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The lights go out at 6:13 p.m. on a weak flicker and the heaving sigh of the air conditioning announcing its long-awaited rest. The cloistering stillness that follows settles in around them like a cocoon—a thick blanket of nothing. Without the constant whirring, hissing, and faint beeping that announces the consciousness of their taken-for-granted electronic companions, everything becomes very still. And very quiet. And a little hot, even after only a minute of waiting. A single droplet of sweat forms behind Neil’s ear, quivering and itchy. He looks from the now black screen of the TV, to the game controller in his hand, to the smoothly blank face of his roommate, Jeremy.
“Uh,” Jeremy says.
Another bead of sweat forms, this one at Neil’s neck. It’s deep October, almost November, but South Carolina weather seems to hold some kind of grudge against numbers below 80.
Usually, you just wait these things out–it’s a little electrical flicker, a glitch, a moment’s pause before the house winds itself up and starts running again–so they sit and wait. And wait. The cool air vacates the premises with an alarming rapidity, chasing the late afternoon light out through the windows and leaving them in a deepening gloom as the minutes stretch on.
“Candles?” Neil ventures, when it seems like the power loss is going to stick.
“Uh,” Jeremy says again, this time with an air of alarm. Neil has only lived in this house since the end of August, but he takes the wild look in Jeremy’s eyes as a ‘probably not’ on the candles. So they’ll just sit in darkness. It’s cool. No big deal. Neil definitely isn’t getting soft in his old age. He’d once slept under a bridge for three months. There’s no way five minutes without power are throwing him for a loop. Right?
“We should see if it’s out for everyone,” Neil suggests. He tosses his controller onto the couch next to him.
It’s not that knowing will make a difference–or maybe it will. They are upstanding, reliable payers of electricity bills. They’re not squatting. The absence of electricity should be temporary. Not personal. Not even a medium-sized deal. Not this time, anyway.
The house is low-slung, ranch style, built in the mid-century and given a half-hearted, largely generic renovation before being flipped back onto the market and landing in the lap of one Jeremy Knox, high school history teacher and girls’ tennis coach extraordinaire. Only nine months later he’d opened it to an old friend–Neil–with all the generosity of a guy who could handle the mortgage but not the silence.
It’s very silent now, though. Too silent, even with two of them taking up space.
Neil opens the front door and steps out onto the modest porch; it’s flat concrete and not even wide enough for a chair you can walk all the way around. Neil means to look up and down the cul-de-sac to see if any of the neighbors’ porch lights are on, but his eyes don’t make it past the tiny yellow spark that ignites directly across the street–Andrew Minyard, tucked black and ivory and gold into the rapidly deepening gloom, flame cupped between his palm and his cigarette with more care than Neil has seen him show anything else. Well, almost anything–there was this one time, but Neil has already realized how mistaken he’d been about that.
Neil’s eyes lock onto the flame, onto the burning red dot that punctuates the end of Andrew’s cigarette. A two-toned exclamation point, white line, red circle.
“Looks like it’s the whole street,” Jeremy says, stepping up beside Neil at their lousy excuse for a porch railing.
Neil belatedly pulls his eyes away from Andrew and scans the rest of the houses. He finds not one light anywhere. “Uh huh,” Neil says, looking back at Andrew, at Andrew’s boredom, at his cigarette.
“I actually might have some candles?” Jeremy offers.
Neil can tell by the way Jeremy says ‘might’ that it would be an outright miracle if they unearthed more than half of a votive in the house. An angel would have to descend from the literal heavens with an armful of wax and wicks. They are candle-less. They’d be fucked for a hurricane, fucked for a dinner party, fucked for a blackout–which is what this appears to be.
Neil doesn’t answer. He’s too busy watching Andrew not notice him: inhale, exhale, cloud of smoke, a slow, steady rhythm of hand and breath that Neil has found mesmerizing since he was introduced to the man fifty-nine days ago. The occasion had been what his–Andrew’s, not Neil’s–cousin had called a “non-optional getting-to-know the hot new hot neighbor soiree.” Neil, as the alleged hot new hot neighbor, had lasted all of half an hour before he’d snuck outside for relief, where he’d found Andrew already sitting and smoking. Andrew had offered Neil nothing more than an unimpressed flick of his eyes–not a cigarette, a light, a nod, or a single word. Just silence, the occasional rustle of fabric, and the faint aroma of cinnamon.
Neil had been hypnotized then and he’s hypnotized now, hanging on the distant flex of Andrew’s wrist until the door flies open beside him and emits Nicky, the aforementioned cousin, who spreads his arms wide and runs into the middle of their narrow, sleepy street. They’re too out of the way to have even a dotted line–it’s just one long slab of asphalt, mostly whole, with sides that slump down towards the drain grates.
Nicky throws his head back and howls at the pale specter of the moon, which stands bashful sentinel in the still darkening dusk and the creeping stretch of color up from the horizon line. The sound is loud and wolfish and stirs something unexpected in the deepest parts of Neil’s core, the ones he so rarely gets around to looking at.
“Monsters!” Nicky shouts. “Assemble!”
Andrew doesn’t stir from his position on the porch.
“Hot neighbors!” Nicky calls, turning his attention to the other side of the street. “Suit up. We’re going on the prowl.”
No one moves except Jeremy, who takes an obedient, hopeful step forward. He’s echoed by movement across the street–Kevin, ducking his way out of the Monsters’ house, followed by Aaron, whose jacket is buttoned and face carefully blank.
“We’ll need jackets?” Jeremy says, though it’s more of a question than a statement.
“Will we?” Neil asks. Those lone beads of sweat have found each other and picked up stragglers as they slid down his back, pooling just above the waistband of his jeans. He knows it’s fall, tip-toeing towards winter, but it still feels like late summer to him.
“You will!” Nicky shouts cheerfully. He has creepy good hearing for someone so loud. “It gets chilly!”
“He’s right,” Kevin calls over. “For once.”
“Fuck your beautiful face,” Nicky says, undaunted. “Neil, my love, my future second husband, kindly retrieve light outerwear for yourself and your hunky, but already spoken-for friend.”
“Spoken for?” Jeremy asks, sounding amused.
“Sweet child,” Nicky says with a theatrical sigh. “You are all so useless. How do any of you ever get laid?”
“They don’t,” Aaron says.
“They?” Nicky asks teasingly. “You got some kind of game I don’t know about?”
“Fuck you,” Aaron says darkly. “I’ve got a gargoyle.”
They all look at Andrew. He flicks disinterestedly at his cigarette, sending its glowing end flying to the ground.
Neil, with no better ideas for the evening, goes inside and grabs a couple of hoodies from the assortment draped on various pieces of furniture. He realizes halfway back to the door that he’s grabbed two of Jeremy’s, but he doesn’t go back for one of his own. Jeremy isn’t that much taller than him, considering, and the difference in breadth just means that Neil will have a little room to hide.
Jeremy has already been lured to the center of the street by whatever intangible thing it is that Nicky has that makes people want to do what he says. His charisma, or charm, or sheer gluttonous love of life, whatever you want to call it, it reels people in. It’s reeled Jeremy in—Neil finds his roommate standing, bemused, with his arms up, letting Nicky poke at his stomach and grinning at whatever words match the eyelashes Nicky is furiously batting. Sometimes Neil really wishes he had that thing, that effortlessness, that effervescence. What he’s got instead is a sharp tongue and a too-big hoodie.
He shoves one of the hoodies at Jeremy and pulls the other over his head with vicious movements, angry at himself for reasons he can’t begin to name. He should go back inside. He should go for a run. He should do anything but play along with whatever this is going to turn out to be.
