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Kevin appears exactly two minutes before the bell.
The slam of his locker would have startled Neil out of his staring match with his pre-calc textbook if he hadn't been expecting him.
As it is, he barely looks up from where the tips of his fingers are digging dents into the book's cardboard spine. Neither does Andrew, propped up against the locker beside Neil with his head tipped back against the metal and his eyes closed.
Kevin, undeterred by their lack of reaction and uninterested in Andrew, looms over Neil. All six feet of a man on a mission. He narrows his eyes. "Meet me in the parking lot after class. Don't be late."
Neil raises a brow. He asks, "Today?" and watches the furrow in Kevin's brow grow impressively steeper.
"Yes, today," he says. "I'm driving. Dad needs us to pick up supplies on the way home."
Andrew snorts, the only indication that he's listening at all. "Good luck," he says. Neil doesn't need him to spell out the insult to Kevin's driving skills.
Kevin, not nearly as in step with Andrew's thought patterns as Neil, flicks him a single, confused glance before refocusing on Neil, who shrugs.
"What if I have plans?"
"You do," Kevin says. "With me."
Neil shrugs again. He's mainly trying to annoy Kevin, which is working. There is nothing in the world that could make him miss tonight.
The bell rings, and bodies around them startle into action. Lockers slam, bags are grabbed, and people stream down the hallways towards their classrooms. Kevin, teacher's pet extraordinaire, grows visibly anxious but doesn't move an inch. Doesn't even take his eyes off Neil.
Neil tips his head over to Andrew, whose eyes are still closed. The overhead panel lights are streaking white light through his hair, painting shadows beneath his eyes and cheekbones, throwing the freckles across his nose into relief.
Neil catches a good bit of cheek between his molars, bites down until he tastes blood, and releases it. He smooths his tongue over the metallic sting and asks. "Are you coming?"
Andrew snorts again. His eyes open, at last, honey pot gold flecked with green around the pupil, and he says, "Not with you."
"Party starts at eight," Kevin tells him over Neil's head. Andrew dismisses him with a bored glance up.
"Fine," Neil says, directed at neither or at both of them, and grabs his bag from the floor between his legs, at last.
"You're coming," Kevin repeats, not as a question. He's clutching the strap of his own backpack. His class is in the opposite direction down the hall.
"Yes," Neil says. "Obviously."
Kevin rolls his eyes, but slips his bag over his shoulder at last. "You're so difficult."
"It's my charm." Neil steps around him, aware of Andrew moving to follow him. "See you later, Kev."
"Don't be late," Kevin calls after him, but Neil doesn't turn around.
Andrew glides smoothly into step beside him. He doesn't look up. He doesn't ask. Neil's heart, for all his outward calm, beats in his throat.
If all goes well, tonight will change things forever.
Neil and Andrew have been best friends since kindergarten. This is a secret to no one.
Not even the precise way they met — Andrew offering the edge of his sleeping mat to Neil, who had been sent without one — or the way they continued sharing the tiny mat until their teacher finally made a pointed call to Neil's frazzled uncle, is particularly well-hidden knowledge. Neither is the way Neil carried on following Andrew around like a lost duckling, the way his stubby fingers linked through Andrew's on their first day of school, or their persistent sleepovers well out of middle school.
What is a secret, one so tightly guarded it hasn't crossed a single pair of lips in the world, is that in the summer break before their senior year of high school, Neil walked in on Andrew kissing a boy. That part is not so much the secret. The secret is the way the sight made Neil's stomach hurt so bad he had to hide in the bathroom of his uncle's house until he managed to swallow down the tears threatening at the back of his throat.
This, he has never told even Andrew.
It was strange, at first, keeping a secret from him for the first time in his life. Neil had been raised on secrets and silence, but that part of his life had never included Andrew. That part remained behind closed doors, on monthly phone calls with the prison where his mother was waiting out the rest of her life.
He doesn't know, even three months later, if Andrew knows that it was him stumbling through the locker room door. If he looked up in time to see the hasty retreat Neil beat before it slammed shut behind him.
It took him some time, afterward, on Uncle Stuart's fluffy gray bathmat, to sort through his whirlwind of thoughts, the thick clog of feelings in his windpipe. Something bitter like betrayal over the fact that Andrew hadn't told him. Something sour like jealousy. And something flighty, something that felt like locking the door before he picked up the phone, like pulling the sleeves of his sweater over his hands and barring himself in the shower stall to change.
He never saw the boy around Andrew again, and Andrew moved on like nothing at all had happened. But something in Neil was irrevocably changed. An irreversible chemical reaction that left him entirely different from before. And all the gas it produced is still trapped somewhere beneath his skin.
It's been three months of silence from Andrew. Neil needs something to happen. Something to release all this tension. A fight. A reaction. Anything at all.
And if Andrew won't then, Neil's decided, he will.
Retired national Exy champion David Wymack spent a good chunk of the wealth he walked out with on a cozy little farmhouse out in the countryside for himself, his wife, and his son. It's situated a good ten-minute drive away from the last sign of civilization, down a long dirt drive through the woods, at the very edge of a lake that belongs to the property.
