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It’s been at least a full minute, and Katelyn hasn’t stopped laughing yet.
When she finally does, she’s met with three almost identical scowls, two of them on precisely identical faces. There’s a little smirk tugging at the edge of Neil’s, though, like secretly he finds this as funny as she does.
(She suspects Andrew does too, at least a little— but he’s trying to hide it, and his poker face is flawless.)
“This is so much better than the time everyone thought I was pregnant,” she says. That had been the last major viral conspiracy theory: after she was out of commission for nine weeks due to a cheerleading injury and ended up getting so bored she lapsed from her normal diet and gained several pounds of inactivity weight, the internet had seen her (frankly barely noticeable) change in physique and speculated wildly that she and Aaron were going to be parents. She’d pointed out that her reason for being benched from cheerleading was well-documented on Instagram, but fans everywhere remained convinced it was all a ruse to keep her pregnancy a secret. In the end, she’d posted a photo of herself holding three negative pregnancy tests to shut them all up. By the time the gossip had died down, she was back on the field with the team and her body had returned to its normal degree of fitness.
She had to admit, though, sometimes she still secretly missed sitting on the couch watching daytime TV and eating mostly ice cream.
Aaron looks the least amused of them all, which she supposes is understandable. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he bites out. “How is it possible that anyone would believe it?”
He’s brandishing his phone like it’s personally offended him. The page of twitter trends is up on the screen, and every tweet has the same set of images. Someone managed to catch a brief moment of Neil holding Andrew’s hand at a coffee stand in the airport when they were flying to Chicago the week before. They’re in line, and it’s early in the morning; Andrew’s hand is resting on the handle of his wheeled suitcase, and Neil’s hand is on top of his, fingers curled around it. The soft smile he’s giving Andrew is private, intimate.
The only problem is, no one even knows that Neil and Andrew are anything but bitter rivals. So everyone on the internet has assumed that the person in these photos is Aaron.
“When would we even have—you know what, it doesn’t matter,” Aaron huffs. “What are we gonna do about this?”
“I don’t suppose leaving it alone is an option?” Neil asks. That causes Aaron’s eyebrows to raise so high it seems like they’ll disappear beneath his hairline.
“I’m sorry, did I hear Neil Josten, unofficially voted Most Likely to Pick a Fight, suggest we leave it alone?”
“It’s fun when Neil fights people. It’s more fun when his choices bother you.” This is the first thing Andrew has said since Katelyn tapped the notification alert on her phone to find hundreds of people speculating her engagement to Aaron had been called off because of his gay affair with Neil Josten. There’s a glimmer in his eyes that tells Neil he’s enjoying this, solely because it pisses his brother off. But he’s also drumming his fingers irregularly against his thigh, and the line of his shoulders is bordering on tense.
“We’re going out to the balcony,” Neil announces. Both Aaron and Katelyn turn to look at him; even Andrew’s eyes shift in his direction. Neil traces his fingers over Andrew’s shoulder, gently. “Andrew?”
Andrew nods once. He follows Neil out the sliding glass door of their apartment and onto the tiny balcony off the kitchen, containing nothing except a couple of folded-up patio chairs, a plastic table with an ashtray perched on it, and a hanging plant Renee gave them when they moved in, that Neil tends and which has somehow still remained green and vibrant despite his sporadic history of caring for it. As soon as the door closes, Andrew goes over to the railing and leans on it with both his hands, looking down at the ground below. (It’s a second-floor unit: the ground is just far enough away to feel safe, not far enough to remind him of falling.)
Neil leans against the wall furthest away from him. “You know we don’t have to do anything.”
“If we don’t, they’ll figure it out on their own eventually,” Andrew says. “Once they see Aaron isn’t having marital problems and shit.”
“Would that be better or worse?” asks Neil. “If everyone just put it together on their own.”
Andrew looks at him. “It would probably take all the fun out of our ‘rivalry,’” he says, and Neil recognizes it as his attempt at a joke.
“I’ll do whatever you want to do,” Neil tells him. “It’s all fine with me.” Andrew mouths the word fine back to him semi-mockingly, and Neil rolls his eyes.
“I don’t give a fuck what they think,” Andrew says.
Neil shrugs. “Okay.”
Andrew sighs out a frustrated breath. “But this makes things—inconvenient.”
“We don’t have to tell them anything,” Neil says again. “But if it makes things easier, maybe we could show them.” He doesn’t like this any more than Andrew does—it aches at him like a vulnerable nerve, to think about letting himself be so seen like this—but the inevitable avalanche of intrusive questions doesn’t seem that much more appealing.
Andrew quirks an eyebrow at him. “Talk.”
-
Two days later, a picture goes up on both Neil and Andrew’s Instagram profiles. It’s their faces close together taking up most of the frame. Their lips are pressed together in a kiss; both of them have one middle finger held up to the camera.
It’s the only public photo they post of them containing any public display of affection. The comment sections on both their profiles explodes. Neither one of them answers any of them.
Neil posts one additional photo in his stories that same day. It’s him replicating Katelyn’s photo debunking her own viral gossip story—he has the same expression of mild disdain, and he too is holding up three negative pregnancy tests. He tags Katelyn in it. The text box reads “Guess I’m not having Aaron’s baby either!”
He gets a text from Aaron an hour later that just says fuck you. It’s the best reaction either he or Andrew could have asked for.