He gets his hands and head free of the labyrinthine folds of crimson fabric, resenting the extra heat, and looks up to discover that something has finally captured Andrew’s attention. It’s him, apparently—actually, it’s probably the violence with which his hair and the hoodie clash, but either way, it’s enough that Andrew has left the porch overhang and delivered himself to the rest of the group. Andrew is manning the outskirts, the way he usually is, a satellite, but somehow, the way he always does, he becomes the sun—Nicky looks to him for approval, and then Kevin does, and then Aaron does; Jeremy follows the trend. Neil never really took his eyes off Andrew in the first place.
Andrew nods—or, rather, Andrew tips his chin up in a faint gesture of permission—and Nicky claps his hands, once again delighted, a 10-level knob turned up to 11.
“Alright,” Nicky says. “Let’s get this show on the road!”
Nicky forges ahead—like they’re setting off for Mordor; like they’re going on an Arthurian quest; like he’s leading a Pride parade through town; like they’re embarking with purpose and not just in an attempt to fill some dark, empty hours that none of them want to spend with their own thoughts. Jeremy jogs forward a little and falls in with Nicky at the lead. Kevin and Aaron shuffle along behind, somehow pacing their strides easily despite the significant difference in length of leg.
This leaves the rear for Neil and Andrew, who are a study in contrasts in everything but height: Neil in crimson and blue, Andrew in black on black; Neil with his sun-baked runner’s tan, Andrew with his pale poet’s complexion; Andrew’s steady gait, Neil treating every step like the road is paved in broken glass. And yet, they are similar in their silence, in their straight-ahead gazes.
“Where are we going?” Jeremy asks.
“Wherever the night takes us,” Nicky says grandly.
“The night’s not at the front of the line,” Aaron says, bone-dry. “And I’m not following you around in circles for hours.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Nicky says, but there’s a thick pause before he answers, full of nothing but the sounds of their shoes against asphalt. Suddenly, Nicky says, “The sun is setting. We’re getting ourselves a view.”
Neil expects Nicky to lead them north, towards the swaths of underbrush and straggling trees that fill the space between their forgotten little neighborhood and the state forest, but instead they go east, towards the past-their-prime strip malls and squat office buildings. They’re miles from downtown, way too far to get a glimpse of the skyline, so the tallest building in walking distance is a stingy four stories—a squatting block of concrete and mirrored glass rooted in a cracked and peeling parking lot.
It seems to Neil like the door to the building should be closed and locked by now, but it isn’t—Neil supposes there are optometrists or accountants in there who stay open late enough to service the 9-5 set. Nicky opens the door and leads them confidently through the dark lobby, right past a set of dull metal elevator doors, past a quiet fountain, and through another door marked “stairs.” They hike up all four floors, then up one more, where Nicky deposits them at yet another door marked “roof access” with a Vanna White flourish and a self-satisfied “Ta da!” It’s very dark, other than the pale orange waver of the emergency lights. Neil isn’t afraid of the dark, or enclosed spaces, or security guards getting paid minimum wage, but this isn’t exactly the destination he’d been hoping for.
Aaron tests the knob. It’s locked.
“Great view,” Aaron says. “Stunning.”
“Hey,” Nicky protests. “You can’t expect me to do everything. One of you juvenile delinquents pick the lock or something.”
“Yeah, sure,” Aaron says. “I just carry a lock pick set with me everywhere I go.”
He’s no sooner finished the sentence than the solution seems to occur to the rest of them, all at once. Their heads turn, Wimbledon-style, to Andrew.
“No,” Andrew says simply.
“No, you don’t?” Nicky asks. “Or no, you can’t. Or no, you won’t?”
“Yes,” Andrew says.
Neil’s wallet suddenly feels heavy in his back pocket. The slim metal tools he keeps tucked into a credit card slot weigh barely anything in real life—they’re only burdensome in his imagination. He says, “Um.”
The heads turn towards him.
“I… could?” he offers.
“Pick the lock?” Jeremy asks.
“Uh. Yeah.”
“Well, get on with it,” Aaron grumbles. “It’s getting fucking hot in here.”
Probably because they’re all wearing these totally unnecessary jackets and hoodies. Neil doesn’t comment on that, though—he just pulls his wallet out of his pocket, slips his tools out of their spot, and angles his body carefully through the others that stand between him and the door.
He’s seen about a million nifty little sets of picks lately, over-designed things that hide inside of fake credit cards, or magnetize back into careful cut-outs, but he still uses the little set of three his mom had given him when he was a kid. They’re steel, dull and scratched, but sound. The only rust involved is in Neil’s out of practice fingers.
He drops to his knees in front of the door—in front of the crowd, a hushed, illicit audience—and fumbles at the lock once, twice, unsteady under the dim lights and sharp eyes. Kevin pulls his phone out and aims its flashlight at the door, which makes it easier. Neil threads his pick into the lock and muscle memory takes over—he twists, and flicks, coaxes the cylinders. He’s never been good at people, but locks? Locks he can charm.
The mechanism gives, surrenders with a little shimmy, and Neil twists the knob and swings the roof door open.
“Neil Josten,” Nicky says. “You’ve just put yourself in the running for my first marriage.”
“You like a bad boy?” Jeremy asks, teasingly.
“I like a man who can get me in places,” Nicky answers, grinning. “I’m not picky as to the methods.”
Neil rocks back onto the balls of his feet, braces his hands on his thighs, uses the leverage to stand up. His left knee creaks, the way it always does, or rather, always has, or rather, has ever since its intimate brush with a crowbar five years ago. He’s hardly upright and out of the way before Nicky slides by him and through the door, followed by Aaron, and Jeremy, and then Kevin, who ducks to clear the frame even though he has a solid six inches of clearance. Or maybe that feels close to Kevin. Neil wouldn’t know. He hasn’t filled a door frame since the days of playhouses.
Soon everyone is outside except for him—and Andrew, whose solid presence colonizes the edges of Neil’s awareness every time they’re in the same place. Neil waits for Andrew to step through the door. Eventually, he realizes that Andrew is waiting for him to do the same, and he’s not sure what the game is, or if there is one, or how the pieces move, so he just walks out onto the roof first. Behind him there’s movement, and the scrape of a brick across concrete, and the weary complaint of the hinges as they try to fold closed and find themselves blocked.
Neil shoves his hands in his pockets and surveys the roofscape, its divots and debris, pock-marked and stained black by decades of rain and humidity. The others have spread out around the periphery of the roof—Kevin and Jeremy manning the northwestern corner, stoic sentinels with matching hands shoved into matching pockets, matching elbows akimbo, looking straight ahead. Aaron is off to the opposite side, his phone pressed close to his ear. Neil kind of expects to find Nicky voguing for a selfie, but instead spots him settled in facing west, his eyes trained on the horizon.
Neil feels Andrew shift into place beside him, and then Andrew says, “Neil Josten,” like it’s a four-course menu, a tasting of syllables instead of just a couple of words. Neil says nothing, and then Andrew says, “It suddenly occurs to me that we don’t know much about you.”
“Yeah,” Neil says.
“An old friend of Jeremy’s,” Andrew says.
“From college,” Neil agrees. “I did a couple of years.”
“In prison or in college?” Andrew asks.
“College, mostly,” Neil says.
“Mostly?”
“I’m not going to rob you,” Neil says. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I might worry if you were a car thief.”
“Different tools,” Neil says easily.
Andrew asks, “You keep those in your wallet, too?”
“No,” Neil says. He glances to his side, expecting to catch a glimpse of Andrew’s profile, but he gets a full dose instead—Andrew is looking right at him, eyes sharp and gleaming. Neil’s pulse jumps in surprise and then stumbles back into an unsteady canter. This much of Andrew’s attention is dizzying, even if there’s more space between them than there was last time he got it. If Neil were Nicky, or even halfway to Nicky, he’d know what to say next, what type of lure to hook on the end of his line and cast into the waters between them to get the fish biting. Except that Andrew is not a fish, and Neil has never had that kind of patience. Neil blurts, “But I could. If you wanted me to.”
