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Neil turns up at Andrew’s bar wearing brass knuckles and a tiara, riding a wave of people who all seem way more excited than he is to be there. It’s his twenty-first birthday, and he’s the baby of the group, the one everyone has been waiting to ply with liquor and good times until he passes out in a pile of his own vomit. They’re a riot of noise and movement around him, fighting over who gets to pick up his tab, jockeying for position to buy the first round of shots, turning Andrew’s little black box hole-in-the-wall into some kind of snapchat party nightmare in ninety seconds flat.
Neil himself is a quiet spot in the chaos, small and serious, his fingers hummingbirds around the half-full glass he uses as a prop for at least twenty minutes. He’s stunning, and separate, so that even the lights seem to slide off of him. He’s teflon, but Andrew sticks to him anyway, snagged like the fuzzy side of velcro, pinned to Neil’s sleeve.
Andrew steals the neglected glass from Neil’s hands and makes him five more drinks before they find one he likes: a gin and grapefruit juice thing that perks Neil up after a single sip. Andrew makes him a second, but Neil hesitates at a third, confessing that he doesn’t want to lose control around so many people. It bangs a big-ass gong in the been-there-done-that area of Andrew’s brain. It feels like a delicious little shiver down the back of his neck, into his shoulders.
Andrew says, to his own great surprise, “I’ll watch you tonight.”
“Designated babysitter?” Neil asks.
“Something like that.”
“We’re not staying,” Neil tells him. “This is only stop three.”
“So I’ll go with you,” Andrew says, easy peasy, loose, shoulders shrugging.
“You’re working,” Neil points out.
“I’ll quit,” Andrew tells him.
Neil’s smile is slow and sweet, a shy thing tucked into the corners of his cheeks and nearly lost in the duck of his head. Andrew wants to tear him limb from limb. Andrew wants to kiss him until he can’t breathe.
Nicky slips Andrew a warning on his way out the door to discover spot four: “He’s not single.”
Andrew stops, rubs his hand over his jaw. “Details?”
“Boyfriend’s overseas,” Nicky says. “Been a while. Might be a while longer.”
Andrew watches Neil move towards the door, his eyes locked on the ruby gleam of his head in the middle of its own mob. At the top of the steps up to street level, Neil stops, turns, catches Andrew’s eyes.
“Don’t care,” Andrew tells Nicky, and follows Neil out the door.
There’s a party bus outside. The look Neil gives Andrew over his shoulder is sheepishly apologetic. If Andrew knew what was good for him, he’d go back inside his fucking bar and finish updating the books the way he’s supposed to.
He gets on the bus instead, following Neil up the idle-shook steps and into a hellscape of streamers and violent neon.
Stop number one, Andrew discovers, had been pedicures—the group had taken over most of a salon and drank two bottles of champagne’s worth of mimosas. One of the girls, a showy blonde, makes Neil take his shoe off and show Andrew his sky blue toenails. They just look white in the crazy lighting.
Stop two had been a hibachi grill, which apparently had a special party room where two chefs cooked back to back and were, several people assured Andrew, “spectacular.” Andrew would happily skip the pedicures, but it would have been nice if the hibachi had been the stop after him—he likes all the knives and fire and fried rice.
The group moves from pampering to dinner to drinks to dancing, pulling the party bus up in front of a low black building that throbs with bass and dumps a sensory overload of light and sound every time someone opens the big sliding door.
Andrew knows the owner from around. He makes a phone call, gets them a handful of VIP tables, earns the goodwill of the whole group–three of whom drop not-so-subtle mentions of Neil’s boyfriend in ways that seem more like a heads up than a threat. Andrew isn’t sure exactly how he’s looking at Neil, but he doesn’t think it can be that bad.
Neil drinks, and looks for Andrew more and more often, and Andrew is velcro—hooked.
Four a.m. finds them at Sweetie’s on Andrew’s recommendation, ordering stacks and stacks of pancakes, milkshakes of every flavor, and enough bacon that Andrew considers going vegetarian again. Half of Neil’s friends turn the aisle into a TikTok dance move class, and Andrew tucks in next to a tipsy and tired Neil in a booth, his own stack of pancakes and a black coffee in front of him.
“Tell me about the boyfriend.”
“Jean?” Neil asks. The thickness of the accent he wraps around the name takes Andrew by surprise. “He’s a dancer. Ballet.”
Of course he is.
Jean the dancer is back in France after a visa problem got him deported. Andrew gets the impression that it was high drama, white wine tears in the public square, a deportation with prejudice. Some kind of complicated family shit, Neil says in a hand-wave of a voice, like “It’s a crazy story,” and “It doesn’t really matter,” all wrapped up in one.
