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“Alright, everyone ready?”
“Ready,” Erik confirms as he takes the cake out of the oven. The smell of cake intensifies. Andrew tries not to look too impatient.
“Why do I have to be there?” Aaron asks for the third time.
“Neil’s your friend,” Nicky replies.
“I can’t tell you how much he isn’t.”
“Just be nice. Please?”
Aaron glares at Nicky, but he doesn’t say anything else. Andrew goes back to playing Snake on his phone. Anticipation-filled silence falls onto the Hemmick-Klose-Minyard kitchen. Nicky is buzzing with energy from the surprise party preparations, but Aaron looks ready to bolt as soon as someone will let him and Andrew is still half-expecting something to go wrong.
“Is he coming?” Nicky asks again.
“Yes,” Andrew replies. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “It’s Neil, so it’s a toss-up whether he’ll show up in running gear or in an ambulance because he was driven over by a bus.”
“I’m pretty sure an ambulance would drive him to the hospital,” Aaron says, because he is of a contrary nature.
“They would try,” Andrew concedes. “But he’d tell them he’s fine and have them drop him here.”
“Just to bleed all over the porch? Ugh. I’m not cleaning that.”
“Consider it training for your future in the medical field.”
“Don’t joke about it.” Aaron shivers exaggeratedly. “He’d be the worst patient ever. I don’t even have to be a doctor yet to know it.”
Andrew toasts to his words with his mug of chocolate.
Finally the bell rings, a short, shrill sound that makes Nicky jump out of his skin.
“He’s here! Andrew, door.”
“Calm down,” Andrew hears Aaron say as he walks out of the kitchen. “He’s not the President. You’re not being judged.”
Andrew yanks the door open instead of listening to Nicky’s answer.
“Hi,” Neil says. He’s not in running gear, miraculously, and visibly injury-free, except for the darkening bruise on his cheekbone where he opened a cabinet door in his face three days ago.
“Mmhm,” Andrew replies, exaggerating his once-over. “You’ll do.”
Neil quirks an eyebrow. “Glad to hear it. Can I come in?”
“If I say no, will you stay outside?”
“I’m not a vampire.”
Neil’s words are completely innocent. Andrew’s hand tightens on the door knob at the thought of at least three different jokes he could make right now, most of them at his own expense. As much as Andrew grouses about it, he’s really the one who likes Neil lavishing attention to his neck, not the other way round.
It’s tragic, really.
He steps aside and lets Neil in. “Only because it looks like it’s going to rain later,” he warns him.
“Your charity warms my heart,” Neil says, laying a hand on his chest.
Andrew closes the door behind him and hovers while Neil slips off his jacket and shoes. “Ready?” he asks, leading him to the kitchen.
“Ready for what?”
Andrew doesn’t need to answer. As soon as Neil steps into the kitchen, he’s welcomed by the chorus of “Happy birthday!” Nicky made them rehearse. Andrew doesn’t say it and Aaron mumbles his part, so really it’s only Nicky and Erik being festively cheerful.
“Oh,” Neil says. He instinctively stepped back when Nicky threw out his arms, closer to Andrew than he probably meant to. He’s warm against Andrew’s chest; Andrew only has a second to relish the feeling before Neil is swept in by his cousins. He misses it as soon as it disappears.
But they’re being watched; Andrew holds Aaron’s gaze long enough to reverse the dynamics. Aaron looks away first, his attention snapped back to the celebration Nicky and Erik have swept Neil in.
“Thank you,” Neil says as Nicky finishes hugging him. It sounds a little like a question. “I really wasn’t expecting this.”
“Your seventeenth! Of course we’d celebrate.”
Neil nods and sits at the table with Andrew and Aaron.
“I forgot they put my real birthday on my papers when they created my new identity,” he mutters to Andrew as Erik approaches with the cake.
“What?” Aaron says from across the table.
“Nothing.”
His cousins singing interrupt them. Erik is bringing the cake to the table, the seventeen candles wobbling precariously on top. Neil glances at Andrew just before the cake is placed in front of him.
“That’s when you blow,” Andrew tells him.