One of Andrew’s eyebrows creeps up, millimeter-by-millimeter, a golden blond arch above the straight lines of his nose and mouth. If he was a fish, Neil thinks, he would have just slapped Neil’s hook and lure out of the water and back into the boat.
Neil is saved from his own awkwardness by a whistle, and then Nicky calling, “Y’all, it’s happening. Get over here and appreciate the beauty of nature.”
Everyone moves that way, obediently, streaming from their scattered positions to line up at Nicky’s sides. It’s a beautiful sunset, heightened by the shortening days so that the sky burns with reds and deep oranges and bashful stretches of pink peeking out behind long stretches of dark clouds. It’s all the colors that should be underfoot at the changing of the seasons. It’s all the colors that Neil has had to learn to accept when he looks in the mirror—crimson smoldering in shadow.
It’s beautiful, but Neil can’t keep his attention on it—he keeps sneaking glances at Andrew, the way he does all too often: assessing the angle of Andrew’s jaw, measuring the flex of muscle in his arms and shoulders. He sneaks a look, and then another, and on the third finds Andrew already looking at him. Not furtive, the way Neil is, but steady, and open, either unashamed of the impulse or not really looking, just catching—catching Neil looking.
Neil holds Andrew’s eyes, the mottled riot of green and gold, for as long as he can. It’s probably not very long before he breaks, jerking his eyes back to the horizon and watching as the sun finishes putting itself to bed.
The last streaks of purple are fading into black when Nicky says, suddenly, “Look. There.” He points. “Do you guys see what I see?”
“Uh,” Jeremy says. “Houses?”
“Yes, you glorious hunk, but which house?”
“None of us know,” Aaron grumbles. “Just tell us. It’s getting dark.”
“Look right there,” Nicky instructs, pointing more purposefully. “Black roof. Big tree. Basketball hoop?”
Neil searches the houses in the direction and then finds it, the one Nicky is pointing at. There’s the black roof, the tree, the hoop, and…
“A trampoline,” Nicky breathes, reverent.
“A trampoline in a fenced-in backyard,” Kevin corrects, but there’s an edge of something else to his voice, too: a little rumble, like he’s a man who may be up for a challenge.
“Fences won’t stop us,” Nicky says confidently. “We’ve got Neil.”
“Um,” Neil says.
“He’s right,” Andrew interjects suddenly, his voice mild but still, Neil thinks, a little mocking. “We’ve got our own criminal mastermind now.”
“He’s not a criminal,” Jeremy protests. “Just a mastermind.”
“Uh,” Neil says.
“You don’t need to be either to get into someone’s fenced yard,” Kevin points out. “You just need to be tall enough to reach over the gate.”
“Well, that significantly narrows our options,” Andrew deadpans. “Unless Neil stands on Aaron’s shoulders and we put a long trench coat on them.”
“No thanks,” Aaron says. “I’m not trying to get arrested tonight.”
“No one is getting arrested,” Nicky tells them. “I happen to know that this particular backyard will be unattended all week.”
“And how do you know that?” Jeremy asks.
“Nu’uh,” Nicky tsks, waggling a finger at Jeremy. “Do you want to ask questions? Or do you want to have a good time?”
“I… want to have a good time,” Jeremy says, his smile breaking and blossoming as the words come out, seeming to surprise and delight him as much as they do Nicky.
“That’s my boy,” Nicky grins. He settles an arm around Jeremy and leans into him, draped loose and elegant by the grace of the couple of inches of height he has on Jeremy. If Neil tried that move, he’d look like a kid sitting on Captain America’s lap at a birthday party. That’s how that works, right? Neil can’t recall ever having been to one of the balloon-festooned monstrosities.
“Listen,” Nicky says, more serious this time. “This night is going to drag if you children keep questioning everything I say. From now on, let’s just agree that I’m the party boss, and I’m driving the party bus, and you get on and get off when I tell you to. Now. To the trampoline!”
They go to the trampoline. Nicky leads them there confidently but circuitously, treating the walk through the neighborhood like a quest through a labyrinth—they take unnecessary turns, detour through a small park, and finally line up single-file outside what seems like a random back gate. Kevin reaches over it and pops the latch open with one hand, and then they’re in—squeezing between the side of the house and a massive rhododendron as they traipse into the slightly overgrown lawn. Neil bats a glossy green leaf out of his face and steps carefully to avoid a rusted bike dropped onto its side in the grass. His foot scrapes the tire even in his attempts to avoid it, but the poor thing has been sitting long enough that the wheel only manages to shriek its way through about a third of a rotation.
There is a bleached patio set on the worn concrete pad that backs up to the house. The others flock to the trampoline, but Neil makes his way over to the furniture and settles on the long end of a chaise. The crunch of feet on concrete announces Kevin, right behind him; Kevin drops onto the other chaise and, like Neil, studiously turns his attention to the cluster around the trampoline instead of making any kind of nod towards eye contact.
Nicky’s voice rises on an enthusiastic, “Break!” and then fades out again as Aaron talks over him.
“They’re vicious,” Kevin says into the comfortable silence.
“Who?” Neil asks.
“The twins,” Kevin explains. “Nicky, too. Anything like this—trampolines, ball pits, go-kart tracks. Aaron is the most competitive person I’ve ever met. Andrew doesn’t give a shit about winning, but he’ll sabotage you for the fun of it.”
“How do you sabotage a ball pit?” Neil asks.
Grimly, Kevin says, “He finds a way.”
“I’m still not sure I understand,” Neil admits.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Kevin says. “You’ll have to learn for yourself like the rest of us.”
Kevin’s tone is casual enough, but the words are ominous—Neil looks over at the trampoline, where one of the twins is jumping, taking great pounding leaps and landing hard. It takes Neil a second to spot the other twin—or the rough, ball-shaped outline of a twin, knees and arms and head tucked, popcorning around inside the trampoline enclosure.
“They’re playing break the egg,” Kevin explains. This time the words are innocuous, but his tone is grim. “Whoever holds the position longest wins.”
Neil would ask what the catch is, but it’s unfolding before him—he watches the egged twin’s body land on the rim of the trampoline, bouncing hard off the thin pad covering the springs and then scraping down towards the center of the circular mat. The jumping twin lands nearly on top of the body, missing by what seems like scant inches from Neil’s distance, and then both twins go flying up into the air again. As far as games go, it seems more on the attempted murder end of the spectrum than the Scrabble end.
“Okay,” Neil says. “I think maybe I’m getting it.”
“That’s Aaron,” Kevin says, nodding towards the jumping twin. “He never wins shit like this—too much regard for human life.”
Neil watches the jumping twin—Aaron—nearly face-plant in an effort to avoid landing with both feet on Andrew’s head.
“I can’t always tell them apart,” Neil admits, feeling stupidly like he’s confessing a personal failing, like he’s a compulsive gambler or watches porn in public or never tips more than 10% in America no matter what. It’s not even like the twins make it easy to tell them apart. All of Neil’s clues depend on closeness—the peek of Andrew’s armbands from beneath his sleeves, the edge of wintergreen on Andrew’s breath from his perpetual post-cigarette mint. Neil wonders how many of those mints Andrew must suck on every day to keep himself from smelling like cigarettes. He doesn’t even know where to start doing the math on that, but there’d definitely been more cigarette than mint, when Andrew had kissed him. The taste of smoke in Andrew’s mouth had been full and fresh and recent. The mint had been shoved aside, but still strong enough to scald Neil’s tongue.
“You’ll get it,” Kevin says. Neil, who’d been thinking about kissing Andrew, about the taste and smell and feel of him, feels caught out until he remembers that they’d been talking about telling the twins apart. He looks at Kevin, finds Kevin looking back, and offers a matching awkward smile. Kevin says, “My trick was the fidgeting thing.”
“What thing?” Neil asks.
