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"Son of a bitch," Neil was muttering, less borne of any actual irritation than an inclination to purge some pent-up profanity after three days at home.
Shouldering through the door, setting down his suitcase, looking up to find a big paper grocery bag and Todd's arched eyebrows dominating his vision. "Oh. Hey. I didn't think you'd be back already." Not that it was anything he couldn't understand; Thanksgiving meant time off from school, but more time with family.
Todd shrugged. "Left over from dinner...my mother..." gesturing vaguely. "Better eat it before it goes bad."
"Seriously?" The bag, upon closer examination, contained a Pyrex container and a pair of pie tins wrapped in foil. Even further exploration yielded white meat, green beans, corn, a few pieces of pie, a few rolls, and some odd red substance in a separate covered dish.
"Strawberry Jell-O," Todd clarified, looking a little embarrassed, "to, ah, make up for not having cranberry sauce."
"Nothing wrong with that. It looks way better than dinner here." Neil had noticed that Todd only stuttered when he was nervous, and apparently he wasn't around Neil. "Hold on a second; I can't contribute as much, but..." Neil rooted through his suitcase. "Quality, not quantity, right?" He had a box of chocolate from his own mother and a half-empty bottle of gin his uncle had unwittingly left behind. He set both on his bed before sprawling out himself. "I'm guessing you can only take so many relatives at once, too."
Todd was silent for a long moment, rearranging a few odds and ends on his desk. "Jeffrey's at Yale. He's...been going with this...girl for a while now, talking about getting engaged. Now everyone wants to know how long before I am."
That was a laugh. "They know going to all-boys schools for most of your life makes that a little challenging, don't they?" Even for Saint Jeffrey.
"I...don't know." Todd shrugged, studying the hem of his sweater. "They make out like they're just joking, but...I can tell, they're thinking, if you can't string two words together half the time, how do you ever...?" He looked up, frustrated eyes not quite matching with hair parted razor-sharp and neatly slicked down. Courtesy of familial get-togethers, Neil surmised, having to look and act like the epitome of responsibility. He knew the feeling. It was as close to being onstage he'd ever been until now.
Still, there was no possible way he was ever confessing Todd's family had a point. He could only imagine what Todd might be like around girls. "Liza Kilmartin plays Helena." He idly ran a finger down the spine of his script where it was tucked under his trigonometry book. "She's pretty. I'll make sure it's okay, you could sit in on a rehearsal. I'll introduce you."
Noticing Todd was practically crimson, he changed tack, tossing a chocolate across the room and grinning. "Somewhere there has to be a nice girl who thinks school uniforms make guys look dignified and doesn't care about letter jackets."
"Now you're just making things up." Under that horrible hair, Todd's face softened into a half-smile. "I mean it, eat something. My mother knows we can't keep food in our rooms, but we were allowed at Balincrest."
"Shocking. Bet they even let you keep posters on the walls."
"You'd think, wouldn't you?"
They'd only had a couple opportunities to sneak in a drink before, the last having been a few sips of some beer Pitts had gotten a hold of. "You know," Neil studied the gin bottle, "I was planning on saving it for the cave, for the next meeting, but maybe we need it now."
"I don't..."
"It's a weekend, it's boring, no one's around, come on." He hadn't gotten dropped off early to spend his spare time staring at the cracked off-white walls. "Why the hell are we staying in? You've got the food, I can supply the drinks, we're all set." He had his coat back on and Todd's grocery bag tucked under one arm in no time.
November had fallen fast and the bite of winter was veining through the trees. Dead leaves snapped incessantly underfoot and Todd walked silently alongside him, cheeks smudged red from the wind. Neil sort of wanted to touch him, but the cold nipped sharply at his exposed skin and he wasn't sure Todd would let him anyway.
He settled instead for murmuring on the way to the cave, snippets from the books he'd taken out of the library to tide him over until the next meeting. He'd been good at memorization for as long as he could remember.
"I am a tramp by the long trail's border,
Given to squalor, rags and disorder.
I nap and amble and yawn and look,
Write fool-thoughts in my grubby book...
"I don't remember the rest," he admitted when he caught Todd watching him, not sure why he felt a need to say so. "The whole thing's probably a million pages long."
Todd lifted a shoulder almost apologetically, not meeting his eyes as they started unloading the bag. "I like it."
It didn't take long to finish setting out a haphazard picnic, but the two of them quickly discerned a few shortcomings. "No silverware." Todd looked amused and crestfallen at the same time.
"Screw it. Who says Jell-O isn't a finger food?" Neil lifted the lid with a flourish and proffered the dish to Todd, who dubiously scooped out a little.
He huffed a small laugh and licked it off his fingers, long eyelashes and flushed cheeks, all innocence. Neil couldn't breathe. Todd didn't say much, but he was eloquent without words.