Neil makes a gesture with his hand like he’s going to swat at his thigh, but aborts the movement before his fingers can touch Andrew’s leg. His comment gets Andrew a look from Nicky, who luckily—for him—holds his tongue.
“Make a wish,” Erik says.
Neil thinks for a moment then blows the candles, missing half of them spectacularly on the first try.
“Huh,” he says, waving his hand over the last one, which fizzles out. “It’s more difficult than I thought.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never blown candles before,” Aaron says, picking up the extinguished butts.
“Fine, I won’t.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“Boys,” Nicky warns. “Coming through with a knife, everyone stands down.”
They lean away so that Nicky can cut parts of the cake. The first cut reveals the inside of the cake, as boringly bland-looking as it will taste. To accomodate Neil’s tastes, it’s a simple lemon-flavored pound cake, which is nice but lacks chocolate in Andrew’s opinion.
Neil’s slice is smaller than anyone’s. He looks unnaturally satisfied with it, so Andrew definitely gives up on him and focuses on methodically demolishing his own slice. He can feel Neil in the chair next to his, vibrantly lively like he feeds off the energy of the people surrounding him.
Andrew wishes he could reach over and take his time figuring out what the urge inside him means; if he wants to push Neil down and kiss him or open himself up to something more intimate. With the audience they have now, it’s impossible. Erik, as far as Andrew can tell, doesn’t even know about Andrew’s sexuality. It’s possible that Aaron does, and that he suspects the existence of the relationship between them. It’s difficult to hide those things to someone who’s grown to know him thanks to close observation. Besides, it’s impossible that so many of his jokes and remarks fall true by accident.
Andrew’s sole official support in the room is Nicky, which just shows that he better take the plunge sooner rather than later. Nicky might be able to keep secrets, but Andrew wouldn’t bet on it. It’s been a little over three weeks since Nicky found them kissing on Christmas Day, and Andrew’s had to fend off several offers to talk already.
Erik takes out the presents halfway through the cake. Neil drops his fork in his plate when he sees the bags, his practiced poker-face betraying genuine surprise.
“You didn’t have to,” he says before he even opens them.
“I know,” Nicky says, “but I don’t like not celebrating birthdays, so here you go.”
“Thank you.”
“Open the presents first, then you can thank us,” says Aaron, who’s been forbidden to leave before Neil is done with this part of the day.
Neil takes the packets out of the bags. He piles them up on the table, looking troubled, and runs a pensive finger along the tape of the first one before he flips it open.
He opens the scarf first; its length of wool falls into his lap like sloughed skin.
“I know winters in South Carolina aren’t too cold,” Erik says as Neil winds it around his neck. “But you never know where you might end up in the future! And it can get windy.”
The scarf is gray and red. Almost invisible tufts of wool bunching up from the stitches are visible against the skin of Neil’s cheek and Andrew has to resist the urge to run his hand against them. Neil doesn’t have the same qualms and he rubs the fabric between his scarred fingers like it’s become second-nature already.
The sweater is next, receiving the same surprised gratefulness. Neil doesn’t put it on this time, but he holds it up and Andrew can see how the pale blue compliments the icy color of his eyes. Its paleness looks bold on Neil, who prefers the anonymity of gray and faded clothes, but there’s no doubt that it’ll look good.
Andrew gathers the discarded wrapping paper as Neil turns toward the rest of the presents, both smaller. The first one is a USB drive, brand new and bright orange.
“Ah,” Neil says wisely as it falls on the table from the thick nest of paper it was wrapped in. “Kevin.”
“How did you know?” Aaron asks.
“Who else would wrap a USB drive in so much paper instead of putting it in a box or an envelope?”
“A bow on top would have sufficed,” Andrew says. He picks up the paper and crumples it, feeling resistance as he does so. A note turns up upon investigation, written in Kevin’s nervous handwriting on thick paper. He hands it to Neil, who plucks it from his fingers like it’s going to catch fire.
“‘A compilation of plays that would be good to know for college’,” Neil reads. “Awesome.”