Neil—tipsy and sleepy—is a hell of a conversationalist, equally as chatty as he can be silently watchful. He pours Andrew a kettle’s worth of tea. The honey and milk are the low rasp of his voice while he talks and the warm weight of him against Andrew’s side. Neil and Jean have been together for eight months, separated for two. They’d known long distance would be hard, but everything before had been hard, too. Life or fate or bad karma had conspired to keep them both out of the dating game until there were no more beginners in their age class, and anyway, they weren’t in the habit of relationships. They were two loners trying to learn to be something else.
They’d found unicorns of a sort in each other. Speaking French made a house into a home for Jean, and Neil had never really had either before, not for a long, long time, if ever. When they did the math, it all added up; who the hell else were they going to find?
They expected Jean would be gone nine months, maybe twelve, fifteen at the outside, and it seemed a small price to pay, you know?
Andrew nods even though he doesn’t know shit.
In the aisle, Neil’s friends take turns doing their best stanky legs, laughing, giddy-happy, young and drunk and celebrating. Andrew listens to Neil talk about his dead mother like they’ve known each other for years and feels… hooked. Fucked.
Could just friends be good enough? Andrew guesses they’re going to find out. He thinks he needs to hang onto this one, either way.
The driver of the party bus is dragging by the time they make it to the Lake Murray dam to watch the sun rise, and even the hardest-partying of Neil’s friends are sleepy and cold, huddling together in the last dregs of night.
“Happy birthday, Neil,” Andrew says. Neil smiles another of those quiet smiles at him. If this was some poignant movie about being young and gay and a loser that they still haven’t made enough of, and which hadn’t come soon enough for Andrew, this would be the moment he kissed Neil for the first time, their hands shoved into their jacket pockets, breath a mingling mist on the pale pink streaks of light shattering the gloom.
Andrew’s life has never been a movie. Or, at least, not the kinds with happy endings.
He meets Jean two weeks later, via a laptop open on Neil’s kitchen counter. Neil lets him into his apartment mid-conversation, with only enough time to smile a greeting at Andrew before he turns around and loops the peninsula to get his face in front of the computer again.
Andrew grabs a soda from Neil’s fridge and leans against the counter, just out of the camera’s line of sight. Neil throws a knowing look back over his shoulder, but doesn’t call him on the avoidance.
On Neil’s screen, Jean’s face looms large. He has striking features, mile-high cheekbones and a fine-boned nose. He looks tall, even sitting down. Andrew knows he’s wrong for Neil instantly, just knows it somehow. Wishful thinking, probably, but maybe not.
“We’re going to the bowling jam,” Neil confirms to Jean. “It’s for charity. It’s a whole thing.”
“Is Andrew there?” Jean asks. “I want to meet him.”
Andrew slides another couple of feet down the counter until he’s visible, lifts his can in a vague reference to a toast, and takes a sip. The Sprite hits his sinuses like bubbly acid, making his brain curl up inside his skull.
Neil makes the introductions. Andrew keeps the word count under five on his side. Jean does his part and ends the call quickly.
“Wow,” Neil says, closing his laptop with a quiet click. “Very charming.”
“I don’t like the French,” Andrew says, straight faced, deadpan.
“I can pretty much promise the feeling is mutual,” Neil tells him. “They’re notorious Francophiles themselves. What’s the American equivalent? What’s Anglophile for the US?”
“That’s not a thing.”
Neil bets a hundred dollars that it is. He’s right—it’s a thing, or at least there’s discourse about the thing, which Neil insists counts. They double or nothing the bet for the bowling victory, which Andrew would think he had locked up if not for the hustler’s gleam in Neil’s eyes. By the time their nachos get delivered to the lane, they’ve both forgotten about Jean Moreau. For Andrew, it’s more pretending to have forgotten; he’s always been really, really good at make-believe.
The hope-springs-eternal date for Jean’s return comes and goes, and Andrew’s life is so saturated in Neil that everything reeks of him even when he’s not there. There are little touches of him everywhere—his toothbrush in the bathroom of Andrew’s office, a pile of his hoodies occupying a never-used armchair in Andrew’s bedroom, his favorite breakfast cereal stocked at both the house and the bar. Nicky acts like Jean is Neil’s rare terminal diagnosis that they can cure through the power of positive thinking; Aaron keeps his mutterings about how bullshit he thinks the whole thing is to himself, mostly, but Andrew knows he’s saving up a mouthful for the first time he scents blood in the water.
