Archive of Our Own

Neil doesn’t even find out from Andrew.

It makes sense, when he thinks about it, considering the level of fame they’ve both reached since their shared Olympic gold medal last year. It’s hard for either of them to do anything without making headlines on some sports mag or celebrity-updates paper. Neil had tried to visit him last spring, a surprise, one he was sure even Andrew wouldn’t protest; only for Andrew to send him a screenshot of a brightly-colored paparazzi article minutes after he touched down. Star Striker Neil Josten spotted in a Virginia Airport.

Neil had been pissed then, but the whole thing is a little amusing in hindsight. He’s been suspicious ever since that his name is set up on Andrew’s google alerts. He doesn’t know how else he would have seen the article so quickly, on some pop-up website with a million ads that Neil hadn’t recognized the name of. He’s yet to prove his hunch. 

Anyway — Neil finds out, this time, in the locker room after a home game against the New York Hyenas. 

It had been a win, but a close one. Too close for comfort, a buzzer-beater, which always leaves something antsy thrumming beneath Neil’s skin. His team, the Nashville Nighthawks, is good — and they’ve gotten even better since he transferred to their starting lineup — but their teamwork is half-baked and the backline practically falls apart under fire. It’s a work in progress.

Post-game, the locker room always smells like sweat and something hazier. Something rampant, a frenetic adrenaline-high which settles into the cubbies and stalls and the sweaty slap-stick of skin, shoulders and jostling elbows. It’s humid from the shower steam, crowded, Neil’s skin sticky and muscles aching from the game. 

It’s always loud, too. Especially after a win. It echoes: noisy conversation, game analysis, jeering celebration and whatever else. It grates on Neil’s ears, but he’s gotten better at tuning it out. The Nighthawks are similar to all the other pro teams Neil’s played for. Different atmospheres, but the baseline is the same. None of them are the Foxes, not even close, and he’s always felt the differences keenly.

Neil’s sitting on the bench, facing his locker. He’s stretching KT tape beside his knee, supporting a small tweak from a few games ago that’s still been bothering him. Andrew had told him to take it easy over the phone this morning, but he doesn’t think he’d listened well enough. He’s sure Andrew will have something to say about it. He’s thinking about the backline and how some of the dealers can’t seem to coordinate during forward offense plays. About one of the left-wing strikers' good footwork and if Neil could overtake her and aim for a pass in their game next week. He lines up another piece of tape beside his kneecap. 

And then he hears the name “Minyard” from behind him, in the tide of noise, and something surfaces. 

It’s immediate. It’s Andrew’s name in someone else’s mouth, and suddenly Neil is listening. It’s like a shot of espresso, adrenaline, carving through his murky exy-brained focus. He’s like a bloodhound with its ears pricked.

“—120 in a sixty, I mean…”

“Yeah.” A low, long whistle. “Shit.”

“You know how the articles are though, who knows. Always some shit.”

“Yeah, yeah. He’s a big guy, too. Don’t know how’d they get the handcuffs on him.”

Laughter. “Remember his swing against Ralphie in that Vipers game? Sent him straight to the floor.”

Another whistle, trilling in the middle, the sweaty slap of a palm against shoulders. Cleats squeaking, steam still wafting from the showers. Neil’s body feels like a live wire.

“Asshole.”

“Not even the first goalie to hit bars this year. Valdez got locked up in August.”

“Shit, I forgot about him. What’d he go in for?”

“I think, like, coke possession. Pounds.”

A whistle. The conversation devolves from there. 

Neil’s fingers press motionlessly into his kneecap, tape sticky against his fingernails. He isn’t thinking about the lineup anymore. He isn’t thinking about the backline or overtaking their left-wing striker or the way his muscles are aching. He’s not thinking about the final buzzer sounding over a stadium with a score of 1-2.

He’s thinking about Andrew. Wholly. 

It’s funny how totally it changes him. Melts over him. The brainless, exy-focused intensity rushes out of his body like the drain to a tub has been pulled, and suddenly Neil is just sitting there, sweaty, straddling the bench in the locker room. Suddenly Neil is just Andrew’s, all the way down to his fingernails, all the way down to the muscle filaments under his skin, and nothing else in the world matters more.

A prickling urgency numbs his hands. When he can finally get himself to move, he turns around to scan the room — finds two backliners lounging on the opposite bench, legs spread. Jockstraps and squeezy-gatorade bottles with the orange lids. It registers distantly.

“What did you just say?” Neil asks. 

His voice sounds strange even to his own ears; harsh, sharp and detached. It cuts through the noise of the locker room. A few conversations falter to his left, a few people on the goalie line raising their heads to stare. The two backliners — Jackson and Lopez, Neil remembers — look up at him strangely. 

“Avery Valdez?” Lopez says, cocking an eyebrow. “He got arrested back in April.”

“No,” Neil says numbly. “Before.”

“Uh, Andrew Minyard,” Lopez says. He’s holding his phone. He turns it around to reveal an article that Neil is too far away to read. “Apparently he got arrested tonight for reckless driving. Could be bullshit.”

Neil is already turning back around to his locker as he hears Jackson say, “What, dude, why?”

He ignores it. He leaves a strange, confused silence behind him, which he ignores, too. He fumbles for his phone in his locker and clicks it on — no new notifications since the last time he opened it. He finds Andrew’s text messages, easy muscle memory, and there’s nothing there either. The last message sent in their thread had been Andrew, a simple text after they had called this morning.  

Andrew, Neil types out and sends. 

His thumb hovers uselessly over the miniature, digital keyboard. It’s the same phone Andrew had bought him years ago, had shoved into Neil’s hands when he had graduated, the one with pictures and videos and Andrew’s name saved to the top of his messages app. Neil doesn’t know what else to send, but it doesn’t matter. The text is vague enough that, if Andrew isn’t sitting in a jail cell somewhere, he’ll respond as soon as he sees it. Always there when Neil needs him. 

The thought makes Neil’s jaw clench, teeth grating together helplessly. He sinks back down to the bench, deciding not to waste any more time. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true, if it’s some bullshit gossip-mag article — Neil’s going to get in the car anyway. If Andrew texts him back, he’ll turn around. If not, he’ll already be on his way. 

He moves then, on autopilot, quickly, blindly. He pulls off his court shoes and stuffs his feet into sneakers, tosses his towel carelessly into his locker, yanks his hoodie over his head. He shoves the rest of his things in his bag and feels his phone buzz in his pocket. 

His pulse jumps. He checks it just to find an email notification in his inbox. It’s from his PR agent. She’s worked with him for years, required by all his contracts — her name is Elise, a pushy, tenacious lady, which is probably the only reason she’s lasted this long. She knows about Andrew in the way most people do. Those who have a brain with eyes connected to it, at least. 

It has a subject line simply reading, Have you seen this?

There’s a link inside. It leads to an article, maybe the same one Lopez had shown him on his phone. 

Gold-medal exy goalie Andrew Minyard has been arrested for reckless driving, according to firsthand reports from a Virginia county police station …

Neil stands up. He doesn’t finish reading. He grabs his bag off the bench, shoulders it, and heads for the door.

This time, he doesn’t even see the strange looks thrown his way. He doesn’t care to; he wouldn’t have noticed them even if his vision wasn’t tunneled, half-blinded by sheer urgency. 

He doesn’t see their captain stand in the way of the door, either — until his bicep is stretched out in front of it, blocking the path to the hallway.

He’s one of the other starting strikers, a good man, a good captain, and Neil likes him well enough. They share a lot of time on the court together, which is maybe where he gets the confidence to pull a stunt like this. Right now, Neil barely remembers the man’s name.