Andrew turns the flash drive in his hand. The letters written in white on the bottom—how Kevin managed to find it in Foxes colors is a question he doesn’t want answered—indicate 32GB, which means that there’s probably hours upon hours of video crammed on it.
“You’re obsessed,” he informs Neil. “Both of you.”
“I know.” Neil sounds almost happy. “Isn’t it great?”
“This is not what obsession usually connotes.”
“Don’t be a spoilsports.”
Neil reaches out for the flash drive, but Andrew holds it out of his reach. “I refuse to let you watch this when I’m here,” he says. “I have limits.”
“Fine. I’ll watch it at home alone. Give it back?”
It bounces off Neil’s collarbone before falling in his lap. Neil clamps his legs together so that it doesn’t fall to the floor and delicately slips it in his jeans’ pocket.
“If you’re done flirting,” Aaron calls from across the table, “you still have this.”
He’s brandishing a flat envelope that was on the table. Neil holds out his hand and Aaron passes it over.
“From the whole team,” he says.
Neil stops with his thumb hooked underneath the flap. “What?”
“We got you a group present.”
“The team knows it’s my birthday?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
A shadow of unease flits over Neil’s face, but he clears it away soon. “Nothing,” he says. “I just never told them.”
“I know,” Aaron replies, like he’s talking to a child. “Kevin did.”
“Right.”
The team present, unsurprisingly, is exy-themed. It was to be expected: Neil doesn’t have much else going on in his life that he’d let the team in. He looks at the Exites gift-card like it holds the answers to his future.
The intensity of his expression is too much to handle for Andrew. He wishes he could wipe it off Neil’s face. Sometimes Neil’s passion is comforting, because it burns bright and warm but only for specific things. His carelessness for anything not pertaining to his friends or exy is solace for Andrew, who relishes being let in like the star member of a very selective club.
Today, though, it’s intolerable. Andrew reaches for Neil’s plate, pushing at his shoulder while doing so. It’s enough to break that troubling focus from the envelope; instead, Andrew is rewarded with Neil’s attention on himself.
“Did you get me anything?”
“I’m on the team,” Andrew says, nodding at the card lying on the table. “And I’m finishing your cake for you.”
“What a great sacrifice.”
“A martyr like you should take notes.”
“Will do. Do you have a pen?”
Neil laughs when Andrew pushes his head away. For a moment, his hand makes contact with Neil’s hair, brittle and dry as it is. Andrew forces himself not to linger. Something primal inside him tells him not to show anything, to keep everything under wraps. In front of an audience like Erik and Aaron, it urges him more strongly than usual. Unlearning it is a process Andrew only allows himself to try in front of Neil and Bee.
In the end, Aaron flees to the living room when all the plates are cleared—courtesy of Andrew, because Neil would have left part of his piece of cake lying around without caring—and drags Erik into playing video games with him. Their ruckus is enough for Andrew and Neil to slip upstairs without attracting attention.
Andrew feels calmer as soon as he closes the door behind him. His brother and cousins are sometimes a little too much, even after years of living with them. Andrew is too used to the beast living inside his own head to stand others for too long at a time. Emptiness is a comfort, a river of blankness that sometimes threatens to carry him away, cool water on a hot day.
Neil collapses on Andrew’s bed, too comfortable in this space for his own good. His hoodie rides up a little, exposing the skin of his stomach, just below the wide jagged scars. Andrew resists the urge to poke his fingers up Neil’s shirt.
There will be other moments, he tells himself.
The package is still where Andrew left him when he received it, on top of the papers thrown around his desk. It’s started to gather dust from sitting there for almost two weeks, so he gives it a quick wipe down before dropping it on top of Neil.
“Oof,” Neil says, jumping and rolling into an upright position. The box hit him square on his stomach; it slides down when he sits up, falling down harmlessly to the ground. “Andrew, what?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” Andrew replies, sitting on the window sill. “Or have you opened too much packages today?”
Neil gingerly picks up the flat box. He turns it over in his hands before looking up and meeting Andrew’s gaze.
“I thought you didn’t get me anything,” he says.
