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Neil waits outside the pool with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his collar pulled up to his nose.
Practice runs later than usual this close to the competitions, and with sunset averaging at around four in the afternoon this time of year and temperatures dropping fast once the sun is gone, he’s learned swiftly that bringing only a windbreaker to pull over his sweatshirt will not keep him warm for long.
This has so far not stopped him. His wet hair is close to freezing off where it plasters against his cheeks and goosebumps creep up his bare legs in waves.
Wymack will be up and waiting, probably eyeing Neil’s ratty old coat hanging in the hallway. Neil watches the clock above the door and waits until it clicks past 6:00 before he fumbles for his phone. Going to Jack’s after practice. Having dinner there.
The response comes seconds later. Alright. Text me when you’re home.
Neil will not, and Wymack knows that as well as he does. He will get up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 in the morning, crack open the door to Neil’s room and find him sleeping soundly. Usually.
A black car pulls into the parking lot right as Neil pockets his phone. It’s not Jack — frankly, Jack is an asshole who Neil has exchanged no more than a few words with in all the time they’ve been on the team together, but he’s one of the few names Wymack remembers, and a convenient enough excuse since his parents aren’t involved at the school and won’t rat him out.
Neil hikes his bag higher up his shoulder and makes his way across the parking lot. The car unlocks when he’s two steps away, and he slides smoothly into the passenger seat, throwing his bag at his feet. The heating is on full blast — it always is, which Neil is sure he’s not supposed to notice — and he shivers into it.
“You’re gonna freeze to death one day,” Andrew comments in place of a greeting.
Neil grins back. “Wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t always take so long getting here.”
Andrew looks nice. He always does, sharp cut jaw and light blonde hair so strikingly contrasted with his dark clothes, but especially tonight. His hair has grown out a bit, falling over his ears in soft waves, and he’s wearing cologne, something sharp and spicy that wafts into Neil’s nose when he leans in.
Their lips meet above the gear stick, almost chastely. Kissing Andrew always feels like coming home. He tastes familiar, like strawberry gum and cigarette smoke, and Neil sinks into him easily.
He sniffs out the source of his cologne when they part, presses his nose right up against Andrew’s throat, burying himself under his ear. Andrew grunts when Neil places a kiss there, sensitive, and pushes him away.
“You going somewhere?”
Andrew raises a brow. He indicates the car. “Clearly.”
Neil snorts and leans forward to peck him on the lips once more. “You smell so fancy,” he explains.
Andrew clicks his tongue. “What are you, a dog?” He pushes Neil more firmly back into his seat and turns the key, making the engine purr loudly once before he peels out of the spot. “I went to one of Nicky’s stupid events.”
Ah. Neil hums. He’s heard of Nicky’s events before, also known as activities he organizes for the campus LGBT+ group. Not something Andrew has ever expressed much interest in, beyond off-handed complaints about Nicky roping him, and more specifically his car, into preparations.
“Meet anyone nice?” The words fall out of Neil’s mouth before he thinks better of them, and he bites his lip. He doesn’t want to know if Andrew has met anyone nice at all.
Andrew scoffs, and says nothing. Thankfully, he is more predictable to Neil than anyone else.
They leave the parking lot behind. Neil turns off his phone once they go past city limits — so far, Wymack claims not to be tracking him, but he can never be too sure.
Andrew lives in an apartment just a few minutes walking distance from campus, although it is perhaps more accurately described as a basement. His landlord is the elderly lady living in the house above it, who chain smokes on the porch and asks Andrew to do her laundry in exchange for lower rent and does not care who Andrew brings home. Neil has only met her a couple of times, and she’s never spared him more than a passing glance.
They enter through the basement door — the stairs into the house are permanently blocked off, likely the only reason Andrew feels at home here — and Neil shrugs out of his jacket to bask in the permanent warmth of the house.
The basement consists of only a narrow hallway and three rooms, one of which is the laundry room. Andrew’s bedroom has a small kitchen nook with a stove and a mini-fridge in the corner, and a shaky table with two chairs that Neil helped him screw together over the summer. Most of the rest of the room is taken up by his bed, right beneath the only window, and the dresser with the TV.
Neil flops back onto the bed, spreading out his arms in what he doesn’t recognize as an invitation until Andrew accepts it, leaning over him, chest-to-chest with his hands pressed into the mattress on both sides of Neil’s head to kiss him again.
They do a lot of that. Kissing. It’s kind of new, but also not really, anymore. It started sometime during the summer when Neil helped him move all those boxes and they spent most of the day lying on the ground instead of unpacking to escape the heat, and just hasn’t stopped since. Not that Neil wants it to. Stop, that is.
He gets a little fuzzy in the head with Andrew’s lips on his.
Andrew always kisses him like this, too: deep, but careful. A tongue in his mouth but his body neatly lifted away from him, held up by the unwavering strength of his arms even as he hovers above him for minutes, hours.
Neil kind of aches to arch up, press the full length of his body against Andrew’s, feel the heat that he knows lingers there from all the paths his lips have mapped out on his skin, but he knows Andrew’s boundaries better than anyone, and so he won’t. Wouldn’t, ever, unless Andrew asked him for it. Until Andrew asks him for it, says the hopeful little voice in the back of his head that won’t ever shut up.
They kiss for endless minutes before Andrew rolls off of him, at last, and grabs for the TV remote. Neil’s lips feel numb and he stares at the ceiling, unseeing, for one, two seconds to catch his breath, before he sits up as well.
“I have homework,” he says mostly to Andrew’s back.
Andrew hums, mindlessly scrolling through the Netflix homepage.
“It’s English,” Neil tacks on, and Andrew sighs, hitting the button on whatever show the remote just landed on, and lowers the volume.
“Let’s hear it.”
Neil grabs his bag from the foot of the bed and digs out his textbook from beneath his swim clothes. Andrew shuffles around behind him and is leaning back against the headboard with a pillow propped under his back by the time Neil crawls over to him.
They sit with their shoulders pressed together, and Andrew arranges the comforter over their legs and props his chin up on Neil’s shoulder, peering down into the textbook in his lap.
Andrew’s infallible memory is the only reason Neil’s grades have been stable all semester, even when the post-practice fatigue hits him about half an hour into the assignment and Andrew has to catch the pen out of his hand and continue it for him, while Neil lets his head roll back against Andrew’s shoulder.
Through half-closed eyes, he watches the show Andrew randomly selected without registering a single word, until Andrew pushes the textbook away and presses his lips back to Neil’s jaw.
It’s past midnight by the time Andrew drives him home, stopping a few houses down from the Wymacks’ dark green door. This is routine, too — they came to a silent understanding about this the first time Neil asked not to be dropped off directly on the doorstep, and Andrew has kept it religiously.
Neil leans over the central console once more for a final kiss goodbye. Andrew tugs at a curl on the side of his face when they part, making it spring back into place, and Neil grins before he slips out of the car.
Water has been Neil’s reprieve since he was a child. When things got too much at home, his mother would put him into the car and drive them to the local pool, letting him swim and dive and splash around until he was tired enough to be wrapped in a towel and delivered straight back into his bed.
Those were the good days. Before he grew older and she more resentful.
Even now, years removed from a splashing child needing to be distracted from screaming matches in the kitchen, being in the water brings him a sense of safety that is hard to replicate outside of the pool. He sinks into it, cool and unending, buffering up his limbs even as his muscles strain to push him forward, ever faster.
Coach Hernandez watches from the side as Neil beats his personal record of the week, clapping slowly when he hefts himself over the edge. “Good going, Hatford.”
The rest of the swim team has gathered on the lower stands to watch him and wait for Coach's usual pep talk — delivered with even more fervor with the first competition of the new year coming up on the weekend.
Neil is easily the fastest swimmer they have, earned them the shiny gold plaque on the wall of the auditorium last year, and he knows Coach is banking on him this year, as well.
By the time he’s showered and mostly dry, the other guys have filtered out of the changing rooms. He gets dressed in peace and makes it outside to find a car waiting in the near empty parking lot.
It’s not an Andrew day — Andrew has therapy on Thursdays and mandatory milkshakes with his brother afterwards, of which a picture will inevitably end up in Neil’s message box — and it’s not Andrew’s car. Instead, behind the wheel of the dark blue hatchback sits Kevin Day.
Neil rolls his eyes, but obediently makes his way over.
Kevin, stinking of chlorine and deodorant like he did not bother to take a real shower after his own practice, wastes no time on greetings. “How was practice?”
“Fine.” Neil buckles himself in. “I could have taken the bus.”
“Could have,” Kevin agrees. “I was on my way past here anyway.” Neil doubts that. The house is in the same direction from here as the college campus. “And I wanted to talk to you about the competition.”
That sounds more like it. Neil resists rolling his eyes again, but Kevin glares at him anyway.
“What is there to talk about? I will swim like I always do.”
Kevin clicks his tongue as he steers towards home. He drives much slower than Andrew or even Wymack, still like he’s only just learned how to operate a car and has not had his license for well over three years. “I know you’ve been staying out late. We can’t have you slacking off.”
Neil bites his tongue. “I’m not.” He has no idea what Kevin thinks he’s doing while staying out late, and Kevin does not elaborate.
Instead, he comes to a stop at the next light and looks over at Neil. “You know how important the first competition of the year is. We’ve worked too long and too hard for you to let it all go now.”
Neil does roll his eyes then, making sure Kevin sees. “I’m not. Stop bugging me.”
Kevin huffs, but the light turns green and he has to turn back to the road. Neil releases a small breath from between his teeth. “Good. But focusing on your performance also includes getting enough sleep, eating well. Making sure you don’t fall behind in class. Besides, dad will be mad if you do.”
“No, he won’t,” Neil says quietly enough for the words to get lost in the roar of the engine when Kevin turns a corner without switching the gear. He’s not interested in what Kevin has to say about it, anyway.
Wymack does not typically get mad at him. He gets mad at the world, at Kevin, at the school, at the court. He will speak to Neil in gruff tones and send him heavy looks, but he has never yelled at him, or thrown things across the room, or expressed more than a slight displeasure towards him.
Neil hates it. He did not come so far to be treated like a doll.
Kevin pulls into the driveway and turns off the engine. “Look, Neil, I’m only looking out for you. You are too good to waste your potential on teenage deviancy, and I won’t let you.”
“Unsure what prompted this lecture,” Neil deadpans.
Kevin’s nose rises a good bit into the air in response. “I do not need to be prompted. I know you.”
Neil scoffs and ends the conversation by clicking his seatbelt open and grabbing his bag from the floor, turning his back on a protesting Kevin.
His phone buzzes when he climbs out of the car. It’s a picture of Andrew’s milkshake — extra tall, strawberry pink, garnished with heaps of whipped cream and sprinkles and a tiny cherry. Neil saves the picture and shoves his phone back into his pocket before following Kevin into the house.
“Neil!” Matt throws an arm around him before Neil really registers he is there. His blinding grin enters Neil’s field of vision from the left, and his heavy arm pulls Neil into his side. “Good to see you, buddy.”
Neil smiles. It comes to him easily — most of the time Matt acts more like an overgrown teddy bear than a human man, and Neil has come to appreciate his presence. “Hi Matt.”
“It’s been a while.” Dan, Matt’s girlfriend and usual partner in crime, appears at Neil’s other side and hops up onto the barstool. She reaches over to ruffle Neil’s hair in a gesture that is probably more familiar than earned for their shaky acquaintanceship. Neil does not mind. “How have you been?”
“Good,” he answers vaguely. The small talk they require feels clunky and awkward in his mouth, but he’s getting better at it. “Lots of stress with class and practice. How about you?”
Dan gives him a sympathetic look, and Matt squeezes him again. “I bet,” she says. “We’ve also been good. Have been working hard setting this place up — you could tell Andrew he could stand to be more of a help.”
Neil finds Andrew across the room, boots kicked up on the chair next to him, lit cigarette between his lips and the smoke wafting out through the cracked window by his side. Neil doesn't think he could make him do anything. He doesn’t say that, and Dan moves on.
This bar is their dream, Neil knows. It’s a rundown little building Allison bought at the start of the semester — though with a decidedly wrinkled nose at the choice — and they have been working hard setting it up for the summer semester opening. How Andrew got roped into this, Neil remains unsure apart from the suspicion that these people might or might not actually be Andrew’s friends.
He slides out of his spot by the bar to make his way over to Andrew, and is intercepted only once by Renee requesting a hand with hooking up the menu screen. He is certain that Renee is perfectly capable of doing this by herself, and is using the opportunity of making him hold the cables up for her to subject him to more of her sweet-faced, deathly calm stare. Neil fights the shivers threatening to run down his back.
By the time he finally makes it across the room, Andrew has almost finished his cigarette. He hands the smoking bud to Neil and lights a new one for himself.
There is no hiding here, not after the first time Andrew brought Neil around, when Allison sized him up for almost a full minute in complete silence, before nodding once, and declaring him fit for company.
Now, cigarette butt held between his lips, he fits himself onto the window ledge and props his feet up on the edge of Andrew’s chair. Beneath the table, Andrew wraps a loose hand around his ankle, and Neil tries his hardest not to laser focus on that single point of contact.
“Dan says to tell you to help out more,” he says, looking at Andrew’s face instead.
Andrew rolls his eyes. “I already drive them everywhere. What more do they expect?”