Neil, having been friends with Kevin Wymack-Day almost as long as with Andrew, has spent too many summer days diving headfirst into the brown-green lake water for the sight of it to leave him breathless even like this; ringed by yellow-and-red trees, the pale blue fall sky looming overhead.
Abby, who is Wymack's wife but not Kevin's mother, exactly, waits for them on the gravel driveway outside the house with both of her arms buried in the trunk of her own car.
"Hi, boys," she calls when Neil climbs out of Kevin's passenger seat. "You're just in time! Got any hands to spare?"
Kevin sends Neil ahead into the house while he helps her with her bags of groceries. Inside, the typically tidy hallway is piled with boxes of decorations, fabric and plastic, and plush. From somewhere in the middle of the mess, Wymack's head emerges, salt and pepper hair plastered to his tan forehead with sweat. He's already wearing a tacky black cloak over his tank top, tied with a string under his scruffy chin.
"Neil," he says, warmly, and pushes himself up to his feet with the groan of a man much older than he is. "Come in, son. Kevin get you anything to eat on the way home?"
He had, but Neil does not say no to the fat sandwich Wymack hands him from a tray in the kitchen. It drips with truffle mayonnaise and spicy mustard, and lands warm and heavy in Neil's stomach.
The rest of the kitchen is covered in food, too — platters of orange and purple frosted cupcakes, more sandwiches with pumpkin-shaped picks stuck through their layers, cake pops with vampire and Frankenstein faces painted on them, huge bowls of fruit punch dyed various freaky colors. Through the open door, Abby and Kevin carry more heavy wicker bags of ingredients.
Abby sets hers down on a free bit of counter space so she can reach for Neil, ruffle his hair back from his forehead. She looks windswept and a little flushed from the cold. "It's good to see you. How was school?"
Neil shrugs. "The usual. Need any help around here?"
Abby laughs. "Oh, desperately. But finish your sandwich first."
Neil does, then rolls up the sleeves of his flannel and helps Wymack load the boxes from the hallway into the bed of his truck while Abby and Kevin bury themselves in the kitchen. With the scent of Abby's pumpkin cookies in his nose, he climbs into the passenger seat and lets Wymack take him on the minute drive around the lake.
On the opposite shore, a large and mostly empty barn makes up the only other building on the property. Eleven months out of the year, the Wymack-Day-Winfields use it as a storage shed and glorified garage. Tonight, it will be home to the greatest Halloween party and home-built haunted house in the state.
Neil unlatches the door and jumps out of his seat before the car has fully rolled to a stop, which earns him a pointed grumble from Wymack.
Inside, most of the structure has already been set up. Neil spreads large, plastic tablecloths printed with pumpkins and bats, and spiderwebs over the tables that line the walls. He climbs a rickety little ladder and pins string lights and plastic spiders along the walls. He helps Wymack pull up the large curtain that separates the main party room from the haunted house. Beyond it, plywood panels covered in more curtains form winding paths that he decorates with fake spiderwebs, bizarre little lamps, and other mysteries from Wymack's boxes.
Outside, Wymack hooks up the sound and light systems for both rooms.
They double back to the house when they're done and load the truck bed with covered platters of food this time. Abby and Kevin follow with both of their cars packed full, and the four of them spend the rest of the afternoon twitching everything into its assigned place.
When the sun is low and red over the golden fields in the west, Wymack hits the switch by the door, and the place lights up in all its eerie glory.
Abby hooks one arm around Neil's shoulders and the other around Kevin's back and squeezes them both close to her sides. Neil allows himself the simple pleasure of tipping his head against hers.
"Good work," she says, and lets them go to clap her hands together, once. "Let's get dressed before everyone gets here."
Neil lets himself be bundled into the familiar warm leather backseat of Abby's car and spends the ride to the house with his forehead pressed against the glass, watching the birds settle in the swaying tree tops across the lake.
By the time the downstairs hallway swells with voices and body heat and the sound of shoes scuffing over the wooden floorboards and the handwoven rugs, Neil is swaddled in a black velvet cloak and has sat through ten minutes of Kevin powdering his face and lining his eyes in black. The dark red waistcoat he wrangled himself into pinches at his sides in a way that makes him suspect it might be a children's size.
Renee smiles at him from where she's leaned against the spiral stair rail. She has her hair braided behind her ears and her eyes painted to take up half her face. "Good evening, Neil. Vampire again?"
Neil shrugs and pulls the packaged plastic fangs out of his coat pocket. It wasn't his idea. He jerks his head at her dress. "Doll?"
She stretches out the stockinged leg emerging from her tight black bodysuit. She winks. "You'll see. Have you seen Allison?"
He has, but only because she is very hard to miss. She takes up a not insignificant portion of the room with her authentic Rococo evening dress, the tattered fabric sliding across the floor inches away from the people taking careful steps around her. Kevin, at last, ascends the basement stairs in a pale blue frock embroidered and ripped at the edges to match her.