The god-damned fucking rub of the thing is that Neil had agreed to settle for not enough. Long-distance often isn’t, even when you work at it. And they do. They do all the things—the weekly digital date nights, the awkward-at-first phone sex that Neil confesses to at Andrew’s bar one night, pressed into the center of a booth by Kevin on one side and Dan on the other. For some reason, making Neil one of Andrew’s people had meant fully integrating their friend groups, a thing that should have been a disaster and instead turned into the wet dream of reality producers everywhere.
Andrew can almost see the cameras recording Neil as he mumbles the phone sex admission into the confessional of his cupped palms, his fingertips pressed to his forehead, hiding his face from his friends’ inevitable delight.
Allison cackles long enough that they have to throw napkins at her to get her to stop. Neil’s head is still ducked and shaking, his chest hiccuping with laughter. Andrew wants to touch him so fucking badly he gets up and makes another round of drinks about it, coming back just in time to hear Allison admit that she’d had an Only Fans account for about fifteen minutes, by which she actually means a month. Neil looks up at Andrew with this expression like he’s coming for Andrew next. Andrew drills all of the emotion out of his face and stares a no-fucking-way back at him until Neil smiles, except it’s a smile that could go either way. Andrew fucks off rather than finding out, retreating to the safety of the bar where he can wipe things with a towel until he forgets about how sincerely Neil works on his fucking relationship with Jean—Jean, who is perfectly fine, probably great, but not right for Neil.
Andrew’s sat in the background of enough FaceTime calls by now to be pretty sure that they’re only still together because they’re apart. Jean’s absence, Andrew thinks, makes his presence in Neil’s life bigger than it would be if he were actually there. If he were there, a man and not an idea, they’d realize the distance between them went deeper than the separation. All the togetherness in the world wouldn’t bridge it, wouldn’t get them close enough to touch flame to tinder.
Neil has such incredible potential to be alive, to really live, to do the Sound of Music twirl right through everything in front of him. He’s just too fucking careful—plays it too safe. Dates a guy halfway across the world.
It’s wasted potential; Neil is shaped like a stick of dynamite in Andrew’s mind, a solid handful of explosives with an untouched wick. Andrew can’t look at him without itching to spark a lighter.
But he doesn’t. They’re best friends. They get on like a house on fire, and it’s easy—it’s so fucking easy—to relax around Neil, to be his very worst and still make Neil laugh, to pass cigarettes and secrets back and forth, burrowing into each other until they know each other’s scars inside and out, to stay up late binging old sitcoms and fall asleep at opposite ends of the couch.
They’re in Andrew’s bar when the clock strikes midnight on Neil’s twenty-second birthday. Andrew had prepared for this—he pulls a cupcake out from the fridge, sticks a single candle in it, lights it in defiance of the fire code.
“Happy birthday,” Andrew says, shoving it across the counter at him.
“Happy anniversary,” Neil says, pushing it back. They stare at each other over the tiny flame, a familiar battle of wills.
Andrew wants all of Neil, his body and his mind, his highs and his lows, his shadows and the things he’s buried there, but above all else, Neil is… Neil. He’s probably the best friend Andrew has ever had. That’s not nothing. Andrew forfeits—he leans down and blows out the candle.
“Any day now on the visa” turns into “three to four months” again. Jean is never there, but he’s always almost there, just about to deliver the payoff for all the waiting they’ve been doing.
Neil takes the news too easily. His total lack of a problem with the new delay pisses Andrew off so much he picks a fight, needling at Neil until he’s finally had enough and snaps back. Andrew does it in front of Nicky and Aaron, so he gets to enjoy watching Neil try to suppress his confusion as Andrew methodically shoves him out the door with his meanness. Neil is obviously, painfully unsure of how to be real with Andrew in front of an audience.
Nicky doesn’t come to Neil’s rescue, and Aaron watches with obvious relish, cutting his chicken blindly, tracking the conversation like it’s dinner theater. Even the cat stays out of it, perched on the counter like an asshole, her green eyes slitted.
They don’t talk for two weeks after that, other than a text from Neil two days later: sorr. tell me what I did somday?
Andrew medicates his phantom limb syndrome with alcohol and cigarettes until he finally figures out who he’s trying to punish with his disappearing act—both of them, obviously—and breaks his fast by showing up to watch the game at Kevin’s.
He can’t cut Neil out of his life. Their friend groups are hopelessly entangled—Neil answers Kevin’s door door, flinging it open wide without looking through the fucking peep hole. Andrew can tell by the way Neil’s face flickers for the first few seconds, from pleasure to surprise to wariness. He’s so much less squirrely than he used to be.
