Chapter Text
“out there i’m a sharp knife.
are you that blue light?”
— MITSKI
Andrew didn’t bring the right jacket. This is the first thing he thinks about Ireland when he arrives; not the cliffs, not the way the air is so salty it burns his throat, not the empty, stone-paved streets. No, it’s the cold that pierces him more than anything, even more than the disorientating feeling of arriving somewhere further than he’s ever travelled.
Kilduáin is small — population of one-hundred-and-thirty, the closest hospital an hours drive. He’d looked it up on the plane, trying to distract himself from the height and the pressure and the turbulence. It hadn’t worked, but he has a list of statistics now in his mind that will never leave. It’s situated right on the West coast, where the winds are harsh and the swells are harsher and the rocks have a good record of smashing up boats attempting to reach the harbour.
The plane had landed just as he’d finished his reading, the in-flight wifi as slow as the creep of nausea. Hopefully the last flight he’ll have to take in a while. Andrew’s not good with heights — good thing that there is no lower place than sea-level. One could argue that rock bottom ends not at the seabed, but with a two year stint in juvenile prison ending with court-mandated medication, but no one has ever seen fit to argue with Andrew.
It’s probably why he’s here now — no one is willing to try and talk him out of anything, which is how he’s ended up in a place so small it requires three zoom-ins on a map to find even it’s name, on the other side of the world from his birthplace.
Renee’s to blame. She’s always the one to fucking blame. Some of them left that team better, and some of them left it worse — the two of them have settled onto opposite ends of the spectrum with similarly opposing acceptance of that fact. Someone she’d met in her first round of the Peace Corps had mentioned it to her, some guy who talked like he’d never even known what it meant to go hungry, let alone feel unwanted hands. She’d passed it onto Andrew, the little job-posting, so obscure it should have never made its way out of its hometown. Coastwatch wanted, she’d shown him, over the counter of the bar on a slow night. Had ignored that he had a job to do, and that he had an apartment two blocks away, and that there were three separate men staring at him from across the bar. Had ignored that it was for a job posting on the other side of the fucking world and that Andrew has never owned a passport.
Coastwatch wanted, she’d underlined with her finger, and smiled like it was fucking nothing.
“It might be good to get out of here,” she’d told him, picking the lemon out of her soda to pry out the seeds with her fingernails. Andrew had watched her lay them out on the napkin under the bar light in a neat line, one two three four, then drop the flesh and rind back on top of the ice in her glass. “I think it would be good for you.”
“I thought we had agreed a long time ago that you had no understanding of what is good for me.”
“Yes,” Renee had told him, that awful glint in her eyes. He’d never respected the bible-bashing, but he knew what lay underneath it. It’s why he knew her next words would be worse. “But we both know you don’t understand what’s good for you either.”
“Oh, little Miss Walker,” he’d grinned. The meds were gone, third year under the watchful eye of absent nurses and an apathetic psychiatrist who left him to detox with a heart monitor for company, but the habits learned on them remain. Apathy is comforting when you have nothing anyway. Even moreso when the drugs that kept you that way are stopped. “What did they do to you in that silly little deployment? You’re too nosy.”
She had smiled back, hadn’t needed his agreement. He got a text one week later from an international number asking to call, which turned into an email thread, which turned into standing here on an empty street with one bag and a phone and the wrong fucking jacket.
“Fuck you, Walker,” he mutters, and jams the keys that Moustache-Man-Conor had given him into the house’s door. It’s a street down from the coast-watch building, a round, storm-facing building that he has not seen yet. Someone’s supposed to meet him there tomorrow to show him the basics — everything else, according to Conor, is just watching.
That’s all anything is, really.
The house is barren — a kitchen with two pots hanging from hooks above the stove, two chairs and a table and blinds that shut against the cold wind. When Andrew looks into the single bedroom that peels off from the lounge, there’s a standard double and a chest of drawers. For more than a couple moments he regrets ever doing this, if only for missing the king mattress he’d had in his apartment back in Columbia.
Nicky had sold the house after graduation. No one needed three bedrooms in the same place anymore.
Andrew’s following apartment was nicer than it anyway. No mould in the bathroom at least. No one to barge into his room.
Here, the house is quiet and empty and belongs to the town, but for now it is his and he stares at the gleam of the pots in the dim light through the curtains for a moment. Outside the house, there’s the sound of rattling fences as the wind batters the coast. It whistles, somewhere, as if caught somewhere narrow, and dissipates into silence, before another gust leaves the town whistling again, like a single storm-fuelled breath.
Andrew drops his bag, and sits down on the cold floor. It’s stone — polished but no longer shiny, and he’ll have to put a mat down if he doesn’t want to freeze to death when the weather starts to get worse. He almost can’t imagine it — it’s July, now, and already colder than he’s ever known.
“First,” Andrew tells himself, as if able to disrupt the silence on his own, the hollow quiet of the Irish coast, “new fucking jacket.”
—
It takes a day. Andrew shouldn’t be surprised — one-hundred-and-thirty people, a town that is a glorified collection of five streets, a pub, and a port. He’s never been good at escaping things, and he should not have expected moving across the world to have changed that. Andrew makes a mental note never to hope for anything again, and stares blatantly across the grocery store at Kevin Day.
He’d been twenty the last time Andrew had seen him; stiff-backed, hair cropped, hand bound in a canvas brace. The winter banquet had been hosted at Breckenridge that year, the Evermore Ravens on the other side of the room from the Foxes.
Kevin Day had been standing with the other coaches, though, not the players. Everyone knew the story; a skiing accident. There had been whispers about it, loud enough to catch Andrew’s attention even out of his mind on his medication.
Kilduáin is a very long way from Breckenridge. That had been the later rumour; not of the accident, but of his total disappearance. Edgar Allen said he’d stepped back from the sport, the Exy world gossiped for a few weeks before going quiet, Andrew forgot about it and got on with trying to ruin his life further.
They had met once before that — in the locker room of Andrew’s high school team, with Riko Moriyama’s slanted eyes narrowing further at Andrew’s dismissal. Andrew had not cared about Kevin Day’s pleading, nor the promises they had made him.
Now his hair is long and unmanaged, falling to mid shoulder even where it’s tied up with a band at the crown of his head. It’s why Andrew disbelieves his presence, until he turns around and there’s the little, dark mark of a number 2 below his eye.
Kevin Day doesn’t see him at first, caught up in reading the back of an orange box, until he looks up as if aware someone is watching him, and locks eyes with Andrew.
Angular nose, a bone structure that had made teenage girls cry and TV hosts act creepy. The density of fatigue in his bones so visible that Andrew can see it from the other end of the aisle.
It takes a few moments before he even begins to recognise Andrew — he would honestly prefer it if Kevin Day did not recognise him at all. Leave that half hour recruitment meeting behind in the past instead of keeping it as a mockery of knowing each other, because that is a lie he would rather not tell.
He does, though, damn him to hell—the elegant tilt of his eyes widen, face dipping into something closer to fear than annoyance, and his mouth forms a quiet, child-like o.
“Oh,” Kevin Day says, dumbly. There is no one else in here to hear him other than a mother on the other side of the short, squat shelves who looks up at them curiously before turning back to the kid zipped into her jacket, and the man at the till who Andrew highly suspects is asleep.
“Oh,” Andrew repeats, mockingly. “Something tells me a lot of people would like to know where you are.”
Kevin’s eyes widen in a brief flicker of panic, before narrowing. It’s almost funny, the quick-change to annoyance from fear, but Andrew doesn’t laugh.
“Are you threatening me?” Kevin asks. He sounds confused; he sounds gobsmacked. Underneath it, there’s a current of fear that Andrew knows well how to pick out, and yet lets be. He shifts on his feet; tucks the bag of breadcrumbs under his arm so they won’t slip out of his hands. Kevin Day is still staring at him incredulously like he’d never though people might be looking for him.
“Should I be?”
Kevin’s eyes narrow me, and there’s a further flash of—panic, maybe. Unease. He leans back, slightly, despite that his height still leaves him unfortunately visible in this interaction. “Did you—follow me?”
“Why on earth would I do that,” Andrew deadpans. He moves the breadcrumbs to his other hand; he wants to leave, goddamnit. So much for a new life of silence. So much for a life removed from the five years he spent tethered to that awful fucking sport. Andrew has never had any luck to call his own. “If it makes you feel any better, this new job was intended to come with the bonus of never having to see anyone I’d ever known again. You’re not exactly helping to sell that.”