Matt also has a car, Neil can see the truck parked out front from where he’s sitting, but he elects not to mention that. “Right. They should be grateful,” he says, trying to hide the smile tugging at his lips.
Andrew hums, and his hand tightens ever so slightly around Neil’s ankle.
Just as the bud of the cigarette is about to burn out, Neil takes one drag of it and stubs it out in the tiny glass ashtray someone — likely Renee — must have placed here specifically for Andrew.
They watch as Matt carries in more boxes and a few crates of beer while Dan and Allison are busy painting the back wall. The sun sets outside and Dan flicks on the newly connected light system to a collective ahh, and half an hour later Nicky and Aaron show up with bags of takeout for everyone.
“Hey Neil!” Nicky beams at him, wide and bright. “Didn’t know you were coming. Good thing we got extra.”
Andrew does not move from his seat, and since his hand does not unwrap from around Neil’s leg, neither does Neil. Instead, the others pull chairs up from around the bar to gather around their table, unpack plastic containers of noodles and rice and dig in,
“Almost done now,” Dan says when most of the bowls lay strewn across the table, empty. There’s a speck of dark blue paint on her cheek, and she grins wildly when her eyes land on Neil. “We’re throwing a party here next week, just with friends. Like a pre-opening celebration. You should come, Neil.”
Neil almost startles. It’s still strange to him, how easily they’ve accepted him, like he’s always been part of them, like he’s not so much younger than them at all.
Andrew’s hand tightens around his leg again, just so, the nail of his thumb digging into the hollow beneath the jut of his ankle bone barely enough to leave an indent.
“Sure,” Neil hears himself saying, and Andrew’s hand relaxes. “I’ll be there.”
His first competition is held at a school half an hour away. Wymack drives him, and since it’s a Saturday he cannot avoid Kevin tagging along and nagging at him from the backseat the entire way.
He’s doing his full four allowed events for the meet — Coach wants to start him off strong into the new year. He swims second in the first relay, making up for the time Jack lost them easily and setting the stage for Jean and Robin to bring it home. He tries not to feel too smug at the constipated look on Jack’s face afterwards.
By the time he’s finished his freestyle and his individual medley, their scores have racked up enough for Coach Hernandez to give them no more than a satisfied nod.
Neil towels himself off half-heartedly at the edge of the pool — he has one more relay to swim, anyway — and sinks onto the bench beside Jean, muscles aching with a satisfying kind of exhaustion.
“Look,” Jean says, with the kind of accent on the oo that he only uses when he’s teasing, “Your loverboy is here.”
The stands are packed with parents and siblings and friends. Neil spots Wymack and Kevin easily, only two rows up, Wymack watching the race and Kevin talking incessantly in his ear.
But further up in the stands, almost all the way at the top as if to be as far away from Wymack and Kevin as possible, Andrew leans against a pole with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
He’s wearing his typical leather jacket over a turtleneck that it is most definitely too warm in here for, and he is looking directly at Neil.
Neil feels himself flush and swats at Jean’s shoulder.
“Ow,” Jean protests. “Don’t blame me. I didn’t invite him.”
No, he didn’t. Neil did — in the way that he always does, by mentioning when and where exactly his competition was going to be, as casually as he could in the middle of the conversation. And Andrew would send him a look, half curious, half knowing, and show his face at some point during the meet. Or not. Neil still cannot quite parse out what it is that makes Andrew show up on some days while staying away on others; he’s come to meets that were an hour away while skipping ones that were barely ten minutes away, he’s shown up three weekends in a row and then not for another four. The pattern seems indiscernible to Neil.
He is here today, though, cocking an eyebrow when their eyes meet again.
The last medley of the day Neil swims alongside Jean, Robin and Bryan, his favorite relay line-up. Jean goes first; he always does — he has the height advantage that none of them do, and can put them ahead fast. Next to Neil, Robin bops up and down on the balls of their feet in time with Jean’s strokes, and dives neatly into the water as soon as Jean’s hand finds the wall.
Neil goes next after them, feels himself pull through the water like a knife, straining with a delicious soreness at this point in the day. Bryan is already on his way in when his head surfaces at the end of his 100 yards.
Bryan’s hand grips bar two full seconds before the opposing team’s final swimmer. He heaves himself over the edge of the pool and Robin throws their arms around him with a celebratory whoop.
The four of them waddle back over to the rest of the team, and Neil runs a fresh towel through his hair. He looks up at the stands again and finds Andrew still looking back at him, head tilted to one side. Wymack and Kevin have leaned back in their seats, though Kevin is still talking.
Neil sits through Coach’s slightly less enthusiastic post-meet speech and heads to the lockers as soon as they’re dismissed.
By the time he’s showered and mostly dry in his swim team tracksuit, the last relay race has finished, and the stands are upset with people rising from their seats. Neil ducks past the scattered remains of his team to avoid getting swept up with them, and makes it up the first few steps into the stands.
Kevin and Wymack have gotten up. He knows they’re waiting for him, knows they will wait until he makes his way through the crowd towards them so they can head up together. Wymack will wrestle his gym bag from him and carry it to the car, and they’ll hit some grimy diner along the highway on the way home and Kevin won’t say anything if Neil orders an extra-large fruit shake.
Neil ignores them in favor of looking up the rows, searching through a rush of coats for a glimpse of blonde hair and black leather.
The crowds part, slowly, and Andrew is gone.
The pre-opening party is much larger than was advertised to him.
It’s on a Thursday, which Neil usually spends catching up on school work at home. Although he usually finishes some of his homework at Andrew’s apartment, the thrill of getting to make out with him usually overrides even his enthusiasm for trigonometric equations, so he needs to set some time apart for it at least once a week.
On this particular Thursday, however, he rushes to finish a sloppy conclusion to his English essay after practice, and locks his bedroom door from the inside. Only one of his Andrew-approved pairs of pants is out of the wash and he pairs it with a sweatshirt Andrew bought him in the fall, after Neil showed up to what was decidedly not a birthday party in a ratty team shirt that left him freezing halfway through the night. He still doesn’t know a lot about clothes or fashion, as Allison will be swift to point out, but he knows what Andrew likes, at least.
It’s almost eight, and he can hear Wymack watching a game downstairs, when his phone buzzes on his desk. He shoves it into his pocket without checking it, and shimmies his window open.
His bedroom window faces the back of the house, and he has to take the long way around the garage to avoid the living room windows. Andrew is waiting in his usual spot, three houses down the street, with the engine idling.
They arrive only five minutes after Dan’s proclaimed starting time of eight-thirty, and the place is already packed. Andrew wedges the car into the last free parking space outside, and catches Neil by the wrist when they get out to give him what appears to be an approving once-over.
Inside, they scoot past a large group of people congregated at the entrance, and find Dan behind the bar with a makeshift cocktail station and a ring of friends around her. She beams when she sees them part the crowd.
“You made it!” She slides a finished cocktail across the bartop into a pair of waiting hands and turns to face them fully. Sweat already plasters her hair to her temples on account of it being a million degrees in the bar, but she glows brighter than the lights overhead and leans bodily across the bar to throw her arms around Neil. “Isn’t it great?”
She does not touch Andrew, but her smile is no less bright when she nods at him.
It is great — it’s not technically the opening yet, Neil knows, but there are so many people in attendance that it might as well be. Every chair is taken up, and even more people are standing, talking, drinking, dancing. Dan is helped behind the bar by Renee and another guy Neil doesn’t recognize, and they can barely keep up between the three of them.
It’s not Neil’s definition of a great night, packed and loud and dark as it is, but the rapid beat of his pulse carries something apart from anxiety that he decodes as happiness for his friends.
He spots Allison and Nicky at the far end of the bar, both of them leering at Renee and slapping the bar for refills whenever she steps closer. He tugs at Andrew’s sleeve to make their way over, but Andrew waves him along — pulling out his wallet and nodding at the bar when Neil tilts his head.
Neil makes his way towards the end of the bar on his own — begrudgingly, as walking with Andrew is much easier. Despite his height, he parts the crowd in a way Neil will never be able to. Neil is out of breath by the time he reaches Allison’s side, and acutely regretting wearing a sweatshirt.
Allison, however, lights up like a christmas tree at the sight of him and secures a previously occupied bar stool for him with no more than two flicks of her manicured fingers. “Neilio!” she yells over the music, voice blurred only slightly by however many hot pink cocktails she has managed to throw back in the short amount of time since the start of the party. Her hands cup his entire face, thumbs pressing into his cheeks right under his eyes like she’s planning to lean in and kiss him square on the mouth, but she continues to simply cradle him. “I’m so glad you’re here. Nicky! Nicky!”
Nicky spins around from his conversation with the guy next to him and grins when he sees Neil. “Ah, Neil!” He sounds almost as drunk as Allison. “So happy you made it. Where’s Andrew?”
“Yeah!” Allison lets go of his face solely to start fussing with his hair instead, “Where’s your boyfriend?”
Neil feels his cheeks color, and almost corrects her. Almost. Instead, he directs a thumb over his shoulder at the corner of the bar he left Andrew in. “Getting drinks, I think.”
“Ah, very good, very good. Do you want a drink?”
Neil blinks — he assumed Andrew would be getting a drink for him, too, but when he looks back to follow Allison’s line of sight on Andrew, he spots him leaning over the bar with a single glass of whiskey in front of him.
“Um.” His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth for a second before he manages, “Sure.”
“One of these?” Allison taps a fingernail against the side of her half-empty pink concoction. Neil has no idea what it is apart from the fact that it’s got Allison like this less than half an hour into the party.
“I’m underage,” he supplies helpfully, but Allison only scoffs.
“As are half the people involved in opening this bar. You think Renee is gonna ID you?”
Neil does not point out that out of all of them, Renee would probably be, in fact, the most likely to ask him for his ID, but still manages to convince Allison to order a soda for him instead. She pays for it despite his protests, and only when the cool glass is pressed into his hands does he allow himself another look over at Andrew.
Curiously, he is still standing at the bar with his single glass, only a few sips emptier. The crowd finally shifts enough for Neil to see the other side of the bar, and he realizes that Andrew is talking to the third bartender he didn’t recognize, who is currently washing out glasses and laughs at something Andrew must have said.
Neil tilts his head — it’s rare to see Andrew being social with his friends and family, let alone with a stranger.
“Ah,” Nicky leans all the way across Allison into Neil’s space. Allison protests with a slap to the back of his head that he ignores, before she resigns herself to using him as a table and bending her head to follow both of their gazes to Andrew. “I see Andrew is chatting up Roland again,” Nicky says, his grin slurring his words almost more than the cocktails. “Not gonna lie, I really thought they were fucking at the start of the year.”
Neil startles, blinking at Nicky. “Hm?”
Nicky laughs, gesturing with his drink so widely that some of the coke sloshes over the side and fizzes in droplets on the bartop. “Yeah, I mean, that was of course before we knew about you. But Roland used to work at this other bar that Andrew went to all the time. I didn’t think college would turn him into a party animal that fast, so I always assumed that the cute bartender probably had something to do with it. They always had chemistry, you know?”
Neil doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he knows much about chemistry at all.
He tries to swallow around the sudden, impractical lump in his throat as Allison weighs in, “Probably nothing, though, right? Clearly he’s still talking to him while he’s here with Neil.”
The start of the year, Nicky said. Neil remembers the first few weeks after Andrew started college, leaving behind the lazy months of summer that they spent rolling around on the unfinished floor of the basement in exchange for drives between the high school and college campuses, lying on the comfortable spread of his bed, Andrew’s hands pulling at his hair and his own lips exploring Andrew’s neck for the first time.
He can hardly imagine Andrew dropping him off at home at the end of the night to go flirt, or worse, with someone else. And yet.
And yet he watches the easy way Andrew seems to be talking to this man, the way he’s leaned almost halfway across the bar with his hand wrapped loosely around his glass. And yet Andrew has not touched him more than their regular makeout sessions, ever. Even the tentative touches under Neil’s shirt have disappeared again after their first venturing months ago. And yet Nicky noticed, saw, Andrew going out of his way to see this guy in the fall.
Maybe Neil knows what Nicky meant by chemistry after all.
“You are here with him, right, Neil?” Allison startles him back out of his thoughts. She’s looking at him with no more concern than before, still sipping her death juice, unaware of his turmoil. “He’s taking you home?”
“Yeah. I mean, he picked me up, so I’m hoping he will.” He does not like how brittle his voice sounds, all of the sudden, but Allison only nods.
“Good, good,” she says. “Ah look, there he is.”
Indeed, when Neil looks back, Andrew is finally making his way towards them, now holding a second glass for Neil. He raises a brow when he sees Neil already cradling a soda, and places the one he bought down in front of him.
“Sorry,” Neil mumbles, chucking back the rest of his glass so he can pick up Andrew’s. Andrew rolls his eyes but gives Allison a nod in greeting before scooting around Neil so he can place himself firmly at his back, still holding his own glass on the bar so his arm is effectively around Neil.
Neil lets out a breath and allows himself to lean just a fraction of his weight against him.
Andrew, evidently doing his best to ignore Nicky’s excited attempts at conversation, touches his chin to Neil’s shoulder. “You okay?”
The warmth of Andrew’s chest against his back is almost enough to undo the knot in his windpipe, and Neil smiles at him, privately. “Yeah. You?”