Andrew misses the fuck out of him.
“Hey,” Neil says, taking a step back, as far out of Andrew’s space as he can get without hitting a wall.
“Maybe,” Andrew says.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”
A few more things flicker across Neil’s face, but all he says is, “Do you still have that bottle hidden in Kevin’s garage?”
“I do.”
“I’ll get it,” Neil says.
Andrew brought grapefruit juice with him. He finishes making Neil’s drink just in time to hand it to him when he comes back with Andrew’s Scotch.
They’re six weeks into reconciliation and one month from another inevitable visa disappointment when Aaron decides to get married. Planning meeting number one is just Andrew and Aaron at the jewelry store, picking a ring based on the rather extensive “random pretty rings” Pinterest page Katelyn had curated and shared around not long after she and Aaron had agreed that they’d probably go ahead and get married sometime, when the time was right, probably sooner rather than later. Meeting number two is the whole family—Neil and Kevin included, and Katelyn, too, of course—and it’s about budgets. Cue spooky noises, the wailing of wind, the squeaking of a loose floorboard under an invisible foot.
“We want to keep the guest list under seventy-five,” Aaron says. They’ve dragged out the Pictionary board for this meeting. Katenlyn has a marker; Aaron has an extendable metal pointer that he slaps against the paper where Katelyn has just written and circled the number seventy-five.
“Will that be hard?” Nicky asks. “With Katelyn having a family and all?”
“We have a family,” Aaron says sharply.
“Right, yes,” Nicky says. “Absolutely.”
“We’re limiting plus ones,” Katelyn explains. “Like, Dan and Matt will get a joint invitation.”
“What about me?” Neil asks.
“You’re Andrew’s plus one.”
“Why?” Neil asks.
“What do you mean, why?” Aaron shoots back.
“What if Andrew wants to bring a date?” Neil asks.
The look on Aaron’s face would be more at home in an alien invasion movie—he looks at Neil like tentacles have just torn through his chest and he’s a mess of wet, writhing appendages. Well, he looks the way someone who doesn’t appreciate the finer points of tentacle porn would—absolute disgust. “Who the fuck else do you think Andrew would bring to my wedding, Neil?”
Kevin eases himself off the couch and goes to murmur about numbers with Katelyn. Neil doesn’t acknowledge the movement—he’s watching Aaron, his forehead wrinkled. Slowly, he asks, “What if I wanted to bring a date?”
“Like who?” Aaron scoffs.
“What if Jean was back?” Neil asks.
“Fuck Jean,” Aaron says bluntly. “I don’t know that guy. He’s not coming to my wedding, not at $125 a head.”
This punches a huff of amusement out of Neil. He turns on Andrew once Aaron is gone, hurried off to take the Sharpie from Kevin’s hand.
“Do you want a real plus one?” Neil asks, his searching face on.
“You’re asking a lot of questions for a charity case.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I,” Andrew tells him. “Shut your mouth before Aaron decides I don’t get to bring you after all and you miss the whole damn thing.”
Andrew wouldn’t bring anyone else to the wedding. There’s no one else who could make the night better, not worse. If there was no Neil, Andrew would go to the damn thing alone and leave it alone, too, probably, lungs full of smoke, veins full of liquor.
Neil can’t let it go, though. He works the problem. He chews and chews on it, drums it into his knee with his fingertips, stares at Andrew and thinks about it so hard it gives Andrew a headache.
He almost lays it on Andrew at the gym one day between bench press sets—exhales, inhales deeply, steadies himself, opens his mouth.
“Don’t do it,” Andrew warns him.
“But—”
“Not in the gym,” Andrew says sternly. “This is a sacred place.”
“I just—”
“I will drop this on you,” Andrew warns, though he wouldn’t really betray the spotter’s bond of trust that way.
The next time, Neil is sneakier. He’s a goddamned cheat, actually, distracting Andrew with Mario Kart and a one-balloon lead in best-out-of-five tie-breaker match, even though he’s using the couch wrong—legs over the back, head tipped off the seat cushion. He’s driving upside down. He’s still winning.
Neil executes a perfect sideswipe; he takes out another of Andrew’s balloons and zooms off, fishtailing his way ahead of Andrew. Oh-so-casually, he asks, “Do you ever date?”
Andrew is a professional, so his car stays on the track. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Everyone sucks.”
“Not everyone,” Neil protests.
“Everyone.”
“You don’t think I suck,” Neil says, like he thinks he’s making some kind of point. He isn’t.
