desk girl and says, “We don’t care what you do with the room. You can go away now.”
She gapes at him, opening and closing her mouth a few times, then shuffles off to the side looking freaked out.
“Lola,” Neil says. “Lola and Romero Malcolm.”
“Okay,” Andrew says evenly. “Good. They keep giving us more information.”
“Oh god,” Neil says. His breath is coming out faster and faster. “She’s going to kill me.”
“She will not,” Andrew says. “I will stop her.”
“You can’t,” Neil says. He’s getting hysterical. “You can’t. She’s crazy.”
“Stop,” Andrew orders. “She’s one of the monsters under your bed. She’s probably old now.”
Neil laughs wildly. “It doesn’t matter. She’ll be lethal for a hundred years.”
“She will not,” Andrew counters, “because I am going to kill her.” He enunciates every word very carefully.
He hooks a hand around the back of Neil’s neck and pulls him close, until their foreheads are pressed together.
“It’s Lola, Andrew,” he says. “Lola is coming.”
“Let her come,” Andrew says. He squeezes reassuringly. “She will lose. We’re expecting her. She’s not expecting us.”
The scene repeats itself in San Diego and then again in Phoenix. They keep leaving and getting new rooms, but Andrew doesn’t stay in his. He can’t sleep with Neil so far away, even if he’s only one door down. He always claims the bed closest to the wall. Neil sleeps facing the door. Andrew lies awake for hours, staring at Neil’s back in the dark and thinking, I will do anything to keep this.
On the morning they’re flying back to Columbia, Neil’s phone lights up with a text: 4.
He holds it up so they can both see the screen and they stare at it, silently.
Eventually, Andrew says, “You’re taking me to McDonalds for breakfast.
. : : .
Andrew gives himself one day to obsessively recheck all of the house’s security measures. He makes Neil walk slow circles around the interior and exterior of the house, making sure every square inch of it is still covered by the cameras. After that, he sits very still on the couch and watches about a hundred thousand shows about cooking with marijuana. He can’t let himself obsess or he will never stop obsessing. There’s a definite possibility that one or both of them is going to die in a few days. He doesn’t want to spend those days thinking about the sadistic fucks coming back for a kid they tortured twenty years ago.
He takes Neil to the track early the next day. Neil is running what’s probably his 30th lap when his phone lights up on the seat next to Andrew: 2.
When he gets Neil home, he climbs into the shower with him and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him until they’re both panting and desperate. Andrew wraps his hand around both of them and strokes until they get off, Neil coming just seconds after Andrew does. He spends the rest of the day kissing Neil any time he gets within arm’s reach: tugging him down onto the couch, pushing him against the kitchen counter, pulling Neil onto his lap while he smokes on the porch.
They both ignore the buzz of Neil’s phone the next morning. Andrew spends about an hour setting up a document in his cloud that incriminates the shit out of Lola Malcolm. If they do die, Nicky will find it and be able to pass it on to the FBI.
After that, he sits and stares darkly at the tv until Neil dangles a knife in front of his face and coaxes him into throwing knives at the fence in his backyard. Neil draws ridiculous targets on the fence in chalk: robots, aliens, nearly shapeless dinosaurs. It would be great if Neil was doing this because he was so confident they’d win, but Andrew thinks he’s actually just resigned to dying.
They throw knives until the sun goes down. Andrew’s pretty good, but he has to admit Neil is better. After dinner, he spreads Neil out on his bed and kisses every inch of him. He has his mouth on the inside of Neil’s thigh when he looks up and sees him, gorgeous and pliant and Andrew’s. He realizes, not exactly suddenly but with great clarity, that Neil is his. Not in the way that his car or his house belong to him, but in the way that the pieces of a puzzle belong to each other. He will burn the world down to protect this.
. : : .
He doesn’t mean to fall asleep that night. In college, he pulled a lot of all-nighters fueled by nothing other than insomnia.
It’s the first thing he thinks when he wakes up to movement and sees an enormous guy pull Neil roughly out of the bed: I was supposed to stay awake.
He’s scrambling for the drawer where they tucked the gun for faster access, but he doesn’t get very far before the dark-haired woman presses her own gun against Neil’s head and tsks.
“We thought you were just the bodyguard,” she says. “But this is a very fun development.”
“If you touch him,” Andrew says, “I will kill you.”
