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Betsy Dobson is smiling when she asks, “Who are you right now?”
He considers this. This week has been full of nightmares—of mostly his father, but sometimes his mother—and it’s making the lines blur, part of him terrified and the other parts struggling to control it. “Neil,” he decides. He’s too anxious to be anyone else.
“Hello, Neil,” Betsy says. She sounds as warm as ever. He keeps waiting for her to sound like she doesn’t believe him, for her to tell him that he’s lying for attention, but she hasn’t yet. “How has your week been? You were concerned about your English class, last time I saw you.”
Last time she saw him was two weeks ago; last week it had been Nate sitting in the chair, sullen and mostly silent. Neil tugs on his sleeves and taps his fingers against his thigh. “I think Katelyn helped. I got my essay back the other day. I got a B.”
Betsy smiles again. She has a cup of hot chocolate in front of her, probably from her previous session. “I’m happy to hear that. Is your study group going well, then?”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m going to Aaron’s place over the weekend to study for our Art History midterm.” Neil shrugs. He and Aaron had signed up for the class to fulfill their arts requirement; they share the textbook that Neil had rented for the class. “It’ll, uh. It’ll be my first time going to someone’s house.”
His skin crawls at the admission. He’s trying to get better at telling the truth, but it makes him feel—exposed, like he’s offering his head on the chopping block.
That’s why his uncle is forcing him to go to therapy, he guesses.
“How do you feel about it?” Betsy prompts. “Are you excited? Nervous?”
He looks away from her desk to the shelves against the wall. One shelf houses only figurines; they’ve been rearranged since the last time he paid any attention to them to accommodate an eighth, a crystalline bee. “He lives with his brother,” he says, slowly, trying to pick out how he feels. “I haven’t—I haven’t interacted with him much. So I’m nervous about that.”
He had met him last year, when he had confused the blond hair for his brother’s and sat across from him in the cafeteria without thinking much on it, and then paused when he took in the rest of him. Oh, he had said. The black should’ve been my first clue. Do you mind if I sit here?
Andrew had given him a very unimpressed look but hadn’t told him to leave, so Neil had stayed in his seat and eaten his yogurt while reading a book for his English class.
They had sat for lunch together for the rest of the year, in almost complete silence, and it had been only a few weeks ago that Neil had figured out how to make their schedules match up again this semester. They still aren’t talking, beyond a few words here and there, so he doesn’t know how much it counts as interacting.
Betsy waits to see if he will elaborate, and when he doesn’t, she asks, “What about it makes you nervous?”
He shrugs, a bare twitch of his shoulders. He doesn’t know when he stopped tapping his thigh, but he starts up again, still looking at the figurines. “I just. Don’t know what to expect.”
“Maybe you should ask Aaron,” she suggests. “He’s your friend, and he’s proven that he’s willing to help you. He’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”
“Uh,” he says. He doesn’t think that Aaron would mind, but he doesn’t want to see the look in Aaron’s eyes when Aaron remembers that he’s some kind of weird fuckup who can’t pretend for longer for a few minutes that he had a somewhat normal childhood. “I guess.”
Betsy’s voice remains gentle as she persists; she has learned that although he appreciates firmness in his friends, his therapist is an entirely different matter. “You’ve told Aaron a little about your past, yes? He won’t resent you for not having the experiences that he has had. It’s okay to ask him to explain what you can expect from this weekend. You are allowed to ask. You are allowed to trust him.”
The bee on the shelf is nearly translucent; he can see through it into the dark stain of the wood. He splays his hands across his thighs, hard, the curves of his fingers lifting off his jeans. “Yeah,” he whispers. He becomes aware of a creeping heat around his jaw and ears, a weakness around his upper arms.
“Are you still here, Neil?” Betsy asks evenly and without judgment. Sometimes, when he feels overwhelmed, someone else takes the reins and allows him to float in a space that is both inside of his body and not a part of it. She has seen this happen a few times during their sessions, when everything is too much and Nate slides forward to tell her that that will be enough. She must be waiting for it, now.
He counts to ten in English, then French, then German, while he breathes. Slowly, the pressure recedes. He flexes his fingers. “Yeah. Still just me.”
“That’s good.” She sounds soothing, now, her voice soft. “Do you need me to talk about something else?”
He likes that she knows when to stop pushing. He likes that she remains patient with him, although he rarely stays for the entire session and talks stiltedly about his past. He sinks into his chair and nods.