“You definitely suck,” Andrew tells him. He’s managed to catch up with Neil again; he rams into Peach’s stupid pink cart, taking out a balloon. The indignant noise Neil makes could be in response to either slight.
Neil asks, “Since when?”
“Since always,” Andrew says blandly. “You were wearing a tiara when we met.”
“And brass knuckles,” Neil reminds him. “That’s why you liked me.”
For once, the idiot gets something right.
“I’m surprised there wasn’t a sash,” Andrew says. With a twist of his thumb, he takes out Neil’s second balloon. If this conversation was half a strategy to distract Andrew from the game—a very Neil type of multi-tasking—then it’s backfiring.
“There was,” Neil says. “I refused to wear it. Have you ever dated? Do you know that everyone sucks from experience?”
“Why is this suddenly a topic?” Andrew asks.
“I’ve known you over a year and I’ve never seen you with anyone.”
“Asked and answered,” Andrew tells him. “Is it my turn?”
They’re both down to one balloon. It should be the tensest, most competitive part of the game.
Neil drops his controller onto his chest and turns his head, looking at Andrew. Andrew feels the weight of his stare without seeing it.
Neil asks, “Am I holding you back? Do you spend all of your time taking care of me and none of it taking care of yourself?”
Princess Peach is idling on-screen. Andrew has a clear shot at Neil’s last balloon.
He doesn’t take it.
“No,” he says, with the confidence of the truth. “That’s not why I don’t date.”
It takes Neil a couple of loops of character idle animations to decide he believes Andrew, but he spares them further conversation, just picks up his controller and takes off at full speed. It feels like a narrow escape, a collision only just avoided, a payment clearing the bank and leaving you with one cent left in your account.
Neil laps Andrew and takes out his last balloon before Andrew figures out where his thumbs are.
Everything goes back to normal, except for the seemingly endless wedding planning. Andrew has Netflix and eclectic viewing tastes, but no amount of Marriage or Mortgage or Say Yes to the Dress could have prepared him for the landslide of decisions that need to be made. Katelyn and Aaron are having a small wedding, but that just means some of the options are cheaper, not avoidable. There are venue tours (boring), florist appointments (surprisingly interesting), and cake tastings (worth the other two). Andrew, who’s paying for half the damn thing, finds himself dragged along on most of them. There are bands and DJs and photographers and hair and makeup. There are cakes and dresses, vows to be written, officiants to be interviewed. There are Katelyn’s parents to be appeased, placated, or distracted, depending on the day.
All the wedding talk puts more ideas in the heads of idiots, and there’s a three-week mini catastrophe when Jean and Neil decide a green card marriage is a viable option.
Don’t you dare, Andrew thinks. Don’t you fucking dare.
Everyone has an opinion on it—everyone. Andrew ends up in three new group chats, one pro, one con, and one mainly occupied with increasingly unhinged predictions about how shit might go down. Someone says nothing will happen because it’s so stupid that Andrew simply won’t allow it. Six people ha-ha! the message, and then someone reminds everyone that Andrew is also in the group chat, and eight people ha-ha! that.
Andrew wonders if it would work, if he could just tell Neil no and Neil would drop the whole thing. If he did it at the wedding itself, stood up when they asked for objections, would Neil run out the venue doors with him?
He ends up alone on FaceTime with Jean a couple of weeks into that debacle—Neil goes downstairs to deal with the pizza delivery guy who’s obsessed with him, and the phone he leaves behind buzzes seconds after he’s gone. Andrew swipes to accept the video call; Neil will have been waiting for it.
Jean is as handsome as always, his brow made for furrowing, his eyes deep and dark, his mouth perfectly straight. He’s as good looking as Neil is, in his own way. In the corner of the screen, Andrew is confronted with his own face, his too-square jaw, the nose that hadn’t healed right the second time it was broken. If there’s a league here, he knows he’s not in it.
“Andrew,” Jean says in greeting. The name sits easily on his tongue. Andrew wonders how much time Jean and Neil spend talking about him.
“Neil is getting the pizza,” Andrew says.
“Ah,” Jean says, the side of his mouth quirking into a wry smile. “His number one fan.”
“He hates it. It’s hilarious.”
“I should thank you, I think,” Jean says tentatively. He’s being sincere with a French accent. It’s intolerable. “He seems happy.”
“If you say so,” Andrew says, like he doesn’t spend half of his waking hours making sure of it.
“Andrew,” Jean says again, but this time it sounds like a question, a polite request for permission to ask one. Andrew grunts reluctant approval. “Should we do it?” Jean asks. “Should we get married?”