“Maybe I didn’t. Maybe this is another of Nicky’s and Erik’s presents.”
“Then it wouldn’t be in your bedroom.” Neil hums as he hooks his finger in the flap and pulls away the tape. He looks puzzled when he opens the cardboard and feels fabric, but then he discards the box on the bed and pulls out the armbands, allowing them to unfold.
“You didn’t like it when Jack said something about your scars,” Andrew says. “Now you won’t have a breakdown every time someone glances at you in the changing room.”
Neil still won’t change with the team; that’s no solution to this problem and Andrew knows it. It’s merely an excuse. Neil has to see through it, but he doesn’t say anything except a disgustingly heartfelt, “thank you.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Andrew says, because if he thought Neil was bad earlier in the kitchen, it’s got nothing on how gentle Neil’s sharp features look now. “Stop it.”
“I don’t know how else to look at you,” Neil answers. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re wrong, but take your time realizing it. That’s okay.”
“Shut up.”
Maybe recognizing the note in Andrew’s voice, Neil does. He doesn’t stay still, though; after slipping on the armbands under the wide sleeves of his hoodie, he steps up to Andrew’s spot on the window sill, his legs knocking against Andrew’s.
“Kiss me,” he requests.
He doesn’t quite sound petulant, because it’s not in his repertoire. Andrew kisses him anyway. It’s one way among others to get Neil’s silence.
Erik comes by later, when Neil’s sitting up propped against Andrew’s pillows watching the contents of Kevin’s USB drive on Andrew’s laptop.
It’s an unfortunate situation that Andrew signed-up for himself, in a dash of stupidity. Neil had been talking, hugging Andrew’s pillows without even noticing it, and Andrew interrupted him to say, “you don’t have a laptop at your place.”
Neil blinked. “No, why?”
“‘I’ll watch it at home alone’,” Andrew repeated. “How do you plan on doing that?”
“What?”
“Kevin’s stupid videos. Keep up.”
Neil frowned then shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go to the library.”
“For how long? Kevin’s probably stuffed the thing full. It’ll take you hours.”
“So?”
Andrew pointed at Neil. “You can’t stay at the library for hours when we both know this is going to give you an exy boner.”
Neil colored slightly. Andrew watched it with interest: little ever seemed to rattle Neil, who took to shame the same way he took to everything, with detached disinterest.
“Do you have a point?” Neil asked finally, laying the pillow aside. He straightened up a little, looking defiant, but he only blinked in surprise when Andrew plopped his own laptop on the bed next to him.
“Use the headphones,” Andrew warned, dropping on the bed next to him. “I’ll be napping.”
Neil dragged the laptop closer to him, sitting back against the wall. He didn’t say anything to Andrew snatching up his pillow and putting it under his head, but he did turn the device around on his lap so Andrew could type in his password. He didn’t watch Andrew’s fingers on the keyboard either, even though he’d told Andrew that he had a knack for memorizing passwords that way.
Neil plugged in the headphones and the flash drive, and Andrew huddled against the wall, closing his eyes.
He didn’t actually think he’d fall asleep—not with Neil warm and heavy on the mattress next to him—but he’s woken up by Erik a while later.
True to his habit, Erik knocks on the doorframe before sneaking his head in the door left cracked open. The noise pulls Andrew out of his nap, and he blinks back to a darkened room. Neil is still sitting in the same position Andrew last saw him, eyes trained on the tiny figures on the screen. Outside, night has completely fallen; Andrew’s slept at least an hour.
“What?” he asks, voice rough from sleeping.
Neil didn’t seem to register Erik’s presence, but he starts when he hears Andrew talk. He looks up, reaching to tug the headphones down and pull the laptop shut at the same time.
“Oh,” he says, as though Erik caught them doing something compromising.
He might just have.
“Were you napping?” Erik asks Andrew. “I hope you manage to fall asleep tonight.”
His new meds keep making him go to bed before ten, so that won’t be a problem.
“I will,” Andrew says, sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What is it?”
“It’s almost seven. Nicky was wondering if you wanted to stay for dinner, Neil.”
