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The first thing Andrew notices about Neil is his silhouette.
It’s strong, cutting through the haze of Andrew’s pills, aiming straight for the steady beat of a blue jay’s fluttering wings in his chest. The shadow of it swallows up his own shadows.
Neil is impossibly fast—a fox on the run—and still, he is no match for a lurking Andrew. Or perhaps he is too fast, and the speed that took him relentlessly from his hometown to Millport’s shabby Exy court fails him at this moment with a well-timed swing of a racquet. The wood slams unforgivingly into Neil’s gut, punching out the oxygen in his lungs, and yet again, Andrew derives no pleasure from inflicting pain. Curious, then, why so many enjoy the act.
The world stays unmoving, but Neil falls as if his world has tilted violently on its axis. His knees hit the ground hard, palms scraping against the school’s polished floor. Andrew watches as Neil scrabbles at the tiles, struggling to breathe, looking every inch the wounded prey he pretends to be.
“God damn it, Minyard,” comes Wymack’s furious voice, though his frustration passes over Andrew like an easily forgotten breeze of summer air. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
“Oh, Coach,” Andrew says. “If he was nice, he wouldn’t be any use to us, would he?”
“He’s no use to us if you break him.”
Wrong, Andrew thinks. Broken goods can be useful, still.
“You’d rather I let him go? Put a band-aid on him and he’ll be good as new.”
It’s unnecessary, though, for people who have taken gunshots and knife cuts and cigarette burns, and survived each cruelty. Andrew knows this keenly, and senses this is true, too, of Neil. Not once does his gaze leave Neil as Neil, hands empty of band-aids, gathers himself together, piece by piece.
Neil casts a fierce glare at Andrew, which Andrew returns with a smile that is at odds with his thoughts. Andrew taps two fingers to his temple in a mocking salute, and says, “Better luck next time.”
“Fuck you,” Neil shoots back, the fire in him reignited.
Later, when Wymack, needlessly concerned, demands proof that Andrew’s borrowed racquet did not shatter Neil into unsalvageable pieces, Neil presses careful hands to his ribs, breathing through the burn. Then Neil inhales, filling in the deflated edges of his silhouette, and on his exhale, returns to them in a solid outline that refuses to cave under pressure.
See? Andrew wants to say. No need for band-aids.
Neil is more than a blurred shape when Andrew picks him up at the airport. He is all the colors of the world dialed up at high intensity, the sharpest thing to pierce through Andrew’s eternal gray.
“Neil,” Andrew says in lieu of hello, and it’s the first time he tastes the way Neil’s name sits between his lips. He chases the bite of it away with a cigarette, but even the familiarity of the smoke is not enough to fight the inevitable addiction. “Neil Josten,” he says again later, after the cigarette burns itself halfway and dies beneath the crush of his shoe.
The name is heavy with the promise of something Andrew doesn’t know but which nags at him to discover. He has almost forgotten what clarity of mind is like. It chases him incessantly, which, funny, because between the two of them, Neil looks like the one who is always running.
Andrew keeps the name to himself, weighing it on his mind, letting it lie amid the lucidity and later, the drug-induced mist. There are lies in Neil’s name, in the way he runs and the way he stays. In the way he craves a court he says he has only known for a year or less, and the way he is at times present yet at times miles away.
“How nice to meet you, Neil,” Andrew drawls, dragging the name out as if the slow act of it can buy him more time to pick apart the consonants and vowels.
And as soon as the single syllable slips away from him, Andrew wants to say it again.
Neil is a problem Andrew can’t parse through immediately, sober or otherwise, but he’s a problem alright.
Andrew is only partway through the equation when he realizes he has fallen.
Later, when sobriety is forced through him in chilling shades of gray, Andrew will remember Neil’s hands.
He will remember the feeling of Neil’s touch on his bare skin, the cautious graze of coarse fingers on his forearm, stripped free of his armband. He will remember Neil’s tight grip on his wrist, and the more damning stare on his thin lines of destroyed skin. He will remember the way his stomach lurched and his ribcage compressed, and the way he easily chalked them up to the violence he relived and his imminent withdrawal, only to later recognize that the way he wrenched Neil’s hand off his arm and drew it back to himself, bare skin and scars turned away from Neil, had nothing to do with his traumas and everything to do with not wanting Neil to see him like this—whatever this was.
Later, he will think about how Neil’s hands—rough with scars and calluses, strong enough to hold a racquet and hit it home—were unbearably gentle.
Later, but not now.
Clarity has become a permanent state of mind when Andrew sees Neil again.