He accepts her gloved hand — the silk torn over her pointer finger and splattered with suspicious red over the palm — into his, and they melt together, pale and shabby, in time for Abby to snap a picture from where she's perched halfway up the stairs.
Besides Neil, Renee gives them an indulgent smile. Neil tucks his head to her shoulder to ask, "Have we ordered the coach, or how is she planning to get across the lake in that getup?"
Renee shakes her head. "You underestimate her."
Neil doubts he does, really, but the room is yanked into action by Abby and Wymack before he can say so. In the end, Allison perches on a crate in the bed of Wymack's truck, one hand propped against the side of her towering wig to keep it steady in the wind, the other arm slung across the side of the car like a queen lounging.
Neil sits cross-legged on the floor beside her and wedges the plastic fangs into his gums.
They arrive at the barn with five minutes to spare until the party's official starting time. Abby, in the same witch costume she wears every year, ushers everyone into their places while Wymack sets up the bar.
Allison barely fits through the narrowest points of the haunted house in her pannier. She and Kevin make up the final room, where they will dramatically reenact their 1740s murder suicide on repeat all night. Neil follows them through until the cobwebbed niche halfway in, where a half wall obscures the coffin he is meant to emerge from when guests pass by.
Renee, now dragging strings tied to each limb and a marionette controller after herself, stops to rap her knuckles on the coffin lid. She winks. "Good luck", she says with that smile tucked into her cheek that always makes him wonder how much she knows.
Neil steps backward into his coffin before she rounds the corner.
He never closes the lid all the way. Through the gap, he watches the flickering lights scatter across the floor and listens as the music finally cuts on and voices spill in through the wide-open barn doors.
He knows the image with his eyes closed. The early dusk dark, the humming cicadas in the grass outside, the cars pulling up the gravel drive as costumed guests stumble their way into the barn. Try as he might, Neil can never quite remember the first time he attended. He was too young, sitting on his hands in the back of Wymack's truck with his knee knocking into Andrew's, still having to be lifted in and out. He hasn't missed a year since.
It was a badge of honor when he was first asked to help with the haunted house, a sign both that he was old enough and that he was a part of this, someone they counted on. Now he almost wishes he was out there instead, sitting on the hay bales in the corner, sipping Abby's punch, listening to the Monster Mash and eating pumpkin spiced cookies, and finding hazel eyes across the room.
He's never liked parties. But for one face among the crowd, he wishes he did.
He knows there are people coming through by the sound of the other attractions ahead of him; one of Abby's nieces is doing a haunted fortune telling in the room before him that requires a lot of clattering and ghostly sounds playing from speakers hooked under the ceiling. Neil rolls his shoulders back and gets into position.
The first gaggle that passes through is a hoard of middle-school-aged girls that squeal and giggle to each other when he emerges, groaning and hissing, from his coffin. They scurry on down the hall, and Neil retreats just in time to be able to redo it for the boredom-feigning boys that follow them, and again for the middle-aged couple that he suspects must be friends of Wymack's.
It continues like that, a steady rhythm of dipping in and out of the casket as guests wander past him, and sounds from other parts of the experience wash over him. Half an hour in, he steps out to find Dan and Matt grinning back at him.
"Hey, man." Matt holds his fist out, and Neil bumps his knuckles against the fake staplers Matt's got glued across his own. "Back on shift?"
Neil gives him a vague half-shrug. "Always."
Dan, with a wig almost as tall as Allison's and two jagged white stripes going up the sides of it, props her shoulder against Matt's and reaches over to brush Neil's hair out of his forehead. "How long are you in here for?"
"Kevin will hunt and kill me if I leave anytime before ten."
Dan grins. "We'll protect you if you join us on the dance floor."
Neil rolls his eyes, but his chest is warming up in that way it often does around Dan and Matt.
Matt slings his arm around Dan and says, "Let's keep going before we ruin it for the next people."
Dan wiggles her brows and leans in close enough to be heard over the spirit wailing through the speakers in the other room, "I think your boy was right behind us."
Neil rolls his eyes, but the two of them are already gone.
He barely has time to step back into his coffin before Andrew rounds the corner. He looks sharper than usual in the dim glow of the place, harsh shadows under his eyes and cheekbones, hair falling into his face beneath the headband he slid into it.
Neil holds himself still, poised, until just the right moment when Andrew passes by his niche, and swings open the door at once. "Boo."
Andrew raises a brow, slowly, a drawling movement. The rest of his face doesn't move. "That all you got?"
Neil shrugs. His neck grows a little hot beneath the fancy collar of the dress shirt Kevin forced him into, but he bats the feeling away. "I could try again."
Andrew tilts his head. The fluffy ears attached to his headband slide with the movement. "You could."
Neil reaches up to poke at the ears, tilt them back into place. "Werewolf?" he asks.
"Woof," Andrew replies, dripping enthusiasm. He tucks two fingers against his forehead in a mockery of a salute. "See you later, Dracula."
He turns, a sheath of purple light falling over him and rendering Neil momentarily speechless.
"Let me try again," Neil calls after him when he's already halfway down the corridor to the next room. Andrew gives him a thumbs up without looking back. Neil hides a smile and sinks back into the shadows.
