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Never let it be said that Andrew was one for public displays of affection. His and Neil’s growing this was for them to experience, not a daily soap for the people around them. But Andrew was a man, and a man had to own up to his weaknesses…
Andrew’s was that he was petty. The little victories were what kept him going a lot of the time – refusing to put forth effort for Kevin but saying yes to Coach, taking Nicky’s name off the car insurance but giving Neil a key to the Mas. Something in him would always be uplifted by schadenfreude, and a greater part of him would be more satisfied by causing it.
When Katelyn bounced into the foyer to give Aaron a good-luck cheek kiss before the first game of the school year, Andrew curled his lip in faint derision, more at the idea of Katelyn’s sticky lip gloss than the PDA, but Aaron caught it. To make matters worse, Katelyn started dusting orange glitter over the kiss-mark, the current Vixens pep trend, and Aaron let her.
And it wasn’t…it wasn’t that Andrew wanted his brother unhappy. Keeping his brother close hadn’t been vindictive, it had been protective. Shutting down his brother’s attempts at ignoring their deal, that had been vindictive. Now that his hand had been forced, there was a distinct part of him that didn’t necessarily want Aaron unhappy, but…the way Aaron locked eyes with him and then flicked over to Neil and back, defiant and a little smug, clearly said “I’M happier with MY significant other than you are with yours now that we broke our deal for them”, and that was frankly unacceptable.
Andrew hooked his massive racquet behind Neil’s head and tugged him in with just enough of a pause to ask with his eyes – Neil’s knowing smirk was a yes that had to be kissed off his face with just a bit of extra teeth to the lower lip.
Allison and Dan immediately stopped wolf-whistling Aaron’s pixie kiss to exclaim in shock over Andrew’s very unexpected public display. Nicky bemoaned the lack of time to get his camera ready in an almost accusatory tone while Wymack grouched, “I want to see game faces, not faces that are fused at the lips!” Kevin thumped his stick on the floor a few times in warning just as the buzzer sounded for their team to line up to go on court.
“So you care enough to be public about it?” Andrew heard his twin mutter from just in front of him. “Though the team hardly counts as public.”
“Eyes front, Tinker Bell.”
“Game on, fairy boy,” Aaron replied with no heat, and that was progress.
Still, if Andrew sent a ball to Allison through Aaron’s legs and clipped his ankle just hard enough to make him fall on his ass, they both knew why.
~~~
Friday night was spent traveling back from their away game, and Saturday night, Eden’s was solidly packed and frantic as the state populace battled the Blue Law’s midnight deadline with frenzied determination.
Andrew and Neil fetched the drinks while the others circled hungrily, waiting for some people to stagger down to the thumping dance floor, and then swiped their table by out-speedwalking a gaggle of college girls homing in on it. Andrew and Neil ignored the girls’ grumbled walk to the bar as they passed them with a full tray, and upon reaching the table, Andrew realized that they had only managed to scrounge four stools.
“Give us a minute to knock a few back before we go to dance and then you can have my—” Nicky started, but Andrew’d sat, looked up at Neil, gotten a nod, and then looked his brother dead in the eye while pulling Neil by the waist to perch sideways on his lap. His eyes said 'public.' Aaron's said 'fuck you.'
Neil leaned in to be heard over the general roar of the club and said into his ear, “can I hold onto you for balance?”
It looked a lot more intimate than his actual words were, and instead of nodding, Andrew capitalized on it by turning his head a little and brushing his lips against Neil’s earlobe to return, “arm around my shoulders, no lower.”
Neil shivered at the contact and did as he was told, and the unerring adherence to his boundaries somehow made Andrew even more aware of the new sensation of the heat of Neil’s thighs pressing against his own. Andrew wanted to place a hand on one thigh, to feel every minuscule flex under his fingers as Neil maintained balance, but Nicky snapped him out of it with a wolf-whistle loud enough to be heard faintly over the club’s ruckus, and Aaron was scowling at the tray of drinks, which Kevin had already started into.
“Are you gonna handfeed him his shots too, Andrew?” Nicky leered.
“Shut up and drink, Nicky, or I’ll send you away from the table sober,” Andrew replied, a bored but genuine threat. Nicky shut up immediately and reached for a dressed tequila shot.
It wasn’t long before Aaron was urging Nicky up to go dance, sooner than usual. Andrew knocked back a victory shot. Game on indeed, and the score was in his favor.
When the two stools were vacated, Kevin arched an eyebrow at them between vodka shots, but neither of them made a move to separate their seating arrangement.
Neil leaned back in, and this time, Andrew could swear it was deliberate the way that his breath brushed Andrew’s neck. Andrew fought a shiver as Neil said, “I’ll move if you want, otherwise I’m good here.”
Andrew squeezed Neil’s waist. “Stay.”
“Lean against your shoulder?”
“Yes.”
Neil leaned into his side, and after a couple more shots, he finally hovered his free hand over Neil’s thigh, got a nod, and set it down to squeeze the muscle under his fingers lightly. Kevin muttered something in barely-audible French that had a tone of half-assed disapproval, and collected the empties onto the tray and took it back to the bar himself, since Andrew and Neil were quite comfortable where they were.