She talks about what she has had for dinner this week. On Saturday she had made quiche, and she had finished it on Sunday with a couple of her friends. On Monday she had made lasagna; that is taking much more time to consume, because there is still some in her fridge, two days later. “I’m already getting tired of it,” she admits. “Maybe I’ll pack it up and give it to my friends for them to finish off.”
He lets her talk to him until the end of their session. It gives him time to settle back into the body, to remind himself that he is Neil Josten and he is allowed to be here.
She walks him out, probably for the first time since he began seeing her, and asks him what he will be having for dinner tonight.
He lets out a breath and glances away; he had been hoping that he would be able to leave without speaking up again. “Uh,” he says, and stops. It takes a moment for him to remember what she had been talking about. “Probably not lasagna.”
“Yes, that’s probably for the better,” she agrees with an easy smile. “Hello, Andrew. You can come on in.”
Neil jerks his head up at the name to look across the waiting room, startled to hear of him here, away from the cafeteria and Aaron. Andrew rises from a chair in the corner, lifting his backpack onto his shoulder, and flicks his fingers at Neil as he passes by, carefully skirting around him. It might be a shoo. It might be a hello.
Neil replays the small motion in his head until he finds himself on the pavement in front of the building. He blinks and nearly turns around to peer through the clear doors to the counseling center; he represses the urge with a shudder, unsure of the reason for the impulse.
He pulls his phone out of his pocket to check the time. There are still a few hours before his next class, and he thinks that he might want to go for a run.
On Thursdays, they have lunch a little after noon. He can see Andrew when he enters the cafeteria, his back against the wall and his food apparently still untouched on the table in front of him, so he piles chopped strawberries into his yogurt instead of getting another container and grabs a bottle of water instead of waiting in line for the coffee machine. He has to stop at a plasticware dispenser and grabs what he thinks is a spoon until he’s setting his food down and is blinking at a fork.
“Huh,” he says, then decides that it’s too much of a bother to get up again. He stabs a strawberry against the side of the cup and eats it.
Andrew drops his phone against the table and begins cutting into his pizza with a knife and fork. “Fruit and yogurt,” he says, voice smooth and low and a little mocking. The timbre of his voice is similar to Aaron’s, but the way he speaks is entirely his own. “Is that all you eat?”
Neil glances up at him, then back down at his yogurt. Now that Andrew’s said it, he doesn’t think that he’s ever eaten anything else in front of Andrew, which is—well. It’s saying something. “Granola bars?” he offers.
“Granola bars,” Andrew repeats flatly.
“I think I got Taco Bell with Aaron a while ago?” Neil tries. “Or… I might have given Marissa most of it.” His fingers had been stained orange from beef run-off, so he had probably wiped his hands with a napkin and let Marissa eat the rest of his tacos. He doesn’t clearly remember that, but he does remember Marissa giving him some brownies the next day, which he had given Aaron to give to Andrew as soon as she had left. “Oh, did you like the brownies you got after that? I asked Aaron to give them to you.”
That makes Andrew pause; the scraping of his knife stops, then begins again. “Aaron had said that you didn’t want them.”
Neil spears another piece of strawberry. There is a distinction between give these to Andrew and I don’t want them, a distinction of intent and recipient, and Andrew apparently thinks it important enough to bring up. “Marissa had given me some brownies, I think for the Taco Bell. I don’t like sweets, and I know that you do, so I asked Aaron to give them to you instead.”
“Your first thought after receiving a gift,” Andrew says slowly, each word deliberate, “was to hand it over to me?”
“Yes?” Neil doesn’t know where he’s going with this. “I wouldn’t have eaten them. You would.”
Andrew just looks at him, one eyebrow raised, not exactly displeased but not exactly pleased, either. “You do realize that I am just someone that you have lunch with, yes?”
“Do we have to be something else before I give you food so that it doesn’t rot on my counter?” Neil shoots back with a bit of heat. There had been no deeper meaning behind his actions, no ulterior motive. He had been motivated by the simple thought that Andrew would like the brownies. “If you don’t want it to happen again, just say so.”
Andrew keeps looking at him, searching for something, maybe, the corner of his mouth curled a little but still; then he shrugs, losing interest, and drops his gaze. “It’s your food; you can do what you want with it.”
That, Neil guesses, is oblique permission to continue funneling unwanted dessert toward Andrew. He chews another strawberry and licks at the bit of yogurt that had smeared across his lip, kisses it off his thumb. The flash of irritation crawls out of his shoulders and allows him to relax again. “I think Marissa mentioned something about baking cookies for stress relief during midterms,” he eventually volunteers, as a peace offering, maybe. “Probably chocolate chip. That good?”