He does try again. Andrew is back fifteen minutes later, hands in his pockets and eyes half-closed, and Neil is poised and ready to go.
He tries every trick in the book. He steals a handful of fake spiders from the decor and throws them at Andrew when he pops out of the coffin. He wrenches the arm off the skeleton down the hall and pokes Andrew with it before he rounds the corner to Neil's niche. He scurries into Kevin and Allison's performance and convinces (blackmails) Kevin into lending him one of his fake blood pouches and covers his hands in the stuff before reaching them out towards Andrew.
Andrew, now the haunted house's most frequent flier, remains unimpressed.
On one notable occasion, Neil attempts to come at him from the other side of the hall, only to trip over one of the speaker cables on the ground. Andrew, unmoved and steady as ever, is there when Neil falls against him, a strong arm around his ribs the only thing that keeps Neil from braining himself on the edge of the coffin.
Neil laughs, breathless with his hands braced on Andrew's shoulders. He's warm, hot, blazing, where their torsos press together, and Neil scrambles for something, anything, to play it off. "Got you," he says, with what he thinks is a pretty good handle on the tremor in his voice. He clacks his plastic fangs together over the junction of Andrew's neck.
Andrew scoffs and pushes him off. Neil stumbles a step, two, backward and spins around him, puts his back to his coffin again.
"Nice try," Andrew says, but Neil knows him well enough to spot the chip in his facade. The tiniest of cracks, but enough for Neil. A foot in the door.
He does not quite manage to tamp down on the smile curling at the corner of his mouth. "Yeah, I think it was."
Andrew flicks his fingers, dismissive, and moves down the hall. "Better luck next time."
But something broils at the bottom of Neil's stomach. His competitive streak, Matt would say. "One more time," he calls after him.
Andrew shoots him a look over his shoulder, eyebrow raised. He shrugs. "Fine," he says, and ducks out of sight.
Neil can't quite hide his grin.
Andrew takes his time returning. Neil did not bring his phone, but his internal clock has him pretty certain that he's getting close to being allowed to leave without risking Kevin's wrath. He scares a few more middle schoolers and classmates, and keeps an eye on the corner of the corridor through the gap in the coffin door.
Aaron and Nicky pass through, chattering about the party outside. Nicky, who's half-naked with a plush snake wrapped around his shoulders, squeals louder than some of the children when Neil swishes his dramatic sleeve at him. Aaron looks no different than usual, though Neil could have sworn that shirt belonged to Andrew. He rolls his eyes, either at Neil or at Nicky or both, and drags Nicky along by the arm.
When at last the flashes of light jumping up and down the halls catch on the familiar sheen of Andrew's hair, Neil pushes the coffin door shut and wedges himself through a gap in the plywood walls. The space between it and the real wall of the barn behind it is narrow, almost too narrow even for him, but he makes it work. He tugs the curtain covering the plywood back over the gap in a way he hopes hides him from view while leaving him with a glimpse of the corridor that leads past his coffin.
Just in time. Not a second later, Andrew shuffles into view around the half-wall. He's walking slowly, much slower than usual, and an uncharacteristic fondness brews up in Neil.
He stays silent, unmoving, while Andrew makes a show of dragging his feet past the coffin. When nothing happens, when Neil does not appear for some foolish attempt at a prank, Andrew stalls. He stares at the coffin in silent expectation, expression flat.
Neil takes a long breath, opens his mouth, and screams.
It will get lost in the overall screeches and screams and wails of the other attractions, probably. But Andrew, only a few yards away, hears him loud and clear and startles.
Neil puts everything he has behind the scream. It's a good one, loud and shrill and terrified and fueled by every nightmare that's kept him up since he was a child. It hollows him out, scrapes all the way from his stomach through his chest and up his throat, and takes everything with it on the way. Every little bit of fear and shame and pain he's felt since he stumbled into that locker room that fateful day, every single time he's bitten his tongue to keep himself from coming clean and begging Andrew for answers.
He pours it all into this one scream, lets it all out, and then he goes silent.
Utterly still. His lungs protest, aching to wheeze in oxygen, but Neil has always had impeccable stamina, and he keeps himself silent, motionless.
Through the slit in the curtain, he sees Andrew's head swivel. Watches him turn, his brow furrow, his hands reach for the lid of the coffin and pry it open, finding it empty.
He says, "Neil," and his voice is even, tight, controlled.
Neil stays silent.
And Andrew's brows twitch closer together, draw a line down his forehead, and he says, "Neil," again, and there's the lightest crack in it, a hiccup over the curve of the syllable. The slightest give.
He spins again, looks up at the ceiling like Neil might be hiding in the rafters, and says, a third time, "Neil."
Something like triumph breaks in Neil's chest like a wave, though it tastes a bit of relief when it washes up into his throat. He waits until Andrew's back is turned again, another desperate bid for Neil to appear in the coffin, before he slips back through the gap and says, "Looking for something?"