Andrew only nods, but it brings his head closer to Neil’s shoulder still, and he does not move it away, even when Neil’s cheek grazes his hair. Another sigh escapes Neil as the gnarly feeling in his chest slowly untangles itself, aided along by the nearness of Andrew against him, not anyone else, and he lets his head tip fully against Andrew’s.
Andrew does not move away.
Neil rolls over into a patch of sunlight and wakes with a sneeze.
Andrew’s bed is soft and piled high with blankets and pillows, and Neil has a hard time shaking dregs of sleep on a normal day, but especially so with last night still in his bones.
He blinks his eyes open against the rising sun slanting in through the high basement window, and flips himself around to find Andrew already up and assembling breakfast at the kitchen nook in the corner of the room. His back is to Neil, showing off the grand expanse of his shoulders, the fine hair at the back of his neck caught in the morning light, lit up like pale gold.
Neil loves to look at him. He has never looked at anyone the way he looks at Andrew, he knows, but no one has ever made him feel the way Andrew does, that tingly feeling he can chase right down to his toes.
“Good morning,” he mumbles, stretching like a cat, meeting Andrew’s gaze over his shoulder.
The alarm clock on the bedside table tells him it is 7:30, which means he has an hour to get to school including the twenty minute drive, but he allows his eyes to slip closed until Andrew places a plate of breakfast on his chest.
Neil opens his eyes to find Andrew leaning over him, unimpressed at the smile Neil directs at him.
There is something else in that expression, though, something a little shaded. He sits down on the bed, but keeps a careful few inches of distance between their legs.
Something sick tears through Neil’s gut and it takes him a moment to identify the memories from last night — of Andrew leaning over the bar into Roland’s space, of Nicky’s words, I really thought they were fucking.
He does his best to shake the thought loose. Andrew gets like this sometimes; bad days, bad dreams, bad thoughts. It’s never been an issue, especially not to Neil. He, of all people, should get it.
And he does. And he knows that Andrew knows he does, which is why Andrew never attempts to hide when he is having a bad day, never withdraws from him. His eyes are shaded into something duller than their usual honey tone, but he still sits only a few inches away from Neil on the bed and forks scrambled eggs into his mouth.
It only feels more wretched, then, that he should ache for the comfort of Andrew’s touch right at the moment that Andrew needs space, and trusts Neil enough to respect that.
He does respect it. He hides the fluttering of his own gaze by digging into the eggs Andrew made for him, hides the little jump his heart makes at the berries arrayed on the side of the plate. All while trying to ignore the persistent image of Andrew with the bartender from last night.
Andrew collects his plate when he’s done, and grabs his car keys and bag while Neil gets dressed. He didn’t bring anything, wasn’t really planning on sleeping over, but he has some spare clothes stashed in Andrew’s dresser that he does not consciously remember bringing over, and most of his textbooks are in his locker at school. It’s Friday, anyway, and his English report isn’t due till Monday.
His phone is the last thing he grabs, dead on Andrew’s nightstand. Andrew digs a charger out of the glove box in the car and presses it into his hand when they get in.
They don’t speak on the drive over, and Neil tries not to pick at his nails. Andrew is even more silent than usual on days like this, he knows this, but today, the silence feels weighted to him.
While his phone charges from the little device Andrew has plugged into the dashboard outlet, Neil stares out the window and tries to rationalize.
He and Andrew have been fooling around since the summer. They have never progressed past heavily making out and one of Andrew’s hands under Neil’s shirt, though that was also months ago and has not happened again since. Neil is a virgin. Andrew is not — which Neil knows because Andrew told him that he hooked up with a guy or two while in juvie.
These are all facts. Beyond this, it becomes harder to figure out what’s nagging him.
He wants to have sex. With Andrew, specifically. He’s pretty certain of this, and has been for months. He’s never been interested in sex before, but he was also never interested in kissing anyone before Andrew, so. He’s ready, he thinks. At least every time they kiss, he knows he only wants to be closer, wants more, wants everything.
The issue, then, is that Andrew does not seem interested in having sex with him.
He keeps an almost celibate distance between them even while shoving his tongue down Neil’s throat, and pulls away when things get hot between them before anything else can happen. Even the one time he slid a hand under Neil’s shirt in a hint of suggestiveness, he seemed to reevaluate for a moment after Neil’s breath caught, before pulling it back out. He hasn’t tried again since.
Neil is, of course, aware of Andrew’s past. Or as much of it as Andrew is comfortable sharing with anyone. He knows Andrew does not like to be touched, and he would never presume that Andrew is interested in sex in the first place. Except that he knows that Andrew has slept with other people.
Nicky’s voice comes back to him unbidden, They always had chemistry, you know?
Neil bites his lip and continues fiddling with the nail of his thumb in the pocket of his hoodie. So what? he makes himself think. Andrew slept with someone else. Andrew potentially slept with that bartender, Roland, after spending the day with Neil. It’s not a big deal. What did he expect, really? They’re not in a relationship. They’ve just been messing around, some kind of natural conclusion to the tension they harbored all throughout Andrew’s senior year, when Neil would sit on the stands at lacrosse practice waiting for Wymack because he refused to take the bus.
Neil is not even eighteen. Surely, Andrew has been meeting all sorts of interesting strangers at college that are better, older, more experienced than Neil is. He couldn’t have seriously expected Andrew to wait for him to catch up.
Or perhaps that is another issue, altogether. Perhaps Andrew is simply uncomfortable sleeping with him while he’s underage, still. In that case, they are barely more than a week off.
He powers up his phone when Andrew turns into the drop-off lane, and winces at the row of unanswered calls from Wymack, three messages that simply read Where are you? and two subsequent question marks, each time stamped half an hour apart from five this morning onward.
At school, he sends back quickly. Sorry.
Andrew pulls up to the pavement behind the other late arrivals and Neil grabs his borrowed bag. On a normal day, he would lean over for a quick kiss even here, at the very low risk of being spotted by Wymack passing by a front facing window and inspecting every car outside, but today is not a normal day. Andrew keeps both hands on the steering wheel and Neil is still pushing down the faint nausea swimming up his esophagus, so he simply says, “Bye, see you,” and slips out of the car before Andrew can say anything in return.
On the rare Fridays that Andrew doesn’t pick him up, of which today is definitely one, Neil walks five minutes from the pool to the lacrosse field and waits as the recently released players stream out of the lockers past him.
Last year, Andrew would have been among them.
Wymack is always the last to leave after his team, clipboard in hand and locking up behind himself. He startles when he turns to see Neil leaning against the wall with his gym bag slung over his shoulder.
“Jesus, kid,” he says, but it takes him all of two breaths to settle back into faintly disapproving. “Scared me to death for the second time today.”
Neil finds in himself the grace to feel guilty, at least, though he attempts to squash the feeling down. He never means to worry Wymack, but he’s also not used to this. The only way to shake the ghost of his mother’s tight grip on him, it seems, is for him to steer towards the opposite extreme.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, aware that he said that already, and that Wymack won’t care.
“Care to tell me where you spent the night?” Wymack heads out past him, and Neil follows him to the car.
He shrugs vaguely. “Jack’s.” The lie feels numb on his tongue by now.
Wymack scoffs, but opens the door to the driver’s seat. “Figures.” He throws his clipboard and bag over the headrest into the backseat, then fixes his gaze on Neil over the top of the car like he’s gearing up to say something else. Neil watches him take a breath, then release it as a long sigh. “Come on, let’s go.”
Robin throws themselves down on the steps beside Neil, and holds out a wrapped popsicle.
Neil takes it — mainly because it’s at least a fruit flavored one, rather than the ice cream cones they handed to Jean and Bryan — but raises a brow. “Isn’t it a bit cold for ice cream?”
Robin shrugs and tears open their own popsicle. “Never.”
The four of them sit on the stairs outside the pool, with Jean and Bryan sprawling their long legs over the pavement from the lowest step and Neil and Robin crammed onto the step above them. Neil is luxuriously sore from practice and comfortable in the sweater he’s pretty sure belonged to Andrew once, and the sticky strawberry flavor of the popsicle bursts on his tongue like a firework.
Hanging out with the team is still somewhat new to him — last year, he did his best to stay away from them, still convinced he would be gone again soon. Nothing good ever lasts, and all. But now it’s his second year on the team, and he’s still here, and Robin is more persistent than the rest of the team combined.
Beneath him, Jean and Bryan trade well-meaning barbs about practice and the upcoming weekend’s competition, and Neil finds himself content to listen.
“No,” Jean says, batting Bryan’s hand away. “Quit being silly.” Neil barely knows what they are talking about, but Jean has a thin mustache of ice cream clinging to his upper lip that makes him smile, anyway. “Neil is never alone, also. His lover always comes.”
Neil feels himself flush and tries to kick Jean in the shoulder, but Jean evades him effortlessly. “Shut up.”
Jean rolls his eyes. “Is that not right? He’s there almost every time.”
Neil does not point out that Andrew has maybe been at half of their meets, at most, because his stomach still flips a bit every time he thinks of Andrew. He hasn’t seen him since Friday, and spoken to him only briefly over text.
“Stop bullying him,” Robin says, their own legs stretched out between the boys on the lower step. “It’s not his fault he has a hot older boyfriend to come cheer him on.” They waggle their brows, and Bryan jeers.
Neil rolls his eyes. “You all know Andrew. He literally went to this school last year.”
Robin continues waggling their eyebrows at him, and taps their popsicle against his. “No need to be humble. We’ve all seen him whisk you away after practice.”
“In his big fancy car,” Bryan adds helpfully. “The freshmen think you’re some kind of sugar baby.”
Neil groans and buries his face in his hands. He does not actually mind their teasing, which took him a while to figure out — Robin’s grin never tips into something mean, Jean’s accent makes him sound haughtier than he means to be, and the meanest thing Bryan has ever uttered was when he called Jack an asshole before winter break.
“That’s ridiculous. He’s not old. He’s nineteen.”
“And you are seventeen,” Robin says, still with an edge of a smile to their mouth. “How scandalous.”
“I turn eighteen on Sunday.” The notion alone makes something stir in Neil’s belly that he can’t quite place, and thus elects to ignore.
“Right. So after Sunday we can tell the freshmen you’re not a sugar baby anymore.”
Neil swats at their shoulder, and Bryan laughs.
It’s good. While he finishes his popsicle and lets his friends’ conversation drift away from him again, the feeling in his chest swells as he lets the sound of their voices wash over him. The sun breaks through the January sky for a moment to illuminate each of their faces, and Neil turns his head towards it.
The sound of an engine makes him look up just in time to see the Mas pull into the parking lot, and feel Robin’s elbow digging into his side. “See,” they say, “speak of the devil.”
Neil’s heart beats in his throat at the sight of the familiar car, like a sick lurch that he can’t quite suppress. He wasn’t expecting Andrew to show up today — if Robin hadn’t invited him to hang out after practice, he would have been home by now, and Andrew would have arrived to an empty parking lot.
He does not think about how that might have already happened.
He’s almost to his feet, itching to grab his bag and walk over out of pure habit, when, unexpectedly, the driver’s side door swings open and Andrew gets out of the car.
Bryan whistles lowly, and Neil resists kicking out towards the lower step again. Instead, he can only watch, utterly transfixed, as Andrew makes his way over to them.
Beside him, Robin bunches up the ice cream trash they collected, and gets to their feet. “Come on, boys.” They grab Bryan by the sleeve and Jean by the back of the collar, and haul them both up. “Time to go.”
“Aww.” Bryan affects an exaggerated pout as Robin pushes him off the stairs and in the vague direction of the bus stop, but he manages to lean back and wink at Neil. “Have fun!”
Decidedly, Neil does not blush. He keeps his eyes on Andrew, whose expression remains his usual solemn. He barely spares the awkwardly struggling gaggle of Neil’s friends a glance as he passes them. Over his shoulder, Neil sees Robin turn back once more, after giving Bryan and Jean a final push, and hold both of their thumbs up for him.
“Andrew,” he says, taking the two steps down, his bag clutched in one hand. “I —”
Andrew pauses right in front of him, and Neil finds himself cut off by the sheer presence of him. Andrew doesn’t say anything, which Neil expected insofar he can expect anything from Andrew, but Neil has learned the composition of his face to such detail that he can read every line, every shift of his pupil as he stares at Neil. Wide open, is what Neil reads here. A question awaiting its answer.
His shoulders fall automatically, the breath bunched up in his chest releases all at once. It’s Andrew. “Hi,” he hears his own mouth say, feels the contours of his smile like a pavlovian response.
“I see you’ve decided to start wearing clothes,” is Andrew’s greeting. He tugs at the front of Neil’s sweater — his sweater. Neil takes it as an invitation to step further into his space.
“I am capable of learning.”
One of Andrew’s eyebrows quirks. “Really? This is news to me.”
Neil smiles, in its full glory this time, and leans in to kiss him. Andrew almost seems startled, but the cup of his hand finds Neil’s jaw to pull him closer almost immediately.
When they part, Andrew is still looking at him with those eyes, big and golden in a way that is so different from the last time Neil saw them. He is still calculating, Neil can tell at a single glance, but his mouth is quirked in something that is not quite a smile — as those are rare and precious on Andrew — but indicates that he is satisfied with the new factors he’s added to his mental equations.
“Are we going home?” Neil asks. Home, Andrew will know, means his apartment.