“Double up on the chocolate,” Andrew says, “and maybe. We’ll see.”
He’s been sitting in the library for four hours, working on the online Spanish homework next to Aaron. The rest of the study group has been flitting in and out as they arrive and finish their assignments and whisper about classes and Pinterest. Katelyn had brought them Starbucks a while ago—a black coffee for Neil and a caramel macchiato for Aaron. Aaron had thrown his away maybe twenty minutes ago, when he went to the restroom, but there’s still a little in Neil’s cup, now cold.
He’s good at picking up languages, finds school-taught Spanish to be challenging but not impossible, not after learning two languages through immersion and terror, but there are thirty-eight parts to this homework and he’s just barely past thirty.
“Remind me why we picked this language,” he says to Aaron.
Aaron looks as frustrated as he feels; his hair is disheveled from running his hands through it too many times. Although the library is air conditioned, long hours can make them sweat. “Because I wanted to be able to talk to Nicky in Spanish, and you thought that knowing Spanish would be helpful. We’re both idiots.”
“You are,” Katelyn agrees with some amount of sympathy, leaning over to look at Aaron’s screen. “That’s a lot of wrong answers, babe.”
“Because there are too many fucking words that mean ‘hate’,” Aaron grinds out. His hands tremble over the keyboard like he’s considering slamming his fists onto it. “Neil, which one uses molestar?”
Neil has to take a look; Aaron is a few parts behind him and has, apparently, been inputting the vocabulary blindly, just hoping to get a hit that will bring some clarity. “Uh, the fourth one. Switch one and three. Eight needs to go where six is. And then, uh, put five where two is, and I think you can figure the rest out.”
Aaron clicks into the boxes and taps the numbers beside the wrong answers so that he can remember where to put them. “I’m going to stab myself,” he mutters, more as a general complaint than a real threat.
Katelyn rubs his hair soothingly, her nails wine dark against his pale scruff. “At least it’s only eight. You’ll be outta here before nine, nine-thirty, tops.”
“You doing anything after this?” Marissa asks Neil from his other side. At some point since the last time he glanced over, she had pulled her hair into a ponytail at the back of her head, wisps curling around her temples. “We could cuddle your cat to destress.”
“Yes,” Katelyn nearly shouts, voice high and strong with excitement. She tamps it down but is grinning when she continues, “Yes. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Boo! Please let us come over. We can order pizza. Or make something? Do you have food at home?”
Neil doesn’t think that a twenty-four pack of water bottles, a carton of eggs, a loaf of bread, and a half-finished box of granola bars counts as having food at home. He looks between the three of them—even Aaron, for some reason, has perked up at Katelyn’s suggestion—so he says, with only a little reluctance, “We can order pizza, I guess.”
“I can pick up some alcohol from home,” Aaron offers. “We’ve got some whiskey, I think a bottle of wine from the last time Nicky came over. Probably some shitty rosé, though.”
Marissa waves a hand. “I like rosé,” she informs them with a touch of archness, as though she is doing them a favor. She probably is: Aaron works at a nightclub, so he probably knows best what alcohol tastes good and what doesn’t. “We can stop by a convenience store and get some soda to mix with the whiskey. None of us will get drunk enough that we won’t be able to get home after a couple hours. Sound good, Neil?”
Neil shrugs. He had been looking forward to lying down in bed after this, maybe scrolling through Pinterest or picking up the book that he had bought at Katelyn’s suggestion but hadn’t gotten around to reading yet, but in the end he doesn’t care much about them encroaching on his space and relaxing for a few hours; it means that Boo will have some company, at least. “Yeah, sounds good. We just have to finish this first.” He gestures at his screen.
Katelyn kisses the side of Aaron’s head and stands up, probably to stretch her legs; she’s been working on assignments for most of the time she’s been in here with them. “I’m praying for you, soldier.”
“I’ll need it,” Aaron says grimly.
It takes them until nine-ten. Neil gazes at the next assignment looming up, thirty-six parts instead of thirty-eight and due two weeks from now, and resolutely closes out of the window and shuts down his laptop. When he stretches, it feels like his entire back pops.
“Yikes, Neil,” Marissa laughs. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Aaron’s back doesn’t fare any better when he leans back in his chair. It sounds like his spine snaps. “This is where Spanish gets you,” he says, to no one in particular. “Honestly. This is the last time I’m doing something nice for my cousin.”