“Oh,” Kevin says, again. “Job—you’re the new coast-watch, then?”
“I suppose so.”
“I didn’t think they advertised it overseas—I mean, not the States, at least.”
“They didn’t,” Andrew agrees, and does not elaborate. Kevin tips his head in confusion, and the motion of it causes his long pony-tail to slip off the shoulder of his coat and behind his back. Like this, it makes his face narrower, more delicate than it had seemed when he had been a teenager. The things time does — for people like Andrew, it makes them rougher. For Kevin, it seems, it’s sweetened him. He’s more demure, less outwardly arrogant. As if something hollowed him out and then he’s refilled it with something viscous.
“Oh,” Kevin replies again, instead, and shuffles his feet. “So—”
Andrew doesn’t know what Kevin Day intends to say, following that, because he turns away from him and leaves the breadcrumbs on the wrong shelf before leaving. On the street, it’s almost empty around, and he doesn’t turn to try and spot Kevin through the windows — only heaves a sigh, something that doesn’t sound as angry as it feels. He can’t help it, as much as Kevin Day can’t help being here, but there’s still an unfettered anger at the fact of it. Andrew has never had anywhere his own, has never found a place to be alone. Above him, the sky is pale blue, sliced through with a single helix of razor wire and bordered in sterile white.
“Fuck,” Andrew swears, scrubbing a hand over his face. It’s clear today, but still cold, and the leather jacket he has doesn’t protect against anything except being perceived as weak. “Fuck.”
He picks his way through the gravelled streets back to the house, grocery-less and trying desperately to forget the image of Kevin Day, even as his memory supplies it to him too readily. Kevin Day, Exy starlet. Darling of the sport world, world champion at seventeen, the striker that every fucked-up kid on the Foxhole Court was trying to be. Short hair. A cast on his hand. Coaching uniform.
Nothing like this, what Andrew has just seen; like time has done its utmost to change every facet of him. A 180 from the boy who arrogantly tried to recruit Andrew to the Ravens with none of the finesse of his brother beside him.
You’re wasting your talents here, he had told Andrew, back then. Bold words from someone hiding in the furtherest corner of the earth possible.
The road gives way to the street that Andrew’s house—for now—is on, two others a little way down, widely spaced. The coast-watch building is down another winding street that splits off right next to Andrew’s, and he takes that instead of locking himself inside. His feet sink in the soft dirt, the town either uncaring for or unable to afford enough concrete to pave the pathway, and makes his way down the field-edged path.
The coast watch building is nothing flash — a squat, round building of white paint and cement, hanging almost off the edge of one of the cliffs that the town rests on the edge of. Inside, he knows it’s barren until you open the cupboards, and then it’s full of tables and maps and radios, a long bench along the front of the building where it’s almost all windows. He’d been shown around his first day, and will be shown again on his third, fourth, and sixth, when the relevant people are free. How to use the radio, how to use the warning sirens, where the kettle is located. All the important things.
Andrew ignores the door—painted green, of all things, and chipped to hell and back—inside, and takes the path that runs down the side of the cliff, a stony slope that leads straight to the beach and eventually evens out into sand. He’d only been pointed in the direction of it his first day, and had elected to stay inside — for both hatred of the wind, and the cold, and the new place. Andrew has always done better with anger, though; lived with it as a shadow.
The wind is stronger on the shoreline when the path flattens out onto the beach; nothing grows in the sand but for the long grasses, dry and tangled at the edges of the dunes. Further out past the line of gravel, the bottle-green swell smashes against the rocks, up the cliffs, leaves it frothy and spraying. The white mist of its violence like smoke against the backdrop of the green hills in the distance.
Beside the rocks, in wind this strong, the only thing he can hear over the rushing of his ears is the swell against the rocks. The wind and the water and the car-crash memory sound. It means no one can hear when he starts to yell.
He doesn’t know if it’s that it’s Kevin Day, or if it’s simply that Andrew could not escape successfully. That even if he went as far as the other side of the fucking planet, he couldn’t run from anything — not the country, not the sport, not the continual demand that he be more than he wanted to be.
He could leave, here, but Andrew is bound by deals, always, and debts. A written contract is enough for him to banish the thought of running from his immediate thoughts — the taste of salt is enough to push it to the back of his mind.
The sea, as it tends to do, ignores him. Just keeps crashing against the cliffs, until the violence of it turns insignificant in his periphery.
—
“Stop following me,” Andrew bites out, turning back to the bare shelves, two days later.
“There is one store here,” Kevin Day points out. Andrew can imagine him frowning behind him. “There’s like four streets in this area total.”
“Then go down one of the other three.”
“I need food!”
“Too bad. Stop following me.”
The wind hasn’t let up since Andrew arrived; if anything, it’s gotten worse. The west-winds whistle up the side of the cliffs and across the grassy fields and hills that border the town, battering the windows loud enough that he can’t sleep without a pillow over his head. It creeps in through the window-frames, too, and under the door, despite the bag he’s crammed against it to help with the draughts. He can feel the puffy, under-eye bruising that comes with lack of sleep; one that he’s well accustomed to, but had foolishly hoped to be rid of here.
Kevin Day doesn’t look like he’s been bothered by the wind other than the impacts its had on his hair — it’s loose today, for some reason, and he’s awkwardly detangling it with his fingers when Andrew turns around to glare at him. He’s in a different coat today, one that’s dark blue with polished, brass-like buttons and a patch of darning at the corner of the collar in bright yellow thread. Andrew curls into his own jacket, a sweatshirt layered under it (and three other layers beneath that), and drops another box of cereal into his basket.
“I—” Kevin starts, and then goes quiet when Andrew glares harder. He turns away, goes two aisles over, and doesn’t reappear until Andrew’s paid — the meat and vegetables are cheaper here than in America, but anything packaged carries the price for import. Andrew wishes he didn’t reappear. Andrew wishes that he had moved to the other side of the world and gotten what you tend to get when you do — absolute anonymity.
“We don’t have to ignore each other,” Kevin calls from the steps to the shop as Andrew goes to walk back to his house, a paper package under his arm, pale against the dark blue of his coat. When Andrew turns, he looks almost desperate. “Andrew—”
“I don’t need your help,” Andrew snaps, his hair whipping in the wind and making his eyes sting when it hits them. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t care about you, or whether we’ve met before. Don’t use my name. We’re not friends. You don’t know me.”
Kevin is quiet following Andrew’s words; not quite stunned, just silent. As if the anger is something he’s been used to before, and he’s woking out best how to weather it. After a moment of stillness, he steps out of the doorway of the store to let someone past and walks past Andrew to the street that leads the opposite direction. In the distance, the gulls cry; the ocean screams.
“We will be each other’s executioner if you keep this up,” Kevin says, before he turns to leave.
In the gale-winds, his hair tangles into it’s own flurry around his face, long strands of dark obscuring his expression so that when Andrew goes home that night he doesn’t know what Kevin had actually meant by that.
—
Andrew’s ‘first’ day is three days into his presence here, one of the men from the tiny office down by the docks coming up the hill to show him the radio systems, how they work and how to troubleshoot them when they don’t. The next day, Moustache-Man-Conor makes a reappearance in his tiny, beat-up blue car and drives Andrew along the edge of the coast, pointing out the places to look most often at, pay most attention to. Andrew has his hands in his pockets the entire time, gripping at his abdomen through the fabric. When the winds rock the car, he digs his nails in until it stings even through three layers.
He doesn’t ask to drive—Andrew has learned the manner of dealing with shit—but he gets out twenty minutes away from where the house is with an excuse that’s flimsy even for him. He backs it up with aggression, though, and that always works. When he’s finally out of the metal-chrome-glass-machine, he blinks once, twice, and shakes off the memory of grating metal and a crumpled frame, to the background music of evening radio.
On the empty road, the stones are sore on the soles of his feet even through the thick rubber of his boots. The mid-evening air is too-clear and too strong, the wind battering at him, the grass at the edge of the road whipping until it gives way to more stone when he reaches the watch building.
Inside, it’s warmer, and dark until he turns the lights on, illuminating the hollows and spilling light over the tables in the centre of the main room. The thick walls block the harshness of the wind and leave it crying outside the door like an animal begging to be let in.