Right now, he’s an obstacle in Neil’s way, stupidly, wearing an expression colored by some sense of responsibility and misplaced concern. A dangerous irritation sparks to life behind Neil’s ribs, painfully, hot and obtrusive. He doesn’t have time for this.

Their captain drops his head, gaze boring into Neil’s.

“Are you good, man?” he asks, quiet but intense, and Neil grits his teeth. “We still have some post-game interviews to—”

Neil lifts his hands, without a word, and slams both palms into the other man’s shoulders. The heels of his hands drive into him, muscle and bone and impact, the release of energy feels good against Neil’s frayed nerves.

It’s cheap, but the other man stumbles anyway. He stares at Neil for another second, mouth twisted righteously, the strong muscles in his shoulders bunching. And then he shakes his head, drops his arm, and moves out of the way.

It’s a good thing, because otherwise Neil would have had to make him.

He doesn’t look back as he makes his way into the hallway. The court rises on his left, towering over him. It’s a huge building, a complex which still leaves him with a helpless sense of awe even after all these years, even after all the pro teams he’s played for, even after seeing the olympic court in Portugal spread out before him. 

He passes under it. Passes one of his coach’s offices, glass windows, and sees him narrow his eyes in his periphery. He ignores it. Heads down toward the parking garage and hears the office door slam open behind him, hears his coach shout a bewildered Where you going Josten?

He ignores that, too. The stadium spits him out into the parking lot.

— 

It’s an eight-hour and fifty-two-minute drive from Nashville, Tennessee to Richmond, Virginia. 

Neil knows the time already. He’s made the drive before, once, when he moved into his apartment in Nashville. He drove from Richmond, where he had been staying with Andrew in the off-season, lugging some furniture and other belongings along with him. He’s flown every other time he's made the trip. At this time of night, though, Neil’s sure he can get there sooner on the freeway than buying a last-minute ticket for an early-morning takeoff. 

There's a two-hour time difference between the two cities, too. Two hours later for Andrew in Virginia. Neil had gotten out of his game at 10:45, almost one in the morning in Richmond — it makes sense, given Andrew’s penchant for late-night drives. 

The possibilities of what could have gotten him on that road, going that speed, reel through Neil’s mind in rapid-fire. Nothing good, probably. And Neil doesn’t know where Andrew is, or why, or how any of it happened, or if he’s hurt. It makes Neil’s chest tight. Something icy, coursing, almost like terror, dripping down his throat and into his stomach. 

Neil presses his foot into the gas pedal. Merges onto the highway, lanes of concrete, towering streetlights woosh-woosh-wooshing overhead. It’s hot in the city even this late in fall. 

He stops once. A gas station thirty minutes out of the city — exxon, dirty asphalt and oil spills by the pumps, ice coolers lining the sidewalk with peeling polar bear logos splashed across the metal. Neil buys a full tank of gas and two energy drinks and gets back out onto the road. 

—

Two hours outside the city, Neil’s phone rings where he had jammed it carelessly in the cupholder. Jarring, cutting through the total silence of the car.

The area code is from Richmond, and Neil knows immediately. 

The reality, the certainty, settles over his skin and into his stomach, cementing there. It’s icy, the calm that floods through him. The focus.

He picks up. Some automated robot voice echoes out of his tinny speakerphones. 

You are receiving a collect call from the Chesterfield County Police Department, it says. This call is subject to monitoring and recording. To accept this call, press one. To refuse this call, hang up or press two.

Neil presses one. A high-pitched beep, and the silence on the other side of the line changes tone. Grainy white noise filters through the car.

Nobody greets him. The silence is so familiar, so recognizably Andrew, and that certainty settles over Neil, too.

“I’m on the way to Virginia,” Neil says into the phone. “Seven hours.”

There’s more silence in response. Neil flexes his hand against the steering wheel and grips the phone white-knuckled in his other.

They sit like that, for a few stretching seconds. With Andrew on the other line — presumably, unless Neil’s been speaking to an empty room — and the road rolling out before him. Streetlights, the glare of the phone the only other light in the front seat. It’s one a.m now, three for Andrew. Neil should hopefully get to wherever the hell Chesterfield is at around ten in the morning. 

“News travels fast,” Andrew says, then. 

His voice rolls over Neil. It’s relief, the sound of it. Something flattens out in Neil’s chest which won’t be truly soothed until he has Andrew in his sight again, safe and uninjured. 

Andrew sounds flat, blank, bored, which is how Neil would have expected him to. He’s good at guessing things about Andrew. He searches fruitlessly for any other minutiae in the tone of his voice, but the tinny connection between them wipes it all clean. 

“Yeah,” Neil says. “Andrew.”

Andrew grunts quietly. 

“Are you okay?” he can't help but ask.

He gets silence, and Neil would have guessed that, too. His foot presses into the gas pedal, helplessly, jaw clenched. His mouth tastes like the stale energy drink he had downed an hour ago. Streetlights. 

“Tell me if you’re safe,” Neil amends. Stupidly tenacious in the way Andrew would chide him for, a flick on the forehead or a pinch somewhere sensitive, warm and altogether lacking ire. 

“I’m safe,” Andrew says, crackling slightly with the connection.

His voice is just as blankly impenetrable as it had been before. Nothing to unearth in the timbre of it. Still, that answer is relief, too. Some of the terrible possibilities in Neil’s head boil down to nothing, because Andrew said he’s safe, and he wouldn’t lie. It could mean different things — with Andrew, something simple always can — but he wouldn’t lie. 

Streetlights. 

And — Neil and Andrew have been playing on separate teams since Neil graduated four years ago. Always separated by some sort of distance. He thinks he’s at his limit with it. He can feel it now, keenly, the miles stretching between them, the hours he still has to drive, the rows and rows of streetlights towering over the highway. It’s moments like these where the distance between them, the reminder of it, jerks to life and tightens noose-like around Neil’s throat. The need to be there, wherever Andrew is. He doesn’t know how much more of it he can take. 

He half-expects Andrew to hang up, but he stays on the line. The grainy white noise keeps filtering through the phone, the sound of the road thundering beneath Neil’s car certainly making it all the way back to Andrew. Neil wonders if Andrew can hear him breathing over the sound of it. 

They sit there together in silence for what must be only a few scant minutes. Neil’s happy to do it, to hold his phone quietly, for however long he’s allowed, if it means that Andrew knows he’s not alone. But then another beep interrupts the quiet. Another robot-automated recording echoes through the car. 

There are thirty seconds remaining, it tells him. 

Neil grimaces. He squeezes his phone so hard in his palm that he feels the plastic case bend.

“I’m coming to get you,” Neil says, solemnly, fatally serious. The vow of it rings all the way to Chesterfield, Virginia, into whichever lonely holding room Andrew is sitting. 

The line goes dead. 

—

It’s five-thirty Virginia time when Neil crosses the border. There’s a beaten-down sign off the side of the highway which proudly proclaims Virginia is For Lovers. He has to stop for gas again at seven.

At eight on the dot, he calls his bank lady back in Nashville. He has one of those now, because even despite his blood-contract, the sum of money somehow in his possession can only be described as ridiculous. He asks the bank lady to please find him a branch of his bank near Chesterfield, and to let them know he needs to make a cash withdrawal.

At nine-fifteen, he stops at the location she had rattled off to him and withdraws rolls of cash in the amount of ten thousand dollars. He stuffs the money unceremoniously in the glove box.

Chesterfield, Virginia, it turns out, is a small suburb outside of Richmond. It makes sense. Not far at all, with miles of empty backroads to escape to between here and the city. Perfectly-picturesque trees line the road, all the neighborhoods old-looking and colonial as he passes by.