“Maybe we’d believe that if Nicky didn’t FaceTime you every week,” Katelyn tells him, but softens it with a brief kiss that has the line of Aaron’s shoulders relaxing. “Come on; Andrew’s probably home and drinking the whiskey. We need to get there before he steals all of it.”
“Andrew drinks whiskey?” Neil asks. It’s the only thing that catches his attention. Whiskey, from what he remembers, smells like rubbing alcohol and burns like ice on its way down. He finds it hard to connect that to the Andrew that he knows, who smells like smoke more often than not and eats a chocolate bar after he finishes whatever meal he’s decided will be his lunch.
Aaron flicks his gaze toward him, a little surprised by the interest. “It’s what he prefers, yeah.”
Marissa lifts her backpack from where she had leaned it against the table leg. “He drinks it straight,” she reveals, both horrified and delighted. “I can’t do that at all. I need to soften it with Coke.”
“Mountain Dew is better for that,” Katelyn objects. “It feels less carbonated. Makes it go down with less bite.”
“I guess we’ll find out after we make sure that Andrew hasn’t drank all of it yet.”
As it turns out, Andrew hasn’t. Andrew is smoking through an open window in the back of the living room, at an angle where he can see the door and the television, when Aaron unlocks the door and walks in, with Neil close behind him; Andrew looks at them with lidded eyes but doesn’t ask questions, only watches as Aaron moves to the kitchen and Neil stays by the door.
Earlier in the day, Andrew had been wearing a jacket, a concession to the dropping temperatures; now, in the privacy of his own home, he is in a short-sleeve shirt. There is a span of bare skin between his arm bands and his sleeve. It looks shockingly warm against the inky expanse of black, although he’s on the far boundary of orange light cast by the lamp.
Neil swallows. “We’re ordering pizza,” he tells him. That’ll probably satisfy him—Neil eating something more than fruit and yogurt and granola bars. “I think Domino’s, that’s the kind Katelyn likes. Do you want me to save you some of the marbled brownie things?”
Andrew turns his head to breathe smoke out of the bug screen. He must lift more than Aaron does; his arms are thicker, the muscles more prominent. He looks back at Neil, still standing in the entryway. “Three pieces,” he says after a moment. “Make sure one of them’s the center.”
“Okay.” Neil is smiling, a little. “I’ll bring over the leftover pizza, too.”
Aaron says, from the kitchen, “I can hear you, Josten.”
“Congratulations, I’m sure that your brother’s pleased about you being a witness to our binding contract of food delivery.”
A cupboard shuts. There is the hard clink of glass against counter, doubled; he must have found more than a bottle of whiskey and the rosé. “I’m ordering veggie pizza tonight, asshole. Every single one of them. Have fun picking off the peppers and olives.”
“Hope you like veggie pizza,” Neil says to Andrew.
Andrew just raises his eyebrows. “It sounds like he needs help in the kitchen. Better hurry before he breaks something.”
It’s a dismissal, but it isn’t cutting; Neil shrugs it off and smiles at Andrew before making his way over to the kitchen. Aaron is carefully pouring the contents of one whiskey bottle into another. The rosé is standing on the counter and appears untouched, so Neil takes it and waits for Aaron to finish.
Aaron mutters to him, in stilted, school-learned Spanish, “What’s up with you and my brother?”
“What?” Part of Neil is confused by the question; the other part of him is thinking, Can ‘qué tal’ be used like that? He’ll have to look it up later.
Aaron pauses to roll his eyes. It’s quiet in their house; the television is on low volume, the voices an almost distinct murmur from where Neil is standing. Andrew can probably hear them, too. “You ask about him. You talk to him. You eat lunch with him.”
“Yes,” Neil says, elongating the word. Aaron is using present indicative tense, which he feels may not be correct but, seeing as they’re only in Spanish II right now, might well be. “What is the problem?”
“You,” Aaron says, then stops. He peers at him, tense and investigatory, his mouth caught in a frown and his brow pulled together. Neil gazes back, unsure of the reason for the scrutiny and verging on defiance because of it, but whatever Aaron sees in him must answer whatever question he has, because Aaron gives up with a sigh and shakes his head. In English, he says, “Just go give Marissa the damn rosé, Josten.”