“If you want to,” is what Andrew always says, but today it feels like more than a half-concealed question for consent. Neil’s eyes flick over Andrew’s blank expression, and he hums.
“We could also go swimming.”
Coach Hernandez locks up the pool after practice, but Neil broke in often enough during junior year that he ended up giving him his own copy of the keys. Which comes in handy both when he is having his own private meltdowns that he knows only a solid few laps around the pool will fix, and when he is sneaking his— Andrew in.
Andrew didn’t bring anything to swim in, but Neil always has a couple extra trunks stored in his locker, so they get changed as fast as they can — the lockers are communal, and Neil vanishes into the narrow bathroom stall to get changed out of habit. Andrew doesn’t question him, and Neil hears him clatter out of the locker room door while he’s still wiggling into his spandex swim shirt.
He finds him already in the water when he emerges, floating but keeping close to the edge. Andrew watches him take the leap, and Neil feels every thought vacate his head as he dives clean into the water.
He feels weightless, like he imagines falling off a building would feel, suspended between the drop and the earth beneath him, except the crash will never come and the moment lasts forever. His anxieties hang suspended with him, unreachable as his body is caught up in the sensation.
He lets his jump blend into a dive, pumping his arms once, twice, letting the momentum carry him as deep as it will, relishes briefly in the pressure on his ears, before he lets him drift back to surface. His head breaches the water and he throws his hair out of his face, air streaming back into his lungs, and he finds Andrew still at the edge of the pool, watching him.
Neil is still exhausted from practice, and he knows he shouldn’t strain himself with the next competition less than a week away, so he leaves the fooling around be and swims over to him.
Andrew knows how to swim. Neil knows this for a fact because he, stupidly, agreed to race Neil exactly once last summer, and summarily lost, but he didn’t drown — though now he sticks to the edge of the pool like he is afraid that he will, anyway. His hair sticks to his face in long streaks several shades darker than his normal blonde, droplets pearl on the ends of his pale lashes, making them stick together and his eyes look huge in the overly bright light.
“You can take a lap,” Neil tells him. “I should rest.”
Andrew tilts his head. He wraps a hand around Neil’s wrist and drags him closer. Neither of them come even close to the floor here, and Neil braces a hand against the edge to stay above water.
Andrew, always the more efficient thinker between them, hooks an arm around the rung of the starting block and pulls Neil all the way against him by his wrist, until their chests almost touch and Neil has to let go of the pool edge to brace himself on Andrew’s shoulders instead. Andrew lets go of him only to wipe a wet lock of hair out of his eyes.
“Hi,” Neil breathes, feeling suddenly giddy. The last time he was in a pool with Andrew — months ago, with the sun baking down on them at the public pool that’s closer to the college campus than here, surrounded by screaming children and mothers heckling them about sunscreen — this was still a far off dream that had barely begun to form at the back of Neil’s head. Andrew, with him. Andrew, pressed up against him. Andrew, with his lips pressed to his.
Like now. Andrew’s hand slides to the back of his neck and his lips slide onto Neil’s, unhurried but no less hungry for it. Neil wraps his arms around his neck so he can bury his hands into the wet mop of Andrew’s hair. This has always been safe territory, and he needs an anchor to stop floating away.
Their tongues slide together in a well practiced rhythm, and Neil pulls himself closer against Andrew — trying to fuse into him, perhaps, wishing he could bury himself in Andrew’s chest and never emerge. Perhaps not even then would he feel like he’s close enough, perhaps the gaping hole of yearning in his stomach would never quite be filled.
And Andrew lets him. Lets him tangle them together until Neil can no longer say where he ends and Andrew starts, his legs wrapping around Andrew’s, his hands buried deep enough in his hair that he’s basically clinging to his scalp, their ribs fitting together like an intricate puzzle he could never hope to tear apart. In the name of staying afloat together, or because he wants him, too — Neil cannot tell, but he is not about to take the permission for granted.
He licks into Andrew’s mouth with everything he has, feels the tremble of his own lashes against the tops of his cheeks, feels Andrew breathing against him; both in the puffs of air against his chin and in the steady rise and fall of his chest against his. He lets every sensation soak into his skin until it is not just the water that leaves him shriveled as a prune.
Finally, Andrew breaks away. His ears are flushed a beautiful pink that Neil could wonder at all day, and he catches Neil’s chin between his pointer finger and thumb, tilting his face up. Neil goes willingly, letting Andrew inspect him. Andrew’s thumb digs into Neil’s lower lip, places a brand there that Neil cannot lick away.
“Andrew,” he says, hears the desperation breaking in his own voice like a wave and would feel embarrassed about it if Andrew didn’t relieve him of it immediately by crashing their lips back together.
It’s even better this time, closer, hotter, warmer. Andrew responds with the same level of enthusiasm as Neil, one arm straining around the rung of the block to keep them both afloat, the other digging into the meat of Neil’s back, nails almost catching in the fabric of his shirt, like trying to break him open.
Neil feels as he loses touch, as he’s buoyed even higher than he normally is in the water, carried on a wave of his desire, his need to crawl under Andrew’s skin and make a home at the back of his throat. He knows, with startling clarity that still does not break him out of the reverie of Andrew’s kiss, that he can never come back from this, that he is ruined for anything like this for the rest of his life, that nothing will ever feel like this again.
One of his thumbs finds Andrew’s cheek, feels the shift of the muscles in Andrew’s jaw as he devours him. The thought drives him even deeper into it, clouds over his brain and he shifts his entire body against Andrew. Electricity zips down his spine when their hips meet and the unmistakable bulge in Andrew’s trunks brushes against his thigh, startling a gasp out of him that he tries to muffle on Andrew’s tongue.
Andrew hears it, or at least feels that pivotal point of contact, and draws back, panting. He is much more flushed now, down to his cheeks, and his eyes burn like hot glass as he stares at Neil.
“Andrew,” Neil says again, trying to keep his voice stable this time. He does not succeed, can hear the wobble of it, can feel the fire rising into his face. He wants so badly it must be pouring out of him in waves, flooding out of every pore, polluting the water around them with the potency of it.
He is attuned to every change in Andrew’s face, posture, could taste his own desire mirrored on Andrew’s lips just a moment ago — and so he also sees the exact moment that Andrew’s shutters go down, feels as his muscles lock up and push Neil away without having to do so physically.
Their bodies part, their legs detangle, Neil lets his hands drop from Andrew’s hair and holds onto the ledge himself again. Every single one of his atoms that tried to fuse with Andrew’s mere seconds ago returns to its solitary state, buzzing through his entire being like a kicked beehive. Where his chest was just brimming with desire, with warmth, with a need so open it almost scared him, it falls in on itself now, hollow. A feeling that eats him up wholly.
“Andrew,” he hears himself saying, for the third time. “I — what —”
He has to swallow around the lump in his throat. The words will not come — he knows he should not ask. If Andrew doesn’t want to, then it’s no. Neil knows that. He will not force him to explain himself.
“It’s late,” Andrew says, looking up at the big analog clock above the pool. He turns back to Neil, his face still flushed rosy, the only evidence that anything happened at all. He leans over the distance between them and kisses Neil once, close-lipped and brief, and says, “Let’s go home.”
He climbs out of the pool without waiting for Neil and disappears into the lockers. Neil stays, clinging onto the edge of the pool, and lets his head fall to rest on the backs of his hands for a few seconds before he follows, still ignoring the hole in his chest.
On Friday, the Foxhole, which the bar is now officially called as per the sign Matt and Aaron mounted over the door just this morning, has both recovered from the previous week’s party, and is several steps closer to its opening polish.
Neil finds himself on a wobbly ladder under the ceiling, gluing LED strings onto the now dry paint under Allison’s strict instruction while Andrew holds onto the leg of the ladder somewhere beneath him.
Dan has whipped Aaron into helping her restock the bar, and Matt is carrying a large box of signs and decorations for Renee to put on the walls. Above them, on a smaller ladder than Neil’s, Nicky is pinning a pride flag over the bar.
“Not much left now,” Matt says when Neil climbs back down the ladder, helped by Allison’s outstretched hand. He’s grinning at Neil over the box in his arms, half-obscuring him from view, and there is a glow coming off of him that warms Neil to the core.
“Just in time, too.” Dan steps up behind Matt and winds an arm around his back. “Last week was a blast, but you could tell we didn’t have it all together yet. Official opening’s next week.”
Neil knows this, as they have told him more than once, but he soaks the conversation up without complaint. In the scant few months he’s known these people, who are more Andrew’s weird crowd than anything else, he’s found a strange solace in the thought that they might be his friends, too.
It is a dizzying thought, still — though he might call the swim team, or at least Robin, Jean and Bryan, his friends, too, this time last year he did not dream of calling anything his own.
Neil helps tape a few more LED strips down the walls before he shuffles out from under Allison’s watchful eye and over to the table by the window and the half-full ashtray. Andrew looks up from his phone and shifts his chair over enough for Neil to slide another one in between the table and the wall. He stashed his backpack under the table when they arrived, and digs it up now. The table is far enough removed from the commotion of the others at the center of the bar, and Andrew is so silent and steady beside him that he feels comfortable enough spreading his textbook out over the table.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Andrew turn towards him, but he tries to keep focused on his assignment. The weird tension of the pool has not truly left the air between them, and Neil found himself almost relieved earlier when Andrew took him here instead of to his apartment. He’s not sure he’s ready for the conversation lingering in Andrew’s searching gaze.
But it’s a chemistry assignment, and one that he can use Andrew’s memory for, so he inches his textbook across the table halfway through the first assignment, and Andrew leans closer with a sigh.
They work in mostly silence, as they mostly do, with Andrew grunting perfectly recalled formulas when he cannot write them down himself, and rechecking the ones Neil does himself with rhythmic taps of his pen. At one point, Neil looks up to find Allison watching them, arms crossed over her chest and mouth quirked in amusement.
No matter how thick the air between them, how bad the itch under his skin whenever he thinks too hard about Andrew and what everything between them even means — nothing at all, or everything at once — the physiological effect that Andrew has on him remains consistent. He relaxes more with every second he spends leaned in close to Andrew, sparks down his spine loosening his back every time their shoulders brush, a warmth settling deep in his chest with every sparse word Andrew speaks.
He cannot describe it. He has never felt like this before. But Andrew has crossed his wires thoroughly, has made him a fool clinging onto hope of something, anything.
Something that is simply not there for Andrew. Whatever he finds in this, whatever it is that keeps him coming back, it is not the same as it is for Neil. He’s made that plenty clear.
Neil is a fever dream from high school that Andrew has apparently not quite been able to let go, but that’s all there is to it. They’re not dating, or any other frivolous term he cannot imagine ever leaving Andrew’s mouth. They are messing around, making out on Andrew’s bed whenever the fancy strikes him, but he knows that the time will come, soon enough, when Andrew will stop bothering to drive back for him.
For now, though, he leans into it while he still can. Brushes his shoulder against Andrew’s intentionally, feels his stomach flutter when Andrew, subtly, presses back. Their ankles hook over one another under the table, and Andrew leans in close enough that Neil can smell his cologne.
The door to the bar opens, letting in a sheath of sunlight that falls sharply across the wooden floorboards, and Neil looks up to watch Kevin walk in.
He freezes, and Andrew looks up, too. Before Kevin’s head can turn to catch sight of them, Andrew has already dropped his pen and shifted away from Neil. The side he was just pressed up against is left starkly cold.
Neil blinks, once, twice, before he meets Kevin’s eyes. Kevin frowns, for only a second, then nods at Neil and moves on towards the group centered around the bar.
Neil cannot even imagine why Kevin would be here — though he, in theory, attends the same college, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen him with any of them, or heard him mention any of their names. He, thus, also cannot fathom why Kevin would be so unfazed to see Neil here, then.
But any questions he might have had fade into the background in light of the gaping hole in his side where Andrew tore himself from him.
He stays stock still, frozen in time. He knows they keep their distance in front of Neil’s family. They always have. Introducing Andrew to Kevin would lead to introducing Andrew to Wymack, and that is entirely too serious for what they have.
He knows it’s what Andrew wants, needs. He’s never had a problem with it.
He knows not to expect more. He just has to wait until the stupid hollow in his chest gets the memo, too.
Andrew is in the stands again. Same place as last time, except now at their own pool instead of half an hour away, he keeps to the top of the rows and watches with his arms crossed over his chest.
Neil spots him as soon as he walks out of the lockers, doesn’t need Jean to point him out this time — though he catches Jean wiggling his brows at him from the bench, anyway.
The meet goes well, overall. Neil only swims twice, and comes first in his individual medley, and second with the team in the relay which he knows Kevin will ream him out for later, even if it wasn’t really his fault. Jack is the weakest swimmer they have, but Coach insists on putting him in their relays to get him used to the pressure — and hope that the others will be able to make up for him more often than not.
Though Neil can admit that he, too, perhaps wasn’t in the right headspace to make up for Jack’s stupid blunders today. His nerves have been shot since yesterday, the metaphorical wound in his side still gaping. Andrew’s presence in the stands, positioned far away from Wymack and Kevin as he is, does nothing but rub the edges raw.
While he’s toweling himself off at the bench, the team still waiting for Jean and Robin to finish their last race, his gaze wanders up the stands once more.
Wymack is here, because he always is, though without Kevin this time, as he had his own swim team to deal with. Neil’s eyes pass right over him and further up the stands to find Andrew’s.