This time, the problem falls apart completely to reveal, at its core, the beating heart of a beautiful boy. Andrew blinks, taking in Neil’s striking auburn hair, and then his striking eyes the exact shade of Andrew’s pills. But the craving he has for the winter blue can’t be blamed on his need for his medication; the sting from letting it go has long dulled down to zero from the weeks spent at Easthaven.
For a brief, disorienting moment, Andrew thinks there are drugs still coursing through his veins. Then he cuts his gaze away, expression carefully blank, as if that is enough to dim the repercussions of heady blue.
The ride back is silent. Everything in the world is terribly loud. Everything is, also, terribly quiet.
Of the people he can turn to for a complete account of what happened while he was committed, Andrew picks Nicky. It is in part because Nicky is excessively chatty and will not think twice about divulging secrets, and in part because Nicky, desperate to relieve his own guilt, will give in far more easily should Andrew press for further answers.
Andrew knows, even then, the only one who knows why Neil has returned to them in auburn and blue is the man himself.
He waits for Neil in the stairwell, arms folded loosely over his chest, back propped against the railing. The cold metal digs into his shoulder blades, but he barely feels the pinch. When Neil appears, Andrew drops his gaze immediately to the dark cloth in Neil’s outstretched hands, the black material as familiar as second skin.
Andrew sees his armbands, but all he can think of are Neil’s hands. Neil’s fleeting touch on his bare skin. Neil’s fingers brushing against each quiet rise and fall of Andrew’s own destruction; the violence it took to survive. There’s no need for band-aids.
Wordlessly, Andrew takes the armbands. He knows Neil has seen his scars, and still turns away to tug on the armbands. There is no logic to it, to hide something from someone who has seen everything. But the reality that no one likes to talk about is that clarity of mind means having space, too, for thoughts not ruled by logic. Even if his scars don’t turn Neil away, Andrew can hardly imagine they add to his desirability. A pity, then, that sobriety has taken away his mania, only to replace it with a crushing weight on his chest.
Only after the armbands are securely tucked beneath his sleeves does Andrew lead Neil up the stairs. A few hard jiggles are all that’s needed to push open the door, into the rooftop. The height spurs his heartbeat, and this is good. This is good. This—his fear of heights—is reason enough to himself for his quickening pulse.
He turns, and Neil’s icy blue eyes on him nearly rob him of his breath. Andrew breathes through the unnoticeable hitch. “I’ll take an explanation now,” he says, and is helpless to it when he raises his hand to Neil’s face. He stops with his fingers just a fraction from Neil’s skin, staring into blue the color of an imminent storm. “Did I break my promise or were you keeping yours?”
“Neither,” Neil says, then says again. Then, “I spent Christmas in Evermore.”
This time, Andrew doesn’t hold back when he reaches for the bandage on Neil’s cheek, already knowing what lies beneath it. When he sees the ink, he thinks perhaps the storm is also within him.
No need for band-aids, but Neil keeps his number trapped beneath a bandage. No need for band-aids, but Andrew pictures Riko’s dirty hands touching what’s his.
“Why did you go?” Andrew says, and when Neil answers, he almost regrets his question.
“Riko said if I didn’t, Dr. Proust would—”
Andrew smothers the rest of the words with his hand over Neil’s mouth, and the storm spins into something unforgiving. It threatens to take the world down with it, even if none of it breaks the calm surface of Andrew’s blank expression.
“Do not make the mistake of thinking I need your protection,” Andrew says, because he has come so far on his own, because he has promised to be the protector, because what use does he have if he’s not the one doing the protecting?
“I had to try. If I had the chance to stop it but did nothing, how could I face you again? How could I live with myself?”
It has gotten chillier on the rooftop, and the faint wisp of a passing breeze bites at Andrew’s skin. Andrew tries to recall the last time someone tried to protect him, and comes up empty. He wants to laugh, even if the sound will be hollow, but the world doesn’t give him that either.
“The next time someone comes for you, stand down and let me deal with it,” Andrew says instead. “Do you understand?”
‘Yes’ would have been an uncharacteristic but acceptable response from Neil.
Pointless protests would have made more sense, because Neil is as much a fool as he is made up of an entire fabric of lies and partial truths.
But Neil only says, “If it means losing you, then no.”
“I hate you,” Andrew says, because neither of them would be able to bear the truth. No one told him that sobriety means being slapped with the cold reality of his wants, and when has Andrew ever gotten what he wanted? “You were supposed to be a side effect of the drugs.”