Neil leaves the kitchen and waves at Andrew in a kind of see you later before ducking out of the house, fingers curled around the long neck of the bottle. He hands it over to Marissa when he slides into the backseat of the car. “Aaron threatened me with veggie pizza,” he informs the girls. Katelyn, at least, can wrangle Aaron into a compromise. “We’re getting the marbled brownie things, though, and you’re leaving the middle row alone.”
Katelyn twists around in the passenger seat to stare at him in disbelief. “Are you actually eating dessert tonight?”
“I’m giving it to Andrew,” he explains.
Katelyn and Marissa exchange a meaningful look.
Neil clicks his seatbelt into place and sighs. “Why is that so surprising to all of you? Does it have to do with me or Andrew? Because you know that I don’t swing, and from what Aaron’s said about Andrew, he doesn’t do relationships, anyway.”
“After looking at you, he might,” Marissa says. Her smile is—teasing, he realizes, not intentionally making fun of him. She’s not thinking about him at all: she’s thinking about whatever fictional version of him is part of this particular fantasy. “I mean, come on, Neil. You’re hot. If Aaron wasn’t straight, Katelyn might actually—”
Aaron is opening the driver’s car door and catches the last part of what she’s saying. He glares at her while passing the whiskey over to Katelyn. “If you’re going to bring up the bed sharing, I will drop you off before going to Neil’s.”
“I’ll be good!” she promises, with a sidelong look at Neil, as if to say, See?
He doesn’t see, so he turns away from her and waits for Aaron to restart the car.
Boo is weaving around his feet as soon as he’s got the door unlocked, meowing like she thought she’d been abandoned. He tries not to step on her as he gets further inside; the plastic bag of soda bumps against his hip as he moves toward the counter in the kitchen.
“My little baby girl,” Katelyn is cooing from behind him. “Ooh, you’re so cute. I’m gonna pet you so soon.”
When Neil turns around to accept the alcohol from the girls, Aaron is nudging the door shut with his foot and shoulder with a wary look at Boo, who seems to be interested in the pizza boxes in his arms, if the way she’s trying to climb up his other pant leg is any indication.
Predictably, no one is reaching out to pluck her off of him. Instead, Marissa is pulling out her phone to open Snapchat.
“Crikey,” she stage-whispers in an accent. “Here we’ve got the mighty and elusive Boo clawing her way up her natural prey, a pizzaman… Will he be able to fend her off without dropping his pizza? More news at 11.”
Aaron levels her with an unimpressed look. “If you’re going to try to imitate someone, you can at least stick to one person. Steve Irwin, David Attenborough, and a news reporter? Really? ”
“Crikey,” she repeats with greater emphasis. “This one’s feisty! He might be able to make it!”
Katelyn takes pity on her boyfriend. “Boo’s natural predator enters the scene,” she narrates, stepping forward to take the pizza from Aaron, “and steals the ultimate prize.” Boo’s head swivels to track the movement of the boxes; when Katelyn begins to walk away, Boo unlatches herself from Aaron’s jeans, slides back onto his shoe, and trots off to follow her with a complaining mrrow, like Katelyn has ruined her fun.
Marissa angles her phone to keep Boo in frame. Her thumb has been pressed over the record button for the past minute; the pink flesh below her nail is white at the tip from pressure. “Defeated, the legendary Boo must nurse its pride for the rest of the night, but never fear—it is a proven fact that pets help Boos recover. Here, baby,” she croons, losing the deep, documentary-like edge of her voice, “here, lemme give you some love.”
Boo ignores her. Apparently, the smell of pizza is more appetizing than the promise of pets.
“Huh,” Neil says. He pulls the liters of soda out of the plastic bag to hide the smile tugging at his lips. “Defeated, the legendary Marissa must nurse her pride for the rest of the night.”
“But never fear,” Marissa sighs, “it’s a proven fact that pizza and booze help Marissas recover. Pass me the rosé.”
Later, watching Aaron corral the girls out of his apartment, it occurs to Neil that he is very nearly happy.
It’s not a feeling that he has ever been allowed to be familiar with. He has seen his father carve into men with a knife, with a cleaver, with an axe. He has had the handles pressed into his own hands to finish the job. He has had the blades turned on him when he wasn’t good enough.
His mother hadn't intervened until he was twelve years old and a school friend had asked him, with the kind of smile that said that he knew, to teach him how to use a knife. Taking him away should have been a kindness. It wasn't. Fists had replaced knives, harsh yanks to his hair, a hard palm striking against his cheek until he was silent and numb, and she never went to the authorities.