“Andrew flicks,” Kevin explains. He holds a hand up and scissors his first two fingers rapidly. Neil gets a mental image of Andrew with a cigarette, a lighter, a pen, jittering it, rhythmic. He nods. Kevin stills his fingers and says, “Aaron rubs.” This time, he sets the pad of his thumb against the side of his index finger and strokes like he’s worrying a stone. Neil flips through his memories of the last two months and hits gold: Aaron with a quarter, a video game controller, a coffee mug.
Neil feels the surface of his thoughts ripple like tiles on a departures board at an old train station, reshaping his understanding of these men.
They can’t actually be this similar by accident. Neil’s seen them at further extremes than their current golden shags—Aaron with a buzzcut, Andrew with a little bun—but only in old photos. The similarity must be intentional, for effect. They’re jarring enough on their own at five feet even and an unexpected width, but together they’re disorienting: identical stone-faced thugs in delinquent cherub bodies. Neil huffs a laugh and scrubs at his face. He says, “Thanks, man.”
“One more thing?” Kevin holds there at the question mark, waiting for Neil to nod before he goes on. “Go ahead and give in. Nicky’s decided you’re family, and he won’t take no for an answer.”
“Give in?” Neil asks, but doesn’t really ask. He can feel Nicky’s attention stalking his peripheral vision like it’s a physical thing.
“Surrender,” Kevin affirms. “You’re going to eventually, and it’s more fun once you do.”
“And free Jeremy up from his babysitting duties,” Neil says somberly.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Keven asks with equal solemnity.
Neil feels Nicky’s patience finally stretch too thin and shatter. Nicky calls, “Neil!”
Neil holds Kevin’s eyes long enough to count a quick one-two-three and then finally relents and looks at Nicky, who lights up and grins charmingly. “Neil,” Nicky says again. “We need you. You’re our only hope.”
Give in. Neil thinks. Surrender.
“Bad news for you,” Neil says, standing. “I operate best well beneath expectations.”
“I refuse to believe that,” Nicky says. “We just need someone more stubborn than Andrew.”
“More willing to die or be paralyzed,” Aaron corrects.
Jeremy laughs, a little out of breath. Andrew’s most recent defeat, Neil assumes. Jeremy says, “Ironically, those are two things in Neil’s wheelhouse.”
When Neil reaches the trampoline, he toes out of his shoes and crawls up through the little gap in the mesh safety net. It adds an oddly dark tint to the faces of everyone outside the net. The only one of them that really looks human in that moment is Andrew. And there’s his shadowed double right behind him. Spooky twin shit. Disorienting.
“Do you know how to play?” Nicky asks.
“No,” Neil tells him, even though he’s pretty sure Kevin had just said something about it. He can’t seem to look at anything in the small space other than Andrew.
“You curl up into a ball. Andrew gets to bounce you around and try to get you to break the tuck of your arms or legs.”
“Or you break your arms or legs,” Aaron adds.
“Andrew is undefeated,” Nicky explains.
“Because he doesn’t care if we actually die,” Aaron clarifies.
Andrew shrugs one shoulder. Neil sees it, because Neil is staring at Andrew.
“So, the idea,” Neil says, “is Andrew and I play ‘chicken’ with my life?”
“Well—” Nicky starts.
Before he gets any further, Andrew says, “Yes.”
“Cool,” Neil says. He’s been standing on the padded rim of the trampoline with a handful of the frame for balance, but he steps carefully onto the black mat of the trampoline now. “I’m not saying no.”
“What are you saying?” Andrew asks.
“I’m saying not today,” Neil says. “Do something else with me?”
The last syllable and the question in it come out on what feels like the last of his breath, and he counts a long four-second inhale before Andrew shifts his weight and says, “Sure.”
“Not today?” Jeremy asks. “What does that even mean?”
“It means Neil located a secret bonus video game quest arc scene thing where the hero and the villain begin with an epic will they or won’t they storyline, except instead of sex, it’s dumb kids’ games.”
“And maybe sex,” Jeremy says. “Nobody’s wearing pins of any kind to this party.”
“I feel like I just learned so much about you, Jeremy Knox,” Nicky says coquettishly. “Come tell daddy more about these parties you’ve been to.”
“Why are straight parties so boring?” Aaron asks. “Straight people deserve shortcuts too.”
“What straight parties are you going to?” Nicky asks skeptically. Their voices fade fast after that, but Neil hears Aaron say something about Prom that makes laughter echo around the spacious yard.
He and Andrew stay quiet another beat or two, maybe three, depending on how you keep time, and then Andrew says, “I think that’s the most talking you’ve done since you moved in.”
“I thought you liked it that way,” Neil says. The memory washes over him in a wave—two weeks ago, the Monsters’ back porch, Andrew’s fingers tucked into Neil’s belt loops, Andrew saying, “your silence is your most attractive quality”—and then evaporates just as quickly, leaving him standing on the inconsistent surface of the trampoline, spot-lighted in Andrew’s emotionless gaze. Neil figures he should do some kind of bouncing now, in this extended silence, but he’s pretty sure that his knees will lock up on him if he tries it. He attempts to shift his weight, to soften his stance, to get a sense of how the trampoline is going to move beneath him, if it’s going to hold him or come apart beneath him or spit him out with prejudice.
“Do you know how to use one of these?” Andrew asks dryly.
“Actually, no,” Neil admits. “I don’t think I do.”
There’s a flash of the response Neil expects to see on Andrew’s face, and maybe even on his lips: what kind of person has never been on a trampoline? What kind of person has never been to a kid’s birthday party, to one of those tween battle arena “bounce park” places, hasn’t been in one of the millions of American backyards just like this one?
The flash of surprise flares, flickers, and fizzles out in the space of a single blink, and shifts right back to that fraction of a go-fuck-yourself smirk that Andrew is so often wearing.
Andrew says, “They are intended for children,” in a matter-of-fact way that somehow doesn’t make Neil feel condescended to. Andrew continues, “The tension limits how high you can go, the net keeps you from flying off, and the pads on the springs keep you from cracking your skull open or breaking a leg in half.”
Neil nods.
Andrew asks, “Do you want me on or off when you try?”
“Uh,” Neil says. His instincts tell him he’s better off alone. His equilibrium tells him he’s walking on water. He asks, “Stay?”
Andrew had been fidgeting with his lighter, thumbing over it rapidly while they talked, but he tucks it away now, nods at Neil, wipes his palms off on his jeans. He reaches out for Neil, and says, “Give me your hands.”
Neil obediently puts his hands into Andrew’s, overly aware of the intimacy of it—Andrew’s calluses; the forever-crooked middle, ring, and pinky fingers of Neil’s left hand, broken once when someone who’d known him as a toddler had closed a car door on them; the faint slick of moisture Andrew hadn’t quite been able to wipe off. His ears heat. Andrew’s thumbs fold across Neil’s palms; Neil’s fingers instinctively close over them. The heat spreads down the back of his neck. Andrew had touched him when they’d kissed, hands chasing each other up and down Neil’s sides, across his back, but there’d been fabric between them everywhere Andrew had roamed. The only bare skin he’d touched had been Neil’s scalp. His ears. The back of his neck. All the places that light up now, public and exposed.
It was one kiss. It was far from Neil’s first. There’s no reason for it to be haunting him—it has no unfinished business. It started. It happened. It ended.
It ended, Neil reminds himself, and consciously drops his shoulders down from around his ears.
Andrew holds his hands for the first careful bounces, letting Neil get a little confident in his ability to stay upright and with an unbroken nose, and then steps back, feet on the padded rim of the trampoline, back to one of the poles that holds up the safety net. He seems content to just watch Neil jump, so Neil overcomes his self-consciousness and…does it. There’s a certain joy to it, once he surrenders—he doesn’t think this is what Kevin meant, but the idea is fresh in his mind, and interacting with the trampoline feels like a mutual surrender—he jumps, the mat catches him, accepts him, boosts him.
