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They’ve in the second half of the game. The Foxes are holding on by the skin of their teeth. Renee is out with a stomach bug, and they can’t afford to sub any of the freshmen in for Andrew. He has to last the rest of the game.
Living on the run heightened Neil’s senses. He knows the exits and blunt force objects that can double as a weapon in every room he enters. And he knows Andrew.
Andrew lights up Neil’s senses like nothing else. He is magnetic North. Neil picks up on the queues everyone else misses—the ones that no one else attempts to notice.
Andrew’s deflects a shot, and the ball flies wide. The opposition scoops it up. Andrew is deliberate with most of his hits; that should’ve gone to Neil.
The opposite striker tries for another goal. The shot is strong, whip-fast. Andrew bats it away. Aaron and Matt are too busy scrambling after the ball to notice Andrew’s hand slipping off his racquet and hanging by his side. He can’t shake out his hand—his glove is too big. Andrew’s face is flat, his teeth gritted.
“Kevin,” Neil says in French. “We need to go full out.”
“Have you been holding back?” Kevin snaps. “You should already be giving it your all.”
Neil scowls. They don’t have time for this. Matt and Aaron are winning the back-and-forth tussle, and the ball will be down their end soon. “Full out, and then some. Don’t let the ball get back to Andrew.”
Kevin glances at their goal. Andrew looks as immovable as ever, knees locked, bad hand back on his racquet. But Kevin has learned to trust Andrew and Neil, especially when it concerns the one other.
“Keep up with me,” Kevin says. It’s not a taunt in the way it might be from someone else, or a dig at how fast Neil is. It’s a plain assessment of Kevin’s skill. His own agreement to run himself into the ground when Neil asks.
Matt passes to Dan, and Kevin and Neil take off in different directions. Neil sprints to the right of Dan, Kevin loops around to the left. Dan passes to Neil; Neil bounces it off the wall to Kevin; Kevin shoots.
Goal.
They continue like that, a two-man army, and the rest of the team picks up the pace.
The backliners realise that it’s Neil urging the Foxes on—or maybe they’re just tired of how fast he is, how ruthless his plays are. Ten minutes until the end of the game, someone tackles Neil in a clear fowl. They slam into the ground. Their heavy bulk pins Neil down. There are hands around his arms, a knee in his stomach, an elbow pressed into the soft underside of his ribs.
The foxes are there immediately, mouthing off and grabbing at the opposition players, trying to get to Neil. The other players fight back. Neil is aware enough to see the brawl breaking out above him. There are hands everywhere. The person on top of him shifts, and Neil’s head gets shoved against the court. The elbow pressing against his lungs has nothing to do with how difficult it is to breathe.
Voices blur together. Neil brings his hands over his ears and curls up like a pillbug. A hand grabs his ankle, and Neil can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, because once someone has him, there’s nothing he can do. Someone’s body is blanketing his, entrapping him, and Neil is waiting for the one-two of Mary’s punch, the familiar drag of a blade, the snap of bone.
And then the weight is twisted off him, and Andrew is there, pulling him up by his collar. Andrew doesn’t let go. Neil sways on his feet, blinking against the harsh court lights.
He registers everything in bursts, coming back to himself piece by piece: Andrew’s hand on the back of his neck. Aaron clutching his bloody nose. Allison shouting at a referee. The audience still screaming. Opposition players drifting around them in dark, hazy blocks. And Andrew, through it all, standing by Neil’s side, his gaze steady.
Neil tries to say, I’m fine, but his throat isn’t working. The words aren’t there. Neil balls his hands into fists, and then loosens them, and then scrunches them back up again. The tingling in his fingers doesn’t go away.
Andrew waits for him to pull himself back together He doesn’t rush him, even as the players around them scramble back to their places on the court. Neil nods his head at Andrew’s hand. How is your injury?
Andrew looks him over coolly. “How is your heart, rabbit?”
Neil rubs his hand over his chest. In his experience, panic is usually proceeded by action, coming hand in hand with a shot of adrenaline, but now that he’s mostly safe, no longer in Baltimore or on the run, his panic has nowhere to lead him. It’s more off-balancing, somehow. He can’t focus on escaping the threat, because there is no threat, only the acidic swirl of memories, blurry shapes in his periphery.
Andrew watches him. Andrew knows, first-hand, what this is like.
Neil shrugs at him. After the buzzer, they can regroup. Assess the damage.
Andrew nods, just once, and heads back down the court. Matt and Dan swoop in and check Neil for injuries. Kevin hovers over their shoulders. The downturned purse to his lips tells Neil that he’s in for a long lecture on the bus ride home—a lecture he has no patience for.
Neil smiles and shoots them a thumbs up. I’m fine.