Andrew whirls around, eyes wide at the corners, lips pressed into a point. His face wars with itself, telegraphing too much and trying to remain neutral all at once. It makes Neil's stomach bubble, something warm and fuzzy that sets off a series of uncomfortable sparks against his still raw insides.
He grins. "Hi."
Andrew's eyes narrow, but at last a breath shudders through him and his shoulders loosen. He says, "What the fuck."
Neil shrugs, still doing a shoddy job of hiding his smile in his cheek. "Got you?"
But his throat foams with everything else he wants to ask, with the image of Andrew's mask shattering, with all the feelings he unearthed from the graveyard in the pit of his stomach.
Andrew's face twitches, and he steps closer, bridges the gap between them. Neil does not dare move back. He does not move a muscle when Andrew reaches out to fit a hand along his jaw, for fear of splintering through the quiet intensity in Andrew's gaze. The touch lights a spark beneath Neil's skin, sends him reeling, all air rushing out of his lungs. He can't quite seem to breathe it back in.
When Andrew steps back, when his expression stitches itself back up, he takes a part of Neil with him.
Neil's lips drop open, still stuttering for breath. "Andrew —"
But Andrew tilts his head to the side, as physical as he ever gets with cutting Neil off. "How long until you're out of here?"
Neil shrugs. He's lost all sense of time, but all fucks he once gave about it, too. "I can leave right now."
"Okay," Andrew says.
Neil swallows. Nods. "Okay."
Outside the haunted house's crawling corridors, the party is in full swing. The dance floor throbs with bodies in costumes, the buffet tables along the walls have nearly been picked clean, and in a corner of the room, Abby is refilling one of the punch bowls with ice. The air is sweaty and heavy and sweet with sweat and breath and smoke from the dispensers under the ceilings, and Neil has to wind a path around the moving body of the crowd to keep pace with Andrew.
Andrew, who never has a problem beating a path into a crowd. Andrew, who hasn't looked back at him once but stops every time Neil falls a few too many steps behind.
He stops by the buffet table to pick two skeleton cupcakes from the near-empty plate, then leads the way towards the wide open barn doors.
Stepping past them feels like shedding a physical weight. The night's gone cool and dark. The kind of dark it only gets out here, where the lights of the city don't reach, the kind of dark it's hard to see in after the orange glow of the barn. A few yards across, dark shapes move around the bonfire Wymack must have started sometime during the night. At their backs, laughter and music and light and heat pour out of the barn's open maw.
It leaves Neil feeling kind of stranded, in this half-space between the party and the night. On the precipice of something, though he can't say what.
With Andrew here, he doesn't know if there's anywhere else he'd rather be.
Andrew rounds the corner of the barn, and Neil, finally, takes out his stupid plastic fangs before he follows. The low murmur of voices in the middle distance promises there are other people around, smoking or talking or getting some air, but they are tucked out of view from the main party here. Andrew props one leg up against the wall behind him and holds one of his cupcakes out in offering.
Neil takes it only because it's him. He nibbles on the frosting and wills it not to hurt his teeth while Andrew takes a generous bite of his own.
They eat in silence for a handful of minutes. The night moves around them; the muted fade of one song into another beyond the wall, the crackle of the fire in the distance, the deep laughter of the men gathered around it. A night bird calls in a tree somewhere above. Tiny bites of confection settle in Neil's belly, right beside the stretched-out, static feeling that's been crawling beneath his skin.
He takes a breath as if to mitigate it and succeeds only at inflating himself further. A giant, boy-shaped balloon of words gone unsaid and feelings swallowed down.
He promised himself that something would change tonight.
Neil blinks, and Andrew is looking at him. He's finished most of his cupcake, has made it down to scraping the wrapper with his teeth, where Neil's still working on making a dent in the top, and his eyes are darker than usual out of the light. They don't move from Neil's face.
Somewhere between all of his vibrating, Andrew's patience finds its end. He crumples his cupcake wrapper in his palm. "What's up with you."
Neil braves another minuscule bite of his frosting to delay answering, and shrugs when he can't make himself stomach a second one. "Nothing much."
Andrew, who knows him better than anyone, holds out his hand. Neil gratefully places the cupcake in it. "Not liking the party?"
His sarcasm falls flat on Neil's strung nerves. He watches Andrew's teeth dig a fresh groove into the side of the cupcake, his lips closing around the sponge of its insides, his tongue flicking out to lick a speck of white frosting from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, it seems, have adjusted to the dark for the sole purpose of projecting Andrew onto the big screen of his brain in high definition.
He has a tiny mole on his cheek, right below his left eye, that moves when he chews.
Andrew swallows and reaches out again just to dig the sharp cut of his knuckles into Neil's shoulder. "Spit it out."
Neil shifts on his feet. But he's not a quitter, and there's nothing else left to say — Neil knows better than to believe the loose line of Andrew's shoulders. Even with his own back to the wall, Andrew has him pinned like a bug in a glass.
"Remember summer break?"
Andrew's brow wanders up his forehead, but he says only, "Yes."