The middle point of their gazes, right where they meet, sparks like a match and leaves Neil scorched to his bones. It does nothing to cauterize the wound, but at least distracts from it.
Andrew tilts his head in the vague direction of the lockers, and disappears between one blink and the next.
Neil chances a look back at the pool, where Robin has completed about half of their 400 yards. Most of the team has their backs to him, also watching as Robin leaves the other teams in the dust. Neil normally tries to stick around for his friends, but he knows that Robin has got this.
When no one is looking his way, he slips away towards the lockers.
Andrew, who really is not supposed to be back here, especially without any of the team around, has always had a thing for getting into places he was not supposed to be in. Like the center of Neil’s life.
He waits, leaning back against the row of metal locker doors. Neil, despite himself, feels his heart kick into overdrive at the sight of him, dark and sharp-cut in his jacket.
A sharp reminder tugs at Neil’s stomach, of the last time Andrew kissed him while he was in his swim gear, but he finds his way into his arm so easily, anyway. It’s always easy with Andrew. A hand wraps around his waist, familiar, Andrew’s eyes find his, a question in them Neil doesn’t have to hear out loud anymore.
Kissing Andrew still feels like home, even through the shredded remains of his chest.
And that’s really the crux of the matter, right? Neil just cannot help himself when it comes to Andrew. His life has been turned fully on its head, his heart has crammed everything it’s been occupied with all his life — the fear, the running, his mother, his father — to the side to make room for Andrew, and he’s settled in.
No matter how often he tries to remind himself that Andrew is not here to stay, that little niche in his heart persists to ache with every moment they spend apart, and flutters to life as soon as Andrew enters the room.
Andrew draws back, his hands still clasped around Neil’s waist, to look at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
Neil shakes himself out of it, forces a smile onto his face. “Nothing. Just tired.”
Andrew’s eyes narrow for a fraction of a second, but Neil holds steady, and Andrew nods, finally. “Alright. Get dressed. Let’s go home.”
Home is Andrew’s apartment. Home is Andrew’s hand resting over his above the gear stick of the car. Home is burying himself under the thick covers of Andrew’s bed and closing his eyes against the dooming reality threatening to sink into his chest.
Halfway through the drive, his phone buzzes with a message from Wymack asking where he is. He ignores it until they get to the basement, when a second message comes through and he turns his phone off instead of reading it.
Andrew makes dinner while Neil fiddles with his sleeve and tries not to think. A simple task he fails miserably until Andrew sets a plate of pasta down in front of him, and he distracts himself by watching Andrew eat more than he picks at his own food.
He turns eighteen tomorrow. If that’s what’s holding Andrew back, he will find out.
He almost dares to hope that it is.
The morning of his birthday dawns bright, and with it the realization that he needs to do something.
Neil did not sleep most of the night, too torn with thoughts of what would happen today. Whether now that he’s of age, Andrew would touch him, would want him. He craves it like air, wants Andrew’s hands on him like a fish wants water, and feels hot shame burn through him at the depravity of it all. It shook him out of his dreams all night, had him tossing and turning, the balls of his hands pressing into his eyes to shut the thoughts out, but they persisted.
He can feel the shape of Andrew on the mattress behind him, the warmth of his body in sleep, where the mattress dips under his weight. He rolls over to look at him, illuminated by the morning light through the window, traces the shape of his face with his eyes, the curve of his pale lashes where they fan over the tops of his cheeks.
He’s beautiful. Neil has always known that. He remembers lying on his back on the warm stone ground, looking up Andrew as he was haloed by the late summer sun — the tips of his hair turned bright, his face shadowed in contrast but so distinct, still — and thinking, with a startling clarity, that he never wants to look away.
Perhaps Andrew has moved on past him. Or will soon, at least. Perhaps to him, Neil is no more than a passing fancy, a boy from high school he’s holding onto, but not for longer than it takes him to find his footing at college, find better, older people to keep his interest. Like he’s already begun to; the image of Andrew leaning into that bartender’s space comes back to Neil with a sharp pang in his chest.
To Andrew, it might be nothing. But to Neil, this is what his life has centered around, what he has become, fundamentally, as a person, the longing and the ache, the hollow in his chest. He knows he can no longer live like this, never knowing where he stands, permanently afloat.
But maybe it was that until eight hours ago, Neil was still underage. Maybe now, Andrew will want him.
There is only one way to find out.
He scoots a few centimeters across the mattress, not quite up against Andrew, but far enough into his space that Andrew automatically begins to blink awake, eyelids batting open over golden irises. They find Neil within seconds, coming into focus, one eyebrow already quirking up before he’s really awake.
Neil smiles, easily, and shuffles closer when Andrew tips his chin in invitation. “Good morning.”
Andrew hums, stretching his arms over his head. His hair is mussed with sleep, pushed up over his face, and his eyes are still half-clouded with sleep.
Neil cannot look away. “Kiss me?”
Andrew’s brow wanders even higher. “Brush your teeth, maybe.”
It’s not a no, so Neil rolls his eyes. “Your breath smells, too.”
Instead of replying, Andrew leans up and kisses him. It’s soft — the kind of slow morning kiss they usually trade, with closed lips and content hums from behind their teeth.
It’s not what Neil needs.
So he presses a little harder than he normally would, his hands coming up to slide around Andrew’s face and into his hair, tangling there and pulling him closer. He deepens the kiss, feels the little Hmm? sound Andrew makes against him before he follows suit, and lets himself sink into it.
It’s so good, it’s so easy. He never knew anything could feel like this, but with Andrew, it’s like he’s on fire. He only ever wants more, the fire consuming everything in its wake.
Andrew lets him, slides their tongues together and places a hand on the small of Neil’s back to pull him closer.
This is still safe territory, not any further than they usually go. Neil lets himself indulge in it — he loves this, after all, feels addicted to the taste of Andrew’s mouth and the hard edges of his body pressing into his own.
It’s still not what he wants today, so he kisses down from the corner of Andrew’s mouth to his jaw, latches his lips against his neck and gets to his knees. Andrew draws back slightly, enough for Neil to look at him. Their eyes meet, and Neil telegraphs his movements very clearly, gives Andrew every chance to stop him as he lifts a leg to swing over both of Andrew’s, as if to straddle him. He pauses above him, though, and asks, “Yes or no?”
Andrew narrows his eyes at him, but says, “Yes.”
Neil sits down on top of Andrew’s thighs and leans forward to resume their kiss. It all feels more intense this way, Andrew shifting beneath him and the full muscle of his thighs propping Neil up so acutely present in his mind. Andrew wraps his hands around Neil’s hips and Neil has to choke back a sound threatening to escape his throat.
He makes his way to Andrew’s neck again, takes stock of the little shiver that rocks through Andrew when he presses his lips to his pulse point, the goosebumps that break out on the back of his neck. He sucks at the skin lightly enough not to leave a mark — though the image, for a moment, makes his blood run several degrees hotter — and bites down lightly when that earns him a small, pleased gasp.
Andrew pulls him back up and presses their lips back together, his tongue back in Neil’s mouth, a desperation that matches Neil’s own now as he pulls Neil impossibly closer by his shirt.
Neil decides to take that as an invitation to shift his hips a fraction higher up Andrew’s lap. His hands curl through Andrew’s hair as if he could push their heads into each other, fuse them into one. His blood pumps frantically, his mind racing too fast for him to catch any thought — closer, better, more, Andrew — and he recognizes the clumsiness of his own hands as he fumbles for him.
His face starts to burn, something that tastes more like embarrassment than the desire that heats the rest of his body, but he grabs the wrist of one of the hands Andrew has settled on his hip and tries to slide it up under his shirt.
He wants it so bad he feels stupid with it, almost crazed for the simple feeling of Andrew’s hand on his bare skin. so much that he feels he must tremble for it. The tips of Andrew’s fingers slip under the hem of the large shirt he always lends Neil to sleep in, press cool against the hot skin there for a moment before Andrew pauses.
“Neil.” He tries to draw back, tries to look at Neil, and a humiliating sound tears out of Neil’s throat. Something like a whine, rasping against his vocal cords with how desperate it is. He surges back against Andrew, presses their lips together as hard as he can, almost solely to avoid Andrew seeing the shameful extent of his need in his face.
Lined up as they are, every centimeter of their upper bodies pressed against each other, he feels the exact moment Andrew goes deathly still. “Neil.”
Neil’s own hand tightens around Andrew’s wrist, so frantic to not let it stop this time, not another time, that his fingernails almost prick Andrew’s skin in his attempt to hold his hand where it is, still resting against Neil’s side.
But Andrew has always been stronger than him, and breaks his hold easily, withdrawing his hand.
“Stop.”
Neil lets go of him immediately, draws back and lifts his hips away from Andrew’s lap, but he cannot look at him. His eyes fix on the clock on the far wall of the room, ticking steadily forward, and he turns his face towards it like it would hide the burning red of his face.
“What’s wrong with you?” Andrew asks, his voice cold.
It cuts something loose in Neil’s chest — he feels almost in free fall, his heart plummeting to the bottom of his stomach. He presses his lips together in fear that if he doesn’t, all his shame will spill out like vomit across the sheets.
“Neil.” Andrew reaches up to tug at the collar of his shirt. “Look at me.”
Neil can’t. He keeps staring at the clock, its hypnotizing clicking, until Andrew grabs him by the chin and wrenches his head around towards him.
His brow furrows as he takes in what must be on plain display in Neil’s features. The need, the desire, the desperation. The shame that boils up hot in his gut.
“Why are you —” so needy, so shameless, so desperate — “in such a hurry today?”
“I thought —” stumbles out of his mouth before he can stop himself, but he clenches his teeth shut before any more words can make their way out. Andrew doesn’t want to know any of this. He doesn’t need to know what a needy creature he has invited into his bed, what a hopeless case Neil is.
“What did you think?” There is no emotion in Andrew’s voice — there usually is not, but its toneless quality cuts sharper today. He tries to turn away again, protect himself from that golden gaze, but Andrew’s fingers tighten around his chin. “What. Did. You. Think.”
“It’s my birthday,” Neil presses out from between his teeth.
Something like recognition flickers in Andrew’s eyes, now, but for once Neil cannot read what it means.
“Yes,” Andrew says slowly. “I’m aware. What does this have to do with you accosting me before breakfast.”
The shame boils over. It spills hard across every one of Neil’s internal organs, burns them like acid, sets every nerve end alight until he burns all over. Words spill from his mouth like water, no stopping them if he wanted to. “I thought that you— I mean, I thought you might not have wanted to before because I was underage and I just thought— now that I’m eighteen, I thought —”
Andrew’s unmoving facade breaks for merely a second, but long enough for Neil to see what’s behind it. Blank-faced shock and something rank, like pure disgust.
Whatever hope was left growing in Neil’s desolate chest breaks. The shards dig into his acid-burned insides.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice raw like he spent the last hour screaming. He climbs off of Andrew’s lap, stands by the side of the bed on his wobbly legs.
Andrew pulls himself together, visibly slotting the mask back into place. “Neil,” he says, voice steady as usual, but Neil knows he cannot hear it. He cannot listen to Andrew tell him that he does not want him, that this is not going anywhere further than this and that they should probably stop while they’re ahead.
He cannot hear those words in Andrew’s emotionless voice and walk out of here. His dignity is already in shambles, as is his heart.
So he forces himself to smile, feels its awkward shape on his face, and says, “No, it's alright. I should go.”
There are things of his scattered all across Andrew’s room, the clothes he wore last night and clothes he brought weeks, months ago and never took back with him. A few notebooks for school on the table, a bottle of iron supplements that only he takes on the kitchen counter, his favorite mug in the sink. Almost half his existence has spilled into this tiny apartment, but he cannot bring himself to stay any longer, and so he leaves it all behind. He slips into his sneakers by the door and picks up his gym bag from the chair.
He’s slipped out the door in sweatpants and Andrew’s shirt before Andrew can muster up anything else to say, and his eyes burn as hard as his face on the way up.
The old lady sits on the porch when he rounds the house, a cigarette smoking between her fingers. She looks him up and down, tilting her head. He tries to turn away so she won’t see his shame, but she takes one look at the goosebumps creeping up his bare arms in the cold of the morning and stubs out her cigarette.
“You need a ride, kid?”
She drops him off right in front of the house. She didn’t say anything much the whole drive, apart from complaining about the shitty engine of her dinky little car, and refused when he offered her money for the trouble.
“Your little friend already pays me more than the place is worth,” she says, and he almost thinks he sees her eyes light up a bit when he winces at the mention of Andrew.
Neil thanks her as politely as he can around the painful blockage in his throat, and climbs out of the car. There is movement in the kitchen window, but he simply shoulders his bag, waves her goodbye, and turns to face his fate.
Wymack is waiting for him in the hallway, still half in the door to the kitchen, his brow furrowed in concern and his arms crossed over his chest. “Good morning.”
“Morning.” Neil drops his bag by the door and makes his way past Wymack into the kitchen, where Kevin looks up from his eggs.
The sight of him, and especially the way his eyes narrow when they catch on Neil, is almost enough to make him turn around and escape up the stairs into his room, but his stomach has been growling, rather inappropriately given his emotional state, since he sat down in the car, so he makes himself walk over to the counter and assemble a bowl of cereal.