The police department isn’t an impressive building. It matches the aesthetic of the town — tiny and brick-laid, tucked into a concrete-gray parking lot. There’s only a few cars parked there, someone listlessly smoking on the sidewalk under another one of those perfect-looking trees. Andrew would probably know the scientific name. There’s a McDonald’s box sitting empty by the roots.

It’s chillier than it had been in Nashville, too — the breeze settling over the bare skin of Neil’s legs as he pops the door open, shoving the rolls of cash into the backpack he had hefted out of the stadium. 

The building doesn’t get any more impressive on the inside. When he walks through the doors of the station, finally, a tiny bell chimes above him. It opens into a small room with waiting chairs pushed to the side and mysterious doors leading who-knows-where set into the walls. A lady sits at a desk behind a pane of reinforced glass with white-blond hair swooped against her shoulders and pumpkin-shaped earrings. He doesn’t know what qualifications you need to be chief secretary of the pig station, but he guesses she has something vaguely ex-cop about her.

Neil blinks gritty exhaustion out of his eyes, his strained knee stiff beneath him from the drive. The lady looks up at him through angled tortoiseshell glasses as he approaches the desk. 

It feels ridiculous. All the urgency and exhaustion in Neil’s body feels out of place immediately, like he’s just stepped into a time-warp or a cheerful DMV office. He wants to run right back out of the building. He wants to see Andrew.

“Can I help you?” Pumpkin-lady asks. The Virginia accent is noticeable in her voice, subtly southern and somehow already vaguely judgmental. It’s premature, considering she hasn’t even gotten to know Neil yet. 

He leans down on the counter, stretching out his aching knee below him.

“I’m here for Andrew Minyard. I got a call last night.”

“Oh, sure,” she says. It drags. “Big fish we caught.”

Neil hates her, immediately, just for that. It itches down his sternum and into his palms. 

He clenches them, knuckles creaking. Decides to give her the grace of ignoring that statement entirely. “What’s the fastest way I can get us out of here?”

Pumpkin-lady stares at him even as she clacks something onto her seemingly-outdated computer. There’s something there, in the way her brow arches a bit — Andrew being back there behind metaphorical bars is probably the most notable thing to happen in this small building in years. Even if this lady isn’t into exy, Virginia’s team is too prolific for her not to be interested. She doesn’t seem to recognize Neil, yet. 

“Well,” she says curtly, glancing at her computer and typing more. “It’s a reckless driving charge. Cases over one hundred miles are class one misdemeanors in this state. Bail money’s required. He’s facing anything from fines up to twenty-five hundred, license suspension up to six months, or jail time up to twelve.”

She glances at Neil like he’s supposed to say something to that. 

“Make sense?” she asks him.

“Sure.”

She looks down again.

“It’s recommended that a lawyer or bondsman be present at this stage. We have resources through the state available—“ she reaches over to tap one nail against a boring paper laminated to the counter “—or you can call one yourself. Bail needs to be paid in full before Mr. Minyard can walk.”

“We don’t need any of that,” Neil tells her. 

Not yet, anyway. He shifts on the balls of his feet, folding his exhaustion-heavy arms on the counter. 

Her gaze slides over to him, and then away. She clacks for a minute. 

“Bail has been posted at three thousand dollars,” she tells him, finally leaning back in her chair. “The money will be returned in full if Mr. Minyard makes it to each of his posted court dates.”

“Great,” Neil says blandly. 

They stare at each other for a minute. Pumpkin-lady’s gaze is piercing and unpleasant. 

“Can I pay now?” Neil asks. 

She raises an unimpressed eyebrow. Neil realizes belatedly that there’s an official-looking name stand on the front of her desk reading Barbara. 

“You have cash on you?” Pumpkin-lady asks dubiously.

Neil nods. There’s a small tin of lollipops in front of the plastic barrier which he rifles through, searching for Andrew’s favorite flavor. He only finds his second-favorite, bubblegum. He steals two and stuffs them in the pocket of his hoodie. 

The lady watches him, mouth twisting, and turns back to the computer. 

“Well. I’ll need your name and an official form of identification.”

“Neil Josten,” he answers, swinging his backpack around to grab his wallet. He pulls out his ID and slides it through the plastic barrier. There’s a beat of hesitation there, a pause in her typing. It’s recognition. Exy players are easier to recognize by name than face, what with their heavy gear on the court. Anyone who knows of Andrew probably knows of Neil, too. 

It’s only after he lays his highway-fried attention on his driver’s license that he realizes his mistake. “Or, Neil Minyard-Josten, I guess.”

They’d agreed to the hyphenation somewhat spontaneously in the courtroom last year. It’s not on Neil’s jerseys or his exy-related records, so he usually forgets to mention it. It sends a pulse of something through him, though, every time. Their names laid side-by-side like that. Andrew tells him he has a fetish for it, for names, for permanency, which he stopped protesting a long time ago. 

Pumpkin-lady’s typing stops entirely. She pushes her glasses up and takes his ID off the counter, staring at it for a long, stretching moment. Neil’s annoyance flares again. He knows what her gaze is stuck on. 

“It’s only thirteen letters,” he says, sharply. “It takes you that long?”

She looks up at him, clearly thrown for a loop, lips parting and then pursing again. She sets the ID down. 

“What is your— relationship to Mr. Minyard?” 

“Is that relevant?”

“For the form,” she says stiffly. “I need to list your relationship.”

“Why don’t you take an educated fucking guess,” Neil snaps. “Anyone can post bail. File the damn paperwork.”

Her mouth twists into a tight, sharp line this time. Her earrings bob as she types something rigidly onto her keyboard. And then she looks back at him and slides her glasses downward again, like some picture-perfect image of an angry librarian trope. Andrew had made Neil watch Monsters Inc. last month.

“I’d like you to please watch your tone, Mr. Josten,” she tells him.

Neil’s jaw clenches. He shrugs but manages to keep his mouth shut.

It’s a good choice, because then she turns back to the computer for maybe the fiftieth time since they started this conversation. Taps her nail against the desk.

“I can take the cash when you’re ready.”

Neil reaches into the backpack, snaps the rubber bands off the rolls, and counts out three thousand dollars. He slides the money under the barrier, and she gives him his ID in return. It’s silent as she takes the cash, straightens it with a tap-tap-tap against the counter, and loads it into a money-counting machine. Neil bounces his leg anxiously as an automated whirring fills the space.

It takes a long time. Neil doesn’t know what she’s doing behind the desk, but she doesn’t ask him any more questions as she clacks away. The money-counting machine eventually stops whirring and still the clacking doesn’t stop. Neil blinks wearily. He rubs his face with rough palms. 

After an eternity, the lady leans down and snaps a handheld radio out from under the desk. Bail has been posted for Mr. Minyard, she says into the black box.

She turns back to Neil. “Our officers can bring him out here shortly,” she tells him. “There are still a few documents that need to be signed by Mr. Minyard or the surety before he can leave.” 

She leans down and opens one of the drawers beneath her desk.

Neil blinks again, wearily. “The what?” 

She leans back up, bringing with her a zippered, official-looking sleeve. She sets it on the desk and looks at him over her glasses. 

“The surety,” she repeats curtly. “The person paying the bond. In this case, you, Mr. Josten.”

It doesn’t take a lot of thought. Neil imagines Andrew won’t want to spend one more second in this building. “I’ll sign everything.”

“Alright.” She unzips the bag and takes the contents out, pushing them under the barricade. “Here are Mr. Minyard’s belongings. His vehicle was taken to an impound lot, the details of which will be on your release paperwork.”