Neil does, too; remembers long days on back porches, plunging into the lake just beyond the barn, sipping Abby's sweet tea in the late golden sunset while Kevin knocked balls down the grass lawn and Andrew wouldn't look up from his book. All undercut by one afternoon stumbling down a long grey hallway and into the dusty parking lot with his stomach lurching.
He swallows the memory down. "When Kevin dragged us along to that kids' team he was coaching."
Even Neil, who usually enjoyed most things Exy, did not care particularly for Kevin's attempts at redeeming the more grating parts of his personality through volunteer work at the local community center. Andrew cared even less. They spent most of the three weeks dicking around, trying snacks from the vending machines, and reading to each other from glossy gossip rags in the lounge. At least, until Andrew started disappearing in convenient coincidence with a boy from the treadmills in the gym, and Neil was left to wander the halls by himself.
He watches, now, as the memory takes hold on Andrew's face. It settles in the small jut of his chin, the tick of his brow, the heavy droop of his lids as he tries, instinctively, to hide any reaction behind apathy.
A miserable smile forces itself on Neil's face. "Yeah."
Andrew pops the remainder of Neil's cupcake into his mouth like it might delay any of the tension unspooling between them. It doesn't. It only makes Neil hone in on his little dancing mole, on the purse of his lips.
Andrew swallows. Licks crumbs off his teeth. Says, "Right."
"Right." Neil wipes his sweaty palms on his dress pants. He thinks the tiny waistcoat might be making it hard for him to breathe. "I haven't —" told anyone, he almost says, and then realizes that's not what he means to say at all. Not what Andrew needs to hear at all.
Something has to give, Neil tells himself, time and time again. He cannot keep them in this suspense any longer, not now that he's dragged Andrew down with himself.
He licks his lip and releases the death grip he has on himself.
"I haven't done that, ever," he says. And, "I haven't been able to stop thinking about it."
Andrew is very, very still, and Neil is suddenly very, very breathless. All air has vacated him at once, deflating him and letting him drift back down to earth with the tattered remains of his balloon. He can't look away from Andrew's face and wants to do nothing more.
Finally, finally, Andrew moves. He reaches out and snags two fingers in the ruffle collar of Neil's shirt. His face still hasn't moved an inch, but he tugs until the fabric cuts into the back of Neil's neck, and he has to concede an inch of the careful space between them by leaning forward, down until they're perfectly at eye level.
Andrew stares at him, dark eyes flicking back and forth between both of Neil's, and finally down to his mouth.
Neil's breath stutters in his chest, involuntarily.
"You," Andrew says, "are so unbelievably stupid."
Neil wants to protest, wants to ask what he's done this time, but Andrew yanks at his collar until Neil stumbles forward a half-step, and crushes their mouths together, hard, and all rational thought leaves Neil's brain.
It's probably not a very good kiss. Their teeth knock together through the soft meat of their lips, and Neil's skull rings with the force, and they do little but stand there, pressed together, Andrew's fist still tight in his collar.
But Neil has no space to think about any of that. All he knows is Andrew, pressed up against him. His warm skin in the cold night, his smooth lips against Neil's horribly chapped ones, his fingers burning a trail into the side of his neck. The smell of him, so achingly familiar and so new all at once. His brain careens off the rails, grasping at every sensation and trying to cobble together anything resembling a thought and failing at every turn.
Somewhere in his chest, his heart aches something vicious.
When Andrew backs away, his brow is furrowed. He doesn't let go of Neil's collar. He says, "Now you have."
Neil's heart chokes in his throat. "Andrew," he says, stupidly, voice hoarse.
He couldn't say, if pressed, who leaned back in first. It's better, too, this time. Andrew lets go of his collar to slide his palm over the back of Neil's neck, the other one finding a place on his waist, and he fits his lips around Neil's bottom lip and kisses him properly.
It's better, softer, warmer, more intense. Neil's skin fizzes all over, a spark in charge. His hands raise, reach for Andrew and falter on the way, and Andrew has to place them on his shoulders, in his hair himself, before Neil gains the courage to hold on.
Andrew is so warm. His hair is so soft. He's still wearing that silly headband, knocked askew by Neil's wandering fingers across his scalp, and they're standing in the dark outside the party with their chests pressed together and their mouths locked, and Neil is sure Andrew can feel the wild beating of his heart through all the layers of fabric between them.
He feels like a kid on a sugar rush on Christmas Eve. He feels entirely out of his depth. He feels resettled into his body, reconnected to his limbs, reacquainted with an existence he's spent the last three months trying to make sense of.
They part a few times just to breathe into the narrow space between them, breath warm enough to puff in the cool night air before they fall back together. Andrew's palm squeezes his waist. Neil winds himself around him, digs the tips of his fingers into Andrew's shoulder blades. Andrew's head thunks back against the wall behind him, and Neil follows his lips like a moth to flame. They're merged together, wound tight, their outlines blurring into one.
A spill of laughter rings out too close to them, and Neil flinches back a step. Andrew lets him go, his head tilted in question, and Neil regrets it immediately.
He clears his throat. Past the edge of the barn, Dan and Matt stumble towards the bonfire, followed by a half-naked Nicky, Kevin, and Allison, covered in fake blood and relieved of their duties for the night. All of them half-caught in the golden light of the barn.