She had kept them running until his father had caught up with them.
She had given her life to protect Neil. He is mostly sure about that. Some days, though, he thinks that her primary motivation had been to spite the husband that had never loved her, to goad him into a rage that he would never recover from so that he could slip up and have it all be because of his own sloppiness rather than because she had alerted anyone, and he doesn’t know which is worse.
Their mistake had been veering too close to their home state. His mother had bled to death. Neil had been on the way to the same fate when the FBI had broken into the basement.
He hadn’t been happy when his father had gone to prison. He hadn’t been happy when his uncle—his mother’s brother, a man he’s only heard of and never met—had taken him in.
He hadn’t thought that he could know how to be happy, but he is standing in the middle of his living room with his cat in his arms, waiting for the guilt that usually jolts through him when he experiences something that his parents would have despised him for, and it never comes.
On Friday, the anxiety is manageable. He can channel it into cleaning his apartment and Boo’s litter box. He stuffs a few outfits into his backpack, the clothing folded as small as he can make them, and he changes into the comfiest hoodie that he owns because that is an easier comfort item to bring than the switchblade he usually keeps tucked in his waistband. Although he is legally allowed to have it on his person, he doesn’t think that Aaron would appreciate a weapon being brought into his home.
He can try to be a normal person for two days.
He wants to try.
Aaron picks him up at four-thirty, eyes bleary from a day of bio labs, and allows Neil to get settled into the passenger seat, backpack kicked underneath the glove box and Domino’s boxes laid onto his lap, before pulling away from the curb. The radio is tuned to a pop station, probably because of Katelyn.
It’s quiet until Aaron says, abruptly, “Andrew picked up some food for you yesterday. Fruit and granola bars and shit.”
It startles him, though he can’t place why. Andrew is the only one who knows his normal eating habits—when he’s with Aaron, they are either in the library or getting take-out with the girls. “That’s… nice of him,” he says uncertainly.
“Yeah.” Aaron is frowning, though. “He said you’d probably eat pancakes tomorrow if we got you, like, blueberries or something.”
Neil can’t remember the last time he ate pancakes. It might have been with his uncle, when his uncle didn’t yet know what kind of groceries to get for him. It might have been with his mother, at a random diner in a random town. He has the sense memory of thick batter made soggy with syrup.
“Yeah,” he echoes, swallowing the taste. “No syrup.”
Aaron keeps his gaze on the road, but he shifts uncomfortably in his seat, like he’s debating on whether or not to bring something up. “I don’t know what you’re doing with my brother,” he says eventually, “but he doesn’t usually go out of his way to be nice to someone. So. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”
It’s permission for—something. Neil thinks back to the failed interrogation in Aaron’s kitchen, to his protest to Katelyn and Marissa that he doesn’t swing and Andrew doesn’t do relationships and Marissa replying, After looking at you, he might.
There is a possibility of a kind within his reach, and he is less sure of his answer than he has ever been.
“Thanks,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and follows it with, “So do you think we should do the next Spanish homework tomorrow and just get it over with?”
The textbook lies open between them. Neil doesn’t highlight, but Aaron does, and the pages are a mess of smeared luminescent yellow by the time that Andrew appears downstairs.
Neil hears the rustle of cardboard and the faint tear of crust that means that Andrew is picking at the pizza that Neil had brought, as he had promised the other day.
He keeps his head down and tries to focus on copying the definition for Baroque art.
(He still glances up when Andrew crosses into the living room again, and if his gaze lingers because Andrew is eating one of the marbled brownies—well. Neither of the twins are looking at him, anyway.)
Neil is curled up on the sofa, a bottle of water on the coffee table and a mug of tea in his hands, when Andrew returns from work. The opening and closing of the door is the loudest noise that he makes: there is the shuffling of fabric, the rasp of laces, dull thumps as his shoes drop to the floor. Andrew takes a few steps without them, then stops.
Neil opens his eyes—he doesn’t quite know when he closed them—to meet Andrew’s gaze. His face feels strangely immobile, his body reluctant to move, so he lifts his mug fractionally in a kind of hello.
“I seem to recall you being offered a bed,” Andrew says. His voice is quiet and a little rough, like it’s scraping against a raw throat.
Neil doesn’t feel up to shrugging, yet, so he looks at Andrew for a moment longer before closing his eyes and tilting his head against the back of the couch. A few years ago, he would have been on alert as soon as he had heard Andrew’s car outside, would have forced himself to stay awake until the house was silent once more, but somewhere along the way he has stopped considering Andrew as a potential threat.