Andrew leaves his jacket on and drops into chair at the edge of the room, at the bench that has maps and radio numbers taped to the surface, the tape yellowed and peeling at the laminated edges of the papers. He picks at the corner of a layout of the docks, catches it under his nails and uses it to pry out a grain of sand that’s stuck under the bitten edge. They’re rougher edged than they used to be — three days and it’s undone the cleanliness that barkeeping used to ensure.
When he looks up, it’s to glass, the wide windows that open up against the grey sky. The watch building juts out at the edge of the bay, the rocks beneath it white and chalky and crumbling. He doesn’t look at the place where the rocks fall away into the ocean; just the water itself, the vicious swell of it, the white-capped waves against the cliffs. It’s why they need someone to stare out there all day, he knows. This coast is not kind to anything, much less humans or their boats.
He tips the chair back on it’s back legs, squints past his own reflection in the glass, ignores the leftover noise of the wind, stares out at the west coast.
Andrew has been fighting for this kind of quiet his whole life. The sea swallows down all the bird-cry and leaves it deafeningly silent apart from the crashing waves. Matched with the emptiness of the building, it’s more silent than he’s ever known — almost makes its way into his head, almost quiets the ever-present thoughts.
It doesn’t, but it’s a close thing. That’s enough for him. Almost is as good as people like him get.
A week passes — Andrew learns how to tie the ropes for the warning flags, how to turn on the coastal sirens, who to call for maintenance and who to call for storms. How the chain of communication works, and where to find the cheapest kindling for the fireplace in his house. Where boats crash the most often, and where people launch rescues from. Andrew picks it up easily, files it all away into a new folder in his head that he can pull from and never get rid of even if he wants to. All the inane things too, like the families in town, and the person who Andrew has taken over from—a girl who’s since left for a masters degree in Cork—and the unfortunate fact that as much as he wishes, he will be unable to completely avoid Kevin Day and the reminders he brings of a life Andrew intended to try and forget.
“Looks like we’re missing the—oh, yeah, that’s right,” Kieran tells Andrew on his eighth day, picking through the old metal filing cabinet of coastal maps. He’s another one of the townies who’s skipped off work on the docks to make sure everything’s in line with the watch office — as much as Andrew had expected the job to be something he could do on his own, there’s a constant stream of people still to make sure he can actually operate it alone. “Kevin’s got half the wind maps at his, you’ll probably have to grab ‘em from him.” Kieran somehow misses whatever baleful expression Andrew throws at him at the words. “Took a few from the port offices too, something for his job. Works as an—oi, Pat, what does the Day boy do for work?”
Pat, an older guy with whiting patches through the red of his hair who apparently spends most of his time on the fishing vessels, yells something indistinct from outside the door that’s swallowed by the wind and is heard only as noise.
“Whatever. Something to do with documents, I couldn’t tell ya’,” Kieran says, wiping dust off his hands from the laminated sheets he’s just pulled from one of the bottom cabinets. “He lives up past the Donnell’s, just keep down that road. You’ll know his place when you see it.”
Andrew knows what street he’s talking about — two streets up and to the left, just up a slope that has the houses right on the edge of town, enough that the only thing between them and the ocean is two miles of green hills that lead down to the cliffs.
“Just go knock sometime this evening, he should be around. Kind of a homebody, but you can’t blame ‘im. Last time he showed up to the pub one of the kids kept mocking him for bein’ American. Surprised you haven’t been run off yet either.”
“I’d rather not,” Andrew drawls, flipping through the other topography maps that they’ve dropped on the desk. All contoured lines and fractured spots where the rocks poke out from underneath the water, remembered only for a class in high school geography where he took no notes and scored higher than Aaron.
“Well, you need them, unless you’re planning on letting people take a quick turn into the rocks when the storms pick up in winter. Why, you got drama with him already? Didn’t take him as the type to piss someone off that quick—well, other than when he got in that argument with old Robbie. Haven’t seen them interact since. Awkward at session nights, I’ll tell ya’.”
Andrew rolls his eyes, still looking down at the other maps.
“Seriously, just go give ‘im a house call. You’re both the same age, might as well hang around with him instead of the rest of us old buggers,” Kieran says. “Can’t do much at the moment without those maps anyway. Hey, if you get the chance, ask him — we’ve got a bet going on whether his name is actually Kevin. Kid looks like he should have the old spelling instead.”
Andrew, well versed with bets from the Foxhole Court and it’s twisted maelstrom of brutally dragging truths into the light, scoffs. He’s never taken a bet, and this one is too weak to hold water enough for him to take part in it, but it still intrigues him. “Like what?”
“Caiomhín,” Kieran says, too cheery. “Anyway. Smoke break? Where d’you keep the biscuits?”
Andrew has two packets of protected chocolate digestives taped under a chair in order to hide them from the older men who have an unnerving ability to find them. He shrugs, silently, and looks back out at the water, whipping in the wind. There’s no storm coming — apparently this is just the normal. The gale-force power of the coast and the dense stubbornness of the waves, their bulk remaining solid even as the wind scrapes off the top of them and turns it to sea-mist.
The rocks groan at the force of the water — the windows shake. In the corner, the kettle clatters, and Andrew sighs, dropping the half-complete pile of maps to the table.
—
“Where’s the map,” Andrew drawls, the moment the door opens. Kevin, apparently not expecting Andrew, is in fluffy knitted socks that poke out from under his jeans, paired with an expression of vague shock.
“What?”
“The map,” Andrew says, slowly, in the same way one would speak to a particularly dim child. Kevin’s not much different, anyway. “Apparently you have it.”
Kevin apparently just now having come to terms with Andrew’s presence in his doorway, blinks and then scrubs a hand over his face with a sigh. “You’re really going to have to be more specific. What map? Who said I have it?”
Andrew does not want to have to be here any longer than he needs to. It’s a cold day — his jacket still isn’t cutting it, and he tenses his muscles against a shiver as another gust of wind cuts like a razor through the seams. “Kieran O’Shaughnessy. Wind maps for the watchtower. You took them for work.”
Kevin blinks, as if processing the information, then looks upward as if trying to reconcile it all with whatever else is going in inside his head. Around him and the halo of loose strands falling from his ponytail, the doorframe is a warm wood with craters of cracking around the lock. Andrew watches the slope of Kevin’s jaw just long enough to want to look away, and then just enough more to see the metaphorical lightbulb go off in his head after a minute straight of processing.
“I—yeah, no, I do have them. Hang on,” Kevin says, turning on his heel, the knit of his socks just barely slipping on the concrete of the entranceway. He leaves Andrew standing in the doorway, the wind catching at his ankles, staring after Kevin at where the hallway is lit yellow and lined with postcards.
“You’re allowed to come in,” Kevin drawls, bored, from where he’s disappearing off down the hallway. “Take your boots off.”
Andrew doesn’t; keeps the weight of them on as he follows Kevin into the house, the hallway opening up into a large area, both lounge and dining area in one. It’s the same style of house that must have been built in bulk back in the sixties or something — the same layout as Andrew’s, but the difference is in how much more like a liveable environment this looks like.
“I said take your fucking boots off—oh whatever, the floors need a clean anyway,” Kevin says when he turns around. Andrew’s too busy looking around to look at Kevin’s face, so all he can do is imagine the annoyance presenting at Andrew’s unwillingness to participate in manners.
The concrete hallway gives way to a mess of rugs and half-carpets over the floor, until the only patches he can see of grey is around the edges of furniture — two tall bookshelves, a hefty wooden entertainment unit that houses a squat television screen, blackened, surrounded by seedlings in plastic pots. The couch is a massacre of blankets and crochet, the dining area set with only two chairs around the wonky, wooden table. When Andrew walks past it, there’s coffee-stain rings over the surface and a folded up piece of paper jammed under one of the legs presumably to keep it stable.
The walls are mostly bare apart for a mess of frames on one wall — blurred pictures of landscapes, the ocean, a seabird perched on a fence. A single picture of Kayleigh Day, mother of Exy, that looks too professional to be anything other than printed from a website. A picture of Kevin in front of the docks in town, looking three years younger with his hair still short. The spaces in between the frames are filled with other things; postcards, stamps, a tiny, perfect painting of the cliffs on a canvas half the size of Andrew’s palm.
“That’s Clancy,” Kevin says, when Andrew finally turns to face him, pointing out the window where Andrew can just barely see a pair of orange ears sticking out of a planter box. “She’ll—come out, eventually. She doesn’t bite.”
