Work Text:
Neil’s pretty sure the baby section of Target is haunted. Not by ghosts, but the lunacy of Nicky Hemmick.
They’re here for dumb shit: sneakers without holes in them, mostly, a copy of a book Aaron vaguely remembers reading in his preteens, a handful of Kinder eggs, a poppy album that Nicky says Allison needs to get her hands on, some over-the-counter meds. Nothing that requires them to be in this specific aisle, but they’re slaves to the minutiae, e.g. Nicky’s headphones flying out the window during the drive here.
It turns out Kevin isn’t too much of an ornery dick to laugh at someone’s expense. Or he’s just enough of one. Neil can’t tell.
They have to cut through the baby aisle to reach the electronics, Kevin dragged by the wrist, Andrew lagging behind with intentional distance. Neil just waits for it to be over. It can’t get much worse than forced socialization and exposure therapy to clothing that is blatantly inspired by Kevin’s most recent magazine spread. Then they’re partway through the baby aisle and Nicky stops to fawn over a blanket.
Neil feels like he’s been rat-trapped in an H&M catalogue and Nicky is cooing over a blanket.
Aaron says something unkind, but things don’t sting the way they’re meant to when they come from a man in Hello Kitty bottoms and decorated slippers. His toes are hanging over the edges, for god’s sake.
The blanket looks like it’s made of the same material as his pants, and Nicky delights in saying as much. Then he’s walking around with it, comparing it to all of their clothing, and Neil doesn’t shuffle away in time. White hairs brush the back of his hand before Andrew smacks Nicky’s hand away. Not possessive or protective, just annoyed. Nicky’s too close again, touching too much again.
They walk away, but they don’t. Nicky plays one-man tennis, bouncing between the electronics section and the baby section like there’s money on the line.
“I’d be a great dad,” he says eventually, “right?”
“No,” Aaron dully answers. “Now can we go home?”
They pay for everything at the nearest counter, the cashier disinterested. It baffles Neil sometimes, coming across people who see Kevin’s face—see Andrew’s—and aren’t immediately stunned. He’s almost suspicious of it before he remembers that it’s normal. There’s a world full of people who couldn’t care less about Exy, and sometimes those people man the Target cash registers less than an hour before closing.
Cramming into the backseat of the car didn’t feel good the first time; it’s even less enjoyable with plastic bags rustling on their laps and under their feet.
Pressed up against the window with his shoulder at an odd angle, Neil glances through the stretched white handles in his lap. He stares. “Why do I have this?”
Nicky twists his neck to peer into the bag. The baby blanket is folded neatly within cardboard wrappings, soft tufts peeking out at each corner. “Oh,” he says. “You bought it. Why, you want me to hold it?”
I didn’t buy it, Neil starts to say, except no one else denies it. Historically, they never hesitate to play make believe with each other’s lies, but there’s a time limit for that kind of thing. Kevin’s bullshit threshold faces a dramatic decline when it’s not Exy-related and Aaron makes it his mission to ruin everyone’s day if he goes too long without seeing his girlfriend. If Nicky were lying, they’d be saying something or, at the very least, smacking their lips. Rolling their eyes. Someone would kick on the air conditioner, tell Nicky to shut the fuck up.
But none of that happens, so there’s a real and present chance that Nicky’s telling the truth. That’s not unheard of, either. It’s just that Neil doesn’t remember buying anything.
He closes his fist around the plastic handles and looks away from it. He couldn’t avoid Andrew’s attention if he tried, so he doesn’t. He catches his eyes through the rearview mirror and lets the moment break naturally. Andrew looks away from him to start the car, and Neil glances down again. He checks the time on his phone and commits the four digits to memory.
The drive is brief and uneventful. Nicky fills it with half-hearted commentary, then Andrew drowns him out with music, then Kevin turns the music off. Assholes of the same brand, different line. It’s one of those things that settles comfortably on Neil’s stomach, even though it shouldn’t. The conversation fizzles out and subjects them to the hum of the engine and infrequent buzzes of Aaron’s phone.
Neil checks the time twice, only twice, just to make sure the minutes sit where they’re supposed to, every second accounted for.
Andrew catches him through the rearview mirror the second time. Neil puts his phone face down on his thigh and reallocates his attention. The engine, the air conditioning, Aaron’s thigh pressed to his; shit he can hear, things he can touch. Somewhere in his room is a pamphlet from Bee: Anxiety and You—Finding Safety in the Fear. He’s never read it, but he’s thumbed through it a few times. The ink has bled onto his thumb during a few of those not-reads, so there’s a corner that’s more white than it is blue. It still sticks when he picks it up, like the ink is fresh and personal, not something mass produced months before he received it. All of its tips are generic, shit that Wymack would scoff at but reinforce. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Center yourself. Stupid shit.