She laughs. It’s high and tinkling and sends an intense chill down his spine. “Oh, I’m going to do a lot more than touch him.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Neil says. “Just leave him alone.”
Andrew looks away from Lola and to Neil, expecting to see panic. Instead, he sees Neil standing upright and rigid. His face is pale but his hands aren’t shaking. Resigned, Andrew thinks. He’s always been resigned to this. Damn him.
“Oh, Junior,” Lola purrs. “Why would I hurt him? He’s my audience.”
“I will—” Andrew starts, but he’s cut off by Lola curling her finger tighter around the trigger.
“You will shut up,” she snaps. “And you will do what I say. Or I will start on you when I’m done with him.”
“Andrew,” Neil says quietly. “It’s okay.”
Andrew’s fury expands to include Neil. It is not fucking okay. When he gets them out of this, he is going to shake Neil until his brain starts working the way it’s supposed to.
Still, he holds his tongue and doesn’t fight when the other guy walks around the bed and puts his gun to Andrew’s back. He quietly watches Lola ziptie Neil’s hands and push him out of the room. He has half an idea to throw himself down the stairs while they’re walking, but it would be a toss up as to who got to the guns first. Neil could get shot before he got to one.
Lola directs the guy holding Neil—Romero, she calls him—and then he’s picking Neil up and dropping him on the dining room table in the front room. The guy on Andrew—who must be Jackson, from what Neil has told him—prods him against the wall and pushes his gun hard against Andrew’s side.
“How did you even get in here?” Neil asks. He’s not reacting to Romero pulling his tied hands above his head or Lola circling the table and lightly trailing her knife over his chest.
“You made it very difficult, Nathaniel. Naughty boy. Luckily, I had some toys.” She reaches into her brother’s jacket pocket and pulls out a black box with a bunch of antennas coming out of it. A signal jammer. “You see, your cameras can’t send you alarms if their frequencies are blocked. After that, it was as simple as cutting the power and removing one of your window grates. That part was annoying, but a blowtorch did the trick. And we might even be able to have a little fun with it later.”
Andrew should have fucking stayed awake. He seethes, but he’s kept from surging forward by the hard press of the gun into his ribs. He can’t do Neil any good if he dies first.
“Now,” Lola says. “This shirt is in the way.” She climbs up onto the table and towards Neil, tiptoeing her fingers up his chest as she goes. The sight of it hits Andrew with a wave of nausea so powerful he doubles over, gasping. Jackson pulls him upright by the hair and jabs him hard with the gun.
“Oh,” Lola says, delighted. “He didn’t like that.” She picks up the bottom of Neil’s shirt and slides the knife over it. The blade is so sharp that the fabric slices quickly and cleanly.
“Now you’re just showing off,” Neil says. “I mean, I always knew you were an attention whore, but this is a little much even for you.”
God fucking dammit, Neil. Why won’t he ever keep his mouth shut?
Lola tinkles out another laugh. “You’ve been away too long, Nathaniel. Your manners are shocking.”
Andrew keeps his shit together while she cuts off Neil’s shirt. When she moves to cut off his pajama pants, Neil starts kicking and Andrew’s hands clench into fists.
“Jackson,” Lola says sharply. “Give Junior a little incentive.”
Jackson pulls Andrew off the wall a few inches and moves the gun to press hard against his temple.
“Just leave him alone,” Neil says. “You have me.”
“But you’ve been an awful lot of work,” she says. “I think I deserve a bonus.”
Andrew knows this isn’t about sex. He knows she’s not here to sexually assault Neil. But the sight of her straddling Neil’s bare thighs tears something inside of him wide open. He moves to take a step forward, but Jackson grabs him harder by the arm and taps his gun against Andrew’s head—not enough to knock him out, but enough to make his vision swim.
He doesn’t even make it through the first cut before he’s trying to rip himself out of Jackson’s grip again, heedless of the gun, charging towards Lola. Neil’s skin is splitting open, blood pouring out of him. He shoves at Jackson and goes for the table, but he only makes it a couple of feet before he’s tackled from behind and hits the ground. The heavy weight on his back makes him panic, just for a few seconds, but it’s enough that Jackson is able to get an arm around his throat and pull him upright.
“Fine,” Lola sighs. “If you’re going heckle, I guess you don’t have to watch.”