Matt and Dan exchange glances. Matt says, “Been a while since you went nonverbal, buddy.”
Neil tries to smile, but from his teammates’ winces, he doesn’t think he succeeds.
“He manages to pull that ‘I’m fine’ bullshit without even talking,” Dan says.
“Can you play?” Kevin says. Neil nods, yes.
“But are you alright?” Matt insists.
“Andrew let him go, rather than dragging him off court,” Dan says. “So I’d say he’s probably okay.”
Kevin looks him up and down. “Don’t lag behind.”
Allison, Neil’s backliner, and the person that bloodied Aaron’s nose are yellow-carded. The game resumes.
Neil isn’t as narrow-minded anymore. He’s shaky. He lets a handful of goals in. Kevin swears at him in French, and the ball loops back round to the other goal. Andrew bats it away, one-handed.
The anxiety souring in his gut pulls at his concentration, but Neil forces himself on. His heart jumps in his throat every time a backliner gets too close, but he doesn’t let that show.
The final buzzer reverberates through his skull. He drops his racquet. The backliners swear, and the Foxes whoop and jump on each other. Somewhere to his left, Kevin is panting through his teeth. Neil doesn’t need to look at the scoreboard to know that, despite the win, their game was too close for comfort.
Neil’s focus is pulled to the other end of the court. Andrew has dropped his racquet, too. Neil scoops up his own racquet, and weaves through the embracing upperclassmen. Nicky tries to pull him into a hug, but Neil ducks away, only just managing to hide his flinch.
“Still here?” Andrew asks Neil mildly.
“He just helped us win the game, you ass,” Nicky says through a laugh. Neil doesn’t pay attention to Nicky. Andrew isn’t teasing. He’s asking, Where is your head right now? Are you here, or are you in Baltimore; Evermore; an overcast beach in California?
Neil points at the ground. I’m right here.
Andrew’s eyes roam over him, clearly doubtful. That’s fair. It’s not often that Neil runs out of words. When he’s the most afraid, he runs his mouth. It’s burnt-out panic that leaves him like this, the weighty exhaustion that comes after panic attacks.
Neil picks up Andrew’s oversized racquet. When they line up to shake hands with the opposition, Andrew offers his left hand to the other goalie’s right. She makes a face, but takes it.
Neil doesn’t shake anyone’s hands. He glances at the hand offered to him, raises his eyebrows, and jerks his chin at his occupied hands, where he’s holding both his and Andrew’s racquets.
The opposition player scowls at him. “Are you serious, dude?”
Neil gives him a close-lipped smile. Normally, he might say, Sorry. But he won’t waste his words on a stranger right now.
The opposition players turn and file off the court. Neil overhears a couple of them mumbling something fowl about bad attitudes, rumours, the word Wesiniski. It’s not the first time his past has been brought up on the court. Every Fox deals with it, to some measure. Now, though, with his defences low, it feels like an ice pick through his stomach.
Andrew steers him off the court, hand ghosting under Neil’s elbow, barely touching him.
Wymack starts in on a speech—more lecture than congratulations—as the Foxes pour in. Andrew and Neil bypass them entirely. Wymack stops mid-sentence. He looks as though he’s about to reprimand them, and then thinks better of it, and launches back into his lecture.
Andrew says something to Aaron and Nicky as he passes. Nicky opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but Aaron elbows him in the side and nods to his brother. Andrew nods back, and pushes Neil into the locker room.
The locker room is empty. Andrew fumbles to take his oversized gloves off. Neil holds his hands a few inches above Andrew’s, and cocks his head. Can I?
Andrew nods, yes.
Neil helps Andrew out of his gloves. He winces when the right hand comes into view. A hand is not supposed to be that shape. Two fingers are round and flushed like they’ve been jarred. The pinky is three times its usual size and purpling.
Neil looks up at Andrew. He’s not sure what his face looks like, but his gut is churning. Andrew stares back with level-eyed disapproval. You’re annoying, even mute, Andrew might say, if he wanted to break the silence. Or maybe: you’re staring again.
Neil glances at the door. With his good hand, Andrew takes Neil’s wrist and holds it eye-level. Neil’s fingers tremble in the air. He makes a fist, and it vibrates in Andrew’s grip.
Andrew drops his wrist, and pushes him onto the bench. Andrew grabs the back of Neil’s neck. Neil slumps forward, and Andrew meets him halfway. Their foreheads bump. They don’t quite kiss; it’s a bare brush of lips and teeth, and then they stay there, in each other’s space, breathing against each other’s mouths. It should be gross, Neil thinks. It should be uncomfortable and invasive and sweaty. It’s not. It narrows his focus to the millimetres between their skin. It makes his world small in a way that’s safe, made up entirely of Andrew.
“Junkie,” Andrew mumbles.