It’s not unlike Jeremy, in a certain metaphorical way.
Maybe it’s not unlike these monsters, too.
Neil doesn’t get much further than the jumping before Aaron calls out from the other side of the yard, “Allison says she’ll open the pool for us. If we want.”
“The pool!” Nicky echoes, loud in his delight. “I’m so in.”
“The pool?” Neil asks Andrew.
“Community pool,” Andrew explains. “Aaron’s friend works there. Has the keys.”
It’s not until the pale flashes of faces catch the moonlight outside of the net that Neil realizes that the evening has reached full dark, most of the color washed out of the world, everything bleached and shadowed. He looks up, wondering if he’ll be able to see more stars without the routine light pollution of the neighborhood, but it’s no good—there are still too many people with power, and downtown, and all that electricity bleeds up into the sky, hiding the stars and world of color that Neil knows should be there. He’s seen it—has slept on a blanket in a field in the middle of nowhere, Germany, and seen the play of galaxies spread across infinite space. There’s none of that here, though, in the suburbs; the sky is flat and black, with only the hint of stars. They’re making the universe smaller all the time, the way they live.
Neil looks away from the darkness and back to the cluster of men around the trampoline. They seem to be waiting on something—on him, he realizes. The pool. Swimming. He’s the new element here, the unknown, the one whose answer they don’t already have a sense of.
“Yeah,” Neil says. “I’m in.”
He’ll just keep his shirt on. He can’t imagine anyone in this group giving him shit for it.
Andrew holds the net open for him, and Nicky offers his hands up like he’s about to help a kid down off a playground. Or a lover off a boat, maybe. Neil stares flatly at him for a minute, and then Nicky sighs and says, “Worth a try?” but moves out of the way so Neil can hop down.
“You know,” Jeremy muses, “I think you might get further with your flirtations if you didn’t hit on everyone indiscriminately.”
“I don’t hit on everyone,” Nicky retorts, sounding aghast. “Only hot people.”
“You must find a lot of people hot, then,” Aaron says dryly.
“I do,” Nicky confirms. “A lot of people are hot. Everyone is hot, in their own way, right?”
“So you admit it,” Jeremy says, delighted. “You do hit on everyone.”
“He shamelessly flirted with a grandma in Starbucks last week,” Aaron says. “I thought he was going to try to dance with her.”
“I did try,” Nicky says. “She wasn’t interested. She broke my heart. I still haven’t recovered.”
“I’ll dance with you,” Jeremy volunteers.
“No can do,” Nicky says. “You’ve been earmarked.”
Jeremy touches his ear self-consciously. “I’ve been what?”
“You are intended for another,” Nicky says. “I’m a slut, but even I don’t interfere with destiny.”
“Nicky, you’re practically married,” Kevin points out quickly, so quickly that Jeremy doesn’t get a chance to ask the question hovering at his parted lips. Whether or not Jeremy and Kevin are going to get together, Neil doesn’t know—but even he can pick up on the not-particularly-subtle matchmaking efforts of Nicholas Hemmick. Can Jeremy? Is the wide-eyed oblivious thing an act? A strategy? Neil decides, for at least the third time since he’d moved in, that the whole thing falls squarely in the realm of things that are not his business.
“Your mouth writes checks your ass won’t cash,” Andrew says, as blunt as always. “And as fun as loitering at the scene of the crime is, it’s time to get this idiot parade back on the road.”
“Excuse me,” Nicky huffs. “My ass has never met a check it won’t cash? I’m not just DTF, I’m ETF.”
“ETF?” Jeremy asks.
“Oh god,” Aaron sighs. “Why did you ask?”
“Eager to fuck,” Nicky answers triumphantly.
There’s a mutual chorus of groans. Neil has never thought of himself as much of a joiner, but he’s pretty sure this response is involuntary. The joke was so akin to a physical blow that they all felt it deep in the solar plexus. Even Andrew makes a half-strangled sound of displeasure.
“Move,” Andrew commands.
Kevin says “Thank god,” at the exact same moment Aaron says, “God yes.” Nicky laughs wickedly and steps back with a dramatic swoop of his arm, a “right this way” gesture that’s incongruously elegant in the dark and overgrown yard. They all file out of the yard and into the street, where Neil looks up and sees that he’s landed next to Jeremy for this leg of the trek.
Jeremy is flushed and beaming in the moonlight. Either the joy or the dark hide the circles that are usually carved beneath Jeremy’s eyes—he’s getting older or more tired, flat out at work despite the modest size of his public school paycheck. Tonight, though, he looks a little like he used to back in their college days, that long tumble of time that curled itself up into years somehow, days and weeks and months sneaking and dancing and spinning past until Jeremy’s 4th of July text had winked up at Neil from right beneath Jeremy’s last message—”thinking of you” sent almost a year before. Neil had stared at the two messages, one he hadn’t known how to respond to, and chosen honesty.
Jeremy: how you living, man?
Neil: barely
Two weeks after that, he’d moved into Jeremy Knox’s spare bedroom and started putting down roots, such as they were.
Jeremy himself is not a root. He’s no kind of metaphor. He grins at Neil, then shuffles a little closer and jabs at him with an elbow, jabbing and jostling until Neil breaks and smiles back.
“Are you having a good time?” Jeremy asks.
“Yeah,” Neil says, surprising himself with the answer.
“Me too,” Jeremy says.
“It beats staying at home,” Neil tells him.
“You love staying at home,” Jeremy says.
“Yeah.” Neil nods. “I know.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Jeremy says quietly. “I know you’re kind of humoring me.”
“I’m not,” Neil protests.
“But it’s good to have a place,” Jeremy continues, ignoring him. “It’s good to have people.”
“It’s good to be good at people,” Neil says. “I’m not.”
“That’s not true,” Jeremy says loyally. “You just don’t have a lot of practice.”
Well, Neil can’t exactly argue with that.
Jeremy clarifies, “With having friends, I mean.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Neil says. “My skills tap out at small talk.”
“Welllll,” Jeremy says, elongating the word with pristine skepticism. “I wouldn’t say you were great at small talk.”
Neil can’t exactly argue with that either.
Jeremy quickly adds, “But you have your charms.”
“Mouth-closed charms?” Neil asks.
“Volume on mute charms,” Jeremy agrees. His voice is fond, even teasing, but Neil feels his face wince towards a grimace anyway. His mouth has gotten him into trouble more times than he can count. He doesn’t have a quippy comeback to wipe away a lifetime of black eyes and sore ribs, and Jeremy’s too good and kind to burden with Neil’s calloused Teflon flippancy anyway.
But Jeremy really is good and kind, so Neil doesn’t have to come up with a response at all—before he can get too lost in the search for words, Jeremy drops his voice a little and says, “You have Andrew’s attention.”
Neil feels a little like he just got caught out daydreaming on a stakeout—like he missed the thing he’s been watching for, hours of staring at the front of a bank only to look away at the exact moment the aspiring burglars slip through the front doors. He swivels towards Andrew just in time to catch Andrew’s gaze, which is angled discreetly towards him. Andrew is ostensibly talking to Aaron, but his eyes are turned further than his profile, locked in their corners, watching Neil.
Their gazes lock; neither of them smile. It lasts a second, maybe a hundred, and then Andrew is looking at Aaron and Neil’s only about half sure he hadn’t imagined it.
Neil’s only half sure he hasn’t imagined all of it.
He tells Jeremy, “I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.”
“Me neither,” Jeremy admits. “But I’m leaning towards good. I think he’s accepting you. You’d tell me if he’d threatened to stab you, right?”
Neil thinks he would, probably, tell Jeremy if Andrew had threatened to stab him. At least, he might mention it lightly, as a fun anecdote during lulls in the dinner conversation: Hey, Knox, did I mention that your neighbor offered to introduce me to my insides? I had to politely decline, as my insides and I have already met and mutually decided we were better off not seeing each other anymore.