He fights Jackson all the way to the living room, managing to break away a couple of times only to be subdued by an elbow to his face and a hard punch to his stomach. Jackson drags him the rest of the way to the couch and throws him onto it, stepping back out of striking range but keeping his gun pointed at Andrew’s chest.
From the living room he hears another of Lola’s tinkling laughs and the quietest of whimpers from Neil. “Your chest is already so ugly,” she says, sounding thoughtful. “Let’s see if we can’t make the rest of you match.”
Think. Andrew needs to think. He takes several very deep breaths and tries to tune out Lola’s commentary, focusing on the situation. He’s in the living room. That’s good. There are weapons in the living room. He can’t get to the guns without Jackson shooting him—even if he missed, Andrew still couldn’t get the safe open quickly enough to fend off the other two. The knives, though. Neil has knives tucked into the couch, less than a foot from Andrew’s hand. That’s a sort of plan. Take out Jackson with the knives, get the gun, shoot that bitch so many times she doesn’t have a face anymore.
He just has to wait for Jackson to get distracted. So he waits. And waits and waits. Jackson is focused on Andrew, glaring and still dabbing at his bleeding and probably broken nose. In the dining room, Lola mostly talks to Neil, but she sometimes calls out a question for Andrew: “Which side of his face is his good side?” “Which do you think, bodyguard, fingers or toes?”, “Are you sure you don’t want to come watch? It’s a very pretty picture.”
Eventually—ten minutes? Fifteen? Andrew has no idea—Neil breaks and starts screaming. Andrew forces himself to loosen his fists when he realizes how deeply his nails are digging into his palms. He needs his hands. He needs them to be sure and steady.
The horrible up side to Neil screaming is that it seems to be what it takes to distract Jackson. He migrates towards the opening between the rooms, taking up a post where he can see what’s happening without totally looking away from Andrew.
Andrew sits completely still other than the hand that creeps towards the side of the couch and the knives hidden there. Jackson looks away more and more, tempted into distraction by whatever Lola is doing that’s making Neil finally beg. Andrew is going to kill them all and he is going to enjoy doing it.
“You do need these, don’t you?” Lola asks. “For your running. Not that you’ll be running again, but let’s make sure you know how hopeless it is, hmm?”
Finally, Andrew has the knife in his hand. Jackson glares at him and glances away, too quickly for Andrew to move. Neil chokes out, “No, please,” and it seems to interest Jackson enough that he turns his head fully to watch.
Andrew has his opening. He mentally thanks Neil for all that target practice yesterday and then throws the knife right at Jackson’s throat. It hits, disappearing almost immediately under a torrent of blood. Jackson drops his gun, lifts his hands to his throat, and makes a sick gurgling noise that makes Andrew want to vomit again. He doesn’t have time for that. He goes straight to the gun safe and presses his thumb against it, hating every second it takes to open.
The safe door swings out and Andrew grabs the gun. They’d chambered a round in every gun when they got home from Phoenix. He doesn’t have to waste any time.
He steps around Jackson on his way out, shoving the stumbling man towards the couch.
“Hey,” he says furiously when he walks into the dining room. “I told you not to touch him.”
Lola looks up. She has a split second to look confused and then surprised and then Andrew puts a bullet in the middle of her forehead. He turns the gun on Romero and gets him in the arm as he throws himself to the side. The big man lands more or less at Andrew’s feet, so he puts three bullets into his chest.
Lola had collapsed on top of Neil after the back half of her head splattered over the bay window. Andrew can’t stand that she’s still touching him, even if she is dead. He shoves her off of Neil, off the table, and fumbles for a place to grab Neil that isn’t sliced open. His hands hover above Neil, shaking. He doesn’t know where it’s okay to touch. Neil is covered in blood. It’s everywhere, starting to crust up in what must be the first of the cuts.
“Andrew,” Neil says hoarsely.
Andrew looks up at him. Lola has cut his face, slicing lines across his cheek. Andrew realizes it’s not just his hands shaking. It’s all of him.
“My hands,” Neil says. “Do you have a knife?”
Andrew nods and starts to go for the living room, but stops after only a step. He can’t leave Neil alone in this room again. “Can you walk?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Neil says.