The ears twitch, then dip deeper into the wooden edges until they’re hidden by greenery. Andrew stares.
“Give me a moment to finish this,” Kevin calls from where he’s disappeared into what Andrew assumes is the kitchen. “I’ll grab the maps in a second. Don’t touch anything.”
Andrew would prefer to be out of here as soon as possible, lest his memory provide anything more than what Kevin’s presence dredges up. He’s not sure if he hates him yet, or if it’s just his existence in this place that Andrew can’t stand.
He takes the absence of Kevin as an opportunity to dig around more, though. For all he doesn’t want to be here, his curiosity always wins out when it comes to his own peace. He unloops the scarf he’d dug out of a box in the watch-building from his neck and twists it in his hands when he steps away from the photo-wall.
Above the wall-mounted phone there’s a pinned-up sheet of paper with curled edges — when Andrew looks closer, there’s a list of numbers scrawled on it in a long, loping script. He recognises the first few, cursed memory of his — the local handyman, the coast-watch building that Andrew works in, the hospital an hour out. There’s one at the bottom with the country code for France, and another below it that’s been scratched out with a pencil.
Andrew knows the feeling. His cellphone in his pocket has two unread messages from a group-chat he still considers blocking.
There’s a desk setup in the corner, the fat computer screen turned on and open to a wall of text with an email application open. There’s a drafted message to a .gov address; something about an archive, and someone named Aoife who’s lack of ability Kevin seems to have strong convictions about.
“If you’re going to lurk I would rather you not do it in my emails,” Kevin snaps from the kitchen, the sound of the tap running. “Have you never heard of privacy?”
Andrew wishes he still had his knives. Renee had gotten him to hand them off to Janie Smalls when her mother came knocking in his second to last year with the Foxes, and he hadn’t asked for them back. He could get new ones, but his hands have always been enough; they’re more than enough for Kevin Day and his fragile-looking wrists. “Fuck off.”
“You’re the one who came to my house,” Kevin says, voice echoey from the kitchen. When Andrew steps into the doorway, there’s a knife in Kevin’s hand and a fish in the other, scales silvery like the steel sink he’s de-scaling it into. “Any grievance you have with my presence here is your own fault.”
The statement is true for Andrew’s being in his house, but not for this town. No one knew where Kevin Day was, let alone Andrew Minyard of the Palmetto Foxes, who spoke to him once and then never again. Andrew’s grievance with Kevin’s presence in Kilduáin is something built on the same kind of feeling as someone else knowing your best hiding spot for hide-and-seek as a kid. A pit-of-the-stomach annoyance, a kind of frustration that knows nothing else to compare it to.
At the sink, Kevin scrapes the scales off the fish to clean it; a barely saintly gesture, but surgical. His hands are bare, the knife is clean, the water is cold where it rebounds off the steel sink and onto the back of Andrew’s hand.
He doesn’t wipe it off, instead staring at the blue tiles in front of him. Theres a memory here, overlaid, as Kevin stands in the yellow light of the kitchen drying his hands on a chequered tea-towel— a Kevin at twenty, catching Andrew’s eye across the carpet-covered court-floors at the Winter banquet, two months before Kevin Day was announced as having left his assistant coaching position at Evermore. Age and time has changed him — he does not look as sad as he had in that split second of seeing, the taut lines of his posture softened into something more resembling normalcy.
“What are you looking at?” Kevin asks, shattering the memory and leaving it with nowhere to go but the ground beneath their feet. There’s a soft, clean-sounding shink as the blade slices through the belly of the fish, but Kevin isn’t looking at it. His eyes fall on Andrew; he’s tall enough that Andrew has to tilt his head back imperceptibly even with the distance they stand apart. His hair is falling into his face and there are no shadows under his eyes.
“Why’d you leave?” Andrew asks. Kevin’s face shutters. He turns back to the knife.
“Why do you need to know?”
Andrew doesn’t — he circles the bench, though, to stand beside Kevin, watching as he turns the fish over, using short, sharp motions to clean the blade. Andrew cannot see Kevin’s expression like this, the thick curtain of his hair falling over his shoulder and hiding his face from view as he guts the fish.
“There were—issues, there. That I couldn’t fix. That—came back, on me.”
“Ah, the cowards way. Running away.”
“If I was a coward, I would have stayed there,” Kevin says. His tone is cool; level, for once. “You do not know what it took to leave.”
“I can imagine.”
“No,” Kevin says. “You can’t.”
Andrew raises an eyebrow, amused. The Ravens were not known for their tact, but they were hardly as bad as the places that Andrew grew up. Riko Moriyama plays for the New York Leviathans, now, and shows no signs of what Kevin seems to wear like a second skin. Edgar Allan University’s exy team had nothing on the scarred backs of the PSU Foxes. “Are you sure?”
“Whatever you think that place was like,” Kevin says, “it was worse.”
Andrew scoffs. The Foxes had twelve criminal convictions to their name in the years Andrew played for them, and three deaths. Edgar Allan had brand deals, and its entire team went on to play professionally. “I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Kevin asks. “Anymore. I haven’t been there in years. You don’t play anymore. Let’s just not talk about it.” His voice leaves nothing to question or to reply to — just a finality that Andrew can respect if only for the conviction in it.
Andrew is silent, but he steps back enough for Kevin to continue slicing through the fish. He gets a side-eyed look as he does, a moment of hesitation as if Kevin is still waiting for him to pry, and then a quiet huff of breath as Kevin jams the blade through the gills. Andrew has never seen a fish gutted, never seen an animal slaughtered except for when his brother took a desk chair to Drake’s head at Nicky’s birthday dinner. The efficiency with which Kevin does it is almost worrying if Andrew and the rest of the world wasn’t so aware of his teenage perchance for perfection.
The head is severed, and the entrails dropped into a plastic bag lining a bowl in the sink. Kevin drops a tea-towel over the white fillets, washes his hands, and then turns back to Andrew.
“Maps are in the—I think they’re in the bookcase,” he stumbles, talking as if to himself, as if trying to ignore Andrew’s presence and acknowledge it at the same time. Like if he doesn’t meet Andrew’s eyes they won’t have to talk about the sport or the past or America again. “Or maybe in my room—hang on,” he says, and disappears down the hallway that leads to the back end of the house, leaving Andrew standing on his own in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge.
Out the window of the kitchen, bordered with mesh curtains, the hills are green and long with threadbare, windswept trees across the moors. Andrew’s eyes follow the green slope towards the cliffs in the distance, the ocean rising beyond them — a block of blue and grey and white. A quiet chirping noise pulls his attention away, and he turns without flinching to find the cat now out of the garden box and stretching on the window-sill. It arches it’s back, tail curving around the curtains, before turning its gaze on Andrew.
Andrew stares — the cat stares back. Kevin pads back down the hallway shuffling a handful of papers, and the cat disappears somewhere in the pile of knitted blankets on the chair beneath the window. Andrew follows the movement until the blankets stop moving, and then looks back to Kevin, now with a pile of rolled documents in the crook of his arms and another pile of papers in his right hand.
“Here they are,” Kevin says. “I’m done with them, so they’re all yours. I think there’s a shelf for them in the tow—”
“There is. What’s with the other papers?” Andrew interrupts reaching for the rolled maps and tugging them free without ever making contact with Kevin’s arms. He earns a frown and a huff of breath, Kevin shifting on his feet as he’s relieved of the maps.
“Utility documents. Would you drop them off to Robert O’Connell? He’s just down on the second street by the shops. The red door.”
“No.”
“Why?
“I am not your fucking errand boy. Do it yourself.”
Kevin gets a pained look on his face, as if being faced with the most awful task he can conceive of in that pretty head of his. “I can’t convince you?”
“That depends on what you can offer.”
“What do you want in exchange?”
Andrew wants Kevin to leave. He wants this interaction to be over. He wants a house like this where he doesn’t always feel cold inside it. He wants to go back to when he was six and had never been touched and he wants to go back to when he was born and hadn’t learned abandonment yet. He wants to never want anything again.
Instead: “Is your name actually Kevin?”
Kevin sighs, exhausted, as if he’s used to this line of questioning. “Did Kieran tell you to ask?”
“Does it matter? I’m the one asking you now.”
Kevin looks pained for a moment, and Andrew catches him glance fleetingly at the framed picture of Kayleigh Day on the opposite wall before he looks down at his socked feet. More strands of dark hair fall out of his ponytail as he does, framing his face and then hiding his expression like a curtain as he dips his head further down.