He should be worried about that, he thinks.
He isn’t.
He doesn’t move when Andrew walks over, lets Andrew take the mug from his hands without resistance. Andrew mutters, “Funny, I don’t remember adopting a stray,” but it might be more to himself than to Neil because he stays for just long enough to tug the throw blanket onto Neil’s legs before moving into the kitchen.
The sink turns on; water smacks against the bottom of its metallic basin.
It feels—well. It just feels.
When he wakes up again, it’s to Aaron sitting on the other side of the couch, clutching his mug from yesterday like a lifeline. One side of his hair is flat, and his cheek bears the faint, red imprint of the creases of his pillow. The arms of his sweatshirt are pushed up to his elbows. The room is yellow with sunlight.
Neil unbends his legs a little, just enough for his knees to click.
Aaron curls two fingers around the back of Neil’s shin and pulls it forward, and Neil follows the movement, stretching his legs into Aaron’s lap. Aaron keeps his hand on Neil’s ankle, below the rolled-up hem of his sweatpants. “So,” Aaron says, and gives him a searching look. “Not a good night?”
Neil shrugs. “I, uh. When I woke up, I wasn’t really ‘me’.”
Of their friend group, Aaron is the one who knows the most about Neil’s situation: he knows about his mother, and he knows that sometimes Neil is not Neil. He’s never seen Nathaniel, but he has seen Nate, and Nate is—similar to Neil, to an extent, but without the softness that Neil has been eased into. Neil lets Marissa hang off of him, lets Katelyn run her hands through his hair, but Nate holds himself at a distance and flicks them cold looks when they come closer.
Aaron had gotten annoyed by it, probably because after a few tries Katelyn had flinched and pulled away from Nate with a surprised, wounded expression, and had confronted Nate when Nate had excused himself to the bathroom. After a moment to make sure there was no mental opposition, Nate had tilted his head to the side and said, Right body, wrong person.
Aaron is in pre-med. He isn’t stupid.
You’re shitting me, he had said. Are you seriously using ‘multiple personalities’ as an excuse to be an asshole?
Nate had smiled his father’s smile: sharp and ready to cut. His voice had been pleasantly soft when he had leaned in, just a little, and said, Hey, Aaron. Take a good, long look at me. You really think I’m Neil?
And—well. Aaron hadn’t really had a response to that, so he had left Nate alone for the night and watched him with dark, speculative eyes. In the morning, he and Neil went out for coffee and talked about it, about what it meant and what Aaron should watch out for and what Neil wanted the girls to know.
What the girls know: sometimes Neil doesn’t want to be touched and sometimes he’s more of an introvert than usual.
What Aaron knows: the reasons.
So: when Neil says, When I woke up, I wasn’t ‘me’ , Aaron gets it. The bed-sharing is something that makes Neil feel safe because it reminds him of his mother, who had spent sixteen years trying to keep him alive, and Nate is—well, he is not entirely his father’s son, but he is very much not his mother’s.
“Oh,” Aaron says. His fingers flex on Neil’s skin. He keeps looking at Neil. “Do we need to get anything for him?”
Nate isn’t as easy to comfort as Neil. He isn’t a runner; he doesn’t lean into the smell of smoke, one of the only sense memories of his mother that doesn’t hurt more than it soothes; he grinds his teeth when touched. What calms him is having a knife in his hand.
“Left my switchblade at home,” Neil admits. “Didn’t think I’d need it.” He shrugs again, more for Aaron’s benefit than his own. “It’s fine. I think I’ll sleep on the couch tonight, though.”
Aaron takes a long sip of his coffee. “When Andrew wakes up, I can ask him for one of his knives. If you want.”
It’s—not an offer that Neil had been expecting. He blinks.
“I mean,” Aaron says, and stops. He blows air out of his mouth and shakes his head. “He’s always got knives on him. I don’t know how many. Apparently you talk to him, so he might be willing to lend you a knife for the weekend, if you need it to keep the fucker from getting antsy.”
The fucker is one of the kinder epithets for Nate. At this point, it might even be affectionate.
Neil hesitates. “I’ll think about it.”
They make pancakes from a box. There is a container of blueberries in the refrigerator, new and unopened. A feeling flutters into him that he finds difficult to name, so he doesn’t.
He does think about asking Andrew for the favor—probably for longer than he should.