Neil breathes. In through his nose, out through his mouth. Doesn’t know what the fuck center yourself means, but he tries.
Nicky wiggles his hips and knocks into Aaron, who knocks back but jostles Neil on the outswing. They all have knobby hips and not enough fat on them to cushion the blow, so both cousins wince and hiss and bicker, and Neil is incidentally shoved up against the door. Aaron’s phone slides off of his thigh and fits itself into nonexistent space between their legs. The next buzz vibrates through the fabric of Neil’s fleece pajama pants.
It’s too much. It’s nothing and it’s too much.
His fingers close around the door handle, knuckle squished against curved leather. He thinks about throwing himself out of the car. The doors are locked, but Andrew would probably unlock them if he asked. Especially if Neil said why. He’d floor it then advise Neil to tuck and roll.
It’s weird, what Neil finds comforting. It’s so much easier to breathe when he considers Andrew.
They stumble out of the car without finesse. He does, at least. He looks like a fawn taking its first steps, except marginally less graceful. Nicky catches his bicep when he staggers, and Neil yanks his arm away. He doesn’t mean to; for once, he’s not peeved by Nicky’s touch. It’s just his body—just the weird, skittish place it’s in. “Okay, damn,” Nicky murmurs, lifting his palms in surrender. His bag is dangling from his thumb.
Neil is holding onto his own bag. He doesn’t remember grabbing it. He checks the time again, and all of the minutes are exactly where they should be but he isn’t.
Andrew’s attention weighs on him. Neil almost wants to tell him to fuck off, but saying anything at all comes with risks, so he just walks ahead. Being the bitch of the hour has never bothered him before.
He misses the conversations that occur between the parking lot and the room. He hears Aaron laugh at one point, Kevin sigh at another, but neither of those things calls for his attention. He closes himself in his room and flinches at the sound of the bag colliding softly with the door. To spite himself, he drops the bag to the floor and kicks it. It skips and rolls a few feet away until it collides with the bedpost. He glares down at it, the centerpiece of his lapse. There are voices in the corridor behind him, groans and shuffles and the unmanageable tedium of dorm life. Separate from it all is Neil Problem-of-the-Day Josten and a goddamn baby blanket.
He bites the bullet and picks it up.
It’s unremarkable: white cotton with baby blue polka dots, something that’s soft and doesn’t shed easily. Neil has little to no experience with children, but he’s seen a million variations of this blanket. He isn’t enraptured by the design and he doesn’t especially care for infants. But he pops the cardboard off of it, plastic ends flying this way and that. The small trash bin at the door is already overflowing, so the cardboard just kind of sits on top of it. He’ll dump it in the morning. He climbs into bed and lies flat on his back, his comforter pulled up to his chest and the baby blanket held there, too.
It takes several minutes for him to realize that this is abnormal. He doesn’t do anything about it.
He doesn’t do anything. He just lies there. The blanket wrinkling in his fists. His breathing even, unconscious. Nothing happens aside from him holding the goddamn blanket, but he feels overwhelmed, somehow. Thrown and left.
He tries to think of the pamphlet he’s never read. The first tip is stupid (recognize that you’re having a panic attack) so he disregards it and skips to the second one. Close your eyes; limit the stimulation.
For a moment, it helps. The drop from minimal light to no light isn’t staggering, but there’s less to keep track of. The hallway is quieter, too, reduced to just Dan and Renee walking past, murmuring to each other. Neil presses the blanket up against this cheek and lets his awareness dwindle down to just that. The feeling of cotton fibers against his face. The scratchy surface that holds it all together, where his nails catch when he grips too tightly.
He wonders if he ever had one, that’s all.
He doesn’t remember there being one in his adolescence, but that was different. That was survival. Series upon series of calamities where the only plan was to maybe not die by the end of the night. Blood would’ve stained the blanket. His stomach grips at the thought. It would’ve stained; it would’ve matted the hairs to the root and stolen the comfort of it all.
But before that. Before Nathan became what he died as, before home was the ripped leather of a passenger seat and a busted radio. He wonders if there was ever a time where his mother swaddled him in one of these. If he’d ever pressed his cheek against it the way he does now.
It’s almost thoughtless how he nuzzles his cheek into it, pushes past the soft to let the batting scratch him. It doesn’t feel as good. It itches a little bit. Hurts a little bit.
That feels more like her. The hurt.