The center where Neil lives has a communal kitchen, where Neil has half a fridge shelf to his name and a box full of granola bars in his bedroom. It’s not exactly conductive to proper nutrition, so he relies on evening shifts at the diner a lot.
Despite this, Andrew can sense the denial come before Neil even opens his mouth farther. He pinches the thin skin of Neil’s wrist.
Neil represses a yelp, snatching his wrist back. He glares at Andrew, but at least his answer to Erik is positive.
“Great. Half an hour, then, unless you want to come and help.” Erik’s gaze is pointed enough that Andrew waves him off.
“Coming.”
Neil places the headphones and the laptop on the ground next to the bed and hops off, stretching his arms. His shirt is long enough that it doesn’t ride up, but Andrew takes a moment to appreciate his silhouette standing out in the darkened room against the bright rectangle of light coming from the hallway.
Andrew disentangles his legs from the blankets, shuffling out of bed and trying to find his footing, both physically and mentally. He feels disoriented, like he’s both not in his body and uncomfortably hyper-aware of every little sensation. It doesn’t feel real to walk out of the bedroom behind Neil, but the light in the hallway burns his retinas. He blinks repeatedly against the onslaught of brightness and stomps down the stairs, his footsteps slow and heavy where Neil’s are light.
“You really were sleeping,” Neil says with a smile. His voice is too low to be picked up in the kitchen, where Aaron has also already been put to task. It feels like the last stolen minutes of a secret encounter.
“Did you think I’d lie and watch exy with you?”
“No. I just didn’t think you were so tired.”
“I’m always tired.” Andrew twirls his finger around. “Too much bullshit.”
Neil doesn’t let the distraction deter him. “Meds?”
Andrew doesn’t do more than grunt his answer. Of course the meds are responsible. Andrew has been seeing therapists for almost as long as he’s been living with Nicky; he was shuffled through a couple of counselors when he was in the system, more or less mandatory sessions that brought him nothing except distrust of the profession for a long time.
Bee has diagnosed him, at last, but the truth behind the science is that Andrew’s symptoms are mostly atypical for his brand of mental illness, so he’s been trying different things with different effects and degrees of usefulness for the past few months.
If Bee ever suggests meditation, Andrew will walk out of her office and never look back.
Tonight is Erik’s turn to do most of the cooking, so Andrew settles at the table with the vegetables he’s been tasked to peel and cut with Aaron and Nicky. Because he’s the guest, and also because they all know that eggs and bacon are basically the extent of Neil’s cooking skills, Neil is sat down at the table with orders not to do anything.
“It’s great to have you for dinner,” Nicky is saying. “Do you want to stay over for the night as well?”
“Oh no, thanks.” Neil is eyeing Andrew’s carrots as he talks. Without faltering, he reaches over and steals a newly-cut bit. Andrew raps him over the knuckles with the flat of his blade, but Neil doesn’t drop it. “I have a shift at nine tomorrow morning, and the diner is way closer to my place than here.”
The bit of carrot crunches satisfyingly when Neil bites into it.
Andrew looks up, meets his gaze, and his knife falters. For a second he’s brutally jerked away from his own mind, gazing down at himself with the sort of detached judgment dissociation brings him. How stupid, to have Neil here, safe and warm in the same place that has—ridiculously—sheltered Andrew’s body and mind for years, now. How disconcerting.
Neil blinks at him in question, fingers poised over another bit of carrot. Andrew brings down his knife with a dull thud against the wood. The slice falls from the carrot stub, face down against the board. He breathes, lifts the knife, does it again. Rinse and repeat; the safety of mundane monotony.
Nicky starts talking, loudly, about something that washes over Andrew like street sounds. Aaron is quiet but quick with the potatoes, and soon enough done with his task, reclining on his chair with his phone. And Neil, always, watches Andrew. Andrew bows his head over his knife, feeling the weight of this gaze on him like the matter-of-fact contact of a piece of clothing on bare skin.
In the end, he runs out of carrot to cut, and wordlessly passes the board to Erik.
Wordlessly answering Neil’s curious yet sated gaze, he sits, waiting, and safe in the winter night.