Neil, who isn’t entirely sure if Andrew is accepting him, rejecting him, or seducing him, changes the subject: “The trespassing stakes keep getting higher. Do you think we’ll break into a bank next?”
“If anyone could, it would be this group,” Jeremy says with an air of (entirely misplaced) pride.
“I’m less worried about could than would,” Neil says.
“I remember a time you would have done it for fun.”
Not quite, Neil thinks. He’s rarely done anything just for the sake of “fun,” and specifically not anything risky like bank robbery. Normal people tend to confuse necessity for thrill, though, when the risk is high. And Jeremy Knox is normal—good people—a good guy. Is that why Neil agreed to move in? He thinks they both picked the wrong house, though, if normalcy was what they were going for.
As if he can hear Neil’s thoughts, Andrew turns his head again. The blond shag of hair gives way to his profile, and their eyes lock; Neil holds the contact this time, denying his perpetual instinct to skitter away. Acceptance, rejection, seduction—one way or another, Neil has a feeling he might know before the night ends.
They walk, and walk, and then all at once they arrive. Neil hasn’t been to the community pool yet, and he’s not sure he had any real expectations of its appearance, but he finds himself unsurprised nonetheless. The building is low, blocky, and beige, wrapped in metal fences and gates that may as well be brick walls in the impenetrable dark. One of the gates squeaks open, revealing a blonde woman. She’s dangerously curved, with impatient body language that suggests more fond exasperation than actual annoyance.
The woman must be Allison, Aaron’s “friend.” Neil takes one look at the furtive glaze of Aaron’s expression when they all cluster around the entrance and thinks he understands the invisible scare quotes that Andrew had distastefully enunciated around the word “friend” earlier.
“Took you long enough,” Allison calls.
“We’re walking tonight,” Nicky tells her. “‘Tis a nobler pursuit.”
“Noble and slow,” Aaron clarifies. “Nicky is constantly getting distracted by shiny objects.”
“You say that like you don’t have your own shiny objects,” Nicky retorts. He gives Allison a pointed kiss on the cheek and shoots a look over his shoulder at Aaron as he slips through the gate and into the pool complex.
Aaron mutters something under his breath that sounds a little like “gargoyle,” and steps in after Nicky. Even in the moonlight, Neil can see Aaron’s face flush at the squeeze of Allison’s hand on his arm.
Kevin follows Aaron, and then Jeremy, and Neil somehow finds himself next to Andrew again, bringing up the rear.
“Andrew,” Allison says evenly. “Lovely to see you, as usual.”
“Almost too lovely,” Andrew drawls. “As usual.”
There’s a moment of silence. Neil has no idea what Andrew and Allison say to each other in the quiet, in Andrew’s flat expression, in Allison’s sharp one, in the words they don’t speak; it stretches, and stretches, and then Allison turns to Neil and says, “You must be Neil.”
“What gave it away?” Andrew asks.
“Oh, the whole package,” Allison says with an airy wave of her hand. The hand dances, flighty, and then tucks under Neil’s elbow and expertly pivots them so that they’re side by side. Neil’s arm is bent and stiff, like he’s escorting a debutante into a ball, like it’s prom and his date is six inches taller than him and wants a really formal entrance. Allison takes a small step, and then another, and then somehow they’re walking in step, smooth, almost a dance. She pats his bicep and says, “Nicky has told me all about you.”
“Oh,” Neil says, though what he really means is ‘uh oh,’ or maybe even, ‘oh no.’
Allison laughs, delighted, as though that single word has tickled her with the precision of a feather. She drops her voice and says, “He told me that I shouldn’t look at, talk to, or talk about you for too long, or you’ll probably run away.”
“He’ll leave the state,” Andrew adds from behind them.
“Maybe fake your own death?” Allison suggests. “Are we reaching your limits yet Neil? Let me know.”
Drily, Neil says, “Yeah, I am feeling a little faint.”
“Do you swim?” Allison asks.
“I can.”
“Good,” Allison says. “So if you drown tonight, we’ll know it’s on purpose.”
“I’m not sure that will hold up in court,” Neil tells her.
“You’re already talking about suing me?” Allison asks. “Nicky’s got you all wrong, I think.”
“Most people do,” Neil says, surprising himself with honesty. He supposes he’s not immune from getting himself wrong, too, but he’s not sure being so unpredictable that you don’t even know what you’re going to do is actually a positive personality trait.
“You know,” Allison says thoughtfully, “I completely believe that.”
Neil doesn’t look back to see what Andrew’s doing, if he’s watching or ignoring them, if he’s right at their heels or way back by the gate with a cigarette, but he thinks he can feel the weight of Andrew’s attention like a hand on the back of his neck. He’s so conscious of it, of that gaze so heavy it’s almost a touch, that he only sort of realizes they’ve reached the door, and only sort of registers that he’s stepped aside and opened it for Allison. She sails past in a waft of mellow, powdery vanilla, and Neil blinks and finds himself looking right at Andrew. For the first time, Neil realizes that Allison and the twins have nearly identical shades of blonde. They could be triplets, Neil thinks, only a little hysterically.
“We don’t have suits,” he says dumbly, about an hour too late.
“Swim in your bottom layer,” Andrew tells him. “Or don’t swim at all. Nobody gives a shit.”
The promise echoes in Neil’s head as they pass through the pitch-black lobby, past the still, dark water of the indoor Olympic-sized pool, and out into a more family-friendly space with a two-story water slide, wading pool, and deeper diving area. Nobody gives a shit, nobody gives a shit, nobody gives a shit.
Neil isn’t sure if it’s that promise or the depth of the night that sways him, but he strips off Jeremy’s hoodie, kicks off his shoes, peels his socks off his feet, and shucks his jeans, leaving himself in underwear and a t-shirt. Kevin, Jeremy, Nicky, and Andrew all strip down to just underwear, but Aaron leaves his shirt on. Allison’s sweats come off, top and bottom, and reveal a white one-piece.
Andrew’s promise holds true; nobody gives a single shit, or spares Neil a single glance as they jump into the water, painting the air with a chorus of mingling shouts and winces. Neil braces himself, inhaling to fill his lungs with air and leave no space for the shock of cold, and then takes the first step into the shallow end of the pool. With the hoodie gone, and with his legs prickling in protest of the drop in temperature, it finally feels like the season. A shudder rocks through Neil’s body; he takes the next two steps quickly, then sinks into the water until it laps at the tops of his shoulders. It’s too cold, and too cold, and then his body acclimates the way he knew it would, settling into the chill.
He’s still shivering his way through the last of his adjustment when the quiet slip of skin through water announces Andrew’s presence behind him. The others had jumped in kamikaze-style to the deeper end, leaving the shallows dark and quiet other than the ripples lapping against Neil’s shoulders—a gentle echo of the flailing and casual attempted-murder-by-drowning taking place across the pool.
Neil wades a few feet further in and then turns, catching Andrew in the moment of submerging up to his neck.
“You don’t want to join in the violence?” Neil asks lightly.
“You call that violence?”
“It’s an approximation.”
“A pathetic approximation.”
“I don’t know,” Neil says thoughtfully. “They might actually manage to kill someone.”
“Accidental death,” Andrew dismisses.
“Right, sorry,” Neil says. “That would be boring.”
“You and Jeremy,” Andrew says. It’s an abrupt subject change, but Neil welcomes it. He was running out of light-hearted observations about masculine bonding.
“Jeremy and I,” Neil says.
“What’s that an approximation of?” Andrew asks.
“Uh,” Neil says. “Friendship?” He thinks about the alternatives—the romantic alternatives—and something clicks in his mind. “Who’s asking?”