Kevin breaks the glass as soon as Neil turns back around. “Where were you last night?”
Neil shrugs, too numb to reply, but it only stokes Kevin’s anger.
“You could have texted, at least. Dad was so worried.”
“Shut it, Kev.” Wymack sounds tired, and falls heavily back into his own chair. “It’s his birthday.”
Kevin grumbles and shoves enough eggs into his mouth that he couldn’t speak if he wanted to.
Neil sits across from Wymack with his cereal and keeps his eyes fixed on the table as he eats, trying to keep his heart from shutting down entirely. He’s fine.
“So,” Wymack says a few minutes into the silence, when Neil has managed to barely scrape the top of his bowl. “Any chance you’re gonna tell me where you did go last night, then?”
Neil spoons a heap of cereal into his mouth, finally, and chews very, very slowly. When Wymack simply continues staring at him, he shrugs and shovels another spoonful into his mouth before he’s swallowed the first one.
“Dad asked you a question,” Kevin chimes in, no less harshly than before.
Neil swallows, twice to get it all down, and shrugs again. He says, through his thick throat, “Out,” and looks away.
Kevin scoffs and throws his hands into the air, but Wymack simply nods. With the corners of his mouth turned down, he says, “Alright. Let me know if you need anything.”
Neil nods and stares at his cereal, stirring until the flakes start to dissolve into the milk. He’s fine. He’s going to eat, and then he’s going to go to his room and bury himself under the covers of his bed and not emerge until he has to go to school in the morning.
Except when he finishes his bowl and gets up to wash it, Wymack gets up, too. He leaves the kitchen, and returns right as Neil has finished washing the residue of milk and cereal out of the bottom of the bowl and placed it on the drying rack to slide a package wrapped in bright orange paper across the counter.
“Happy birthday,” he says, gruffly.
Neil picks the package up carefully, feeling the smooth wrapping paper between his fingers. Wymack got him a gift last year, as well, but the idea still shocks him to his core. Almost enough to make him forget how the day began.
He unwraps the paper and a soft bundle of fabric falls into his hands. A coat, made of sturdy blue cotton and lined with dark wool, much more luxurious than any of the flimsy jackets his mother would dig out of retail bins for him. Much less holey than the single one he brought when he moved in and hasn’t replaced since.
“So you stop letting yourself freeze to death after practice,” Wymack says. The words ring so familiar in Neil’s head that his heart gives a few painful thumps. He presses the coat against his chest to still it.
“Thank you. I—” He swallows. “Thank you.”
“Try it on.”
Neil pulls the coat on, feels its warmth seep into his bones. It’s even softer than it looked, and fits like a glove.
Wymack gives him a once-over, then nods, satisfied. “Good. You like it?”
Neil nods, smoothing his palm down the front panel of the coat. It’s a good color, he thinks. At least, it’s the thought he forces to stick to the front of his mind, rather than the other, more pervasive one: Andrew would like it.
Wymack nods again, and Neil understands he’s been released.
He leaves the kitchen to make his way upstairs. He considers hanging the coat up in the hallway, but takes it with him instead to fold and put on his desk where he can look at it from where he curls up on his bed.
He’s not used to gifts, still, even though it’s been almost two years since his mother died. The thought gives him enough pause, enough to smooth his mind over that he manages to blot out the events of the morning for the moment, and roll himself up to sleep.
He gets up. He makes himself look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror while he brushes his teeth. He packs his school bag, his gym bag. He eats toast with peanut butter and banana slices for breakfast that tastes like nothing. He watches through the kitchen window as Kevin takes off for campus while he waits for Wymack to finish his coffee.
Wymack drives, drops Neil off at the front of the school with a pat on the back before he leaves to hunt for a parking spot. Neil buttons up his new coat and makes his way inside.
After school, he goes to practice. He changes, he says hi to Robin and Jean, he swims. He barely remembers what Coach Hernandez says to him after he gets out of the water.
There’s a text from Andrew on his phone that he can’t make himself read. He deletes it while he walks with Robin and Bryan to the bus stop.
It takes almost a full hour to get to campus by bus.
Neil, who has always had the luxury of being driven back and forth, did not consider this, or the fact that it takes almost another thirty minutes to walk from the bus stop to the Foxhole bar.
By the time he makes it to the bar, the opening party is already in full swing, probably has been for hours, and there are drunk people already milling about the small parking lot outside with lit cigarettes and other substances Neil does not look too closely at. Just as he steadfastly ignores the sleek black car parked right by the door.
Inside, the music is pumping loud through speakers he remembers helping Matt install along the walls, and none of his friends are working the bar tonight — they are the ones being celebrated, so Neil watches them float among the crowd with sparkly drinks in their hands and tablets of shots they’ve secured for the people around them while hired strangers staff the bar. Neil tries not to be relieved that Roland isn’t among them.
He runs into Dan only a few steps onto the floor. She grins wildly, her teeth illuminated pink and blue by the light around them, and throws both of her arms around his neck to squeeze him hard against her chest.
“Welcome, welcome, Neil”, she yells into his ear, tugging him towards the bar. “You want a drink?”
“Nothing alcoholic,” he yells back, and she nods and flags down a soda for him.
Once it’s been pressed into his hands, shockingly cool against his already overheated palms, she ruffles his hair and smacks a big kiss against the side of his head before sending him off to find Matt.
He spots him at the very end of the room, wedged into one of the plush sofas with Renee and a couple other guys Neil doesn’t recognize. He approaches anyway, emboldened by the thrall of the music and the crowd. Matt smiles just as widely as his girlfriend did when he spots him, and shoves one of the strangers off the couch and into one of the armchairs to make room for Neil to sit next to him.
“How are you doing, buddy?” he asks, not quite having to yell over the music back here. “Is Andrew also here? I haven’t seen him.”
Neil does his best to hide his wince. It’s been three days, and he’s gotten better at it, getting his practice in every time one of his friends asked if he was going to be picked up from the pool. He tries to shrug the question off, and looks at Renee instead — which turns out to be a mistake.
Neil has never quite known how to feel about Renee. She is friends with the others, and appears to be the closest to Andrew out of all of them, but nothing about her adds up. There is something in her gaze that puts him off.
Tonight, she smiles at him so sweetly that the bottom of his stomach drops out.
He chugs the rest of his soda in one go. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom.”
The crowd lightens up the closer to the bathrooms that he gets. There’s only one door, half-ajar, leading into a washroom with sinks and stalls that’s lit by soft neon strips along the walls. Neil slips into one of the stalls, because he does have to pee a bit, and listens to the rush of muted voices and clicking heels outside.
When he’s done, he stares at the mirror while he washes his hands. His big, pale face, dotted all over by freckles, huge blue eyes that he’s never been able to escape, the limp red curls that fall around his face.
It’s a bad kind of night to stare at his father’s face in the mirror, has been a bad kind of week to torture himself like this, but he makes himself look, anyway.
He dries his hands and is halfway to the door when he’s stopped in his tracks by a voice outside.
“—know.” He catches the tail end of Allison’s sentence, right outside the bathroom. He pushes the door open a bit further, and spots her standing in the niche of a hallway that sections the bathroom off from the main area of the bar.
“Jesus,” a second voice, distinctly Nicky’s, though he’s just out of Neil’s view, replies. “When’d he tell you?”
“Just a few days ago.” Nicky makes a sound in response and Allison nods, the movement almost throwing her off balance. “I know. I told him that’s crazy. None of us knew!”
Neil takes a step out the door and considers saying hi. Getting involved in conversation with Nicky and Allison is a dangerous affair — they are both the type to snare you in and not let you go once they’ve got you, and with their combined efforts and alcohol in the mix, Neil knows he will not see the outside of this hallway for at least an hour if he makes them aware of his presence. And though he’s not itching to return to the table with Renee, he would like to go back to Matt or Dan.
He’s just made up his mind to try and sneak past them as inconspicuously as possible when Nicky says, “So, wait, how old is he?”
“Apparently he just turned eighteen, like, last week!”
His insides go cold. They’re not talking about the usual gossip Allison loves to pick up and relay whenever prompted or not. They’re talking about him.
“Jesus Christ.” He can see Nicky now, watches as he falls dramatically back against the wall at his side. “A high schooler? Andrew never told me.”
“Right? I’ve offered him alcohol, Nicky. I feel like I’ve been corrupting the youth.”
Neil pushes back the sudden nausea climbing up his throat. Andrew must have told them. He almost cannot imagine in what scenario Andrew would tell Allison anything about Neil before Nicky, but he must have let something about Neil’s outrageous attempt at seduction slip, or else they wouldn’t be talking about it.
“What now?” Nicky asks. “You think he’s here tonight?”
Neil cannot listen to this. He considers turning back into the bathroom to empty out whatever is in his stomach, but instead makes a break for it, slipping past Nicky and Allison before they can recognize him and making his way through the crowd towards the door.
Outside, cool air floods his lungs, hitting his face with just a tinge of familiar nicotine that he inhales like a man starved. He pants, fighting the sick feeling in his gut, and presses his hands into his eyes, blotting out the world for a moment to collect himself. When colors start to dance across his eyelids, he blinks them open and starts walking.
He has no idea where he’s going, if he’s walking in the right direction back to the bus stop, but he just keeps moving, keeps his legs in motion like if he just never stops, none of it will ever catch up to him.
He rounds the bar and walks straight into a cloud of cigarette smoke in the alley beside it.
Andrew is leaning against the brick wall, one leg propped up against it, a lit cigarette between the fingers of the hand resting on his knee. His eyes widen for a brief moment when he looks up at Neil, before he schools his face back into its perfect mask, raises an eyebrow and says, “Jeez. Look what the cat dragged in.”
“There’s no cat,” Neil says before he can stop himself. He bites his tongue. “What are you doing here?”
“At my bar?”
“It’s not your bar. Are you even really friends with these people?”
Andrew takes a long drag of his cigarette instead of replying. “Having a little freak out moment all by yourself, then?”
Hot anger tears through Neil so suddenly it almost makes him stumble. It consumes all of the yearning, all of the terrible loneliness and the gut wrenching sadness he’s been nursing over the past week in an instant and makes them cinders to fuel its flame. “Fuck you.”
Andrew scoffs, clicking his tongue, and the casual mockery of the word choice makes Neil so desperately sick he thinks he’s going to vomit directly onto Andrew’s shoes.
Instead, he pulls himself back up to his full height, intending to use every single centimeter he has on Andrew despite the massive boots he wears. “I’m leaving, anyway.”
Andrew pushes himself off the wall. He pushes a hand into his pocket and Neil hears the jangle of his keys. “I’ll drive you home.”
Neil, already half turned away, spins back around. “No you won’t.”
Andrew raises a brow, and his unaffected manner only stokes Neil’s anger higher. “What’s your damage?”
Neil wants to get out of here. “Nothing,” he snaps. “Leave me alone.”
Finally, Andrew frowns. The first show of any real emotion on his face. Under any other circumstance, Neil would rejoice in getting to see Andrew without the mask, but tonight it only feels like more salt in the wound.
“Neil —” Andrew starts, but is interrupted when the door next to them opens. It must be some kind of staff door into the bar, because a second later, Roland steps out through it.
Neil hates that he recognizes him, hates the bile that immediately splashes up into his mouth when Roland soundly ignores him, and instead directs his blinding white smile at Andrew.
“Hey Drew, I was just wondering —”
Neil barely hears the rest of the sentence. His vision swims, and he knows that if he isn’t moving right now he is really going to be sick all over the floor right where he stands. His heart beats so hard in his throat he’s sure it must be about to break through the cartilage and flee him, and he tears himself away from the alley and nearly sprints the other way.
He almost thinks he hears Andrew calling out his name from somewhere behind him, but he cannot hear him over the beat of his pulse in his ears.
Drew, plays on repeat in his mind as he stumbles down the street. Drew?
He doesn’t go to school. When Wymack knocks on his door Thursday morning, he barely remembers how he got home, or if he slept at all. He lies and stares at the wall and doesn’t reply.
After the second time he knocks to no response, the door creaks open just far enough for Wymack to stick his head through. “Neil?”
Neil hums. Wymack doesn’t usually come into his room, but it’s more out of an inherent respect he holds for Neil’s space than an actual boundary Neil has established.
“Are you feeling alright?”
“No.” It’s not even a lie, considering the nausea still lodged firmly against his trachea.
Soft footsteps pad over the rug towards his bed, but he can’t make himself turn around to look at Wymack where he stands over his bed. “No school today?”
Neil shakes his head. He doesn’t trust his voice.
“Alright.” Wymack’s voice softens to a degree that is almost unrecognizable. “I’ll let your coach know. You got my number if you need anything.”
Neil does not call. He gets out of bed around noon to assemble a sad excuse for lunch consisting of half a bagel he can’t even muster up the energy to put cream cheese on, four grapes, and three slices of cheese he eats raw out of the container, all wolfed down at the kitchen counter before he crawls back into bed.
He wakes from his dim half-sleep once more when the door clicks open and shut downstairs, and he realizes it must be afternoon. At least there’s no lacrosse practice on Thursdays, so it can’t be that late.
He drags himself out of bed, still in his pyjamas — which, he realizes with a start, consist of sweatpants that hike too high above his ankles and a shirt that is much too lose around his shoulders, and thus definitely belonged to Andrew originally — and shuffles downstairs for the bathroom.