One of his scars slides weirdly across the batting and leaves him stinging. He winces and feels the cotton between his teeth. He turns his face a little more until the blanket is as much a wall as it is a comfort. His breath has nowhere to go but back to him. It’s almost tangible. It dampens the hairs, if only slightly. He opens his mouth wider, breathes harder, like a good layer of moisture will flatten the blanket the way he imagines the blood would have. He wonders if he could ruin it like this or if one of his wounds will open up. He almost regrets not buying a second one, just to test it out. Just to bleed over it and ruin it.
His mother would’ve wrapped him in it anyway. She would’ve scoffed at the idea of anything untouched by blood. What luxury he would’ve deluded himself into wanting. Neil would have grown up with stained material, the colors all messed up. The blues wouldn’t be blue anymore. He would have scraped his fingernails through the stains and walked away with flakes of dried blood tucked under each one.
They would have stashed it somewhere. They always stashed the valuable shit.
No—they would have dumped it. Years and years back. The same way they did his Exy gear and his childhood toys and the trading cards he’d tried to collect in the first grade. She always dumped the valuable shit. He would have cried, but he would’ve gotten over it sometime between her yanking him by the hair and throwing him into the car. Would have breathed in cigarette smoke and comforted himself with the odor of it.
He rolls onto his side and tucks his knees close. Like a child. He imagines how she’d react if she saw him now. Stupid and stationary. Fetal and fucking complacent. He thinks about the rough hand she used to get him moving until he learned how to do it himself. He tries to think of what she’d say, and his head swells with all of her nasty responses. It’s a relief.
There are days—not many, but some—where he can’t recall her voice at all.
It catches in his throat, the grief. He chokes on it and has to cough it back out.
When Nathaniel opens his eyes, they’re miserably wet. His vision has blurred around her absence. He blinks a couple of times to clear it up, unstick his eyelashes, but she’s no less absent and his body seems intent on reminding him. When he forces breath down his throat, his ribs crack as punishment.
That’s step three. In the pamphlet, he means. Take a few deep breaths. Reduce hyperventilating. It helps you manage the other symptoms.
He camps there. He just breathes and, in turn, reduces. Volleys between staring up with wet eyes and squeezing his eyes shut to keep everything else out. Keep the grief in so that nothing else falls out.
Every now and again, a phone buzzes where it’s tucked beneath his hip. He’s not a huge fan of his ass vibrating, but he can’t be bothered to pick it up, either. Checking his phone means letting go of the blanket. He should let go of the blanket. His mother would tell him to. But letting go of it means losing the ghost of her disappointment. It means reducing her barrage of insults and instructions and leaning back into the permanence of a life without her.
Both hands on the blanket means he can’t check the time anymore, but that’s fine. He can sacrifice time for this. Her. The ghost of it, whatever.
He’s aware and not aware of the door opening. It feels real fucking embarrassing to be caught like this, but Nathaniel has been through worse. Humiliation is an easy trial to survive, all things considered. Easier if he doesn’t open his eyes. Somewhere in the mess of his mind, he knows who it is anyway. He has a roommate. He knows who that is. Knows cigarette smoke and leather and a binder stuffed into the worn fabric of his duffelbag.
A handful of seconds later, he realizes that’s not right. He’s in the wrong time again. Maybe he should check his phone after all. The year—what’s the year?
“Neil.”
His mother had a habit of scribbling dates onto random things. Gas station receipts. Candy wrappers. Sticky notes with dirtied adhesive. The stiff paper in her mint tin. There was never a rhyme or reason to it, not a Sunday thing or a daily thing. She just did it when she felt like it. Sometimes, she’d grab his wrist and push the ballpoint tip against his forearm, testing the ink on his skin. He’d walk around with looping scribbles on his arm. It always hurt. He’d hold his thumb against the spot and try to smooth out the pain.
One time, a kid in little league told him that he could get cancer like that. Neil had worried about it for days. He’d asked his mother and she’d said—
“Neil Josten.”
He tries breathing again. There’s smoke in his lungs. He can get cancer from that, too. There are a hundred billboard ads about it. Is that better or worse than being chopped up by his dad? They both sound unpleasant, just about equally so. But, fuck, if he’s done all this hiding and running just to get killed by goddamn Sharpie ink or tobacco, he’s going to be real upset.
Challenge negative thoughts. For example, if you think you’re going to die, remind yourself that panic attacks do not kill people. You likely have experienced this before. You’re still here.
The hand doesn’t touch him. It barely grazes his arm, but Nathaniel recoils from it. The top of his head hits the bedframe, shooting pain all the way down, and his eyes fly open. There’s a face above him. He recognizes it. It’s not his mother or his father or Kevin Day—Kevin, Kevin—he blinks. “Andrew.”