“Mm,” Neil says. Not quite a word, but still an improvement. He’s thawing out, just a little. Andrew examines Neil’s hands again. The tremble is still there, but it’s no longer so violent.
Andrew stands. “Shower?”
Neil nods, and follows Andrew to the showers. There aren’t stall doors, but there aren’t any teammates to look at them, either. Andrew shucks out of his pants, but Neil has to help him out of his shirt, careful with Andrew’s injured hand. Neil changes, and steps into the spray, and closes his eyes.
Neil doesn’t have time to admire Andrew—undressed all the way down to his boxer briefs and armbands. He barely registers the bare skin and light hair. He focusses on what’s important instead: Andrew’s bad hand, held to his chest; Andrew’s good hand, succinctly soaping himself up, and motioning for Neil to do the same; the cacophonous buzz at the back of his head, like a bad TV signal, beating in time with the shower spray; Andrew’s steady gaze, tethering him to that moment.
They towel off and redress. Neil helps Andrew back into his uniform. He spends one of his words: “Abby?”
Andrew frowns. He considers his hand. “Can it wait?” Neil shakes his head, no. “We’ll be stuck out there for a while before we can get on the bus. They might try and talk to you.”
Neil shrugs. That’s fine.
“Martyr,” Andrew says. He also knows what it means to not have many words. He knows what overstimulation can do to a person, to have a buzz of static and bad memories playing on loop at the base of your skull. He probably knows better than Neil.
But he leads Neil out of the locker room to track down Abby without arguing.
When they exit the locker room, Neil isn’t surprised to see Aaron, still in his sweat-damp uniform, leaning by the door. He is surprised by the cool glances the Minyards exchange, the amicable nod of acknowledgement.
When Andrew and Neil come out of the locker rooms, a few of the Foxes head in to get changed. They were waiting for them to be done, Neil realises, and then looks again at Aaron, standing by the men’s locker room like a sentry. Huh.
Andrew and Neil take a seat on a bench. Abby looks dismayed when she sees Andrew’s hand, and Wymack gets that pinched look again, the one he wears when he realises one of his Foxes have been silently playing through a serious injury. Andrew looks back at them cooly. He has no patience for their worry.
Wymack tries to talk to Neil about his panic attack on the court—he hadn’t realised anyone else had even noticed, but no one else looks surprised. They knew he had panicked underneath that backliner’s weight. And when he had said he was fine, they hadn’t pushed. They’d given him his space.
That means more to him than he can say. They know when to power through his defences, to stop him from giving in to his years-old instincts and running, but they know when not to crowd him, too.
“Neil?” Wymack prompts when Neil doesn’t respond.
“He’s not talking,” Andrew says.
“Is that so?” Wymack asks. “Well, are you gonna talk about that panic attack tomorrow morning?”
Neil chews on his lip and shrugs, not looking at Wymack. Andrew translates, “He’s embarrassed by the fact that he had a panic attack on an exy court at all. He doesn’t know what caused it. Muscle memory, probably.”
Neil slants a glare up at Andrew. He looks evenly back at him. “Shut up, rabbit. Recovery is not a straight line.”
Allison studies Andrew and Neil, and says, “Is this cute, or is it disturbing? I’m leaning towards disturbing.”
“It’s cute,” Renee says. Andrew turns his scowl her way, and she returns it with a small smile.
Nicky comes out of the locker room, rubbing a towel over his damp curls. “What’s cute?” He gestures at himself. “Aside from the obvious, I mean.”
“Andrew knowing exactly what Neil has said even though he hasn’t spoken,” Allison says. “Are you reading minds, Minyard? What am I thinking about now?”
“It’s the power of love.” Nicky sees Andrew’s face, impossibly blank even as Abby prods at his damaged fingers, and wisely says, “I’m going to wait in the bus.”
When Andrew refuses to go to the hospital tonight, Abby gives him an ice-pack and asks Neil to take Andrew in for a check-up tomorrow morning. Neil nods without looking at Andrew. Andrew grabs him by the neck, this side of too-tight, and steers him out the door and into the bus.
They head for the back seat, bypassing Kevin. He stands up, but before he can follow them and start in on a lecture, Andrew says, “No.”
“Andrew—”
Andrew touches his damp armbands. Kevin sinks back into his seat with a scowl. The lecture that is sure to come in the following week will be even worse now, but Neil is grateful for quiet, now. Just the thrum of the engine, the quiet chatter of his teammates elsewhere in the bus, and Andrew. His shoulder is warm and solid underneath Neil’s cheek.
“I’m learning ASL,” Andrew says.
“Okay,” Neil says, barely a whisper.
“Starting tomorrow.”
Neil thinks, I’ll learn, too, but he doesn’t say it aloud. Andrew probably already knows.