“I don’t know,” Kevin says, still looking at his feet, his voice smaller than it was. Pitiful. Intriguing. “Good enough answer for you?”
“No.”
“Too bad. It’s the only answer you’re getting,” Kevin tells him, sharpening at the edges, and turns away to end the conversation. “Enough for you to take these with you?”
Andrew glances at the papers still in Kevin’s hands. “Nope. If you’ve got a problem with the guy then deal with it. Don’t force me into being your protector, Kevin Day.”
With a scoff, Kevin steps away, dropping the pile of papers on a desk in the hallway. Andrew adjusts the maps in his arms and makes his way towards the door, eyeing the wooden cross on the wall as he does. No Jesus hanging there; just the winding knot patterns that he’s seen on some of the wooden boats in the harbour. All brown and green against the yellowing wallpaper.
“Here,” Kevin says from behind him suddenly, and when Andrew turns he gets a mass of fabric to the face.
“What the fuck,” he says, yanking it away, and once it’s in his hands he’s greeted with the unimpressed face of Kevin, hand still raised from where he’d been dangling the material in front of Andrew. “What is it.”
“A jacket,” Kevin says. “Yours isn’t suited for Kilduáin.” He says the name fluently, even if it’s accented with the tinge of the Americas. In Andrew’s voice, the towns name is said rough and weighted — in Kevin’s, it’s lighter, sharper.
“I don’t need your help.”
Kevin smiles; almost condescending, if Andrew didn’t know better that Kevin is too afraid to challenge him yet. “You did say. You’ll thank me later. Winter is worse than this.”
Andrew doesn’t ask him how much worse. No point in quantifying pain when he’s so used to the different types of it.
“Fine,” he says. He picks up the other pile of papers, toll for them paid, and leaves the door open.
Halfway down the road, he tugs the coat over his own jacket, pulling it closed over his chest. It’s wool on the inside; a slick, seal-skin like outer. Andrew ignores how much warmer it is than his own, vows to return it once he has one of his own, and takes the second turn to the southern end of town.
—
See, Andrew knows he can stay away if he wants. He has the willpower and ability to — to force others to take the jacket back, or to ignore Kevin in the street, or to keep to his end of town and the coast watch building where he already is most days now.
He doesn’t, though. Andrew wonders what it makes of him. The jacket is balled up messily under one of his arms when he knocks on Kevin’s door, and he hooks a thumb into the hole in the sleeve of the knitted jumper he’s got on under his leather jacket. It’s not as warm, but it’s more serving of his dignity than wearing Kevin Day’s castoffs.
Behind him, down the street, the sun is pale and pink as it sets over the piled stone along the edge of the road, like walls that had collapsed long ago and were left like that. His eyes fix on what little of the horizon he can see while he waits for the footsteps, and then Kevin Day is at the door like he was the first time — surprised, and a little confused, and in fluffy socks.
“Oh. What—”
“Your coat,” Andrew says, shoving it into Kevin’s arms. Behind Kevin, down the hallway, he hears claws scrabbling on the hardwood, and then a blur of orange. “I don’t need it.”
“Oh, that was quick. Have you already gotten another one? I didn’t think you would have had time already to bus up to Cardoon to get a good one.” He takes the bundle of thick, warm fabric from Andrew with more grace than Andrew had handed it to him, and turns away briefly to shake it out and hook it somewhere on the wall. “You really need something waterproof, especially when it comes to winter.”
Andrew’s already moving to leave as Kevin talks, before the coat is even hung up, and the rocks of the path that lead to Kevin’s door crunch under the heel of his boot. The front yard is windswept and kept in by the same rock walls that border the rest of the street; a few straggly blossoms struggling though the weeds in the corners of the grass. Beyond it, Andrew can see down the road to the rest of the town, the paddocks and back yards of houses, backsteps piled high with wood and the chimneys already smoking.
“Oh Andrew, wait. Do you want—”
“No.”
“I haven’t even asked you a question yet,” Kevin frowns. His hair falls over his eyes when he turns back, and Andrew watches the dull evening light bounce off the scarring on his hand as he brushes it back behind his ear in a single, smooth motion. Practiced and perfected, until the strands are hooked away and out of his face. It reveals a single mole on the peak of his forehead, a dark mark that makes him look younger, somehow, and more wide-eyed. “Do you want dinner?”
Andrew’s plan tonight was to eat cereal in front of the fireplace now that he has kindling, and attempt to start a new book. It was not to eat an actual meal in a warm, furnished house, and it was far less to simply share company with Kevin Day.
“What is it?”
“Colcannon. And fish.”
Andrew ignores his brain in favour of his stomach. Something in the back of his head shrieks and writhes and complains and Andrew ignores that too. “Whatever.”
“I—” Kevin stumbles, turned sideways in the doorway as if to turn away or to allow the space for Andrew to come in. He’s tall and slight and yet he still takes up all the space like he doesn’t know where his limbs are supposed to go. He takes up all the air in the fucking room and he takes up permanent residence in Andrew’s thoughts recently even though he wants him out. “Is that a yes?”
“Are you fucking stupid?”
“I—no?”
Andrew rolls his eyes, ignores the biting chill that sweeps in with the wind. There’s a storm rolling in tonight — the weather alert settles into the back of his mind behind everything else Andrew has ever learned or read. Wind speeds, in miles and kilometre and knots. Rainfall. The damage that wind can do to the coast and to the tides and to any boat that dares to venture out into it. It’s still dry though, now — just cold. Biting at his bare skin. Andrew shoves his hands into the leather he brought over from the states. “Just let me in. If the food sucks I’m never coming back.”
“Such high praises,” Kevin mutters, but he steps down the hallway and doesn’t turn back when Andrew follows; only throws a close the door, you’re letting all the cold in over his shoulder, and disappears into the kitchen. The house is the same as it was the first time — table piled high with papers, the furniture mismatched and cushioned with blankets, the framed photos on the wall crammed in as close as they can be without overlapping. The kitchen light throws a golden, electrical haze over floor from the doorway, and Andrew ignores it in favour of crouching in front of the smouldering fire, too smokey inside the hearth but hot enough to show a faint, red glow through the soot-stained glass window.
In the kitchen, Kevin clatters around with the oven and the metal pan he’s pulling out of it, the entire image of him clouded by steam and the condensation it draws on the windows. It blurs his edges, softens the angle of him even more than he already is — Kevin holds himself like a bullwhip, deceivingly flexible but stiff and unyielding when he snaps.
Andrew barely knows him. He should not have the understanding of the other man enough to make these observations. Andrew digs his fingers into the meat of his forearm until it feels like it’s bruising, and then pretends to be surprised at Kevin’s reappearance from the kitchen.
“It just needs to rest,” Kevin tells him, hair frizzing slightly from the evident humidity in the kitchen. “Five minutes.”
Andrew casts a glance at the tray he can see on the bench, covered in steaming foil and gleaming from the oil leaking out of it. “Didn’t take you for someone who cared that much about food. I’m not a guest.”
“You can’t take me for anyone,” Kevin says, haughty and a little annoyed. “You barely know me and you keep ignoring me at the shops.”
Andrew does do that. He belies no shame for it on his face, though, and Kevin evidently eventually gets tried of waiting for Andrew to express any level of guilt for his actions. “Want a drink?” Kevin asks, turning to tug at the edge of a stuck cupboard.
“No.”
“Your loss,” Kevin remarks, and tugs down a half-empty bottle of vodka. Andrew eyes it, the dusty neck of the bottle and the glint of the liquid across the kitchen when the sun catches it, before he rises from his crouch to sit on the couch, kicking his feet up onto the cushions. Kevin should be grateful—he’s taken his shoes off this time—but Andrew still earns a scowl when Kevin follows him with a glass in his hand.
“Did no one ever teach you manners?”
“Foster care doesn’t care about manners as long as you’re ignorable. No one ever teach you not to invite strangers in?”
Kevin makes a scoffing noise, somewhere between a laugh and disbelief. “If you’re a stranger than Clancy’s a dog. Foster care?”
Andrew shifts on the couch as Kevin sits down, a few more inches between them that he can afford until he’s pressed against the armrest. “Don’t act stupid. You would have seen my files if you came begging so desperately back then.”