Neil looks at Andrew and finds him still looking back.
He takes a breath and reaches for Andrew's wrist. Something in him thrills when Andrew simply lets him, loosens himself into Neil's grasp.
Neil smiles. "Let's go?" he asks, and Andrew follows when he tugs.
Wymack's truck is parked just out of the way of the barn, on the gravel among the other cars that arrived throughout the night. The bed is littered with crates and boxes and other things gone unused during the party. The sides are high enough to hide them, Neil knows from years of playing hide and seek around the house.
He hoists himself backward up onto the ledge, and Andrew steps up between his thighs. Their mouths slot back together so easily, Andrew's palms around his jaw. Like a dance they spent years practicing instead of something they discovered they could do ten minutes ago.
Neil's whole body feels alight.
Andrew follows him when he shimmies backward into the truck bed, crawls over him when Neil lies down, settles on his thighs. They never stop kissing. Andrew is an inferno on top of him, his hands burning their marks into Neil's skin, his lips insistent against Neil's until they open up and their tongues touch, all tentative.
Neil presses himself into Andrew's hands when they slide down his chest. His lungs ache for oxygen, but he's too distracted to fulfill their request, too busy gasping into Andrew's mouth when Andrew's quick fingers undo the buttons on his waistcoat.
His ribs ache, freed from their prison, and he manages a full breath before Andrew's hand works its way beneath his shirt and all air wheezes out of him again.
He grips Andrew's skull as tight as he dares, rakes his fingers through his soft hair to keep himself sane while Andrew touches him and kisses him and holds him so close.
They stay there for longer than Neil cares to count. Entangled in the back of this truck, barely away from the party full of their friends. If he cares to listen past the bubble of their breaths, he can still hear their distant laughter, the music floating through the night. But there is little he cares about beyond the weight of Andrew's hands against his stomach and the flame it stokes deep inside of him.
Their kisses slow, eventually, turn from frantic to languid, until they're barely trading pecks. Andrew rolls off him to lie beside him instead, both of them on their sides and tucked together. Neil fits a hand along Andrew's cheek and touches the tip of a finger against his sweet mole.
Andrew's eyes are shaded, half-lidded, and his expression is loose. Kissed open, Neil thinks dizzily.
"Who was he?" he asks into the easy silence between them.
Andrew shrugs. "The only other gay boy in that miserable building." His brows twitch. "Beggars can't be choosers."
"Not the only," Neil says before he can stop himself. He doesn't even know if it's true. He's never thought of himself as gay, exactly. Not even in the last three months.
He doesn't care for men. He cares for Andrew. He doesn't know if there's a difference. Doesn't know if he cares, either.
Andrew blows out a breath, but it sounds almost more amused than anything.
Neil's fingertip draws a nonsense pattern over Andrew's cheek. Circling, again and again, back to the mole. "Are you …" He swallows, tries to pick the right words, but still comes up with only, "Are you still a beggar now?"
Andrew stares at him. He reaches back out for Neil, slow and deliberate in the way he leans close until their lips touch again. In the way he presses against him, harder and harder until Neil rolls onto his back again, and Andrew follows until he's half above him. He winds a hand around the wrist of Neil's hand, still touching his face, presses his thumb into his pulse point.
Rational thought escapes Neil again, and he's willing, fully willing, to let the conversation drop and surrender himself to Andrew's kiss. But then Andrew pulls back, hand still wrapped around his wrist. He keeps Neil pinned with his gaze when he says, "No."
Neil can't help his smile, brittle and hopeful as it is. He tries to hide it by pulling Andrew back against him.
Andrew lets him, though he keeps his thumb on Neil's racing pulse.
Hours later, when the last of the party-goers have vanished back up the road into the woods and they've made a halfhearted effort at breaking down what they could of the barn before Abby ushered them out with a yawn of her own, Neil sits in the backseat of the same truck with his thigh pressed up against Andrew's.
Kevin, on his other side, has his head dropped against the window. His breathing has gone so deep he's almost snoring, his wig discarded and his hair matted against his forehead with its imprint.
If he stretches, Neil can just see the headlights of Matt's car in the rearview mirror between Wymack and Abby's heads up front.
All of them pile into the house among content midnight murmuring. Dan and Renee help Allison up the front door steps and set about unlacing her dress in the hallway while queues for the bathrooms are formed, haggled over, ignored, and fought over. Aaron helps Abby distribute cups of water and leftover snacks.
Neil leans against the kitchen island and tips his shoulder against Andrew's.
The house is big, but there are not quite enough beds for everyone. Kevin, already dragging his feet, disappears up the stairs towards his bedroom. After a suspicious moment, so does Aaron.
Neil doesn't need to look over at Andrew to know that he noticed, too.
He abandons his half-finished water glass and Andrew in the kitchen to help Wymack dig up spare comforters and pillows from the hall closet and carry them down into the basement den, where Abby's unfolded the pullout couch and Renee is inflating the air mattress she brought.