They eventually managed to fashion a pair of crude spoons by twisting aluminum foil into serviceable shapes. His aunt and mother had done a fair amount of tut-tutting over the Great Cranberry Contamination of '59, but in Neil's opinion Jell-O was better anyway.
"Why'd you come back a day early?" Todd asked finally, when they'd grown bored with bemoaning the resumption of classes.
"I told my father I needed the library. For that chem project I'm working on. You know." The one he'd fabricated specifically for the occasion. "I can only put up with giving thanks for so long." More specifically, hearing his father go on to a houseful of relatives about how his son was going to get into Harvard. He meant well, ultimately, and Neil couldn't deny him that. There was no point dwelling on it. He huddled in a little closer, pressing up against Todd's side--warmer that way; they were both used to having more people in the cave to generate heat.
"It's the same way. With Jeffrey, I mean. He's better in small doses." Todd took a drink and pulled a face. Neil noticed offhand that it made him look ridiculously young. "So's this."
Neil poked at a half-eaten slice of pie, makeshift spoon still clasped in one hand. "Last year, we went down to the creek with a bottle of wine. Got it all over Knox's shirt. We ended up drawing straws to see who'd have to go to the dry cleaners."
Unexpectedly, Todd settled a little more comfortably against him. Neil cleared his throat and continued, voice as steady as he could maintain. "Meeks lost and had to take everyone's laundry down at the end of the week. He came back raving about this gorgeous girl who'd started working there, so next week we all went and there was no one but a few old ladies. We could've killed him."
Most of them had an allowance for things like that, or their parents took them on the weekends. They took bets for dry-cleaning duty through the winter, then went together when the weather turned. Bicycled into town after class, picked it up a couple days later, wearing street clothes, getting a snack, and watching the public school kids. Pitts always ended up with brown arms and sunburned cheeks, while Charlie's pasty, ironical face was spattered with freckles.
Neil swallowed a cold mouthful of corn. This wasn't the time to be thinking of next year, of whether he'd end up being enrolled in another round of summer school to bump up his grade point average just a little more. He wondered if Todd would join them in spring. All told, he didn't know much about what Todd ever did for fun, other than keeping to himself and his books, if he'd ever been part of a group before.
Todd shifted, a firm band of warmth down Neil's side, and smiled one of those rare strange-soft smiles. "Jeffrey told me about some guys getting in trouble for drinking once. He...he didn't sound like he approved."
Neil laughed, wondered if he was better off being an only child. Everything had to be perfect for Todd, and since his brother was already perfect, nothing he did could ever measure up. Not that either of them had ever said so in those words precisely. "Jeff was also a jerk. I think he was born fifty years old and just needs his body to catch up."
Smiling again, Todd shook his head. His hair caught the light and not a strand moved. "I know. I...I sort of hope his girlfriend turns him down," looking like he didn't believe that possibility for a second. No one could say no to someone like Jeffrey Anderson.
Shadows were stretching slowly across the cave floor. Afternoons were growing steadily shorter; it wouldn't be long before every day was draped in drabness. One extra shadow here or there shouldn't have seemed as offensive as it did. Todd was used to having a big brother casting a shadow large enough for him to hide in and Neil was used to his father plotting out the dimensions of his own shadow for him.
Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline.
The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets. One waits.
Neil ate another chocolate and chased it with a swallow of gin. His other hand eased around Todd's waist, burrowing into the folds of his coat.
Tentative Todd, shying away from everything but drinking in affection so readily once he allowed it, as if he'd been unconsciously craving it. Little things, keeping him involved, inviting him out with the others, and if he declined half the time to read or be alone, that was okay. But you didn't leave your roommate out in the cold; it wasn't as if he was a jerk like Cameron. He deserved a chance and if he was a little quiet and nervous, so what?
As far as Neil was concerned, no one could actually remain that terrified of human interactions if the right measures were taken. "Do me a favor," he'd said to him once, when the night turned cold suddenly after an unseasonably warm day. They'd woken up shivering, pulling on sweaters over their pajamas, huddling by the radiator after closing the window. "Just for a minute," getting back into bed and folding back the cold blankets.
He remembered thinking Todd had probably never been this close to anyone in years. He had expected him to be awkward, declining entirely or lying stiff as a board, but instead he was compliant and drowsy, languidly curling up against Neil's back. Neil woke up hours later with sandy threads of hair pressed to his lips as if he'd kissed Todd's head in the midst of a dream. Half-asleep still, he did it again, because it seemed nice, because Todd's brow was wrinkled in his sleep, because Todd worried too much what everyone thought. He wasn't touching Neil at all anymore, no mean feat in the narrow bed. "You're warm," he'd said flippantly, when Todd was roused enough to blink at him. And Todd didn't balk or blanch or blush, just smiled vaguely and fell asleep again.