The drugs have been weaned off ages ago in rehabilitation, and taken the cruel edge with them. But in the aftermath, Andrew is left with an ache in his heart that refuses to show on his face.
“I’m not a hallucination,” Neil says, nonplussed.
Neil’s right; he’s not. He is as tangible as the scent of tobacco that lingers on Andrew’s fingers after he smokes, as visceral as the sinking sense of doom Andrew feels when he perches too close to the edge of the roof. He is the realest thing Andrew has ever known.
“You are a pipe dream,” Andrew tells Neil instead, and it’s generous of him to offer two truths to Neil in exchange for a reminder to himself that this—his desire—is nothing more than an unattainable dream.
Somewhere along the line, Andrew pays attention to Neil’s mouth. Sometimes, it’s to grasp tightly to each syllable of the truths Andrew trades with him, so that someday Andrew can map out all of Neil’s life into a wall-sized tapestry. Most times, it’s because Andrew wants to taste the words off his lips.
“Why does Roland think you’re tying me down?” Neil asks, and Andrew follows the way his lips move around each word until the entire sentence sinks into him.
He hesitates with his glass halfway to his mouth, and turns the focus of his gaze to Neil’s hands, where they are clenched on the edge of the seat between his knees. Is Neil’s tension because of lust? Or because of fear?
After a while, Andrew returns his full shot to the tray. His fingers stay on the rim of the glass, tapping an uneven beat, the only giveaway to his own tension coursing through him. Is it lust? Or is it fear? Lust? Fear? Lust? Fear—
Andrew drags his stare up from Neil’s hands, back to his face. “Presumably he thinks you’re as bad at following directions as he is,” he says. “Roland knows I don’t like being touched.”
It isn’t Neil if he doesn’t back down from Andrew’s cryptic answers, even though the truth is as blatant as day. Perhaps it is fear after all, Andrew entertains, that Neil is rejecting the obvious truth. Andrew shifts in his seat to face Neil and props his elbow on the back of his chair. He cradles his face in his hand and considers Neil, expression impassive despite everything.
“I didn’t think I was a personal problem,” Neil pushes. “You hate me, remember?”
“Every inch of you,” Andrew agrees easily, and then decides that it is a painful but quicker lesson in desire and in rejection for himself if he says, “That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t blow you.”
Unlike Andrew, whose expression remains deceptively calm, Neil looks as though Andrew has just pulled the rug from under his feet. “You like me,” he echoes.
“I hate you,” Andrew corrects Neil, speaking past the racing beat of his heart, a blue jay with broken wings.
It takes a long moment and considerable effort for Neil to find his voice. “You never said anything.”
“Why should I have?” Andrew says, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. He was only half right; Neil can’t bear the truth, but Andrew, by some miracle, is still alive. There is an unbearable pressure against his ribcage, but Andrew will survive. The only thing he can do is survive. “Nothing will come of it.”
“Nothing,” Neil echoes again.
“I am self-destructive, not stupid,” Andrew says, and almost smiles self-deprecatingly, if only he could. “I know better.”
I know better, because when has anyone ever wanted Andrew like this? I know better, because when has holding out hope ever worked in his favor? I know better, because Andrew wants Neil, but why would Neil want him?
Andrew keeps the rest of it to himself and gives Neil a heartbeat to answer.
“Okay,” comes Neil’s quiet response.
It’s only because it’s everything Andrew expected that he survives it at all.
I know better, but Neil is looking at him, and Andrew doesn’t know anything anymore. He is senseless in the face of his want, and it will devastate him when he comes away with his hands empty at the end of the chapter before it even begins. Still, Andrew basks in the moment for a quiet second, before it turns unbearable.
He digs a finger in Neil’s cheek, forcibly turning his face away, if only to stop being the victim of his gaze. “Don’t look at me like that.” Like you want me the way I want you. You don’t want me like that. “I am not your answer, and you sure as fuck aren’t mine.”
His cigarette fizzes out against the concrete rooftop tiles. “I hate you,” Andrew says later, and this means nothing when everything has spilled out into the open, lying beneath the scrutiny of the sun.
“Ninety per cent of the time you don’t,” Neil says, a little smug; Andrew thinks someday Neil’s smart mouth will cost him.
Now, it costs him this—
Andrew, catching Neil’s face in his hands, leaning in to kiss away the smugness from his smart mouth. Neil tastes faintly of cigarettes and nothing and everything, and Andrew has never wanted anything more than this. The kiss is anything but gentle, hurling them toward death, only for them to come out on the other side alive and breathing.