Andrew helps him sit up and slide off the table. He very carefully gets an arm around Neil to help him walk, stopping just long enough to grab another knife and a blanket from the couch before he takes Neil to the dining room. He needs to call an ambulance, but their phones are both upstairs and besides, Lola has their signal jammed. He has to go back for it. But he can’t leave Neil.
“The jammer,” Neil says. “You need to turn it off.”
“Do not move,” Andrew orders. “I will be gone five seconds.”
Neil smiles unevenly at him, wincing when the cuts on the right side of his face warp.
Andrew grabs the jammer and thinks enough to unbolt the front door, pulling it open so the police don’t destroy it when they eventually show up.
When he gets back, Neil is trying to pull a laptop towards him from across the table. His hands are slippery and shaking, though, so he can’t get a grip on it. He looks up at Andrew. “We can call 911 on this,” he says. “Our phones are upstairs.”
The ambulance arrives before the cops do, but of course they have to wait until the cops charge in uselessly and clear the scene. Andrew thinks about taking Neil out the front door, but he’s not sure Neil can walk that far.
“Hands up,” Andrew says when he hears the cops breach the front door.
Neil nods and drops the blanket enough to put both of his hands up. Blood drips down his forearms and off of his elbows. Andrew has been very explicit with the 911 dispatcher: three attackers, all down in the dining room and living room; the two of them, survivors, sitting at the kitchen table. They still get faces full of guns as soon as the cops reach them. Andrew doesn’t twitch, but the last vestiges of his control are slipping. More people are holding weapons on Neil. Andrew wants to kill them, too.
The cops try to stop him when he goes to get into the ambulance with Neil—apparently they have “questions.”
“No,” Andrew says. “I’m going with him. You can talk to us at the hospital or you can try to stop me and arrest me for assault. But then I won’t talk until I’ve seen my lawyer.”
He’s separated from Neil as soon as they reach the hospital. He keeps telling everyone he’s fine, but he’s got blood all over him and he’s not sure they believe him. They check him out, stitch up his eyebrow where it split, and then stick him in the waiting room to sit until he gets to see Neil.
He’d run up and grabbed their phones as the EMTs were strapping Neil to their gurney, so he pulls his out now and texts Renee: attack at neil’s. they’re all dead. we’re at the hospital.”
It’s 4:45 in the morning, but Renee calls him immediately. “Andrew,” she says tightly. “What happened?”
“Long story,” Andrew says. “I’m fine. Neil will live. We’re going to need a ride at some point.”
“Of course,” she says, “but what happened?”
“I won,” Andrew says, and then hangs up the phone.
. : : .
When they finally let him back, Neil is covered in bandages and talking to a tall, good-looking man in a white coat.
“No,” Neil is saying. “Thank you, but it’s not necessary.”
“It is necessary,” the doctor says, sounding exasperated. “That’s why I’m here to do it.”
“Do what?” Andrew asks.
The doctor turns and smiles wryly at him. “I’m Dr. Whyborne, the plastic surgeon. Mr. Josten was just telling me he doesn’t need me to stitch up his face.”
Andrew turns what he means to be a hard look on Neil, but he knows it falls apart the minute their eyes meet. Neil is alive and clean and alive and there are no more numbers in the countdown.
“Hey,” Neil says. He holds his bandaged hand out tentatively. Andrew steps forward and takes it.
Neil squeezes very gently and turns back to the doctor. “I know I need someone to stitch up my face. It just doesn’t need to be a plastic surgeon.”
“Sir,” the doctor says, turning to Andrew. Andrew doesn’t know this guy, but he thinks this voice is a mix of amusement and exasperation. “What is it you do for a job?”
“I’m his bodyguard,” Andrew says flatly.
“How would you feel,” the doctor says, “if I came to your office as a client and then pointed at an accountant and said I wanted them to guard me for no reason other than that I, inexplicably, am resistant to letting you do the job you are very good at?”
Andrew turns back to Neil. “Are you serious.”
“Fine,” Neil says. “Fine.”
He pulls a chair over when the doctor leaves and reclaims Neil’s hand. Something in him settles at the closeness, but most of him is still a whirlwind of stress and anger and fear.
“You are an idiot,” Andrew says, bending to rest his forehead on the back of Neil’s hand.
“I know,” Neil says. “You like it.”
For the first time in days, Andrew feels his shoulders drop.
. : : .
one month later.