Andrew’s belongings make a neat stack on the counter. His cell phone, looking very dead at this point, and the small black leather rectangle of his wallet; his keys with one charm attached to them, a little wooden otter Andrew had gotten while visiting Neil when he lived in Seattle two years ago; a green lighter, a D.A.R.E. baseball cap, and a pack of Marlboro Reds.

The last item really catches Neil’s attention. Andrew carries around lighters often, just to play with, but he hasn’t smoked since undergrad. He pops the carton open to find all the sticks still there, lined up neatly in the cardboard.

“Any questions?” Pumpkin-lady asks.

Neil looks back up to find her staring at him expectantly. He shakes his head no.

“Well, we can get started on your tax information, then. Mr. Minyard will be out in a few minutes.”

They do just that, and it’s almost as thrilling as it sounds. Because he posted bail privately she makes him fill out an entire W-9, which feels a little excessive, but he jots everything down without complaint. Whatever processing they’re doing back there with Andrew takes a long time, too — Neil gets almost all the way done with the form by the time he hears one of the doors across the room open.

His gaze flies upward immediately, and there’s Andrew.

He walks into the room still handcuffed, two officers following behind him, and even the sight of his hands held behind his back kindles something new and sharp inside Neil’s sternum. He pushes past it and scans Andrew, head-to-toe — he’s wearing one of his team hoodies, the Virginia Badgers, a fading mascot plastered on the front of it. Basketball shorts and slides, his pair of rectangle-wire-frame glasses. His hair is short, how he’s been keeping it lately, cropped close to his head. 

He looks tired. Neil sees that immediately, easily, obviously. He knows that Andrew wouldn’t have slept for even a moment in this building — that he probably hadn’t been sleeping that well beforehand. 

There’s nothing else, though. Neil knows Andrew’s body better than he knows anything. All of it shows up there, all the things that sometimes Andrew doesn’t even have to put to words for Neil to know, inherently. Andrew looks tired, and worn out, and pissed off. But Neil doesn’t see anything worse in the cuts of his posture — pain or fear or dissociation — which would raise any alarms. 

The relief is even more immediate than the sound of Andrew’s voice had been. Having Andrew in his line of vision settles Neil’s entire body. It’s maybe stupid, but it doesn’t matter. The whole trivial, aggravating jailhouse around him, the lady in front of him with her dumb earrings, the exhausting, tedious drive Neil just made, his gritty eyes and aching legs, it all fades into nothing. Just noise.

“His surety is signing the release paperwork,” Pumpkin-lady speaks up to the officers. “Mr. Minyard is free to go.”

Andrew doesn’t look at Neil once. The officer behind him leans down to unlatch the handcuffs. Andrew shakes out his wrists, expression set blankly — he walks over, grabs the pack of Marlboros, takes Neil’s car keys that he hands over, and walks right out the door into the parking lot, all without looking at Neil one time.

Neil’s lips twitch. He turns back to pumpkin-lady and slides her his W-9.

The tax form isn’t the end of it, unfortunately. Pumpkin-lady makes Neil fill out two other forms, something-something-appearance-bond-form and something-something-bail-acknowledgement. It’s gibberish to Neil, but he jots his name on every dotted line, folds over each page of each pamphlet. When he’s finally finished with all of it, he stacks the paperwork and raises an eyebrow. 

“Are we done?”

“If everything has been filled out,” she says curtly. “You’re both free to leave. Court dates will be posted.”

“Great.” Neil flips to one of the pages of the document. Beside Relationship to the inmate, Neil had circled spouse. He flicks the ink with his index and slides both documents over. “You can put that down on your form.”

Pumpkin-lady glances at the paper and up at Neil with some unreadable, twisted expression. She clears her throat, leaning forward toward the glass.

“I hope you know that speeding is a selfish crime,” she says, tight and condescending. “More than ten thousand people die each year from related accidents. People could have been hurt by this little stunt.”

Neil scoffs. On an empty backroad? He puts Andrew’s belongings into his backpack and shoulders it again — takes the release paperwork she had given him and heads for the door. 

“I hope you know what a massive waste of my time this has been,” he returns blandly as he pushes it open.

Luckily, Neil doesn’t have to hear her response. The perfect-looking tree and the McDonald’s trash greet him outside, the loitering smoker gone entirely. It’s warmer than it had been when he had gone in, the sun shining relentlessly on the pavement. It’s strange. Settles over Neil’s skin all wrong. His body feels wired, off-center, like his brain is expecting it to be well into the night instead of midday.

The parking lot smells like cigarettes, too. Even more strongly than before. 

The passenger door of Neil’s car is propped open. Andrew’s silhouette sits inside, with a cemetery of littered, dead cigarette butts on the pavement below him. It reminds Neil of the way bugs die in the South Carolina heat, midges clumped there ugly and forgotten on the ground. A stream of smoke is still rising continuously from the open passenger seat. 

Neil raises his eyebrows and steps forward, sliding quietly into the driver’s side. Andrew still doesn’t look at him as he slings his backpack into the back seat and starts the engine. He has no intention of going anywhere just yet, but he puts the vents on cool and angles them toward Andrew, watching the air move the tiny strands of hair above his ear. 

And then Neil slumps backward, thumping his head sideways against the headrest. Facing Andrew. Tracing him again with his eyes, a quiet fixation. Over the strong, broad slope of his shoulder and the fragile freckles on the back of his neck — his hair is flattened and matted at the back, his ears hot red probably from the sudden rush of nicotine. His fingers tap out a soundless rhythm on the center console, fidgety, tap-tap-tap-tap, as he finishes his cigarette and puts that one out on the ground, too.

Neil can’t help but feel, nonsensically, a little pleased. The anxious uncertainty — the dozens of possibilities and fears that had clogged his chest with something sticky for the whole drive — is all gone. With everything wiped clean now, something new rises in Neil’s body. Something lighter. 

And, Andrew is tired — his body lined with a little bit of angst and sleeplessness, something invisible he’s obviously chewing on — but it’s nothing they haven’t dealt with before. Andrew is going to be okay. Andrew is okay, right here in front of Neil, close enough to touch. 

Neil wasn’t supposed to see him for another two weeks. Neil’s eyes pave the way from Andrew’s temple to his throat, his biceps, his thighs, his knees which stick out of his basketball shorts — and thinks: silver linings. 

Andrew’s eyelashes look very pale and blond in the morning sunlight. The edges of his side profile are back-lit and on-fire. Silver linings. 

Across from him, Andrew’s apparently decided that he’s done with his cigarette murder-spree. The last butt he had put out sputters and dies on the pavement, and he slams the passenger door closed, leaving them alone together in the quiet, peaceful bubble of the front seat. 

Andrew leans back on the headrest too. He looks out the window, head craned all the way away from Neil.

“Hey,” Neil says into the new silence. It’s not a plea to get Andrew to look at him, just a greeting. He can’t keep the stupid warmth out of his voice, the half-smile which is somehow twisting his lips up.

Andrew catches it, obviously. He snorts, his throat sounding hoarse and thick from all the cigarettes. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

“You are insane,” Andrew denotes mildly, his voice shredded.

“Mm,” Neil agrees. “You didn’t want to drive home?”

He’s sure the police station wouldn’t like it, but neither of them have ever given a fuck about that. He’d have thought that Andrew would want to make the drive back to Richmond, to gain some control back after it was ripped from him all night. 

Andrew doesn’t answer, but his place beside Neil is clear enough. He would have gotten in the driver’s if that’s what he wanted. 

Neil shrugs, even if Andrew can’t see it. They sit there for a few more minutes with nothing but the quiet whir of the air conditioning filling the silence. It’s nice. Neil blinks some more and yawns, cracking his sore neck.