Andrew stares back. “What’s wrong with you?”
Nathaniel laughs. He doesn’t quite mean to. It’s all mangled anyway, like something out of a horror flick. One would think he was dying. “I don’t know,” he confesses. Keens. He grips for Andrew and gets lucky. He manages to wrap his full hand around Andrew’s wrist. When he tries to tug him closer, he doesn’t get as lucky, but that’s fine. Andrew’s here. That means Nathaniel is somewhere in time. Probably in the right time now, though he still can’t figure out when that is.
Nathaniel doesn’t usually cry. He isn’t even crying now, close as he is. Forget the vulnerability, there’s a level of stagnance that comes with the act. Crying means situating yourself in a singular moment and camping there until you can put your feet on the ground again. It means putting survival on the backend and letting emotions take priority. His mother would kill him for it. Andrew might kill him for it. He hates these moments just as much as Nathaniel does. Less access when he’s all messed up; a lot less sex.
That’s not why. Nathaniel knows that’s not why. Andrew would kill him for even thinking that.
Step five—step five.
Find something to ground yourself with. Focus on that object. Hone in on the details. What do you know about it? What can you feel from it?
“I think I love you,” he blurts out. If it’s supposed to help—him or Andrew—then it doesn’t succeed in the least. He tries to remember if he’s ever said that before. He’s thought it. Every time Andrew lets his disinterest front but does something meaningful in the back, he thinks it. Every time Andrew lets their fingers fall in together and doesn’t say anything about it, he thinks it. Every time, every day, every trackable second.
It’s not something he says, just something he knows. It’s something he feels.
Time shoves past him again. He doesn’t notice it, but he hears it in Andrew’s next, impatient, “Neil.” There’s a tug at the blanket. “Is this helping you or hurting you?”
There’s a question. Mary Hatford, in life and death: helpful or harmful?
“My mom is dead,” Nathaniel says, choking on the words as they come out. It’s not news or anything. She’s been dead for a long time, much longer than the two of them have known each other. The words shouldn’t have to force their way out when it’s just a fact. But they do. It hurts to say. His vision blurs again.
Andrew doesn’t respond. That’s not new either. Nathaniel could fill up books with things that Andrew hasn’t responded to. This one fact isn’t special. Andrew isn’t leading the mother lovers association anyway. Things just get a little quieter without his dry responses, so Nathaniel has less of a grip on time. He tries to figure out how long he’s been lying here like this, but all he has is this blanket. The fibers closest to his mouth have grown well and truly damp by now.
How long has it been since—her death—since—he got back?
Recite an internal mantra. It will give you something to focus on. Repeat it to yourself.
“My parents are dead,” he says, “and I’m not fine. Nothing is going to be okay.”
Whether Andrew notices his own words coming back to him is a mystery to Nathaniel. Nothing about Andrew comes without intention and barely anything is forgotten, but that doesn’t mean he cares to keep it all in mind. He can’t be expected to remember something said during a moment when he only had half of the facts and not nearly as much power as he thought. But Nathaniel remembers. For a very long time, Nathaniel’s survival hinged on remembering what people said, whether they meant it or not. Whether they could protect him or not.
He could fill books with all of the things Andrew has said to him. Maybe not a whole lot of books, but one or two. Libraries with things left unsaid but felt and known. Things like: I love you. Things like: your mother didn’t.
Nathaniel’s stomach rolls.
“I don’t think she loved me,” is what he says next. “Or—she did, I know she did, but I don’t think she liked me. My parents are gone and neither of them even liked me.”
The bed shifts under Andrew’s weight. “You didn’t like them, either,” he points out. He has that tone he takes on whenever he has to balance his blankness with sincerity. Picking his way through all of the things he doesn’t normally feel the need to say but will anyway, so long as Nathaniel stops breaking down in front of him.
How romantic.
“You don’t like me,” Nathaniel adds.
A pause. “I hate you.”
“You hate me,” Nathaniel repeats, like a mantra. “You hate me.” He likes that better. “But you like me.”
“I’m your boyfriend. I thought that was implied.”
“Right, right. I hate you. What every doting boyfriend says when he’s feeling affectionate.”
“You don’t do well with affection.”
Nathaniel makes a noise at that. He can’t confidently call it a laugh, but it’s something in that direction. Pitiful, one way or the other. He thinks about saying it again: I love you. Not think, I know. I am addicted to loving people who hate me. You are the greatest example. He doesn’t, because Andrew would hate it; he’d hate him if he said it right now. One day, Nathaniel will have to make these big swings without being in the midst of a breakdown.
Step seven goes something like, Practice mindfulness. Be in the moment. What do you feel now? How do your clothes feel on your skin? Are you hot or cold?