“I just saw your game videos. I didn’t need much else other than that.”
“Then you are a fool.”
“Maybe. Better a fool than a skeptic.”
Andrew spares a thought for whatever miserable soul had to deal with Kevin Day through the teenage years. Probably Jean Moreau, wherever he is. Andrew doesn’t follow the professional circuit now that he doesn’t have to. All he knows is that the Ravens won every year of the NCAA circuit that Andrew played, and the only Foxes still playing the sport are Matt Boyd and Janie Smalls.
“At least a skeptic has self-preservation,” Andrew comments uselessly. His hands itch for something, sitting here in Kevin Day’s living room — a drink, a snack, a book, a cigarette, someone else skin and muscle. He fixes his gaze on the chair across from the couch instead, shredded at the corner from cat claws and baring its skeleton of wood. There’s a knitted throw over the back of it — green and blue and cream, like the ocean when it foams on the sand here. The chair is orange. The floors are gold. Kevin’s hair is furiously dark and sinfully straight and he does not meet his eyes because Andrew is self-destructive but he is not suicidal anymore, and he knows what seeing the green of Kevin’s irises will do to him.
His hands twitch, and Andrew digs into the pocket of his jeans instead, raising his carton of cigarettes questioningly. Kevin eyes them, suspicious, before he rolls his eyes and drops his head against the back of the couch to stare up at the ceiling. The glass in his hand tilts against his leg — Kevin’s vice, in the same way the smoking is Andrew’s. Escape or self-harm. The difference is always in how much.
“I don’t really care,” Kevin eventually says, sighing, waving a hand flippantly. His hair bunches behind the crown of his head in a silken bundle caught on the blankets thrown over the back of the couch, tipped back as it is. “Just don’t burn my furniture.”
“Again,” Andrew tells him, fumbling for his lighter tucked into the carton, “you’re too trusting. That will kill you one day.”
“It already almost did.”
“Different with me,” Andrew tells him, lighting the cigarette in his mouth. Kevin’s nose wrinkles briefly, but he’s tipped his head to the side to watch Andrew with curiosity, a small flush over the highs of his cheeks. His glass is already empty.
“Why’s it different with you?”
Andrew laughs, dry. There’s no real amusement to the action of it, just something to react in a way that Kevin will understand. “There is a reason I was called a monster in college. I would not be so careless around me.”
“There are many men who think they’re monsters,” Kevin says. His eyes are bright — the sun’s fully disappeared now, the moors out the window having dropped into a sudden, total darkness. The lamp in the corner throws red-tinted light over Kevin’s jaw, and his eyes gleam green in the corner of Andrew’s vision. “Few of them actually are.”
“In my case, I’m right,” Andrew replies, taking another long drag of the cigarette, an excuse to turn away. The acrid smoke of it pools in his lungs, a dull ache, before he blows it out in the same breath that Kevin grabs his arm.
“You’re not,” Kevin says. His eyes are desperate and uncomfortably sure. His grip is loose, and burning. Andrew flinches. “You’re not.”
“Let go.”
Kevin does; snatches his hand back in the same moment that Andrew raises his palm. The second contains too-much movement; Kevin shuffles back on the couch, hand empty, and his glass falls from the arm of the couch, crashing dully onto the rug without breaking.
Andrew snarls, ignores the way his arm burns not in a way from pain or fear of unwant, but from the exact opposite. “See? You do know it, even if you look stupid. I can hurt you if I want.”
“Anyone could,” Kevin agrees readily. His gaze has sharpened, assessing Andrew like one would an opponent. “What, you think I’d be here, on the other side of the world, if I was able to fend off whatever got handed to me?”
“I think you are here because you’re a coward,” Andrew says.
“So what does that say about you?” Kevin challenges, mean and sharp. He leans back in — Andrew does not lean away. This close, he can see the abandoned freckles on Kevin’s cheeks, the small, barely-there scar that adorns his cheekbone. The gleam of his eyes, angular and green like seaglass. “You’re here too.”
Andrew’s hands are empty but for a cigarette he holds aloft out of way of Kevin for concern of burning him; unconscious the motion but nevertheless untruthful. Kevin, hands open and stupidly trusting with hair too long to fully tie up and two crooked fingers.
“I’ve known monsters,” Kevin continues, in a breathless rush. There’s red to his cheeks — the vodka, or the fireplace, or the anger, or something else. “And it sounds fucking stupid to say it like that, like something out of some damn fairy story, all Tir na nog and that, but I have. Andrew,” he says. “That’s not you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know enough to know that you’re not the kind of person who smashed my hand into pieces and then ensured it wouldn’t heal. Or the one who was employed to cut people into pieces. Or any of the ones who were allowed,” Kevin spits, “to come into my bed after I had been ruined for the sport. I don’t have to know you. All I have to believe is that you won’t hurt me. You don’t fool me, Andrew Minyard.”
Something rises in Andrew, fierce and furious and dark. The same kind of anger that comes with people assuming his nature. The same kind of fury that comes with the story Kevin is telling him. He grabs Kevin’s scarred left hand with the cigarette-free hand and forces it above his head, pinning it to the wallpapered living room wall above the couch.
“Wrong hand,” Kevin says, sharply, feigned boredom. His eyes are dark. “You wanna hurt me? Fuck the other one up too.”
Andrew is silent; below him, Kevin glares, pinned in place like a museum specimen. Hair dark, face sharp, lips taught. Andrew isn’t sure what he’s waiting for — words, actions, for Kevin to knee him in the balls — but he’s well practiced in the simple act of it. Kevin seethes, jaw clenched, and then eventually squirms in Andrew’s grip, trying to pull himself free. Andrew has five years of collegiate sport behind him though — Kevin made it one year, and then fled to live somewhere where the ocean wind is the worst force he has to contend with. He doesn’t budge, and Kevin strains against his hold to no success.
“I hate you,” Kevin spits. He sounds resigned to it. “I fucking hate this.”
“You barely know me.”
“I know,” Kevin says bitterly. “That’s the worst part, isn’t it?”
When Andrew kisses him, Kevin doesn’t freeze — he pushes back immediately, lips firm and teeth catching when Andrew licks into his open mouth.
Kevin tastes like salt, and vodka, and the sharp, bitter tang of the greens from his garden. And below that, as Andrew bites and licks into his mouth, there’s blood, and metal, and the stain that despair leaves on a person.
He whines when Andrew pulls away, something hopeless and pathetic and uncomfortably attractive, and Andrew has to press their mouths back together just to muffle the sound before he does something he regrets more than already doing this. Under him, Kevin’s lithe and light in the way someone who’s never known hard labor is, malleable where his jaw slackens as Andrew deepens the kiss. He doesn’t make the same noise when Andrew pulls away again, but it’s probably because he already looks half-ruined, lips swollen and slick from spit and eyes blown wide.
Andrew swallows his desire, and bites out, “do you want this.”
“What?”
“Do you want this.” No questions. Always statements. Questions can be twisted in the way facts cannot.
“I wouldn’t allow this otherwise,” Kevin spits, haughty as if he had never fallen from his fame, and the terseness of it is enough for Andrew to take it as truth and enough to take it as even more infuriating. It’s at odds with his disheveled appearance, as if the fury is unearned when paired with a chest heaving for breath.
“Then move,” Andrew says, and Kevin at least is bright enough to not question the intent of the words. Something behind those eyes at least, other than the damning green of them. All the dark lashes do is make him look like a deer on the road but he has the sense to run; Andrew lets him sit up, and for a moment all they do is sit there with Andrew’s hand still at Kevin’s wrist.
Andrew is old friends with restraint; first there was the sleeping-clothes that kept him from moving too much in his sleep as a toddler, then the hands at own wrists and throat and hips. The first cop who ever handcuffed him left him bound until his fingers blued. Andrew will never forget it — the scent of vodka and zip ties, the sound of cuffs and a bottle petaling into blades.
For all he hates the memories of it, it is something safe when he is on the other side of it. Power, after all, is wielded by the one with the keys to the door. Andrew has learned how to open store-bought cuffs when the keys are lost. It’s probably not what people mean when they say you gain life-skills in college, but it’s been fucking useful.
“Gonna stay like that?” Kevin says, mocking, raising his eyes to meet Andrew’s. There’s a proud tilt to everything he says and does, as if even destruction and displacement was not enough to take it from him. Andrew has always fucking hated that in people, the sense that there is no one higher than them in this sense — there is only one way of taking that expression off of his face, and so Andrew dips back down, unforgiving, until Kevin is panting back into his mouth with an absence of sound.