He reaches out, eventually, to place his hand palm-up on the console. The movement must register in Andrew’s peripheral vision — despite the grouchy violence in his posture, it’s only a few seconds before he settles his own palm over Neil’s.

Neil takes his hand. Wraps their fingers together carefully. He rubs his thumb over the meat of Andrew’s pinky, sliding over the freckled, velvety back of his hand. Squeezes his knuckles. 

Andrew still doesn’t look at him, but his whole body reacts to the touch. His shoulders shake a bit, shuddering minutely. His strong thighs flex as he pushes his feet into the floor, his throat working around nothing. Neil would guess that Andrew hasn’t touched anyone else since his on-court collision against Weston last week. 

Andrew breathes, and Neil revels in it, the heavy, thick weight of Andrew’s hand, those tendons and muscles so alive against his own. He squeezes.

“Enough,” Andrew says eventually, and Neil takes his hand back.

Andrew drops his own into his lap, resting his head again on the headrest, staring sideways into the parking lot. Neil takes a few more minutes just to look at him, that side profile, before he puts the car in gear and makes his way out onto the road. 

It’s only thirty minutes to Andrew’s apartment downtown. They make it fifteen before Andrew shifts in his seat, thighs flexing again, knees pushing further apart. Twenty before he clears his throat awkwardly. Thick like there’s something stuck in it. Still staring out the window. 

Neil looks over, and it’s not just Andrew’s ears flushed red, this time. The crimson is staining its way down his neck, disappearing into his hoodie. Andrew’s skin is so reactive, so good at revealing things to Neil, too. Neil can see sweat beading on his forehead and the baby hairs at the slope of his spine. 

It makes sense. Andrew hasn’t smoked in years. No matter how tough and untouchable he makes himself out to be, he’s lost his tolerance, and chainsmoking a pack of cigarettes in twenty minutes is probably catching up to him. Neil knows how it feels — how quickly the buzz of nicotine turns wrong, sick, hot, the flush of nausea starting behind your teeth and sliding its way down your throat. 

“Need me to pull over?” Neil asks over the quiet humming of the engine.

Andrew doesn’t answer. Neil reaches over, slowly, to press the back of his knuckles into Andrew’s sweaty neck. He knows the cool weight of his hand feels good against the flushed skin there. He can feel Andrew’s heartbeat racing and skipping away beneath him.

Andrew turns his head in response, pushing his weight into Neil’s touch, pressing his cheek into Neil’s wrist. He shoves the hard line of his nose against Neil’s hoodie sleeve. Neil slides his thumb mindlessly over Andrew’s skin. Back and forth. 

Tap-tap-tap-tap, Andrew’s fingers pick up speed on the console.

Andrew reaches over suddenly, almost fumbling, to put his hand on Neil’s own neck. His calloused fingers dig into Neil’s carotid artery, not gently, pushing into Neil’s heartbeat with his fingertips. He’s always said that Neil’s heartbeat is slow. Hard to find. He runs too much for it not to be. Neil thinks following the rhythm is some kind of game for Andrew, something for him to keep track of, something slow and unfaltering when everything else moves so fast.

He thinks that’s what Andrew’s using it for right now, anyway. He bares his neck so more of his skin is on display for Andrew’s grappling fingers, keeping his gaze focused on the road. That hand, which Neil knows every crevice of, digs into his skin, tight and powerful enough that it might leave a shadow there tomorrow. Neil doesn’t mind. He feels his own heartbeat through Andrew’s grip, and it is slow, pulsing gently. He hears Andrew breathe around it. 

He cracks the window down and turns the AC up. The breeze flows through the car. He keeps driving. 

By the time they pull into the parking garage of Andrew’s fancy apartment building, he’s breathing slower, still taking each inhale against the cuff of Neil’s hoodie. His heartbeat has calmed down a bit too, less jackrabbit-y where Neil cups the spiky hair at the slope of his skull. 

He thumbs through it as he puts the car in park, and Andrew moves immediately — shoves the door open and spits onto the concrete, all nicotine-saliva.

“Gross,” Neil says, killing the engine. Andrew flips him off over his shoulder.

Neil gets out of the car and walks around the hood, leaning against the open door beside Andrew. He watches Andrew spit again, wiping his mouth with a violent, trembling hand. And then he hefts himself out of the passenger seat and slams the door closed, without fanfare, without a word. Without looking at Neil.

It’s been a theme of the morning, and it registers now that it probably has something to do with whatever mood Andrew is stewing in. Andrew’s train of thought is usually so complicated, though, that guessing at the cause will do Neil no good. He follows Andrew dutifully into the apartment building.

When they get inside, Andrew makes a beeline straight for the bedroom, and Neil follows him there, too. He rests his backpack against the foot of the bed — stands there quietly as Andrew sits down on his side and sprawls backwards, knees bent. He stares straight up at the ceiling. 

Neil shrugs and follows suit. Toes his shoes off and climbs onto the mattress, flopping against the pillow. 

He groans quietly into the memory foam. It’s an expensive one, something Andrew had bought Neil for christmas one year when his neck had been hurting. He’d bought a duplicate, too, when Neil moved into his Nashville apartment, so that he’d have one in both cities. Right now, Neil’s grateful — his body aches from the drive, his spine protesting ridiculously as he closes his burning eyes. The muscles in his knees flutter reflexively against the mattress as he stretches his legs out. 

It feels good. The dip on the other side of the mattress feels even better, Andrew’s familiar weight beside him. Neil never stopped thinking of this bedroom as their bedroom, even though he’s lived in Nashville for months now. Last summer, he’d woken up in this bed every day, rolled over to watch Andrew sleep, the light from those blinds latticed as they slid their way down Andrew’s features. Down the pale, freckled slope of his shoulder. Neil’s clothes spilling out of the dresser. Their shoes lined up beside the front door. Neil’s toothbrush beside Andrew’s.

It’s a wound, fixed somewhere inside Neil that twinges when he moves wrong. He breathes around it now. He’s too grateful for the sudden opportunity to have Andrew in arm's reach to really feel torn up about it. And, anyway, he still has a pillow here. There’s still an extra toothbrush in the bathroom just for him.

The thought reminds him of how disgusting he currently feels. He’d barely showered after his game last night, just a quick rinse in the communal stall. He stinks and he feels sticky and grimy, his mouth disgusting. He runs his tongue over his teeth and hefts himself up on his elbow.

Andrew is very still and very blank beside him. The flush of nicotine has faded from his face, leaving him just kind of gray. 

“I need to shower,” Neil says, watching the subtle rise-and-fall of Andrew’s chest. “Do you want the bathroom first?”

Andrew stays quiet, which means, no.

Neil assumes he probably doesn’t want to share the shower right now, either. He sits up, stretching out over his legs. Giving Andrew a few moments to himself, especially with the way he’s been ignoring Neil so entirely, probably isn’t the worst thing. 

He moves to heft himself out of bed, but Andrew catches his wrist.

Neil stops. He looks down, shifting his weight back onto the mattress. Andrew still doesn’t look at him, but he brings their joined hands up and digs his pointer finger into Neil’s cheek. He leans his head into the weight of Andrew’s fingertip.

“Shave,” Andrew says.

He hates Neil’s stubble. Neil hadn’t even noticed, but now that he’s pointed it out, he feels the wiry hairs grainy against Andrew’s hand. He smiles, stupid.

“Okay,” he agrees. Andrew pulls away, and Neil makes his way into the bathroom.