Andrew raises an eyebrow, questioning. The brow is pale, but not as pale as his skin in the moonlight. The tops of his shoulders are alabaster, rising in bleached slopes above the water, the definition of muscle lost in the low light.
“Kevin?” Neil offers. “Nicky?”
“Ah,” Andrew says. It’s just one word—and hardly that, more of a sound than a word—but for the first time all night, Neil feels like he’s being laughed at.
He tamps down his defensiveness and says, “Nicky isn’t subtle.”
“No,” Andrew agrees. “He rarely is.”
Rarely isn’t never, Neil recognizes. The departures board surface of his mind ripples again, searching for configurations that make sense. Andrew is asking because… Nicky sent him on a mission. Kevin sent him on a mission. Nicky is always hinting about Kevin and Jeremy, and it took Neil about two weeks to figure out that’s what he meant, but he got there eventually, and he’s pretty sure about it now. Andrew is asking because they need to know if Neil’s going to lay claim to Jeremy. Or, Andrew is asking because they need to know if Jeremy is going to lay claim to Neil? He’s so busy trying to find the truth of it that he doesn’t realize Andrew is moving again until he tries to blink the world back into focus and finds nothing but moonlight on black glass where Andrew used to be. Neil turns his head to the right, then the left, and finds Andrew halfway behind him, ninety degrees into a curve that would place him at Neil’s back. Neil turns, slowly walking his feet in that direction so he can keep Andrew in his line of sight.
“They’d probably be good together,” Neil says quietly. “Jeremy and Kevin.”
“Probably,” Andrew agrees. “Insufferable. Annoying. Cutesy.”
“Kevin?” Neil asks. He tries to picture the man—tall, quiet, focused—being cutesy. He tries to picture what Andrew would think was insufferably cutesy and lands on… well, most things. Hand-holding. PDA. Acknowledging each other in public. Prolonged eye contact. Any eye contact at all after you kiss, apparently.
“He is highly emotive,” Andrew says, without even a drop of his own emotion. “It’s embarrassing.”
Neil turns himself another fifteen degrees so he can keep Andrew in his line of sight as the other man cuts through the water in a smooth arc. Andrew barely leaves a ripple behind him, moving so steady that Neil keeps forgetting he’s doing it until Andrew slides out of Neil’s line of sight. He turns, and turns again when he’s too slow, too late to keep up.
It takes him a minute to realize he’s being fucked with—not just the movement, but the words, the claim about Kevin’s expressiveness. Neil says, “Not Jeremy.”
“No?” Andrew asks.
“He’s notoriously cold,” Neil says. He doesn’t stop moving this time, but keeps his feet shuffling in increments of centimeters. He says, “Who can tell what Jeremy Knox is thinking?”
“Toddlers,” Andrew says.
“Toddlers are surprisingly empathetic,” Neil says. “Like dogs. They know what their owners are feeling.”
“Jeremy and Kevin would own insufferable toddlers,” Andrew says.
Neil is definitely being laughed at. Andrew is laughing at him. Neil thinks about splashing Andrew in retaliation, thinks about opening his mouth and seeing what comes out, thinks about telling the man to stay the fuck still, thinks about swimming away and joining the nonsense happening at the other end of the pool. He does none of these things—instead, he inhales deeply and drops his head beneath the surface of the water, letting himself fall until he’s nearly sitting on the pool’s concrete bottom. It’s pitch-black underwater, no pool lights, only the vaguest glimmer of something above the surface. Neil holds his breath and counts one-thousands, wondering if Andrew will still be there when Neil resurfaces, if he will have fucked off entirely, where in his orbit of Neil’s position he’ll be.
He holds his breath twenty-one-thousand, twenty-one-one-thousand, twenty-two-one-thousand. How long until Andrew gets bored? How long until Andrew thinks he’s drowned and hauls him back up to the surface? Or would he even bother? Neil has a mental image of Andrew shrugging and slipping off towards the others. Neil’s drowning put down as an accidental death, just like he’d said. Thirty-one-thousand. Thirty-one-one thousand. Neil’s lungs are on fire. He’s never been a particularly strong swimmer. There are a few vague flashes in his memory of thrashing in a bathtub as a little kid, desperate for air, failing to find any purchase against the smooth white sides of the tub.
Thirty-three-one-thousand.
He surfaces, and there’s Andrew, somehow precisely in front of Neil, blonde hair silvery-gold in the moonlight and nearly black where it curls around the nape of his neck.
Neil wipes his own hair out of his eyes, pressing hard to sluice the water off his face. His breathing is embarrassingly ragged when he sucks in air; it takes him three deep breaths to get ahold of it, a fourth and fifth to smooth it out, and then Andrew reaches out and smooths a few errant, dripping locks of hair off of Neil’s face and the sixth breath comes out halting and shaky again. Andrew’s hand is warm, somehow, despite the chill in the air, and there’s a callus on the inside of his middle finger that scrapes against Neil’s forehead, sending a shiver through him.
“Death wish?” Andrew asks mildly. “I think they can probably help you out with that.”
He indicates the ‘they’ with only the tiniest nod of his head, but Neil follows it anyway, tracking across the expanse of water to where the others seem to have stopped wrestling and started lining up.
“Neil!” Jeremy calls. They’re outdoors, but it’s nearly silent, and his voice echoes around the concrete area, maybe even off the rippling surface of water. “Want to play sneaky sharks and minnows?”
Does he? On the one hand, he wants to stay here and stare at Andrew until the man makes sense. On the other hand, if he does that, he’s probably going to say something stupid or awkward. He looks to Andrew for guidance, unsure of why he’s doing it, unsure of why he thinks he’ll find any.
“What makes it sneaky?” he asks quietly.
“The shark keeps his eyes closed,” Andrew explains. “Doesn’t start hunting until someone makes a sound.” He stops there, holding the pause. Neil feels like he’s caught in Andrew’s cupped palm, like whatever decision he makes, Andrew will be the one to execute it. Neil nods. Yes. He wants to play. He’s here to play. Give in, Kevin had said. Surrender. It’s been working out for Neil so far.
“Let’s go,” Andrew says. Louder, he calls, “Neil is the shark.”
Of the two of them, Andrew’s the one who’s been practicing for the role—circling Neil in the pool the way he has been, always moving, always at the predatory edge of Neil’s awareness. Still, Neil doesn’t mind being the shark; he swims to the center of the pool, staying shallow enough that his feet can still touch the ground. He closes his eyes and lets his arms float on the surface of the water, his palms spread wide, ready to catch the slightest lap of a ripple as the minnows start moving
“Alright, fishes,” Neil calls. “Come and try me.”
He starts counting again in one-thousands. He makes it to eighteen before he hears a sound, a tiny splash, nothing more than the slip of an arm into and out of the water, but that’s all he needs. The night is so quiet. Neil springs into action immediately, diving under the water and kicking off, arms out, groping for limbs and flesh. He catches Nicky first, who goes down in a dramatic facsimile of a real shark attack. He gets Kevin after that, grimly chasing him down only a few feet from the safety of the edge. It’s Andrew and Aaron who prove nearly impossible, and Neil wears himself out trying to get them, finally giving up after the fifth round and surrendering the role of shark to Aaron, who hums the Jaws theme music with a grin on his face that Neil thinks is more wolfish than sharkish.
By the time they call it quits at the pool, Neil’s arms and legs are sluggish, his body chilled, and his stomach growling. He has no idea what time it is. Reality waits for him in the pocket of his hoodie, but he finds himself reluctant to engage with it. Getting out, getting dressed, turning his phone back on—all of that will sort the world back into lanes and lines, progressions and priorities.