He thinks about it when Andrew comes downstairs, dressed for the day but rumpled, like he’s pulled on clothing that he had previously left on the floor, and passes directly into the kitchen without looking at them where they sit around the coffee table, reviewing the notecards that they had made last night.
He thinks about it when the microwave beeps and the cloying scent of pancake batter, maple syrup, and melted chocolate hits his nose.
He thinks about it when the back door opens and closes, and then he stands up and follows Andrew out. Andrew is sitting on the back porch, though calling it that is a stretch: it’s a slab of concrete that isn’t high enough off the ground to warrant stairs. There is a patch of bare earth that stretches for a few feet before giving into grass.
Andrew is lighting a cigarette. Neil notices, with a kind of amused startle, that the feet planted in the dirt are covered by both socks and sandals. He takes a seat next to Andrew with his legs folded to avoid dirtying his socks, leaving a couple inches of space between his knee and Andrew’s thigh, and tries not to inhale the acrid smoke too noticeably.
Four cars rumble past the house in the time that it takes for the cigarette to burn down to the filter. Andrew stubs it out on the concrete and lights another.
He is able to take a single drag before Neil plucks it from his fingers. Neil cups his hands around it as if to trap the smoke, as futile as the ache that slips through his ribcage like a breath.
He says, casually, “Word on the street is that you can provide a knife, if I ask nicely.”
Andrew huffs in what could be a laugh or what could be derision. “And you calling Aaron the street is meant to be you asking nicely?”
“Yes,” Neil says, unperturbed. “It’s all in the tone.”
It’s a dig at Andrew and they both know it. As with the cigarette, Andrew allows it without protest, though this time he comments mildly, “You are not as funny as you think you are.”
Funny has never been a word that Neil would use to describe himself, so he lifts a shoulder and waits for Andrew’s decision.
It doesn’t take long. Andrew taps a staccato beat onto his knee, fidgety without his nicotine, before suggesting, “Let’s make it a trade. A knife for a truth.”
Unease crawls up Neil’s spine, the way it always does when he is asked for something real. He flicks a clump of ash onto the dirt and examines the sensation: it is not overpowering and does not threaten to choke him. It is, perhaps, a leftover fear from his time with his mother. His therapist says that it might have started earlier, when he had become aware of what his father did and had therefore been forced to begin to lie, but enough of him bears the stain of his father that he wants some of his mother.
“A knife for a truth,” he agrees. “What do you want to know?”
“Why do you want a knife?”
It’s a reasonable question. For a moment Neil considers telling him about Nate, considers explaining enough of his past that Andrew will understand why the knife would be a comfort—and it is dangerous, that consideration, because he does not know Andrew well enough to predict how he will react.
No. That isn’t quite right. He thinks that he does know Andrew well enough, through months of mostly-silent lunches and the past few days of almost-conversation, and that is what is dangerous—wanting to put his trust into someone and allowing the risk of having misjudged.
He breathes in the smoke and gives the simplest version of the truth. “I’ve been having nightmares about being back where I was. Having a knife within reach makes me feel safer. More in control.”
Andrew considers this. He has picked up the tapping, again, and it is without conscious thought that Neil adjusts his grip on the cigarette and offers it, filter-first, to Andrew.
Andrew’s gaze flickers to it, then him. Neil has seen this expression before, in the cafeteria on Thursday, when Andrew had been searching for something that Neil hadn’t figured out. He thinks that he understands, this time, because Andrew leans forward carefully, tilting his head so that his nose does not brush against Neil’s fingers, and inhales. The end of the cigarette flares red. They do not make eye contact, but it is close.
Andrew sits up again, and he releases the smoke in a cloud. He lifts himself from the poor excuse for a porch and goes inside.
For a long moment Neil doesn’t move. Then he flips the cigarette around, dislodging another clump of ash, and puts his mouth on the filter, fitting where Andrew’s had been.
He is no longer thinking about his mother. He is thinking about Andrew.
Another two cars pass through the street in the time that it takes for the cigarette to burn down to his fingertips. One of the cars is from this house.
He stubs the remains of the cigarette against the concrete and wanders back in. When he reenters the living room, Andrew is nowhere in sight, but there is a switchblade on top of his notecards.
Aaron doesn’t say anything when he sits back down, but he doesn’t have to.
What’s up with you and my brother? Aaron had asked two days ago in his kitchen, and Neil realizes, with a kind of dizzy swoop in his stomach, that if Aaron asks him again, he might have a different answer.