The shower feels good, too. Neil normally only showers with lukewarm or cool water — something he and Andrew have to compromise on, considering Andrew likes the spray so hot it turns his skin red — but today he twists the knob to something warmer. It loosens up his tight muscles, washes away the sticky sweat which has at this point cemented itself thinly over his skin. 

He takes longer than he usually would, another deviation from his routine, to give Andrew more time to wind down. He uses Andrew’s body wash, shampoo — even conditioner, which he usually goes without. The products all smell sharp and minty, probably some eucalyptus-spearmint blend. Andrew’s used the same scents for years, and it’s something Neil associates so strongly with him that it does almost as much to relax his muscles as the water does.

When he gets out of the shower, his hair is softer than usual from the conditioner. He rubs over it roughly with the towel. Andrew likes his hair soft, and Neil likes to smell like Andrew, so really it’s a win-win. He wraps the towel around his waist and shaves in the steamy mirror with Andrew’s razor. Rinses all the stubble down the drain so that he doesn’t do anything to exacerbate Andrew’s bad mood.

He makes his way out into the bedroom, eventually, with his face freshly smooth and the towel still slung around his hips. He smells so strongly of spearmint that the scent trails after him. He hopes it lingers long enough to follow him home to Nashville, too.

He finds Andrew in the exact same position he left him. 

Flat on his back, knees bent toward the ceiling, staring blankly upward. There’s more movement this time — his knees bouncing, hands fidgeting on the covers, chest trembling subtly. The set of his jaw is drawn, tight, angry.

Neil frowns. He opens Andrew’s dresser and finds something to change into, hanging the towel on the door. He shrugs on one of Andrew’s t-shirts and a pair of Andrew’s black sweatpants and turns back to the bed, sitting on the edge next to Andrew’s hip.

Andrew’s still wearing his slides and his glasses. His head has to hurt at this point from the combination of everything, and the glasses can’t be helping. Neil reaches over to take his shoes off and toss them quietly to the floor. Eases the wire frames off of his face and onto the nightstand. Andrew doesn’t protest any of it.

And then Neil puts his palm against Andrew’s sternum, right in the middle of his chest. 

During Andrew’s fifth year, there were a brief few months where sometimes his lungs stopped remembering how to breathe. When they did, Neil always put his hand right here. Andrew would grip Neil’s wrist and press his palm in deeper, violently, like he could push Neil’s hand right through his chest. Through the layers of bone and skin and cartilage. Like Neil could reach in and fix everything wrong there. 

The dip of his sternum — right between his pecs, right above where his abdomen shifts into something stronger and softer — fits the heel of Neil’s hand perfectly.

“What can I do to make this better?” Neil asks him.

He doesn’t know exactly what he means by this. The entire, angry, vibrating-dark-cloud of a man laid out on the bed beneath him, maybe. 

Andrew doesn’t answer. Neil doesn’t think he’d really expected him to. He spreads his fingers out, the fabric of the hoodie bunching gently as he does so, and Andrew’s eyes slide closed. The pissed-off angle of his jaw doesn’t unhinge.

Neil comes up with his own answer. Sleep is probably the most obvious thing — they’ve both been up for over twenty-four hours at this point, they both need it — but they should probably eat first. Andrew needs to shower, too. There’s no way in hell he’ll fall right to sleep after spending all night in a jail cell, after strangers' hands were all over him for who knows how long. He needs to wash it off. 

“Go shower,” Neil says. “I’ll make us something to eat. Something easy.” He taps his thumb into the strong cut of Andrew’s chest, matching the pace of Andrew’s bouncing knee for a minute. He thinks it over. “Ice cream. Grilled cheese.” Two things Andrew definitely has in his kitchen. 

Andrew snorts, so subtle Neil barely hears it. He doesn’t move, but Neil isn’t one to nag. If Andrew has an entire mindset shift and decides to go to sleep right there in his clothes, then that’s his prerogative. If he doesn’t move, Neil will bring the food to him.

When Neil makes his way into the kitchen, though, he hears the bathroom door slam shut in the hallway behind him. He turns the stove on and hears the shower run. 

Andrew takes a while in the bathroom. By the time he pads out into the kitchen, Neil’s already made his way through one grilled cheese, has made one for Andrew, and is flipping another on the stove. 

Andrew looks better — flushed and warm, wearing a heavy hoodie and thick sweats, bundled head-to-toe. The heat of his shower turned his cheeks pink, but his eye bags are still sunken and hollow. Still vibrating with something angry, expression set stonily. His hair is damp, and beads of water drip down his temples. Eucalyptus. Spearmint. 

The sight of him aches all the way down Neil’s throat, warm and familiar. 

“Hi,” Neil says as Andrew sits quietly at the kitchen counter. “Did you throw up?”

Andrew looks even more annoyed at the question. He shakes his head no, resting his head on his arms and glaring sideways at Neil. 

“I’m impressed.” Neil pokes at the edges of his toast with a spatula. “And I won’t tell Aaron. He’d make you sign up for another lung screening.”

He doesn’t get a reaction other than a quiet exhale. Neil slides over a bowl of ice cream — he had taken it out a few minutes ago to be slightly soft — and the other grilled cheese he had made.

It’s almost comical. A meal for a toddler, essentially, which contrasts wildly against Andrew’s hulking figure there on the barstool. His big shoulders hunched, features severe and hair cropped tight to his skull, radiating so much subtle vitriol that it wafts through the air. He starts wordlessly tearing his grilled cheese into tiny pieces and sticking them between his back teeth.

Neil’s lips twist again. Helplessly. He turns back to the stove.

He doesn’t understand, really, why Andrew is so upset. Neil isn’t upset, now that he has Andrew here safe with him — he doesn’t want Andrew to be speeding alone at night, sure, knowing that something probably chased him from his bed. But it’s not like Neil has some aversion to going fast. He thinks he and Andrew have probably gone faster than Andrew went last night, with Andrew in the driver’s seat, pushing down some highway on one of their late-night escapades. Neil trusts Andrew with every fiber and cell within his body. He trusts Andrew to drive fast on the backroads between here and some random suburb if that’s what he needs.

Andrew clearly has some problem, though. Neil doesn’t think it’s some outside factor causing his angst. It’s inward — in the way he made himself sick with a pack of cigarettes, and the way his knuckles keep cracking, digging into each other, his knees bouncing.

Neil eats his second sandwich and dumps the pan into the sink. And then he rounds the counter, sinking onto the stool beside Andrew. He watches him finish his ice cream, methodical as he does it, caging the spoon in his mouth. Neil thinks he likes the way the metal clacks against his incisors.

He eats slow. He always does. Eventually, he finishes and pushes the bowl away. Stares down at his crossed arms. 

“Okay,” Neil says, then. “You were speeding. So what?”

Andrew’s expression shutters even further, if that’s possible. His lips pull flat, taught, jaw grinding. 

“You’re being reductive,” he says eventually, his voice still rough. 

Neil shrugs. “Then explain it to me.”

It’s immediately clear that Andrew isn’t going to. The silence is written into his expression, his shoulders, his brows pulling into themselves. 

Neil lets it sit for a second just in case, watching Andrew with careful, pensive attention. 

“Did anything happen?” Neil asks, because he has to, to know without a shadow of a doubt. “In that police department—“

“No,” Andrew grits. 

Neil exhales. He leans his elbow against the counter, wishing that Andrew would look at him. 

“Nothing happened,” Andrew says, and Neil believes him. 

“Okay,” he agrees. “Then what?” Andrew’s tapping starts back up again, his thumbnail against his empty ice cream bowl. “Your team probably doesn’t care. You know I don’t give a fuck. I don’t care that I had to drive all night, or take out cash or whatever. I don’t care that I’ll miss practice.”