~~~
On Monday, after early morning gym and a short nap before his first class, Andrew stepped out of his dorm room at almost the exact second that Aaron left his. They were heading to a shared class, Intro To Forensics, which Aaron was taking as a serious pre-med elective – how much blood loss was too much blood loss? How long was too long for what types of wounds? What could have been done if they’d gotten to the hospital in time? And Andrew was taking it as a fun Criminal Justice elective, and possibly for research – was it an accident? Was it meant to look like an accident? How had it been messed up so that the non-accidental nature of the death was discovered? Useful information. Neil was prone to deals with mafia men, so one never knew.
At any rate, Aaron liked to get to class early and Andrew liked to stop for a drink in which sugar featured as the most prominent ingredient and the type of coffee featured as, at the very soonest, the sixth word in the name, so they left the dorm at the same time. Andrew started down the hall to the elevator.
And then Katelyn followed Aaron out of his dorm room, looking both satisfied and frantic, and gave him a kiss even as she tugged at his hand to get him to follow her to the elevators. She didn’t have a backpack, so she probably had to make a mad dash back to her dorm before her first class. Matt was emerging from Dan’s dorm, grumbling good-naturedly about his sore neck from napping on the couch. Andrew turned silently to the stairs instead, and Aaron caught his eye as he did so.
Aaron didn’t look smug, he just appeared as sleepy as Andrew felt with a dollop of Katelyn’s satisfaction on top, but it didn’t matter that Aaron wasn’t trying to flaunt this time. The easy nature of the dorm exit was almost worse because it wasn’t an act or a bid for attention, and it was normal and accepted and raised no eyebrows, and that made it almost a win without trying. Andrew couldn’t let that pass. Aaron wanted to be casually public about his sex life? Andrew would be casual and obvious about his.
On the way past his own room, Neil opened the door in those shorts that made Andrew feel nearly as much as the roof, intent on a run before his own blessedly-later first class. Andrew paused, then herded him back inside the room for a minute and said, “lay one on me that will stick for a few days.” He sounded a little angrier than expected, probably because he’d anticipated the grin Neil gave him in response. Neil asked for a confirmative yes anyway as he stepped forward, and planted a quick kiss on Andrew’s lips before moving that grin down against his neck.
Andrew gripped his hair and gritted out, “not that side. Other side.”
“He sits on your right, huh?”
Andrew nearly shoved Neil’s stupid grinning face away and walked out, but he was petty, and he and Aaron had a game on, and he felt he’d won the first two points already. One more to drive it home and that was game, set, and match.
~~~
Aaron’s schedule this year couldn’t be worked in any way that allowed their usual Wednesday session with Bee, and so Andrew had changed his schedule last week to match one of Aaron’s open periods. A concession, and a confession, that he wan…no, that he was willing to change his life a bit to make room for his brother, and that was progress.
As a consequence, he and Aaron were now taking a once time-differing shared elective at the same time in the same classroom. He had not told Aaron this. Aaron sat in the front, attentive and caring, and Andrew sat in the last row, interested but not eager. Andrew would have left faster at the end of class, too, nearer the door, so if Aaron hadn’t turned to check the clock on the back wall right before class started, he might never have known. They still didn’t really talk outside of Bee’s office, and certainly not in public. But Aaron had hesitated and raised an eyebrow. Andrew matched it. Aaron stood up and walked to the back of the lecture hall to sit not right next to Andrew, but one seat away, and they heaped their bags onto the chair in between and glared at seat-searching stragglers, and that was progress.
Today he'd had to skip coffee because of Neil, and his slight shortness of breath was only half because of the rapid pace to class. He made it a couple minutes before the professor was due to stroll in, sat, dug out a notepad and pen that were more for doodling than any real note-taking, and waited for less than ten seconds.
“That is the boldest hickey this side of the fucking Potomac,” Aaron hissed at him. “There’s teeth marks. They’re clear enough for a fucking forensic match! Jesus, Andrew.”
Andrew shrugged without looking at him and doodled something jagged –prominent peak, lesser bumps, prominent peak, all shoved close together, fast – either an upside down heartrate monitor line or an upright set of vampire fangs. Either one was probably a subconscious indication of a reaction to Neil’s sharp mouth – sharp smile, sharp tongue, sharp and increasingly skilled teeth. “If Katelyn’s too tame to know about our sensitive neck or you’re not brave enough to let her, that’s not my problem.”
“Our sen-” Aaron cut himself off, his face flushed and somewhat scandalized, and tapped the side of his neck as if testing the veracity of Andrew’s words, and then jerked his hand away from his neck as if he’d been caught doing something far worse as the professor walked in the door.
Three points to Andrew.
~~~
When class was over and they were gathering their things, a girl’s voice sounded from the row in front of them – “Ooooh, twins! Yes please.”
Looking up was instinctive, and Andrew just stared at her while Aaron likely rolled his eyes. Their classmate didn’t seem to notice; instead, her eyes locked on Andrew’s neck.
“Well, I guess you’re taken. But you…?” She arched an eyebrow at Aaron.
“I’m taken too,” Aaron said testily. Her eyes lowered meaningfully to his bare neck, and he viciously defended, “just because I don’t have a hickey right now also, doesn’t mean I don’t have—I mean, twins don’t do everything at the same time, what the hell—”
Four points. Andrew balanced out his ruthless satisfaction by texting Kevin to keep his trap shut about “invitation to public scrutiny” for once if he didn’t want to borrow the business half of a knife at practice that afternoon.