“Tell me no,” Andrew says, because he needs to hear it. When Neil is quiet for too long, Andrew pries Neil’s hand off his coat, where his fingers have knotted themselves in the heavy wool. “Let go,” he says, and the blankness of his face is the only thing preventing any of his rising nausea from making itself known. “I am not doing this with you right now.”
Leaning away from Neil again, backing out of his space, Andrew picks up his crumpled cigarette butt. He aborts the decision to salvage it, and then digs out a new stick, each motion jerky as if he were a puppet on strings. That, too, fails to calm his nerves, and he kills the cigarette before pulling a third out. This last one, Neil steals from him.
“Why not?” Neil asks, and Andrew tells him.
Andrew would not change anything about their kiss, but if it wasn’t a yes from Neil, if he had misconstrued Neil’s desires, he would take it all back within a fraction of a second. The thought weighs on Andrew as he stares out into the horizon, watching the world bleed out into a thin, fragile line.
“I won’t be like them,” Andrew says quietly. “I won’t let you let me be.”
Eventually, Neil picks up the second key to Andrew’s Maserati that he paid for with his blood money, and leaves Andrew be. Andrew sits on the rooftop without a cigarette for a long time, feeling the ghost of Neil’s kiss, and tries to remind himself he has already gotten more than he should be asking for.
“Question,” Neil says, and it’s the first time they’re together alone after their kiss. Andrew refuses to call it a first, because that implies a second, and a third, and Andrew will be greedy with it. “When you said you don’t like being touched, is it because you don’t like it at all or because you don’t trust anyone else enough to let them touch you?”
Andrew casts a glance at Neil, gaze flicking to Neil’s lips. He lifts it to Neil’s chilly blue eyes, and it’s all the more catastrophic. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If it didn’t, I wouldn’t ask,” Neil says.
“It doesn’t matter to a man who doesn’t swing,” Andrew clarifies, and it gives him grief to spell it out like this. To put into words how Andrew craves someone who does not want him the same way, who does not want him a second time.
Neil takes it all and crushes it in his closed palm, and tells Andrew he trusts him. He wants to let him in. It’s the most dangerous offer Neil has given him.
“Everything about you is a bad idea,” Andrew says, because he will be greedy with it. Give him a star, and he will yearn for the sun.
Then, “Yes,” Neil says, as he leans in. He lifts a hand toward Andrew’s face without ever touching him, and Andrew catches hold of his wrist and squeezes in warning. There is fear thrumming in Andrew’s veins, even if none of it reveals itself on his face; he can only survive the crash of disappointment so many times.
But Neil says yes again, in other words, in a way that Andrew has learnt also means ‘yes’.
“Stay,” Andrew says, and then leans down to kiss him a second time.
The next time they kiss, Andrew allows Neil to put his hands in his hair, feeling the way Neil twists his hands into Andrew’s short strands at the back of his head to bring him closer and the gentle scrape of Neil’s blunt fingernails against his scalp.
There is no ‘this’, Andrew tells himself. This is nothing. There is nothing. If Andrew gives it a name, only to be shaken awake from his dream, he will not survive.
“Thank you,” Neil says. “You were amazing.”
And Andrew barely survives the aftermath of it.
The first thing Andrew notices about Neil—not Nathaniel, never Nathaniel—is the wounds streaking across his body like the marks of a child’s unraveling crayon.
He grips Neil’s chin, holding him steady, so he can take in each hurt carved cruelly into Neil’s skin. A finger drags along the lines of tape that keep the canvas of bandages in place, and Andrew thinks, tapestry, but not like this. With a careful hand, he tears the gauze off Neil’s right cheek, looking at the striped lines that make Neil no less breathtaking.
When Andrew peels off the second bandage on Neil’s other cheek, his hand freezes near his face. Tension seeps into his shoulders, the only thing holding him together just so the earthquake doesn’t take him apart. He cannot look away.
To know that Riko had held Neil down to mark him with a number was agonizing beyond belief. To know that Neil suffered again at the same spot, Nathan’s henchmen brutal in their taking, was devastating.
Andrew cannot look away.
At long last, Andrew drops his hand from Neil’s chin, careful to avoid the wounds still healing, and fists it in Neil’s hoodie. Violence warred in him; violence Andrew knows Neil can discern from his eyes, from the countless times Neil stopped and looked—really looked—at him.
Andrew cannot look away.
“I’m sorry,” Neil says, and the world cracks in half.