Andrew cracks his neck. Tap-tap-tap. “‘Flat on the ground, he contemplates two stars…’” 

Neil frowns. “What?” 

“Line from Narcissus. Not everything is about you.”

Neil blinks. He drags a palm over his face.

“Okay— sure,” he agrees. “Is it that you got caught? Cause I’d be pissed, too.”

Andrew glares at him, pure malignance, and it’s the first time they’ve made eye contact all day. Neil’s lips twist up at the corners, minutely — helplessly — and he thinks that pisses Andrew off even more. 

Andrew looks away again. His knees are bouncing, looking uncomfortable and rigid on the stool.

“The court shit will be annoying, but you have to know you’re not getting jail time,” Neil continues, shaking his head. “We can afford any lawyer we want. The city loves you. A slap on the wrist at best, maybe some community service. It might do you some good.”

Andrew’s side profile is unmoved by Neil’s joke. 

He’s half-serious, though. The odds of Andrew getting jail time are slim to none, but Neil wouldn’t let it happen even if they weren’t. He’d call in a favor with his uncle or the FBI — he’d pack up all their shit and run from the mob forever if it meant Andrew wouldn’t go behind bars. He’d probably run the place if he did, but Neil isn’t going to entertain a situation where anything happens to him without his control ever again. 

“You think I’d let you go to jail?” Neil asks, solemnly, leaning down again. “You probably won’t even get your license suspended.”

“You’re pissing me off,” Andrew warns. “Be quiet.”

Neil doesn’t know when to stop pretty much ever — he’s been told it’s one of his primary character traits — but with Andrew, things are different. Neil stops when Andrew tells him to. It’s simple, clear-cut. After years, though, he knows when to toe the line.

He sits for a minute, obediently quiet. Andrew’s thumbnail rings against the porcelain of his bowl, over and over again. Tap-tap-tap-tap. 

“I know that you’re punishing yourself for last night,” Neil says after a while. “I don’t understand why.”

Andrew gets up then and disappears into the living room without a word. He’d warned Neil, at least.

—

Neil gives it more time. He washes the dishes in the sink and cleans the kitchen. Walks back into the bedroom and plugs in Andrew’s cell phone, waiting for it to finally light up. It starts vibrating with notifications almost immediately — ex-foxes and current teammates, a few official-looking emails from his team and coaches. Neil didn’t know why he’d bothered, ‘cause he has no intention of responding to any of them.

He goes back out into the kitchen, eventually. He’s not going to push it any further, but Neil is more than happy to sit with Andrew quietly in the living room and let the issue die for now. He didn’t drive all this way to give up and let Andrew spiral by himself. 

He finds Andrew lying across the couch, pretty much the same position he had been in in the bedroom. Flat on his back, knees bent. 

Andrew doesn’t tell Neil to leave when he enters the room. So he sits beside Andrew’s feet, the sliver of couch not taken up, and leans back into the cushions. He signals his surrender by remaining absolutely silent. Just sitting there with him, tilting his head back and closing his eyes.

Eventually, after a few endless, quiet minutes have stretched between them, Andrew moves and puts his socked feet in Neil’s lap.

Neil hums. He takes the movement as the permission it is, slipping his hands under Andrew’s sweatpants and placing firm palms on his ankles. He rubs over the cut of muscle and the jut of bone, the soft, untouched skin there. He dips his fingers beneath the line of Andrew’s sock and massages his achilles, digs his thumb gently into the top of his foot. 

He works his way down, careful and methodical. He circles his knuckles into Andrew’s heels and kneads the arches of his feet, cracks each of his toes. Drags his fingers across his sural nerve. Time passes slow and warm. The sun drips in through the windows, still feeling so strange against Neil’s tired eyes. 

Andrew moves again, eventually, to dig his toes into Neil’s strained knee. Still a bit sore from the drive. The weight of Andrew’s foot digging into his kneecap feels good. 

“Hurting?” Andrew asks, voice gravelly.

Neil shakes his head against the couch and yawns. “Just stiff. Don’t worry about it.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything. Neil’s eyes slide closed. He lets go of Andrew’s feet and moves to his legs, his ankles, rubbing up and down his calves. The muscles are tight there, and he works them out with his fingers and knuckles, dragging his palms soothingly down Andrew’s shins on each pass.

The exhaustion pulls at him, after a while. The comfort of having Andrew beneath his hands. He turns his head sideways, temple sliding into the cushion, still working at Andrew’s legs with mindless motions. He’s halfway to dozing when Andrew speaks again.

“I hit a bird.”

Neil’s thumb stills against the fragile undersides of Andrew’s knees. He keeps his eyes closed and lets his fingers resume their purposeful movements.

Andrew likes to start like this — somewhere far away from the true root of the issue, letting Neil follow him and connect the dots. 

“A carolina wren,” he says. “They’re the official state bird of South Carolina. The second-most abundant in Virginia.” Neil’s hands smooth down the backs of Andrew’s legs. “Tiny, little things, brown wings, a white line above their eyes. It makes them easy to identify.”

Andrew pauses, and Neil hears him fill up his lungs. He’s doing a lot of talking considering his voice still sounds so shredded — from his silence all night and from the cigarettes. It settles low and gritty in his throat.

“Their song is called a teakettle,” he continues. “They mate for life. They don’t usually survive the winters. Not when it goes below freezing.”

Neil hms again. The pads of his fingertips trace whorls into Andrew’s skin, Andrew’s voice fading away again, the silence settling over them. 

It’s not about the bird.

With his eyes closed, Neil can picture it — the Virginia backroads at nighttime, with streetlights spaced just enough to throw light on the speed-limit signs. Neil’s been in the passenger seat while the engine of Andrew’s sports car has thrummed dangerously below them, so much kinetic energy, the wind whistling by so fast that it tears knifelike through the passenger with the window down. At that speed, the streetlights fly by blurry.

At that speed, everything is hyper-sensitive. If Andrew saw something small and dark streak toward his windshield — if he twisted the steering wheel even an inch — the car would have flinched wildly in response. Wheels wobbling, spinning below him, the wind and the metal frame rumbling on all sides. At that speed, he would have been weightless for a second, the thrill frying electricity up his nerve endings. Maybe he would have tilted sideways, still streaking forward. Only half-a-hairsbreath away from the roadkill on the rumble strips.

At that speed, the bird’s tiny skull would have smashed apart on impact.

Neil circles Andrew’s ankle in his grip and squeezes. 

“And then what?” Neil asks.

He opens his eyes again. He’s already facing Andrew, still kneading the muscles in his calf with slow fingers. He watches Andrew shake his head blandly. 

“I started driving faster.”

Neil hums again. He can hear all of it, all of Andrew’s contempt and vitriol condensed into those four words. The root of whatever this is. 

It still doesn’t quite make sense to Neil — he could guess, but he won’t — so he figures Andrew will start talking again. If he wants to, if he wants Neil to understand, which it seems like he does. For now they lapse into silence again, Neil’s eyes heavy, his hands warm against Andrew’s skin. 

Andrew’s breathing changes shape, pulling long inhales into his lungs. He exhales, rasping a little around the edges, and pushes his heels harder into Neil’s lap. Neil holds onto him. He grips Andrew’s ankles firmly, tightly, holding him in place.

“I made a promise, a while ago,” Andrew says suddenly, between breaths.

Neil frowns. Andrew had left promises and all the transactions behind years ago, with the cigarettes, with the key he pressed into Neil’s hand. No more give-and-take.

“To who?”

“To you,” he says, and then shakes his head. “To myself, about you. Mostly. To your raven, maybe.”