As he does, he opens his hand, letting go of the reconstructed bones. Kevin doesn’t move his hand away immediately—leaves it held in the air for a brief moment as if caught still—before he lets it drop and pushes himself off the couch in the same breath that Andrew pulls back away from him again.
“This way,” Kevin says, breathless, and despite his memory Andrew is not sure he will remember the way back out of Kevin’s bedroom, so dark the hallway and so loud the wind outside. Kevin, ahead of him in the dim hallway, is sleek and sharp and Andrew has met beautiful people in bars and clubs and places that his brother will never know exists, but Kevin is lethal in the way that he is shaped. Andrew has always been weaker when it comes to the stubborn — even more-so when their spine is angled like a knife and their shoulders are wide.
In the dark, Andrew cannot make out the shapes of anything but the bed and the escape routes — the door, the large windows on the wall looking out to the hills. Invisible in the dark, just the heavy pulled curtains of canvas that everyone in this town uses to keep out the cold. It hasn’t yet worked — Kevin’s room is an ice-box, and the only warmth is found when Andrew shoves a knee between Kevin’s thighs to trip him backward onto the mattress. He’s hard against Andrew’s thigh, his breathing high and reedy, and Andrew allows himself the luxury of following him down onto the sheets.
On the bed, Kevin slots their hips together at the same time he brings his mouth to Andrew’s neck. His mouth is hot and his teeth are blunt and useless at Andrew’s jugular but he sucks at the skin like he could be capable of making it hurt. Andrew ignores the heat in his face, and bats Kevin’s hands away when they reach for him.
“Keep your hands here,” Andrew tells him roughly, guiding Kevin by the wrists until his hands are trapped under the pillow beneath his head, leaving him stretched out below Andrew. Like this, he looks like an offering, something willing to be broken and bruised, and Andrew takes it as it is, hooking his fingers in the hem of Kevin’s pants and pulling them down in a single practised move as he slides down the length of Kevin’s body.
It’s unsurprising, the lethal structure of Kevin’s body even below the clothes — creamy skin, legs like a dancers. Or, those of a once-decorated athlete, the muscle faded but present. Every inch of him something elegant, out of place in the ruthless sea air and muddied streets of Kilduáin. Andrew does not waste the image though — he digs his fingers into the rounded flesh at the inner thigh, follows the curve of it with his thumb until he’s pressing the flat of it to Kevin’s entrance. He squirms at the touch, buckles under it when Andrew presses almost inside.
“Lube?” Andrew asks, blunt, and it seems like it takes Kevin a moment to even register that Andrew’s spoken, trying to drag himself back to coherence.
“In the—ah—side-table,” Kevin manages to get out, fairly admirable considering how his eyes roll back when Andrew scratches his nails down the inside of Kevin’s thigh, firm. He shudders at the lube once Andrew’s pried it out of the rough-hewn drawer and popped the cap, the viscosity of it cold against Andrew’s fingers and no doubt colder against the delicate flesh of Kevin’s thighs.
He makes no move to warm it; just circles Kevin’s entrance with a slick finger, once, twice, before pushing in.
Kevin makes a cut-off, choked noise at the intrusion, and his legs move to close before Andrew brings his other hand to the inside of Kevin’s knee and push them back open. He’s tight, and Andrew takes it slower than he would, to the second knuckle until Kevin makes a sound less of discomfort and more of relief.
When Kevin starts to shift, adjusting to the stretch, Andrew distracts him with his hand and Kevin chokes back a swear at the touch. Andrew makes a humming noise, something more mocking than anything kind, but Kevin’s eyes are wide and pleading at it, and when he starts to lean up, Andrew kisses him again, running his tongue across the back of his teeth before sucking his bottom lip between his own teeth. Kevin’s answering moan is muffled and whiny into Andrew’s mouth, and his hips buck where they’re trapped back underneath Andrew.
“And—” he tries to say, before it’s cut off by another kiss, and then whines quietly when Andrew draws away, a long strand of saliva connecting their mouths as he pants. Andrew uses his free hand to run his thumb over Kevin’s bottom lip to break it, pressing down until the soft flesh dimples and Kevin’s eyes are glossy where he crosses them to watch Andrew’s fingers tease at his mouth. The distraction is enough that he doesn’t react when Andrew draws the finger out of him and slicks his hand further with the now-warmed lube.
The second finger slides in with only a little work, the lube slick between Andrew’s fingers when he twists them, testing the stretch — earns another punched-out moan and Kevin’s hips lifting off the bed as if unsure whether to draw Andrew deeper or pull away. His spine curves, visible against the sheets even in the dim light of the room, and when he slackens against the bed again he pushes against Andrew’s hand, searching.
He makes a choked noise when Andrew bites down into the curve of his hip to still him, another hand pressing his abdomen into the mattress. His skin is hot and flushed, the flat compactness of his stomach shifting with every stuttered breath.
When Andrew makes no move to let him go, Kevin shifts down again, trying to fuck back onto Andrew’s fingers with quiet gasps.
Impatient, Andrew thinks, and reaches up with his other hand to tug Kevin’s hair free from it’s hair tie and let it splay, silk-like, on the cotton sheets. Kevin is silent, tense and panting from Andrew’s fingers, but when Andrew tangles the other hand in his hair and pulls, Kevin makes a sharp keening noise that whistles out into the dense heat of the moment and makes Andrew’s fingers curl reflexively. The motion brushes Kevin’s prostate, and Andrew watches through narrowed eyes as Kevin chokes soundlessly, eyes rolling back momentarily as the rest of his body shudders.
Like this, Kevin looks inhuman — cheeks flushed, eyes blown wide, lips like the ones that drew heroes away from their myths and into iniquity. Under Andrew’s hand, his hair is oil-slick and fine, black and tangled as the lengths of seaweed in the waters below the docks. When he yanks at the strands again, Kevin makes another breathy noise that Andrew has to surge up and swallow down before it ruins him any further.
Kevin moans into the kiss, hot and damp against Andrew as he licks into his mouth, before he whines at the absence of Andrew’s fingers. He cants his hips up against Andrew’s thigh in desperate search of friction, hands still uselessly trapped under the pillow. Andrew bites down on his lower lip in redress, the swell of it slick against his teeth, and while it doesn’t stop Kevin from moving, pressing up into the muscle of Andrew’s thigh, the bite tears a harsh breath from him.
Acquiescently, and feeling the way heat sits heavy in his own core, Andrew grinds his hips down against Kevin, pressing him further into the mattress with a hand back on his abdomen and his mouth swallowing the noise Kevin makes. With one last tug to the roots of Kevin’s hair, he drags his hand down the length of Kevin’s chest, shiny with sweat, before digging his nails into the flesh of his inner thighs.
Kevin makes a half-aborted, choked moan at the sensation, before Andrew replaces his nails with his mouth and the sound deepens into something guttural and echoey in the expanse of the room. Andrew hears him attempt a fuck, but it comes out weak and breathy when Andrew sucks at the soft skin, the sun-scared meat of it. It’s already starting to bruise when Andrew pulls away, a round red mark at the inner thigh where the muscle carves a line like an inseam. He doesn’t look up to Kevin’s face when he presses his fingers to the mark, but he sees how Kevin twitches at the pressure, hears the breathy fuck you, fucking—
He’s still open, and Andrew slides two fingers back in without resistance, Kevin’s legs falling open when he scissors his fingers, testing the stretch and give. Kevin’s lax against the sheets as Andrew works in a third, a choked sigh the only sign of his tension; every other part of him is syrupy in its movement and reciprocal stillness.
For a moment Andrew doesn’t move, just testing the give against his fingers, waiting for any signs of discomfort. Andrew is not a kind partner in bed but he is also not a cruel one. He will bite, but not break. Around his fingers, Kevin tenses briefly at the stretch, before relaxing again, his legs falling wider apart against the textured cotton of the sheets. Like this, Andrew can see the thin lines of a knife in the hollows of his knees from the light spilling in from the hallway. The marks of a life he will never learn. Never know.