Wymack catches him on his way back, standing in the kitchen with a pot of coffee in one hand and two mugs in the other. He gestures for the table, and Neil sits.
Wymack sits down across from him with a sigh, and pours a good helping of coffee into both mugs — not adding anything to either — before sliding one over the table to Neil. “Feeling any better?”
Neil cups his hands around the cup if only to soak up its warmth. The scent bears him a certain comfort, now, after living with Wymack for so long, but he’s never quite been able to endear himself to the taste. Too ingrained are the memories of the cheap sludge his mother would buy at gas stations to stay awake behind the wheel, the smell of it stale on her breath for hours after. He sips at it to delay answering, and burns his tongue.
He knows he cannot avoid the conversation endlessly, though, not when Wymack has got him sitting down with him like this, so he sets the mug back down and says, “Yeah. A bit.”
Wymack narrows his eyes at him. “You sure? You still look like someone pissed in that mug.”
“Might as well have.” Neil allows himself a small smile, though it feels like a grimace.
Wymack scoffs, but does not let the conversation devolve into their usual squabble over Neil’s ruined taste buds. “You wanna tell me what happened?”
Neil shrugs. He could lie — he knows he could, he has done so before and will do so again. Wymack almost never calls him out on it anymore, though Neil doesn’t actually think he believes half of what comes out of his mouth. He could say he’s sick, running a fever or a common cold, and go back to bed, and Wymack would let him, probably.
Or not. Some days, or whenever he thinks something is especially important, he forgets his self-imposed boundaries around whatever cracks he perceives in Neil’s facade, and presses until it cracks.
Judging by the look in his eyes, Neil suspects today it might be the latter.
“I had a fight,” he makes himself say, though his tongue feels thick in his mouth with the wrongness of the term — it sounds so overly dramatic and yet like such an understatement at the same time. Through the fog in his brain, though, he cannot come up with anything better, so he sticks with it, and adds, “With a friend.”
“With a friend?” There is something terribly knowing in Wymack’s eyes, and Neil feels so caught out he doubles down on instinct.
“Yes. With a friend.”
Wymack hums. “So, are we talking about Jack? Or Andrew Minyard?”
Neil feels in free fall for the nth time this week, and turns his gaze away. He perfected the art of lying for so long, from such a young age. Everything depended on it for so long that it feels like a physical loss that he now seems to no longer be able to, that someone should catch him in it so easily. That life after his mother has taken another thing from him so easily. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew.” Wymack knows not to give him the disgrace of being gentle about it. “You were not as subtle as you think you were. Jack’s mother was very surprised when I asked her about you.”
Neil curses under his breath. He looks at Wymack, his gruff face, the broad statue that frightened him once. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Wymack sighs. “Look, kid. I know you’ve had it rough. I know your relationship with your mother was … different. And I know you wanted emancipation back then, and were upset when you ended up with me instead.” He looks at Neil, bent at his kitchen table like a sad worm, and a gruff smile pulls at his lips for a moment. “Would I have liked it if you felt comfortable enough to tell me what you were doing? Sure. But at the end of the day I’m not your dad, and I didn’t think you were in any imminent danger. Andrew’s a good kid, even if he likes to pretend he’s not. You weren’t falling behind in school and he drove you home every night. Beyond making sure you were safe, I didn’t think it was any of my business unless you decided to tell me about it.”
Neil looks out the window, at the strip of the street he can see from here. A few yards down from where Andrew would drop him off every night, exactly three doors down the street so Wymack wouldn’t see them. All for nothing, because he knew all along. The truth sits lodged high in his throat.
“I would have told you,” he says, voice raw, “if it had been anything serious. We were just messing around.”
Wymack nods, slowly, still frowning. “Right. I suppose it still isn’t any of my business, but I’ve had a few flings in my lifetime — look at Kevin — and I’ve not ever moped around in bed for a day after a fight with them. Maybe that just means you’re more in touch with your emotions than I’ve ever been, what would I know, but …”
It earns him an actual snort, a sound Neil did not even know he could still produce. “Sure. Me.”
Wymack smiles a bit, but continues, “I don’t know, kiddo. You’re eighteen now, and I’m still not your dad, and I was frankly always glad to not have to have this conversation with Kevin.” He sighs, and chugs the rest of his coffee in one. “I cannot tell you what to do, but I can let you know that whatever happens, you will always have a place to come back to, right here. No matter what happens, Kevin and I are not letting you go again. Tell me when you need anything, and I will be there. I can promise you that much.”
Neil can tell how much it costs Wymack, never one for big speeches even for his team. He tries to show his gratitude by pushing his cooling mug of coffee across the table for Wymack to catch and finish. “Thanks, coach.”
“Not your coach,” Wymack grumbles, but there’s a twinkle in his eyes now.
“Sure.” Something has loosened in Neil’s chest, at least a bit, and he smiles as best as he can. “Am I dismissed?”
Wymack waves him off. “Sure. Go do what you need to.”
Neil returns to his room, but does not crawl back under the covers. Instead, he sits at his desk and pulls out his homework.
When he gets out of practice the next day, a tiny blue hatchback is parked in the spot right by the entrance.
Neil sighs, but bids goodbye to his friends — who seem only marginally confused at the change in vehicle — at the door, and makes his way over.
“So, we’re going to practice again, huh,” Kevin says before even Neil can try to get a greeting in.
Neil drops any pretense in return, too, and rolls his eyes. “It was one day. I wasn’t feeling well.”
Kevin clicks his tongue, but turns the key and peels out of the parking lot in silence. Only when they stop at the light at the end of the road does he speak again. “Did it have something to do with Andrew?”
And if Neil had not had that conversation with Wymack yesterday, this would have sent him spiraling all over again. As it is, he only lets his head drop back against the headrest with a groan. “You knew, too?”
Kevin cuts him a look, which nearly constitutes a staring match for Kevin Day, who normally keeps his eyes on the road almost anxiously while driving. “Of course I knew. How wouldn’t I know? All our friends know.”
“Friends?”
“Yes? Matt, Dan, Allison, the like?”
“They are your friends?”
“What, you didn’t know?” Kevin sounds almost as incredulous as him. “Did you think I didn’t have any friends?”
Neil blinks, and the silence stretches for a bit too long. Kevin makes an annoyed sound. “I’ll have you know that I do in fact have friends. Plenty. More than you. And I’ve known them longer.” He adds the last part very pettily.
“Sure,” Neil gives back, crossing his arms. “So. You’ve known for a while.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Of course.”
Kevin huffs. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret.”
Silence stretches between them for another few moments before Kevin returns to his original question: “So, did it have something to do with him? You can tell me. Aaron would let me punch him.”
Neil raises his brows and looks over at Kevin. There is something almost righteously angry on his face, even though his eyes are still fixed on the road. “What?”
“Yeah. I mean, they both get a little defensive, but Aaron and I are taking philosophy together, so I think —”
“You. You would fight Andrew Minyard. For me.”
Kevin frowns. “Of course I would. You’re basically my little brother, right?”
And that sets Neil spiraling in an entirely different direction.
He knew Kevin before the trial, of course, just as he knew Wymack. When the judge decided it would be best for him to remain under the supervision of an adult and more or less ordered Wymack to take him in, he was not expecting much at all, apart from having to find his way around a new house with new rules. He’d had a mother before, and a father in name, but never something that he would call a real family, like the ones he saw on TV.
He was not expecting any of this. Whatever it is.
He chews on the inside of his cheek as he stares out the window, at the colorful dots of houses they pass by. “It wasn’t him,” he says eventually. “I mean, it did have something to do with him, but. Not his fault. I did something.”
He doesn’t particularly feel like telling Kevin, who has just declared himself his brother, about his failed attempt at seducing Andrew on his birthday, and hopes he doesn’t press.
Kevin hums. “Did that something include not telling him how old you are?”
Neil startles. “What? No. Andrew still went to school with me last year. He knows how old I am.” He blinks a couple more times. “Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. I mentioned it was your birthday to Allison and she was shocked when I told her how old you were turning. Said she had no idea you were still in high school, and that she didn’t think any of the others did. Then suddenly you were moping around like someone pissed in your coffee—” Neil holds back a smile at the unconscious copy of Wymack, “—so I just thought it might be connected.”
“Wait, wait.” Neil feels like his synapses are firing at rapid speeds and still unable to catch up. “You told them how old I am?”
“Yes?” Kevin frowns. “Should I not have?”
A hysterical laugh bubbles out of Neil’s throat before he can stop it. Kevin told the others how old he is. Of course. He saw Kevin at the bar days before — he could have thought of this himself. Andrew didn’t tell anyone what happened. Of course not.
“No, well, it’s alright. They would have found out eventually. I didn’t even really consider that they wouldn’t know.”
Kevin blinks a few times in quick succession. “Okay …” His eyes keep flicking back and forth between Neil and the road in what Neil thinks might be slight concern for his sanity. “Glad we cleared that up.”
Neil hums, thoughts still flicking back and forth between the events at the bar, and the conversation he overheard. There is still something gnarly, and darkly Andrew-shaped lurking at the back of his mind, thoughts he still cannot touch without burning himself again or being sick all over Kevin’s car, but between this conversation and yesterday’s, something has definitely loosened in his chest.
It isn’t until they pull up to the house that he thinks to ask, “Why were you hanging out with Allison, anyway?”
This time, the look Kevin gives him is definitely pitying. “Neil,” he says, putting the car into park. “Allison and I have been dating since the summer.”
Neil stands at the edge of the pool, toes dipped in the water lapping over the floor, breathing in the chlorine. His heart pounds in rhythm with the buzz of anticipation that hangs in the air moments before the buzzer sounds, and his mind narrows to the lane ahead of him. Nothing else matters in the moment that the announcer’s voice finally gives way to the starting buzzer, and his body jumps on instinct, in perfect synchrony with the others around him.
In here, Andrew is far away. Thoughts drift from him as his mind suspends, his muscles strain, his body becomes the one thing he’s been honing it into for years. The world falls away and his sole focus becomes the water, the well-practiced movement of his limbs, the speed with which he cuts through his lane.
Despite it all, he knows it’s lacking. The wound in his side, growing and festering for days and days, spreading over the rest of his torso like a cancer, weighs him down.
He comes in second, which would be upsetting any other day, but he can barely focus on it. His head surfaces to the cheers of the other team, but Robin is there with a towel they throw over his head, and the rest of the team gathers around him. Jean pats his back, Bryan rattles off the other team’s stats in an attempt to make him feel better about his chances, but Neil’s eyes are on the stands, and his heart in his throat.
There, among the many heads of the onlookers, is Andrew. In his usual spot at the top of the stands, in his usual dark leather jacket despite the temperature of the pool, his eyes always on Neil.
Breath gets stuck in Neil’s throat, lodged behind the blockage that has been there for almost a week. He brushes off the towel and yanks off his cap, wipes his wet hair out of his face, but does not take his eyes off of Andrew. Andrew, stoic bitch that he is, looks back, unmoving.
“Neil.” Robin tugs at his wrist. Something in their face tells him they know, but they only smile when he looks back. “Come on. Coach is waiting.”
He follows them to the bench, where Coach Hernandez gives him a tight nod over the edge of his clipboard — but it was his only event today, and no one stops him when he just keeps walking, straight past the bench and into the lockers. He showers methodically, washes the chlorine stuck to his skin down the drain, and dresses. Not in his team tracksuit, but his sweater and jeans that he fishes from the bottom of his bag.
When he walks back out into the pool, Andrew is still in the same spot, and his eyes find him immediately.
Neil doesn’t stop. He walks back past the team — and catches out of the corner of his eye as Bryan elbows Jean in the side, who in turn elbows Robin in the shoulder — and into the stands. He sees Wymack and Kevin, both obviously pretending not to notice him, but no one else really pays attention to him, too transfixed by the events still happening in the pool. He just climbs the steps to the top, pushes his way past the stragglers along the banisters, until there are three people between him and Andrew, then two, and then he is right in front of him.
Andrew does not look away for a second. His eyes, strangely, look darker in the fluorescent light of the pool.
“Hi,” Neil says. Andrew tilts his head.
“Hi.”
Neil reaches out, then, before his brain catches up with him. A single hand between them, almost on instinct. He pauses before he touches Andrew, remembering himself, but Andrew does not pull away. He just keeps looking at him, eyes two perfect dots of cool brown, until Neil’s hand settles for curling into the sleeve of his jacket.
Andrew lets the arm give, not tensing against Neil’s grip, and a breath shudders through Neil’s lungs. He has always been weak when it comes to Andrew, never truly stood a chance, so when Andrew tips his head towards the exit and says, “Let’s go,” Neil knows it is a question, but he goes without comment, anyway.
His eyes jump down the stands, for a moment, and find Wymack turning back in his seat to look at them. Neil raises his hand, curling his fingers in an imitation of a wave, and Wymack nods. When Neil turns back, Andrew is looking at him, eyes still hard and dark and unreadable. Neil’s hand curls deeper into the leather of his sleeve, as if he could hold onto him harder, and when Andrew turns to go, Neil goes with the tug of his arm.
He would follow him to the end of the earth, after all.
Andrew’s landlady is smoking on the porch again when they make it to the house, and one of her stark eyebrows moves up her forehead as she watches Neil climb out of the passenger seat.