Andrew’s fist swings back, and it will never make contact, because he holds himself with great effort and a greater promise to never see Neil hurt again. “Say it again and I will kill you,” he spits out instead, knowing that Neil knows he means to say, Say it again and it will kill us both.
“Am I at ninety-four yet?” Neil asks.
This, at least, is familiar. It is as familiar as the smoke that burns from Andrew’s cigarette and lingers on his lips, on Neil’s mouth. It is as familiar as the icy blue of his god-forsaken pills and Neil’s ocean eyes.
“You are at one hundred,” Andrew says, and isn’t that answer enough?
Black garbage bags litter across Neil’s bandaged wounds, a makeshift waterproof cover so that he can get a warm shower. Tapestry, Andrew thinks again, but not like this. Neil is quiet as Andrew works, making sure the splash of water will not seep through the gauze to his wounds.
The ridiculous get-up makes Andrew think of Halloween, except the lights are turned down and there is no party. Any collection of alcohol in the fridge has been whittled down to meagre cans of beer, the vodka expectedly thieved by Kevin. Silence settles over the suite, and no one is laughing.
“Hey,” Neil says, as Andrew gets into the bathroom and presses fingers to Neil’s scar-ridden chest.
The only thing Andrew would ever do when Neil leans in to kiss him, is to kiss him back. His lips part without hesitation, and his fingers chart a path up Neil’s chest to rest around Neil’s throat. He needs to keep a hand on Neil, feel how he is here. He needs to feel the constant thump of Neil’s pulse in the vein along his neck, feel how he is real.
“You are a mess,” Andrew says against Neil’s lips. A mess, like when a star explodes into a supernova to leave behind a field of debris and an expanding shell of gas and dust. Beauty in its chaos.
Andrew is clinical in his stripping of Neil’s clothes and washing of his hair. But when he gets to cleaning Neil’s body, the close proximity and the feeling of Neil’s warm skin under his careful hands distract him from his task. There is more kissing than cleaning, but neither of them pays it any mind.
Andrew is helpless to the shudder that wracks his frame when Neil chases a rivulet of water down the side of his neck, and it embarrasses him how responsive he is to Neil’s touch. “Your neck fetish is not attractive,” he lies, the words coming out too weak, and they both know it.
“You like it,” Neil says. “I like that you like it.”
And Andrew only wants Neil so terribly.
“Yes or no?” he asks, kissing along Neil’s jaw, tasting the sweet curve of his skin.
“It’s always yes with you,” Neil says.
It is too easy for Andrew to say, “Except when it’s no,” because Neil has a poor track record of taking care of himself. It’s alright, Andrew can do it for him. I won’t let you let me be. Then Andrew kisses down, charting a trajectory through Neil’s skin and scars, mapping it out. He ghosts a kiss across Neil’s hip, and then swallows him whole.
Tapestry, he thinks, like this.
Andrew solves the equation, and by then, he’s fallen through the margins and down the guidelines, into the numbers and truths and lies. One hundred and one. One hundred and two. One hundred and—
Calling Riko a sore loser would be an understatement, and Andrew was right that someday, Neil’s smart mouth will cost him. But not now, because just as Riko’s racquet swings through the air with the sole intention to destroy the only person who breathes technicolor into Andrew's monochromatic world, Andrew brings his racquet up to parry.
Andrew is impossibly fast, and the speed that takes him from his goal to Neil is just barely enough to catch Riko’s swing and shoot the entire force of it back up Riko’s forearm. Riko stumbles and falls away, but Andrew can hardly care what happens to him when the only thing that matters is that Neil is safe.
“Your close calls are getting old,” Andrew says later, when they’re back in the room. “I thought you knew how to run.”
There’s no one else here, in this quiet moment that belongs only to the two of them. Outside, the tangerine sun has sunk below the horizon, putting behind it a sea of black and blue and gray.
“I thought you told me to stop running,” Neil says, and has the gall to seem confused.
“Survival tip: no one likes a smart mouth.”
“Except you,” Neil reminds Andrew, and there’s smugness on his face.
The first thing Andrew noticed about Neil was his silhouette. Then, his eyes, his hands, his lips. How he is shaped like home, and tastes like a dream.
He’s the most beautiful person Andrew has ever laid eyes on, the equation he wants to solve over and over again until he can decipher each part from memory. Andrew wants nothing more, right now, than to wipe the smug smile off his expression with his lips. So when Neil draws him in for a kiss, fingers curling around the soft fabric of Andrew’s jersey, holding on tightly and showing no signs of ever letting go, Andrew lets him.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
— Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out