When Andrew still doesn’t start to move, Kevin starts to tentatively rock his hips, trying to fuck back onto Andrew’s fingers again. At the movement, Andrew spreads them once, twice, testing the give, before he pulls them out completely. Kevin makes a frustrated noise at the absence, and an affronted one when Andrew wipes his fingers off on the splay of Kevin’s hair, before whining again when Andrew tugs on a strand in reprimand. His eyes roll back when Andrew’s hand moves back to wrap around him, stroking with one hand as he undoes his belt with the other.
Andrew doesn’t fully strip down; just shoves it all to his knees enough that he can move freely and press up against Kevin’s skin without friction. Kevin’s drawer had revealed a single box of condoms alongside the lube, and Andrew does not think about the kind of people that Kevin would allow into here — the home of his with his cat and his colourful curtains and the sea-glass hanging in the windows. Andrew does not think about how he has been allowed in here as well — he is so hard that simply rolling the condom on is enough to distract him from any thoughts other than the ones of the man underneath him.
“I—fuck, fuck,” Kevin groans, “will you fucking get on with it.”
“What did I say about patience,” Andrew tells him, before he presses in with one smooth motion, hands under Kevin’s thighs.
Kevin crumples into the pillows with a punched-out whine as Andrew continues to push in, steady but not as fast as he normally would. Kevin is agonisingly tense around him, every string of his pulled taut and lean like cardiac muscle. Not surprising. He had always seemed high strung in the brief moments Andrew had witnessed him in person, but Andrew at eighteen would not have dreamed of learning first hand how far that went.
Andrew at eighteen didn’t dream of a lot of anything, anyway, such poor sleep did those drugs give him. But he is sure whatever scenes his mind could concoct, whether of the boy with the dark hair in his Chemistry class or the men he worked with, payed under the table for bartending, would come nothing near this — the almost surreal headiness of fallen child star Kevin Day fucked out underneath him. His hair’s splayed out further, tangling around his throat, long wisps plastering themselves over his forehead, the bridge of his nose. His eyelashes meld into the strands, long and dark and soot-stained over his cheeks where a high blush rises, and when Andrew presses further in, his brow scrunches at the stretch.
Once he is fully inside, Kevin pants heavily, face relaxing; his eyes stay shut, though, and Andrew watches the minute expressions flicker over his face as he adjusts to it. Around them, the air is dense and humid, with the low thrum of something falling on the roof.
Andrew is too-aware, for a moment, of where he is — in a country who’s ground he had never known beforehand, in the lived-in home of a man he had met once and yet does not know. Andrew has never been particularly good at escaping, he finds — things from his past find him no matter where he runs. He finds himself too often called by the sound of his own desire no matter his attempts to ignore it.
The backs of Kevin’s thighs are already sticky where they press against his hips in this position, a mess of lube and precome that they have both ignored where it seeps into the sheets. In the interest of not filthying the sheets further and not immediately taking Kevin how he wants, Andrew stays like that, letting him adjust to either the size or sensation. Kevin was too willing and too prepared to have never been with another man like this before, but his chest still heaves with exertion at Andrew’s intrusion. He’s tight, too — not just tense, but torturously sheathlike around Andrew, to the point that Andrew is almost worried for himself if Kevin allows him to move freely. He has done his time in the beds of other men like Kevin, but a creature like this is one that Andrew will fall quickly to.
After a moment though Kevin starts to squirm, tentatively rocking against Andrew. The sheets shift as Kevin brings his knees up to dig his heels into the mattress, trying to bring Andrew deeper, pushing down to search for purchase and take his own pleasure. Andrew is tempted to let him continue like that — fuck himself on Andrew from underneath him, — and he encourages him like that for a few moments, wrapping his hand around Kevin and lazily stroking him in time with his weak attempts to take Andrew deeper.
After a moment, Andrew reaches up the length of his body to tuck Kevin’s hand back under the pillow from where it’s slipped out, the surgical scars pink from where he’s flushed all over, fingers grasping uselessly at the sheets. Kevin’s wrist is fine-boned and willing under Andrew’s hands until he goes rigid when the change in their position jostles him. Kevin’s heels slip on the covers, his knees falling apart again around Andrew, and he crumples breathlessly back into the sheets with a punched-out moan.
Andrew is twenty-five now and he does not break under the weight of desire as frequently anymore. The freedom of college and the years after it have settled him more into his own body during moments like this — he takes the requests of others more seriously, understands that most people do not have the baggage that he does. He still will not let others touch, but he will give what is asked for.
“Will you just fuck me already,” Kevin spits, choked, and, well. What else can Andrew do?
The first thrust is harsh, pushing Kevin part-way up the bed; the second angles in a way that draws another ruined moan from Kevin’s noise, and Andrew settles into the rhythm of it, a pace that has Kevin writhing and letting out a constant, quiet stream of curses.
Andrew has never lived somewhere so private — even after graduation he had lived in an apartment block, every wall belonging to two people. Palmetto’s dorms and his post-grad apartment called for discretion and a hand in the mouth of those that he brought home.
Out here, the houses are separated by thick green yards and flora, the streets dark and empty this time of night. It means that there is no need for the mortification of being heard as he does his best to draw every possible sound out of Kevin. He digs fingers into his side a moment, then scrapes his nails up the side of Kevin’s ribs.
Kevin makes an obscene sound at it, and Andrew drags his eyes away from where he’s watching himself disappear into Kevin up to Kevin’s face. His eyes are unfocused, lashes damp with unshed tears, and his mouth hangs open, lips spit-swollen and bitten-red.
There is no need for silence out here, but that doesn’t stop Andrew from reaching up to slip two of his fingers into Kevin’s mouth, stilling his movements for a moment before Kevin bites down lightly, tracing the space between index and middle with his tongue.
Something short-circuits in Andrew’s brain at the image — Kevin’s punch-drunk expressed and his mouth hot around Andrew’s fingers. It’s that of all things that wills Andrew into upping the pace, bringing himself closer to the edge. Full and flush against Kevin and quick enough that he has to remind himself where to breathe.
Kevin’s breath quickens even around Andrew’s fingers, shallow and hot into the palm of his hand where it supports his jaw. Around Andrew’s hips, Kevin’s legs shake; somewhere outside, there’s the sound of rain, barely audible over the rising volume of Kevin’s keening around Andrew’s fingers. He grazes his teeth over the webbing between Andrew’s fingers, moans lightly, and then groans into the kiss when Andrew pulls his hand away and replaces it with his lips. The angle forces him deeper and unmoving for a moment and Kevin shudders under him weakly.
Kevin falls fast, after that — his thighs tremble and his eyes roll back when he comes, clenching around Andrew. Andrew fucks him through the orgasm and the aftershocks of it, a fast, steady pace that has Kevin’s mouth opening in a long, silent moan as he shakes and spills over Andrew’s fist.
Andrew is close behind Kevin; when the spring feels near snapping, he pulls out, twists his wrist on the upstroke, and spills between them. He heaves in a lungful of humid, sex-stunk air as he does, and Kevin stares up at him as he does.
In the moments after, all he’s aware of is his hands and where they lie; the cotton sheets under his right hand, damp and crumpled, the warm curve of muscle under his left, overlapped with tangled hair. As if as distant as the coastal waves from here, Kevin sighs softly, breathy and fatigued, and shifts under Andrew.
“You can—“ Kevin starts, but whatever he had been about to offer is lost to the sound of the closing door as Andrew leaves the room.
Hallway, then lounge, through to the entranceway where he’d left his shoes. He passes the cooling food in the kitchen, abandoned to the counter, barren of steam. Andrew had not stripped his clothes off like he had Kevin; he’s sweat-sticky at his back, the uncomfortable damp of it over the back of his legs. It means he just needs to shove his feet into his boots, still rubbery and muddied, and re-adjust his belt in the doorway. Behind him, there’s no noise.
Kevin, like Andrew had thought, is at least smart enough not to follow.
When he opens the door, the doorframe drips. Outside, the wind has fallen away, leaving the rain to fall heavy and dense onto the silent street. There’s wind somewhere far off, he can hear — a dull howling out at sea that he’s still not learned how to interpret. For now, Kilduáin is in the eye of the storm, and Andrew sighs, reaching out for the coat that Kevin had hung up earlier. It’s still got a receipt of Andrew’s in the pocket — cereal and a snack bar — and he crumples it in his fist when he shoves his hands deep into the oilskin. Beyond Kevin’s door and the hallway light, the rain is a thick sheet of darkness, tasting of salt and grass.
Andrew shifts his feet in his boots, and then steps out into the mammoth nothing of the night.