“If you scare him off again I’m gonna start charging you gas money,” she calls over, even as Andrew ignores her.
Down in the basement, things look — almost exactly like Neil left them last week, nearly untouched. His notebooks are still on the table, his sweater still hangs over the back of a chair, even the clothes he wore before bed that day that he abandoned are still folded sloppily on top of Andrew’s dresser.
Like he never left at all, like nothing happened and Andrew was expecting him to come back the entire time. It’s almost worse than if Andrew had packed his existence up and away.
Neil makes himself draw a chair out from under the table — decidedly not the one that has his sweater hanging from it — instead of sitting on the bed. Andrew lets him, but does sit on the edge of the mattress himself.
Silence stretches between them like gum, while Neil picks at a thread coming out of the seam of his jeans and Andrew appears completely at ease, until Neil, at last fed up with the words stewing inside of his chest, says, “So.”
“So,” Andrew mocks, entirely flat.
Neil bites the inside of his cheek. He’s not here to butt heads. He’s tired, and hurting, and realizing at once that this limbo has been going on for entirely too long. He needs to know where they stand so he can settle into either option; so that he can leave this all behind him once and for all, or fall back into Andrew after all.
But he needs to know so he can make the decision. “Is this over, then?”
Andrew narrows his eyes at him. “Would I bring you here if it was?”
Neil cannot look at his face, even if it’s the only thing he wants to do. It’s too mesmerizing, too tempting for him to fall back under, and he cannot say what he needs to say unless he keeps his head clear.
“I do not know why you do most things. You’ve never told me much.”
His gaze flicks back to Andrew only long enough to take in his reaction, the brief furrow of his brow before he smooths it out again. “I wasn’t aware that anything needed clarifying.”
“Clearly it did.”
“Clearly.”
Neil lets the words hang in the air. The ball is in Andrew’s court now.
Andrew plays it. “If you wanted to sleep with me you could have just said so.”
It hits home. Neil keeps his eyes fixed on the little fox magnet stuck to the front of Andrew’s fridge. He remembers putting it there, months ago, after he got it at a stall at one of the campus info markets he made Andrew go to.
“I didn’t think you wanted to.”
That gets him a bigger reaction, at least. Andrew’s face deepens into an actual frown. “What do you mean?”
“You always stopped. Or stopped me. Whenever things started progressing in that direction, it was always you who put an end to it. Which I respect, you can stop at any point you like, but I did take that to mean that you didn’t want— to. Didn’t want to.” Didn’t want me, he stops himself from saying, but he thinks Andrew heard it anyway.
His expression shutters, the frown vanishing. But he says, “I stopped because I assumed you weren’t ready.”
“I thought I had made it fairly obvious that I was.” Old, familiar shame washes over him as he recalls all the time they got so close. The pool. All the times on Andrew’s bed that he longed to press their bodies together. Last week.
“You act like a deer in headlights whenever I touch you beneath the neckline.” Andrew is looking directly at him now, and Neil can no longer look away from those eyes. Where they were cool and hard at the pool, the soft light of the basement lightens them back to their usual honey tone, but they are all the more intense for it. “You startle whenever I put a hand on you. You never talk about it, never expressed any type of interest in sex. I will not apologize for reading the signs you gave me.”
Heat rushes to Neil’s face. He recalls his own startled gasps when Andrew’s hand slid against him very well — not out of shock, but out of hot, shameless desire. “Well, you read them wrong.” He’s aware of how petty he sounds, so he adds, “And I do not need you to treat me like a child.”
Andrew huffs a breath, and it is such a distinctly angry sound that it does startle Neil. “I am not treating you like a child by respecting the fact that you might not be ready.” Then he blinks, and — broken open as Andrew is, or allows himself to be, for the moment — Neil watches as something almost visibly clicks in his eyes, and his frown only deepens. “And I was not waiting for the day you turned eighteen so I could legally fuck you. You will not paint me as some sort of cradle robber just because you have a complex.”
Neil’s heart misses several beats. “That’s not what I —”
“No? Then what did you mean to imply when you thought I would just roll you over the morning of your birthday?”
Neil tears his gaze away, can only look down at the loose thread on the inside of his knee, where he winds it around and around his finger. “I thought —” But the same is finally too much, bubbling up in his throat and cutting off his voice. “Nothing. Nevermind.”
Andrew does not even give him the grace of a response. When Neil finally looks up again, he finds Andrew simply staring back at him, arms crossed over his chest. Waiting.
“I did think it bothered you,” he admits. “But not— I didn’t think you were weird for it. I just thought that you’d want someone older, and that if I was at least of age, I’d finally be able to compete.”
“Compete with who?”
Neil focuses back on the thread, disintegrating it between his forefinger and thumb. He shrugs. “Anyone. I assume you were meeting all kinds of people at college.”
A vein jumps over Andrew’s left brow, and Neil would jump to catalog all the new expressions Andrew is granting him access to tonight if he were not currently attempting to shrivel up into his skin and never be seen again. “So what. You thought I was going around fucking anything that looked my way?”
Neil shrugs again. Laid out bare like this, the truth looks a lot uglier than it felt at the time. “Nicky pointed out that bartender. He said you’d go to see him all the time at the start of the year.”
Andrew frowns, but Neil watches as he pieces it together and understanding settles. His expression vanishes into its usual mask again. “Roland. You were jealous of Roland.”
Neil looks at the little fox magnet again. “He called you Drew.”
Andrew snorts. It sounds amused enough for Neil to glance back at him. “Roland oversteps more than is good for him, and cannot recognize a threat if it punched him in the face. He is good at making drinks and not much else. I have never slept with him.” He waits, chin tilted up, until Neil turns all the way towards him, and lets their eyes meet again. The weight of his gaze is so intense Neil feels he might wither under it entirely. “I have not slept with anyone since the summer. Nor did I intend to.”
Neil snaps the thread off, finally. “Why not? You could have.”
Andrew quirks an eyebrow, an expression so entirely his that it’s almost calming. “Right. Because if the mere idea that I could be sleeping with other people had you torn up like this, then I’m sure the knowledge that I did would have you feeling just peachy.”
“But why would what I felt about it have stopped you?”
A muscle ticks in Andrew’s jaw, and, through clenched teeth, he says, “Has it, at any point, occurred to you that I might not want to sleep with anyone else?”
Neil shakes his head. “But why? If not with me then you —”
“Neil. Are you in need of a hearing aid?” Andrew stares at him, lips pressed into a flat line, shoulders tense where he’s hunched forward in his seat, and his words finally sink into Neil’s brain.
Andrew. Hasn’t slept with anyone in the entire time they’ve been messing around, and has also not wanted to. Has had no issue waiting until Neil felt ready. Put a consistent stop to anything sexual between them only because he misinterpreted Neil’s desperation as fear or uncertainty, and respected that without question.
Neil swallows. He looks around the room again, but not to avoid Andrew’s gaze this time. He looks at all the little pieces of himself that have taken over Andrew’s room. The sweater. The clothes. The notebooks. The magnet on the fridge. Even most of the furniture he helped assemble. The sheets on the bed he picked out by blindly reaching into the shelf at IKEA and tossing a pack into the cart. Andrew paid for his share of Swedish meatballs at the food court half an hour later, and Neil hooked his ankle over Andrew’s under the table while he discreetly pushed his peas onto Andrew’s plate and Andrew stole his fries in retaliation.
“For the record, I also do not do anyone else’s homework for them or pick them up from school every day.”
Neil’s heart feels too big for his throat as it tries to squeeze out through it. Instead, he gets up from his chair and walks over to the bed. He stops at the edge, but has to wait only a moment until Andrew tugs him to sit down by the front of his shirt.
“I’m sorry.”
Andrew wrinkles his nose. “Don’t.”
“I think I will.” Neil feels a smile tug at his lips despite himself. “I could try to be less stupid sometimes.”
Andrew snorts. “I fear it is too late for that.” His knee knocks against Neil’s and rests there. “Although next time you want to know something, you could try opening that mouth of yours for something useful for once.”
Neil sniffs. “The next time you think I’m being weird, you could also just ask.”
Andrew hums, and his leg presses a little more insistently against Neil’s. Neil presses back. “Yeah? Then tell me why you start shaking like a leaf every time I touch you.”
Heat flares through Neil’s chest again, but he lets it — feels it settle in his chest by his heart, lets it burn all the way through to his stomach. He looks back at Andrew, aware of how red his face must be, and says, “Only because I was afraid to want you so much when I didn’t know if you felt the same.”
Andrew’s hand settles against his neck for a moment, cool against the flushed skin, then slides up to cup his jaw and turn his head towards him, into his kiss.
Neil almost shudders. It’s only been a week, but his body feels so deprived of Andrew’s touch that he melts into the kiss like a drug, allows his mouth to be kissed open until Andrew’s tongue slides against his. His own hands reach for something to hold onto, and come up against the sleeve of Andrew’s sweater. Andrew grabs his hands and sets them on his shoulders before diving back for his lips.
It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but a week after thinking he may have lost this forever, may have fucked it up beyond saving, it’s everything. He clings onto Andrew’s shoulders like he’d float away if he didn’t, and follows every movement Andrew makes in return.
When Andrew pulls him closer, Neil goes without question. He gets his legs under him on the mattress somehow, follows as Andrew scoots them both backwards into the middle of the bed, and settles over Andrew’s thighs, keeping his weight in his thighs instead of resting it on Andrew.
It’s a bit of an uncomfortable reminder of the last time he was in this position, but he blots it out by pressing his mouth back to Andrew’s. This time, they both know what they want.
Andrew’s hand trails down his front, from his neck over his chest to his abdomen, and Neil almost shakes out of his skin. He sees now what Andrew could have misinterpreted as him being afraid — his muscles spasm under Andrew’s touch, and his breath hitches uncomfortably, but when Andrew looks up at him, he can only nod. The hand presses down against his stomach, and Neil lets himself be pushed backwards. Not away, though. Andrew only pushes him onto his back and follows him immediately, hovering over him and resuming their kiss.
Neil reaches up to tangle his hands in Andrew’s hair, and when their lips part briefly he takes the chance to latch onto Andrew’s neck instead. It earns him a gasp, a rare sound out of Andrew that he chases by pressing his tongue against the bit of skin he’s got between his lips.
Andrew pulls him away from his neck, pushes him down into the sheets and looks at him. They’re still close enough for their noses to almost touch, and Neil can see something hiding between the green specks that interrupt the golden brown of Andrew’s eyes.
Andrew shifts, and Neil is suddenly, all-encompassingly aware of where Andrew’s hips rest between his thighs.
“Yes or no?” Andrew asks, but Neil is already nodding.
“Yes, Andrew, I— Yes. If it’s a yes for you, too.”
Andrew nods, once, and leans back down to crash their lips together once more.
Despite the desperation, it’s slower than Neil would have expected. Not really soft, because Andrew never has been, and he rucks Neil’s shirt up to put his hands on him with no less ruthless efficiency than he does anything else, but he does not rush them.
Why would he? They have all the time in the world.
Andrew kisses him, once on the mouth, once on the center of his chest, once right above his belly button, before he undoes the button of Neil’s jeans with one last look up for confirmation — which Neil returns with a furious nod.
Both of their shirts and pants end up on the floor, and Neil is left panting into Andrew’s pillow, flushed all the way down to his chest by the time Andrew resurfaces from between his legs. His stomach still quivers with the aftershocks as he watches Andrew shove a hand down his own boxers.
Andrew grips his chin and forces his gaze up to his face, which Neil gladly obeys. He watches the faint pink circles that appear high on Andrew’s cheeks grow, his eyes fixed firmly on Neil’s face, watches as his expressions crumples and his entire frame shudders.
It’s a quiet affair, but it sets Neil’s world alight. He holds himself back from surging up to kiss Andrew again, knowing he will need space after, but he cannot help the smile that pulls at his lips.
They take a few moments to catch their breath before Andrew leans back down to kiss him, brief and sharp, before pressing their foreheads together. “Good?” His voice is a bit hoarse, which makes Neil’s heart beat faster.
He reigns himself in and nods, swallowing. “Yeah. Thank you.”
Andrew grunts, and rolls over to fall into the sheets next to him.
Neil needs another shower — he feels distinctly sweaty all over and sticky in some more specific places — but with Andrew’s weight and warmth on the mattress next to him, he decides it can wait. He slides closer, knocking his shoulder against Andrew’s until Andrew gets the hint and wraps the arm around him.
They lie in silence for a couple of minutes, Andrew’s thumb tracing back and forth over Neil’s shoulder, before Neil props his chin up on Andrew’s chest and says, “Do you think the others are mad at me?”
Andrew blinks a few times. “What?”
“The others. Yo— our friends. Kevin told them how old I am and I didn’t really ever consider that they might not know and Allison sounded pretty upset and I don’t want them to be mad.”
Andrew snorts. “The things you manage to be stupid about never fail to astound me.”
Neil smiles. He’s sure Andrew is right.
He raises a hand over Andrew’s chest, looks up at him for reassurance, and rests it there when Andrew nods. He can feel Andrew’s heartbeat under his palm, steady though still slightly accelerated, and closes his eyes.
“So, if my friends ask if you’re my boyfriend, am I allowed to say yes?”
Andrew flicks the side of his head. When Neil raises his head to look at his face, though, his eyes are closed and a corner of his mouth is curled up in what could almost be a smile.