Andrew opens their front door and glares at Nicky and, by extension, Erik behind him. “This is your fault,” he says.
“My fault that your whole family is here to love you and meet your new boyfriend?” Nicky asks. He beams and sails through the door and past Andrew. “I will take full responsibility.”
“You’re late,” Andrew says.
“Fashionably,” Nicky protests. “And we stopped and got this cake.”
Andrew considers. “Fine. Everyone’s in the backyard.”
And he does mean everyone. Everyone has come for this thing that Nicky is calling a “Yay, you didn’t die!” party. Kevin has flown in from New York. Aaron and Katelyn have flown in from Chicago. Matt brought Dan, Wymack brought Abby, and Renee and Bee are there, though they’re actually welcome. Allison, as Andrew understands it, invited herself.
He steps out onto the patio and leans against the railing next to Aaron, watching Nicky happily present the enormous sheet cake to the group.
“This seems fast,” Aaron says, the way he usually comments disapprovingly on Andrew’s eating and drinking and smoking habits. And Andrew knows, he does, that he only met Neil a few months ago, and that he’s only moving in so soon because he can’t stand to have Neil out of his line of sight for very long, only weeks after he had to sit there and listen to Neil try not to scream as Lola cut him, but he also knows that he’s waited 28 years for something that actually felt like home and he wishes both Aaron and social convention the best of luck in prying it out of his cold, dead hands.
So he looks into his glass and says, blandly, “Not really.”
“You could have died,” Aaron says.
“That is yet to be proven.”
Aaron sends a sardonic look his way. “You’re not immortal.”
Andrew just shrugs and takes another sip of his whiskey.
“If you’re happy,” Aaron says carefully. “Then I’m happy.”
Happy is a complicated word for Andrew. He’s not even sure what it’s supposed to feel like. And he’s not sure that’s what he’s feeling now—maybe someday, maybe even someday soon, but there’s still too much fear. They’re still jumping when the doorbell rings. Andrew still takes Neil to the track every day.
But that’s not really what Aaron is talking about. Aaron means are happy in the context of your relationship with Neil. And that, that is a much easier answer. He and Neil fit together incredibly well. When it’s just the two of them, everything is easy. It’s the world around them that could use work.
“Yes,” Andrew says, after he thinks about it a minute. “Are you?”
“With Katelyn?” Aaron asks incredulously. “Yes. We’ve been married for six years.”
“Well then,” Andrew says, with a small, insincerely serene smile in his direction, “I’m very happy for you, too.”
“Okay, asshole,” Aaron says. “He looks like he’s about to snap out there. Don’t you want to go rescue him?”
Andrew’s eyes find Neil. Matt has been escorting him around from group to group and he’s finally, Andrew assumes, reached the conclusion of his tour: Dan. Aaron’s right, though. Neil’s shoulders are tight. His smile is tight. They’ve been telling him ‘fun stories’ about Andrew in college, but Andrew’s pretty sure Neil doesn’t think they’re particularly fun.
He sees Dan gesturing widely, talking and clearly unaware of the way Neil’s face is sharpening into something deadly.
“Actually,” Neil interrupts her, loudly. “I’m going to have to disagree.”
“Oh,” Dan starts, taken aback. “I—”
“Look,” Neil says. “It’s fine, I get it. You didn’t understand Andrew in college and it was very entertaining for everyone. But you were wrong then and you’re wrong now. You wanted him to be a person in a way that made sense to you and he wasn’t and you think this all means he is now. But he was never the one making him not human. It sounds a lot like that was something the rest of you decided.”
He pauses, frowning, not seeming particularly concerned with the way everyone is staring at him. “If you’ll excuse me,” he says, “I need to go pretend to check on the sides.”
Neil stalks past Andrew and Aaron his way back into the house, his face thunderous.
Aaron turns to Andrew and gives him another look, more considering; it says okay. Now I get it.
Andrew smiles helplessly and looks out over the faces of his family in the backyard, all shocked into silence except for Bee and Renee, who are wearing matching quiet smiles. They all turn and stare at Andrew, who just shrugs. He can’t seem to wipe the smile off of his face. He buries it in his glass of whiskey and says, “He has an attitude problem.”
“Oh my god,” Nicky says. He clasps his hands together and brings them to his chin. His eyes gleam as he says, rhapsodically, “He’s perfect.”