"Jeff talked about you a few times, too. Never by name. He just said you were shy. Doesn't mean girls don't like that. `Dignified and shy' could be very in by the time you graduate."
"I don't want to think about it yet," Todd said calmly. Apparently drinking shook some of his self-consciousness. He flushed and glanced away. "The closest I've come to having a girlfriend was when some friend of my father's had me...he had me take his daughter to a school dance. I don't think we even looked at each other. That was the first time I really kissed anyone, since I thought that was the nice thing to do, and she didn't respond at all. It was horrible." Plucking the bottle out of Neil's hand, he took another sip.
Despite never having been drafted into a comparable position, Neil grimaced sympathetically. "Your story can't be worse than mine. Know who it was?" He paused. "Charlie."
"Um." Todd blinked, glancing between Neil and the bottle as if gauging the difference. "Why?"
Neil held up his hand. "He thinks he knows everything, always has, so I told him to prove it." They'd been thirteen, fourteen, and Charlie had looked so smug and pleased when he drew back that Neil had to wonder if that had been his first actual kiss as well. But Charlie liked his past mysterious and checkered, so he had no illusions of ever finding out for sure. "It's one way to make him stop talking."
"Listening to him is more interesting than sitting in the living room while everyone smokes cigars. A-and you can't leave because it's rude and they want to talk about your future." The confession didn't seem to have fazed Todd at all, or maybe that was thanks to the alcohol. Either way, Neil was grateful for it.
"God, I know. My father and uncle were making jokes about the stock market because that's the most interesting thing they know. If that ever becomes the funniest thing in my life..."
Neil couldn't think of an adequate punishment. His father and uncle had seemed so content, behaving as if there was nothing outside New England, comfortable with their brandy snifters and sport coats that would hang like choir robes on Neil's skinny frame. "Listening to everyone talk about the rest of your life, having to sit there and smile through it, it's all bull." He grinned and scrubbed a palm over the crown of Todd's head. "So is having to use ten tons of mousse till you look like you just fell off the train to Squaresville."
"Hey!" Todd jolted, grappling back, laughing indignantly. Neil hadn't heard him laugh often and it seemed to rattle off the walls.
"Hey what?" It came out in an embarrassingly high-pitched squawk because there were fingers digging into his ribs, and that wasn't fair at all. "You are gonna--damn it!" His foot crunched down on a pie tin, the rest of him went toppling over the cave floor in a clumsy cluster of limbs, both his hands scrabbling over Todd's head until a dozen little cowlicks had broken free of their constraints. Less cold this way, and weirdly exhilarating, tussling in a cave while surrounded by lengthening shadows and remnants of their stolen banquet. Todd eventually struggling overtop him, eyes shining, still laughing--so close it just happened to happen--and Neil went arching up mid-laugh to slick a gin-wet smear across those parted lips.
Todd's body jerked over him, tensed like a locked being turned, clenching away so suddenly it took Neil a second to understand why. "I...I...wh-what...what was...?" blinking down, eyes wide and guileless, half-styled hair hanging in his eyes. Oh.
Shitshitshit. At least Todd wasn't the type to hit him, thank God for that. "I'm an actor." Neil forced his mouth into the widest grin possible.
"You're a liar," Todd corrected matter-of-factly, and Neil couldn't so anything but agree and struggle to dredge up something to joke the last few seconds away, but there was that smile again, spreading hesitantly over Todd's pink face and then pressing petal-soft against the corner of Neil's mouth.
Cautiously, he slipped a hand up under Todd's jacket and sweater, feeling the heat of his skin through the undershirt, feeling as the other's breath caught and released and finally evened. "Warm?" And if Todd's voice sounded a little strangled, it was nothing Neil couldn't handle.
"It's why you're good to have around." He noticed that Todd's hands, one of which was caught against his nape, were careful and very soft. His own were dry and tended to crack at the knuckles in this weather. Both of them splayed and pressed more firmly when Todd's back when rigid under his palms. "Come on, don't think I'm serious," he added anxiously. "Better than Charlie, too. But I promise I won't tell him."
Todd looked at him, no hesitation, dipped his head in closer and delicately drew a thumb down the bared side of Neil's neck. Not a word needed. "You...are you comfortable like this?" he ventured after a few minutes.
Afternoon was waning and twilight was approaching, a few stray rays of sunlight prickling over the horizon. They would have to pack up the food soon since they hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, but there was still a little time before they needed to leave for the dorm and that blank box of space with a stark little paper-cut of a window. "Yeah. You?"
His feet were numb, his arm was asleep, the chill of the cave floor was stark against the back of his head, but there was no class the next day and the future was still far away.
Only gin and heat and silence left, sandy strands of hair against his lips, and that messy head moving once against Neil's shoulder in a nod.