No. Absolutely fucking not. And not just because Andrew is more than half in love with Neil himself. Jean and Neil have been apart longer than they were together—much longer. They don’t know how they fit into each other’s lives anymore. It could work out. It could not. That’s something they should know before they get married, not after.
Andrew shakes his head shortly. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Would you do it?” Jean asks.
“If I were you?” Andrew asks. He feels mean doing it. “Or if I were Neil?”
“If you were me what?” Neil asks, slipping back through the propped-open door.
“Would I marry this fine French specimen,” Andrew says, saying it weird so Neil will be distracted by the words and not wonder about the meaning. It works: Neil’s forehead wrinkles, his mouth silently shaping the words.
Andrew doesn’t look back at the screen to see what Jean’s face is doing, and by the time Neil puts down the pizza and takes the phone to his bedroom, he seems to have forgotten about it entirely. You never really know with Neil, but Andrew thinks he’s safe. After a week goes by without another ambush, Andrew knows for sure. Neil isn’t that patient.
They don’t get married.
The whole thing is held together with duct tape and Elmer’s glue. Andrew keeps everything on a tight leash, rolls any and all feelings or longings or what-ifs into cigarettes and chain smokes them until even he thinks it’s excessive, so he quits smoking. Kevin buys him gum and Andrew goes through it as fast as he did cigarettes for a while. Neil buys the strawberry kind in bulk because he says it smells the best. Nicky comes home with every fancy flavor he can find—birthday cake, salted caramel, Thanksgiving turkey. Andrew chews until his jaw is sore; Neil shows up with lollipops.
Without cigarettes, Andrew realizes how much time he spent smoking to keep his hands busy. Idle hands want to do things, and high on that list of things to do is touch Neil Josten. Andrew feels a near-constant itch to do it—just little intimacies, a hand on a neck here, on a knee there, a futile attempt to tame his hair, fingertips on a pulse-point when he’s pretty sure Neil is spinning some bullshit.
The unofficial rule is hands off. It’s only unofficial for Andrew—he’d told Neil the first night that he doesn’t like to be touched without permission. Once had been all it had taken. Neil asks for permission before he does so much as flick a mosquito off of Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew simply doesn’t touch Neil, doesn’t lay hands on him at all, if he can help it.
Hands to himself only covers so much territory, though, and Andrew knows the weight of Neil’s body as well as he knows his own. He knows that Neil’s feet get hot at night, and he knows the way they feel tucked against his calf, Neil asleep at the other end of the couch. He knows the topography of Neil’s shoulder, and where to put his head to avoid all the bones. He knows how hard to lean into Neil so they counterbalance, holding each other up.
What he doesn’t know, it turns out, is how much of that counterbalance isn’t physical at all. This is an exciting new discovery. Andrew makes it alone, on the fourth day of Neil’s three-week visit to France. If the mountain can’t go to Mohammed, etc.
Andrew ends up with two unopened boxes of Neil’s cereal, that weird Grape-Nuts shit that he eats up like a squirrel, head tucked furtively over his bowl. He likes it with skim milk, like an alien. Half a gallon of it expires in Andrew’s fridge on day seven.
The group chat explodes with speculation—is Neil going to come back or will he stay in France with Jean? Andrew tallies the votes and figures them at about 50/50, though some people (Nicky) change their votes so often they may as well not get one at all.
It’s September. Andrew’s birthday is in November. The wedding is in December. Time races, except when it crawls, which it does every day that Neil is gone.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” one of the trainers asks at the gym.
“Not my boyfriend,” Andrew says evenly. “On vacation.”
The barista at their usual post-run coffee spot proudly hands over two drinks when Andrew goes on day ten.
“I saw you coming!” they say. “It’s been a while.”
Andrew doesn’t have the heart to tell them that they wasted their time. He throws the second coffee away on the corner, well out of sight.
The closer they get to Neil’s flight home, the more the group chat starts leaning towards Neil missing it. This spawns a faction that vows to go kidnap him back, and another (Allison, though Nicky turns traitor and joins in) that starts dreaming of a destination wedding.
Andrew thinks he’s the only one who actually asks Neil, the question spoken quietly into the phone at two a.m. on day nineteen, Neil’s eight a.m., before Jean gets up for coffee and bread and an extensive demonstration of his flexibility, Andrew assumes. It’s only more than a whisper because Andrew clears his throat before he asks: “You’re getting on the plane?”
“I am,” Neil says, and Andrew can hear the promise in his voice, a hooked pinky from across an ocean.