Nicky, who seems to have found a shirt and a pair of pajama pants and also appears to be entirely unconcerned about Aaron's absence, sprawls out on the reclining chair and flashes Neil a grin.
"All right?" he asks with a wiggle of his brows, and Neil turns to help Renee and Allison set up before he can think of any other questions. Like where Neil spent the latter half of the party.
No one else asks him about it. Renee, who's managed to wash the makeup off her eyes and unbraid her hair somewhere in the middle of all this, gives him an indulgent smile from where she's sitting cross-legged on her mattress, and digs her fingernails into Allison's forearm when she opens her mouth. Dan sits on the edge of the pullout couch and leans her head on Neil's arm while Matt sorts out their sheets.
She flops backwards as soon as he's done, and looks about asleep within seconds.
Matt smiles down at her. He meets Neil's eye across the couch, and smiles at him, too.
"Thanks for inviting us, man," he says when they've stepped aside, like they haven't been invited every year since freshman year. Or like it was Neil inviting them in the first place.
Perhaps it was. Neil shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable, and Matt claps a friendly hand on his shoulder.
"I'm gonna go get washed up. You should, too, maybe," he says, twinkle in his eyes, and walks backwards to the basement bathroom.
Neil frowns after him, but wanders back upstairs. Light and muted conversation spills out of the open kitchen door, but Neil heads for the bathroom instead.
He sees what Matt meant in the mirror. The powder Kevin covered him in dyed him several shades greyer than normal, and while it's flaked off in spots under his eyes, it's disappeared completely from around his mouth and down his chin.
Face hot, Neil wipes a self-conscious palm over his smudged cheek. It does little to hide what everyone has already seen.
He can do nothing but squash down the embarrassment and wash his face in the sink. He digs his pajamas out of his bag and brushes his teeth and pokes his head into the kitchen to say goodnight.
Wymack is sitting at the island with a cup of something steaming cradled in his palms. Abby, who's changed out of her costume into a fleece sweater she's had as long as Neil has known her, sets her own mug down to give him a hug.
"Thanks for all your help," she says. Her shoulder smells like a long day and tea and home. She pulls back with a wink. "Don't worry about school tomorrow."
Neil wasn't, but he gives her a smile anyway. If nothing else, they always know exactly what to tell his uncle.
Back downstairs, his friends have turned off the light and settled down. Dan and Matt are curled around each other like commas on the couch, Nicky has fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his arms. Allison and Renee are talking quietly, but neither of them looks up when Neil pads past.
He finds Andrew in the spare bedroom that is basically Neil's, courtesy of too many nights unable to sleep at his uncle's house. He's changed into sweatpants and lost his hairband and tucked himself into the armchair across from the bed with his phone. He looks up when Neil walks in and raises a brow.
Neil feels hot all over again. He clicks the door shut behind himself and wipes at his cheek again. "Do you think they could tell?"
Andrew snorts. He doesn't bother answering, and Neil tries to tamp down on his own smile.
Past the hot embarrassment, his body still feels strung with something he hesitates to call giddiness.
Neil crawls into the bed, and after a moment, pats the mattress beside himself when Andrew stays where he is. "Come here?"
Andrew blinks, slow and lazy, and unfolds himself at last to climb in next to Neil.
It's a big enough bed for both of them, but the diminishing space between them feels, at once, electric. Neil can no longer fathom ever having had the courage to put his hands on Andrew.
He swallows around nothing and keeps his hands, anxious, on his knees.
Andrew just keeps looking at him, quiet and still, until Neil feels ready to squirm out of his skin. Finally, he says, "Neil," and touches just the tips of his fingers to the back of Neil's hand. It's enough to make Neil shiver. "It's not a big deal."
Neil swallows. "Isn't it?"
Andrew looks at him. In this kind of light, his eyes are a sort of dark honey shade that Neil has always found particularly comforting. "It doesn't have to be."
Neil nods, somehow both relieved and disquieted. He chews on his lip, staring off at the wall. "It is to me. A little."
Andrew is quiet for just a moment. "Okay," he says.
"I don't want it to mean nothing," Neil adds too quickly, words spilling out of his mouth in a rush. He realizes only how true they are when they hang in the air between them, waiting.
Andrew breathes out slowly. His hand moves to cover the back of Neil's fully. "Okay," he says. "Then it won't."
Neil nods. He shifts his hand so he can wrap his fingers around Andrew's and hold tight. "Okay," he says, and something restless in him settles, at last. "Can we —"
Andrew huffs and tugs him close by his hand. Neil lets himself fall against him. He can't quite hold the smile pulling at the corners of his mouth when Andrew presses their lips back together. His bubbling insides calm, at last, only to heat up with the dizzy excitement of the kiss.
They're slower, more meandering with it than earlier. Andrew lowers them both down into the pillows, and Neil curls a hand around his jaw to hold him close. They shuffle under the blankets together and keep kissing, until they're fully cocooned with nothing but the air between them.
When Andrew draws back a final time, he lifts a hand to fold it around Neil's still resting against his cheek. He looks at him, and Neil looks back, and they lie still together until one of them falls asleep, and the other, always, follows.