He’s the last out of the pool and the last to gather his stuff, which he tries to hold close enough to shield him but not so close that his wet t-shirt and underwear soak the dry clothes. The wet-dry division stumps him for a minute as he stands alone around the corner, shivering on patchy grass and huddling against a concrete block wall for privacy, but he figures he’s already come this far, he might as well commit. He peels out of his wet t-shirt and pulls the hoodie on as fast as he can, his movements jerky in the cold. Next, he shucks his underwear and pulls the jeans on over bare skin. There’s a metaphor in it, he thinks—losing a layer, his linings, the stuff that separates what people can see from what he doesn’t want them to.
They hang their wrung-out clothes up in the employee locker room and hit the streets again, clumping together around the doors as Allison carefully locks and double-checks them, ensuring that no more roving bands of hooligans break in and avail themselves of the facilities.
Adding Allison to the group throws off the balance—they’re seven now, instead of six, but Neil still finds himself at the back of the group with Andrew. It’s less a coincidence than it is the result of Andrew standing toe-to-toe with him and blocking him in until the others have fallen into their positions in line. The distance between them and the rest of the group stretches from ten to fifteen to twenty feet as they walk. Neil walks slowly enough that his shoes scrape the ground audibly; he’s shoulder to shoulder with Andrew, bumping, arms brushing. The gritty sound of soles on pavement is punctuated with the rasp of Andrew flicking at his lighter’s spark wheel over and over again.
Andrew flicks, Neil remembers Kevin saying, and Aaron rubs.
Feeling bold, Neil taps his knuckles against the back of Andrew’s hand. “Nervous?” Neil asks.
The look Andrew gives him is censuring. Scathing. It flips a switch on something fizzy in Neil’s chest. He grins at Andrew.
Andrew rolls his eyes.
Neil tucks the smile into the corner of his mouth and rubs it off with the sleeve of his hoodie. The fabric is thick and warm against Neil’s face, even if it’s staving off just enough of the cold to keep Neil from shivering. Thinking about the cold is enough to let a shudder break through, creeping its way down from his wet hair to his elbows and teeth.
They’re heading towards the little downtown area in this end of town, which mostly just means the blocks are getting shorter and the rows of shops are getting older and closer together. They’re still firmly in the 1990s phase of the expansion when Nicky suddenly whoops and veers off-course, hopping a scraggly bush and bee-lining straight for an open door in the row of buildings. Neil squints to read the lettering on the shop in the darkness: Sno Cones.
Inside the shop are the first other people they’ve seen all night: three girls in fur-lined Crocs and matching sweatsuits, who tell them about a bonfire party down by the lake and then all climb into a tiny, two-seater convertible and take off in a fury of hair and tires and Lizzo at speaker-busting volume.
“Icons,” Nicky sighs as the girls’ brake lights disappear around a corner. “We are definitely going to this party.”
Neil lets Andrew order for him and ends up with two scoops of a bloody crime scene in a cup. There’s so much crimson syrup that Neil feels vampiric eating it, knowing every bite is leaving bloodstains on his lips and tongue. Andrew’s own cup looks like a unicorn exploded—pink and blue and lavender swirls with a maraschino cherry and a stick of rock candy poking out at a rakish angle. Neil can’t believe he’s eating ice in this weather, but somehow he feels warmer doing it—or maybe it’s just that his tongue gets so fucking cold that he appreciates the little heat there is in the rest of him.
The bonfire thing is halfway to a rager by the time they get there, probably because they’re the only ones who’d decided to go it on foot that night—Neil thinks they walk past half a mile of cars lined up on the side of the road before they spot the glow of fire through the trees. The core of it burns orange in the night. It reminds Neil of the sun: a central point of heat and light, a dense core of gravity, and all of them pulled to it, orbiting. Bonfire party as solar system, Neil thinks, and all of them planets. Or, some of them planets—Neil feels more like a moon, or a meteor, something sucked in by their gravitational field. They wind through the trees towards the light. Neil makes one valiant effort to separate himself once they reach the clearing, presses his feet into the soft earth, tries to hold himself back from following as Andrew steps past the treeline.
Standing his ground is harder than it should be. Maybe it’s just habit, after these hours of following, but Neil feels oddly lonely, standing by himself just past the golden glow of the fire. His heart thumps in his chest, tripping, chasing after the others—chasing after Andrew. The yearning pulls him forward onto his toes, but he forces himself back down onto his heels. Surrender? Give in? Neil almost doesn’t, and then Andrew looks back over his shoulder to check for Neil. Their eyes lock; Andrew stops, turns around, comes back. He raises an inquisitive eyebrow at Neil, who shrugs helplessly.
Neil says, “You kissed me.”
Andrew’s other eyebrow goes up, nearly matching the curve of the first.
“And then, nothing,” Neil says. “Why?”
“Does it matter?” Andrew asks.
“I don’t know,” Neil says. “Does it?”
Andrew’s thumb works at his lighter as he studies Neil’s face. Neil can’t see either the lighter or Andrew’s eyes, not well anyway, but he sees enough to know Andrew is reading him, every nook and cranny. After a long moment, Andrew says, “I guess so.”
There’s a smooth little movement when Andrew puts away his lighter, then he puts his cold hands on Neil’s face, thumbs resting on Neil’s jaw, and pulls him down until their mouths brush.
Andrew says, “Hello, Neil,” and kisses Neil’s response away with soft lips and a firm grip. Neil expects it to be perfunctory, a kiss to humor him, but it isn’t—it’s consuming, muting the noise of the party nearby and the flicker of the fire, blurring everything and then obliterating it behind Neil’s closed eyelids. In the huddled confidence of the forest, Andrew kisses Neil like he’s saying something with it.
Neil flushes hot from his toes to the roots of his still-damp hair, shivering as the chill scatters and dissipates like ripples in water. He makes a strangled, undignified noise at the slick heat of Andrew’s mouth, and flushes hotter yet when Andrew’s lips curve into an amused smile, effectively stopping the kiss.
“Oh fuck you,” Neil grumbles.
“Rude,” Andrew says, with a punishing bite to Neil’s bottom lip.
Neil wants to put his hands on Andrew, so he shoves them into his pockets instead; he wants to push Andrew against a tree and kiss him senseless, so he curls his hands into fists that flex against worn denim. The play of Andrew’s mouth over his doesn’t last long enough—it’s only a minute, maybe two, of desperation and satisfaction, the bruising sweetness of Andrew’s fingertips, the strain of Neil’s body towards the man in front of him, and then Andrew stops, drops a single soft peck to the corner of Neil’s mouth.
Neil shivers again, from cold or sensation, he doesn’t know.
“You’re still cold,” Andrew says, more like he’s accusing Neil of a personal failing than making an observation.
“A little,” Neil admits. His hair is damp. The hoodie, which had been too warm before, isn’t quite enough without anything beneath it. He’s borrowing some heat from Andrew, from the press of them together, but his back is still cold, the tips of his ears numb with it now that the rush of blood has subsided. He wishes he had another layer on. He wishes they were closer to the fire.
“I’m learning so much about you tonight,” Andrew says casually. He steps back, leaving Neil feeling cold all over, and bereft, and maybe abandoned again, but before he can fall too deep into it, Andrew tucks his fingers into Neil’s front pocket and tugs. “Picks locks. Bad at trampolines. Can’t dress for the weather.”
Neil takes a step forward to match the backwards one Andrew takes—a step closer to the fire, to the wide golden dance of it, to the heat it promises. To Andrew.
“I didn’t know we were going swimming,” Neil protests. Andrew takes another step back, eyes gleaming, purple-stained mouth opening to deliver another dismissive comment that’s oddly soothing, or maybe one of his habitually casual insults, as blunt as a slap to his face but somehow never really stinging. Whatever it is Andrew’s going to say, it’s not going to translate that kiss for Neil, or the fingers tucked possessively in his pocket, or the openness with which Andrew is doing it. This is still a language Neil doesn’t speak, a game he doesn’t know how to play, but he thinks he knows one thing for sure. The most important thing. Jeremy was right; Neil has Andrew’s attention.