Andrew is the undisputed Neil handler by now, so he’s the one who picks him up at the airport—he parks and goes in, feeling like the yellow lab in one of those soldier-returns-from-war videos that are scattered all over the internet like emotional landmines. Neil deposits himself in front of Andrew looking tired and rumpled and perfect. And tan.
“I’m back,” Neil says.
“If you made me drive to the airport and then didn’t show up, it would be real convenient for me to get on a plane and disembowel you.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” Neil says, and it’s obvious he means it. Andrew shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and knocks Neil with his shoulder, sending him swaying exaggeratedly on his feet.
Andrew takes Neil home with him, tucks Neil into his bed, lets the whole house know that they can either whisper or die. It’s been years since he made that many threats on lives in one day.
A few weeks later, Jean finally gets good news about his visa. It’s real this time: he’ll be back after the New Year. He’ll miss the wedding. Neil will still be Andrew’s plus one.
Everything is going to change. Andrew is sponge-ified, almost formless, soaking up every precious moment of having Neil to himself. He wishes it was still summer, that they could still stay out late on restaurant patios, Neil golden and gorgeous in the glow of string lights and lanterns. Instead it’s winter, and the leaves fall off trees, and they spend their nights in clubs or bars, at one or the other’s places, working their way through Golden Girls, sometimes with company, most times without.
For Andrew’s birthday, Nicky and Allison put together a whole laser tag thing. Andrew would prefer it were paintball, because at least then he’d get to damage some of these people, but half the group gets hung up on the wardrobe possibilities for the laser tag’s blacklights, and then Andrew shows up to his own birthday party with a small mob of neon-clad freaks. It reminds him of Neil’s twenty-first birthday, the commotion, the commitment.
He claims right of first choice and gets Neil on his team, but Dan scoops up Renee, and Andrew gets stuck with Matt, who can’t stop smiling. His teeth glow in the dark, a Cheshire Cat, a dead giveaway.
Halfway through round three, Neil says, “Cover me,” and unzips his hoodie. Beneath it, something glows orange.
“Traitor,” Andrew accuses.
Andrew sees Neil’s smile only in the shadows of his face—he’s not dumb enough to give away their position like that, or at least, he wasn’t until he exposed the neon monstrosity under his hoodie.
After, Andrew drives Neil home and parks his car. He gets out and leans against it, fishes out the single cigarette he’d bummed from one of his bartenders.
“Birthday treat?” Neil asks.
Andrew pulls his lighter out of his front right pocket. His first inhale feels like someone taking an electric knife to his lungs.
“Wait for me,” Neil says. “I have something upstairs for you.”
Andrew nods, watches him jog away and up the stairs, watches him disappear into the second floor hallway. Neil is back in minutes, light on his feet down the stairs, something hanging from his hand.
The cigarette sucks. Andrew drops it to the curb, crushes it with the hell of his boot.
“Show me,” he says, when Neil lands in front of him again.
The thing Neil holds up to him is sparkly and curved, familiar. It’s a tiara—the same one he’d worn the night they met, Andrew thinks. He ducks his head and lets Neil put it on him.
“Pretty,” Neil says, his softest voice, the one he uses to talk about good things.
Andrew shoves his hands deep, deep into his pockets.
“Can I actually—hug you?” Neil asks.
Andrew unwinds his hands from their fists and pulls them out of his pockets. He doesn’t know where else to put them, but he says, “Yes,” and Neil takes care of the rest, his arms around Andrew’s shoulders—the perks of being three inches taller. Andrew wraps his arms around Neil’s waist, low, and lifts until Neil’s weight presses him back into the car. Neil is warm, and he smells amazing, like grapefruit and fresh laundry and his rarely-used cologne, something smokey and woodsy that he’d picked out when Nicky insisted everyone needed a ‘signature scent.’ Andrew closes his eyes and locks his hands together, keeping Neil close. Probably too close.
“I love you, Andrew,” Neil whispers against the side of Andrew’s head.
“Shut up.”
“I think I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”
It might be Neil’s weight that makes it hard for Andrew to take a deep breath, but the racing heartbeat is all his own. “Me too,” he says, because he can’t help himself, and because it’s true, and because he doesn’t think Neil means it the way he means it, and Neil trusts Andrew, and—
“Shit,” Neil says quietly. His body is suddenly heavier against Andrew’s, and then lighter, gone, Neil stepping back. “That was shitty,” Neil says. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re fine,” Andrew says, because he can’t think to say anything else.
“I’m gonna go,” Neil says, hands in his pockets, shoulders high. “Happy Birthday. Keep the tiara. It looks better on you.”