When he inhales, it comes in a little wet. There’s moisture accumulated on his upper lip, vellus drenched and attached to his skin. He shifts on the bed, abruptly aware of how wet he is everywhere. His shirt is stuck to the small of his back; the sleeves of his shirt are damp, on their way to going stiff and lint-speckled. Beneath his comforter and the blanket, already clothed in fleece and a zip-up hoodie he forgot to take off, he’s lucky it’s just a little bit of sweat.
Hot. It’s fucking hot. Maybe not leather sticking to your thighs like velcro levels of hot, maybe not cars going up in smoke hot, but still. He feels hot and real fucking miserable in this moment.
Gradually relax your muscles. Start with your hands: one finger at a time. Loosen up, bit by bit.
His fingers hurt. He winces as he slowly peels them off of the blanket, his palm stinging where blunt nails bit into it, muscles cramped from an unforgiving grip. He doesn’t completely let go of it; he can’t, not with the thought in mind that this is the closest he’ll get to hearing his mother’s voice again. But the grip becomes less desperate. Less childish, less helpless. Belatedly, he realizes that he was holding onto Andrew’s wrist just as hard. “Sorry.”
Then they’re back to silence. Andrew doesn’t say anything as Nathaniel’s hold on him goes slack, loosening in just a way that leaves his thumbprint on Andrew’s pulse. He can’t escape Andrew’s attention, least of all right now, so he doesn’t try. He just continues lying there, a light tremor in his hands, and stares back at his remarkably hateful boyfriend. “Sorry,” he repeats.
“You just said that,” Andrew says. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”
If he’s asking, then Nathaniel has a hundred and two reasons to apologize. He’s sorry, all at once, for all of the candy wrappers and gas station receipts that he lost, the dates he didn’t memorize. He’s sorry for the ink that he failed to scrub off of his skin and the nicotine that might have permanently wrecked his lungs. He’s sorry for wanting to have things and keep them, too: trading cards and Exy jerseys and baby blankets and Andrew Joseph Minyard and Neil Abram Josten. He’s sorry, without reason, for being scarred and grown and wanting to be held like a child.
If you give Nathaniel a pen right now, he’ll test the ink on his forearm first. Then he’ll write out a full receipt of transgressions he needs to atone for.
Andrew wouldn’t even read it before throwing it out the window. He might set it on fire just to be an asshole.
“You don’t care what it is,” Nathaniel challenges. He sniffles.
“Then why are you wasting my time with it,” Andrew asks but doesn’t ask. Like he knows there’s no answer to that, either. Like he’s sized up Nathaniel’s scars and guilts and concluded that forgiveness was a given, if it was ever needed at all.
He can’t take it lightly. Andrew’s not famous for his forgiving spirit.
Nathaniel tightens his hold again, though only fractionally so, and brings the hand up to press his lips against the heel of Andrew’s palm. It’s dry in comparison to the sweat-slick, borderline gross state of Nathaniel’s hand. His skin isn’t gentle or unmarred. It doesn’t break under the force of Nathaniel’s neediness. It doesn’t reject his touch. Andrew lets Nathaniel have that kiss, then two others, traveling from one end of his palm to the other, and he does nothing. He can’t escape Nathaniel’s affection, either; he doesn’t try.
When Nathaniel fists his hand in Andrew’s collar, Andrew puts a hand on his chest. “Abram,” he warns, which is essentially everything. The blood, the ink, the smoke, the cotton. Fleece pajamas and poppy albums and knobby hips fashioning themselves into pendulums in the backseat. It’s a time and a place where Neil slots into himself and fits.
“Neil,” Andrew says, and the idea that nothing is okay is a goddamn lie.
“Yeah,” Neil says, then pulls him down.
It’s a light kiss. Neil can’t ask for too much because he knows Andrew. Knows Andrew will leave him pouting for lack before he traumatizes him with excess. Knows that calling Andrew a monster is lazy from start to finish. He knows that Andrew knows where the line is and won’t cross it just because Neil thinks he’s stable enough for it. The kiss isn’t much, but it is fine. It isn’t lacking anything. He doesn’t imagine wanting any more than this.
The moment they separate, he grasps blindly at the blanket and pushes it against Andrew’s chest. “I want to burn it.”
Andrew grabs the blanket, too, fingers curling over Neil’s. “Okay.”
Neil doesn’t let go of it just yet. Every bone in his body tells him to, but he isn’t quite done with his mother’s hatred yet. He hangs on, her disdain pinching every nerve. Andrew doesn’t let go, either. Neil breathes until it doesn’t hurt, and Andrew hangs on.