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They’ve been together nearly five years when Nicky asks, jokingly and without any ill will, who was the first to say I love you.
Neil stares at him blankly for a moment and says, “neither of us.”
“What?”
“Neither of us.”
Nicky pauses with a drink halfway to his mouth. He looks like the strangest mix between horrified and pitying. Neil ignores him and sips his soda.
(he drinks now, sometimes, but only around Andrew and rarely with Nicky. It’s unfair to hold that first time in Columbia against him after all these years, but Neil is more instinct than he is reason.)
“But,” Nicky says, and then, “you can’t be,” before settling on a disjointed, “but you’ve been together so long.”
Neil looks at him and wonders if Nicky is really this ignorant. “Yes,” he says, “but this is Andrew. This is me. This is us.”
Nicky raises his brows. “And you’re okay with that? Not ever saying anything?”
“Yes,” Neil says, honestly and without pause. “Yes, I am.”
Nicky opens his mouth and then closes it. He stares at Neil like he’s a puzzle. It’s not a new look but it’s one Neil hasn’t seen in some time. It’s almost nostalgic. He gives a confused shake of his head but drops the subject, and when Neil excuses himself to head back to the dorms barely half an hour later he doesn’t stop him.
The thing with Nicky is that he’s too human, too nice. For all the dirty things he says and for all he terrible things he’s seen, there’s a pureness to him that will never fade. He doesn’t exist in the black spaces Neil and Andrew do, and he thinks just because they live more in shadows than darkness these days that they’ve changed.
Maybe they have. Certain things, anyway. Andrew has learnt to give more space to the people at his side, is learning to want something more than breath in his lungs. Neil has stopped running, and although trust doesn’t come to him easy, he’s learnt there are people he can give it to.
But Neil and Andrew have always been more than those things, more than the demons they let people see, and all the stability in the world won’t break them of that.
The dorms are dark when Neil gets back, and although he hadn’t drunk he’s tired enough to fumble with the lock to his room, trying twice with the wrong key.
It’s not entirely his fault, because over the years his keychain has become a crowded thing. There’s the key to Nicky and the twins’ house, the key to Andrew’s old car, the key to his new one. There’s the keys to the court, the key to Kevin and Aaron’s room, the key to the Coach’s house. There’s the key to Abbey’s, and the infirmary, and Matt and Dan’s spare house key they’d given him right as they moved.
The key to the room he shares with Andrew though always feels hot to touch, and his fingers get there finally.
He unlocks the door to more darkness, but when he shuts it behind him he sees something move on the couch.
Neil bites back a sigh but can’t hold his smile. For all Andrew’s apathy both feigned and genuine he was an easy creature to read.
He doesn’t turn on the lights as he shucks out of his jacket and hangs it by the door, kicks his shoes to the side. Andrew doesn’t say a thing and waits until Neil comes to him. The moment he’s in armsreach he reaches for him, unhurried and bored as he gets his hand around the back of his neck and drags him in for a kiss.
“You’re awake,” Neil says against his lips.
“I said I would be,” Andrew says, like it’s as simple as that.
The hilarious thing is that it really is. When he’d left earlier Neil had said I might be back late and Andrew had said I’ll still be up. And so he was.
Sometimes people overestimate the complexity of what went on in Andrew’s head.
Neil kisses him again and Andrew sinks his arms around Neil’s shoulders before leaning back into the couch to take Neil with him.
Like this Neil is bent over Andrew, hands on the cushions by his thighs because Andrew hasn’t yet given him permission to touch. He thinks this too is a way Andrew has changed. It takes more trust than he’d ever admit to let Neil tower over him.
It’s not exactly comfortable, and Neil is tired from too little sleep and too much socializing, but he’d told Andrew it was always a yes and he’d meant it. Besides, to a man who wore as many scars beneath his clothes as Neil did, a sore back and extra bags beneath his eyes tomorrow mean very little.
They kiss for long minutes like that until Andrew pulls back. Neil lets him, assumes Andrew is finished with affection for the night. A second later though he feels Andrew pulling him in, this time to the couch as opposed to him.
Neil goes, slightly bemused, clambering up with him so they’re lying crammed on the two-seater. They’re both short enough that they barely have to bend their legs to make the fit. Neil makes sure to keep his hands to himself, and it is Andrew that drags them up.
Neil lets him, confused until he feels Andrew’s hands at the hem of his shirt.
The sick lurch in his gut and the panicked freezing of his mind are purely instinctual. His breath catches and it takes him a second to realize that Andrew isn’t doing anything.
“Yes or no?” Andrew asks, softer than the way he still sometimes asks it when he’s going for a kiss.
“Yes,” Neil says without hesitation and he means that too.
Andrew’s lips brush at his forehead and then his hands are moving and Neil’s shirt is up and over his head. He feels freezing like this even though objectively he knows it’s actually warm out, but then Andrew’s hands are on him, not his exposed chest but his wrists, guiding Neil’s grip where he wants it.
One hand is slipped beneath Andrew’s shirt to rest at his navel and the other goes to his hip to rest just about at the waistline of his jeans.
Andrew’s skin is warm, mostly smooth where Neil’s is bumpy. Empty whereas Neil’s is full. He strokes along it gently, and Andrew shudders. It’s only then that he reaches for Neil, stopping with his palms just millimeters away.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Neil says and Andrew touches him.
His hands are hot. Not iron-burning but steady warmth that presses away the chills that are trapped in his bones. He chases out the scars that have been part of Neil for as long as they’d known one another and the scars that have accumulated in the times they’ve met.
It’s not the first time Andrew’s touched him like this, and the meaning is different from the time it had been. That had been one more secret to trade. This, now, is trust, but it is also – something that Neil has no word for.
Intimacy, affection. An always written with their fingertips on one another’s skin.
He supposes the easy answer would be to call it love. Maybe it is. Neil is almost certain that it is, really. But that is a word that had too much weight to hold between them.
When he told Nicky that neither of them said it he’d been telling an incomplete truth.
It’s a reality that Andrew had never even come close to saying it and Neil had never even dreamed of trying. But for Neil, at least, he thinks that they have a lot more to them than the words other people try to insist they should speak.
He thinks it says more that on the days Neil can’t bring himself to face the mirror it is Andrew that sets him down and makes him presentable. That there are sometimes weeks when Andrew won’t even let Neil touch him and Neil does his best to make sure that keeping the distance between them falls more to him than Andrew.
He thinks that they’re on year five of a relationship that all of his teammates had bet against should say everything.
Neil knows that they will never have the words for this, not even if they live to be old and grey, but they say a thousand-and-one things with the give and take between them, and the One Big Thing they will never be able to breathe aloud is written into the space between them.