Then he’s gone, but Andrew still can’t remember how to breathe.
He wakes up two days later to six-thirty a.m. text from Neil: call me
It’s nine-thirty. Andrew counts up his hours of sleep: four. He taps on his screen, lifts the phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Neil says when he picks up. He sounds a little breathless. It’s Thursday—one of Neil’s longer run days. He’s probably on mile twelve, give or take.
“Hey,” Andrew says, his voice rough with sleep, and the lack of it.
“I have a call with Jean today,” Neil tells him. “At noon. I’m going to talk to him about ending things.”
“What?” Andrew asks. His eyes still want to be closed. He doesn’t think he’s hearing right.
“I’ve been doing some thinking—”
“I thought I told you not to do that,” Andrew interrupts, incapable of not being an asshole when an opportunity presents itself.
“—and it’s the right thing to do.”
“Two months before he gets home?” Andrew asks.
“Andrew,” Neil says evenly. “How and when do you want to hear from me next?”
Some knee-jerk reaction shouts “Never again.” Another shouts louder. “When you’re done,” Andrew tells him. He hangs up. He won’t hear from Neil again for hours. There’s no way he’s going back to sleep.
He goes to work early, buries himself in payroll and inventory, grits his teeth every time his phone buzzes and it isn’t Neil. He doesn’t like the thing bumping around in his chest. It’s something like hope, risen from the grave to haunt him. Andrew salts the earth as much as he can with some of the homework his accountant begs him to do every year, but he still holds onto the phone so tight when Neil calls that his thumb aches at the strain.
“It went great,” Neil says. “It’s over and it’s okay.”
Is it, Andrew wonders. Is it really?
They don’t talk about what they are now, or what they could be. Andrew knows Neil would do it—he’s not the holdup, that’s all on Andrew. For the moment, Neil is single is about as deep into the water as Andrew is ready to wade.
It takes him about four days to believe he can put his hands on Neil, that he can indulge all of those impulses he’s been sitting on for—how long? Neil will be twenty three in the spring. It’s been… a year and eight months? All that time has made his hands flighty, birds that can’t find a good place to land. He starts with an arm around Neil’s shoulders, works his way to storing his hands in Neil’s hoodie pockets instead of his own, learns the geography of the inside seams of Neil’s favorite pair of jeans.
They aren’t dating—or, they aren’t until Neil sends a text, the same hideous way he always does: buy u dinner?
Dates are kissless affairs, topping out at hand-holding and culminating in intense hugging at the end of the night. Andrew thinks Neil is being a gentleman, not assuming anything. It’s cute. It lasts about two weeks, and then Neil is at Andrew’s house, at the other end of Andrew’s couch again, his toes tucked under Andrew’s thigh. He’s giving a masterclass in Tomb Raider. Andrew’s hand curls around Neil’s ankle. He walks his fingers up Neil’s calf, rubbing against the grain of his leg hair. His hand hits just above Neil’s knee before he reaches the limits of stretch in Neil’s cheap sweats.
He looks up, finds Neil watching him, the game paused.
Andrew retrieves his hand, braces it against the back of the couch, and climbs onto Neil. The kiss has been a long time coming, and Andrew remembers none of it later, his memory failing him in a blur of taste and touch. It doesn’t last long enough, and the voice that interrupts them is so sudden as to feel immediate—Aaron: “For fuck’s sake.”
“What?” Nicky asks, curious, and then, “Oh my god, finally!”
No amount of money could get Aaron to stay. No amount of money could get Nicky to leave. Andrew aims a middle finger at each of them in turn, expecting nothing and not being disappointed. Neil is laughing beneath him, breathless with it.
“You know when I knew?” Nicky asks, rhapsodizing. “Neil, you won’t remember. It was the second time you came over, and…”
The story lasts five minutes. The next time they kiss, Andrew puts a locked door between them and the world.
By the wedding, everyone knows. The group chat has gone strangely quiet. Andrew figures they abandoned ship and managed to leave him out of the new one. It wouldn’t be fair for him to see the wagers, after all—but he wonders if Jean was included, if he’s leveraging insider information to win all the bets, strategically questioning Neil on every weekly video chat. They still have those. Everything has changed, but in a lot of real ways, nothing has changed.
Neil bets that Jean will hit it off with Renee, but there’s no wager attached. Andrew thinks his seriousness might appeal to Kevin.
“Or maybe,” Aaron says, “He could date someone outside of this incestuous ass group.”
January is just around the corner. They’ll find out soon enough.