Andrew hasn’t spoken to Jean since undergrad. Neil’s frown stays in place, his grip stays heavy and grounding around Andrew’s ankles. When Andrew doesn’t seem forthcoming with an elaboration, Neil squeezes.

“That?”

“That I wouldn’t leave you,” Andrew answers, his next exhale squeezing tight out of his lungs, and everything kind of falls into place. Dominoes. The way an exy game collapses toward a win when you’re already in the lead.

Neil doesn’t hesitate, after that. With his grip heavy and tight on Andrew’s ankles, he pulls, tugging at the strong line of Andrew’s achilles tendon.

“Come here.”

It’s permission for Andrew more than anything, and he takes it. He hefts himself up, all of his stony hesitation shredding away. He moves hard and purposeful, his hands finding Neil’s wrists, his weight pressing into Neil’s. Andrew pushes him backward and Neil moves, pliable, heated adrenaline budding in his stomach, until Neil is laid back against the arm of the couch, Andrew’s fingers digging into each of his wrists, Andrew’s knees pinning his thighs downward.

And Andrew’s looking at him, now, finally. His eyes are very dark in the way they get sometimes, so hard and brown it’s hard to see any flecks of hazel in them. So intense, burning holes into Neil, all the emotions visible that he’s been sitting on for hours. All that anger, so condensed, the regret he swears up and down he doesn’t feel. Neil breathes.

“You didn’t leave me,” Neil says, feeling the weight of Andrew against every piece of his body and reveling in it. He shakes his head with how ridiculous the sentiment is. “You aren’t going to leave me. You went for a drive. This is your living room, not the afterlife. They’d probably put someone nicer looking than me up there.”

Andrew’s expression roils with something like anger, his lips curling. “You’re being dense.”

“You’re making yourself miserable for no good reason,” Neil returns. “You’re punishing yourself for something that didn’t happen.”

“I was reckless,” Andrew says, a rare admission. “If I had—”

“If?” Neil interrupts, brows furrowing. “Since when are you worried about if?”

“If I had veered off the road, and into a tree, and my head split in half, it would have killed you,” Andrew says, very seriously, his eyes very dark, and it stops Neil short. 

Andrew’s fingers squeeze Neil’s wrists. Bruising. His attention flickers over Neil’s features. 

“It would kill you,” he gravels. He pauses. “And then— who would be around to look after you, when you make people want to swing racquets at your head? Who would take care of you then?” He shakes his head, his voice practically quivering bitterly, his jaw grinding tight. “That was my promise.”

Neil breathes. He can feel his pulse through Andrew’s grip, just like he had been able to in the car, but it isn’t slow anymore. Pounding hard through his veins, Andrew’s weight hot and heavy on top of him, Andrew’s knee digging into the soft meat of Neil’s thigh.

“Jesus,” Neil exhales. “Andrew.”

Andrew breaks eye contact, looking away, his jaw so tight that the muscle there flutters visibly. He pulses his grip on Neil’s wrists, clearly attempting to loosen his hands. He doesn’t really succeed, but he manages to rub his fingertip carefully over a scar on the side of Neil’s palm.

“Okay,” Neil says. He hesitates and shakes his head. “So your solution was to come home and chainsmoke until it made you sick? Really hit the nail on the head?”

Andrew dips his chin, shuddering, and puts his temple into Neil’s collarbone. 

“Hey,” Neil says. He twists his own fingers down until he can brush Andrew’s knuckles, dragging the pads of his fingertips over the swells and dips of bone there. The touch makes Andrew’s grip loosen just a fraction, enough so Neil can break his wrist free, catching Andrew’s hand in his own. He drags his palm up Andrew’s arm, gripping, squeezing up his bicep, reminding him exactly where he is and who he’s with.

“You’re right, it would kill me,” he says matter-of-factly. It’s obvious. It’s Andrew's name on his driver’s license. When he tries to picture it, he sees a distant pain so bright and explosive that he has to close his eyes and swallow around even the possibility. 

“I can’t even think about it,” he admits. Andrew’s fingers dig into him. “But I trust you.” Neil squeezes Andrew’s bicep and Andrew’s hand keeps squeezing Neil’s wrist. Skin on skin. “I know you. I know you probably barely even swerved when you hit that bird. I know the reason you started driving faster wasn’t because you didn’t want to come home.”

Andrew keeps his head down, forehead digging painfully into Neil’s collarbone. He takes each breath big and purposeful, filling up his lungs to the brim and exhaling into Neil’s chest, over and over. 

“Hey,” Neil says, and Andrew pushes closer, hefting his weight higher, his knees pinning Neil’s hips. Neil slides his hand to Andrew’s back and rubs over those huge shoulders, the knotted muscles there so tight they feel like ropes under his skin.

“Nothing happened. Feel this?” He digs his thumb into Andrew’s taught shoulderblade and Andrew squeezes Neil’s wrist hard enough to crack. Good. “Nothing happened. Stop killing yourself over it.”

Andrew doesn’t move for minutes, so Neil doesn’t either. He keeps rubbing Andrew’s shoulders, not gently, trying his best to work the tension out of the muscles there. 

His head eventually falls forward into Andrew’s cropped, spiky hair, the texture half-soft and ticklish against his cheek. It smells so sharp and strong, eucalyptus and spearmint so heavy in his nose, that his eyes flutter closed again. Andrew’s big, purposeful exhales keep spilling against his skin. 

Eventually, Andrew pulls back and hefts himself above Neil, staring intently. His eyes are still dark and solemn as they track over every line and angle of Neil’s face. 

Neil blinks at him sleepily. Andrew reaches out to grip his chin in strong fingers. 

“We’re fine,” Neil tells him, in case he needs to hear it again. 

“I fucked up.”

“Yeah, okay,” Neil agrees. “So don’t do it again.” Andrew’s stare sharpens sardonically, but Neil is unphased. He knows it’s not that easy. “Next time,” he continues, “when you wake up for whatever reason, when you can’t go back to sleep, don’t double the speed limit. Don’t buy a pack of cigarettes. Don’t let the pigs catch up to you.” Andrew snorts cruelly, but Neil soldiers on. “You don’t even have to get your car out of the garage, not if it’s going to hurt you like this.”

Neil shakes his head, and Andrew’s fingers dig in tighter.

“Take a shower next time. Watch a movie—” Andrew doesn’t like movies “—and it’ll maybe even bore you back to sleep. Next time, you can call me at two in the morning instead of the police station,” Neil says very seriously. He ducks his head, meeting Andrew’s gaze. “And you can wait on the couch instead of a holding cell while I drive all the fucking way here.”

Andrew stares at him blankly for a long moment, but Neil sees the words rattle around and crawl their way over his features. He moves his hand to Neil’s mouth, pressing the pads of his fingers brutally into Neil’s lips. Something lands in his eyes, eventually. It’s almost disbelieving, sharp with relief, vulnerable. It looks like a resolution to Neil — like Andrew is finally getting it. Finally remembering that Neil isn’t something that can be scared away, and that Neil’s place right here beneath Andrew is more important to him than anything else.

Andrew leans down again, reluctantly, like gravity is pulling at him, to press his forehead into the arm of the couch. The movement nestles their heads together, Andrew’s ear pressing into Neil’s cheek. 

Andrew’s hand stays firmly over his mouth, but Neil breathes deeply through his nose and closes his eyes again. Any uncertainty settles in his chest. They’re fine. Andrew is fine, right here on top of him, so heavy that Neil’s hips and quads are going numb. He turns his head and Andrew’s hair tickles his nose. Silver linings. 

Minutes pass and Neil half-slides blearily into sleep again. It’s too easy with Andrew’s weight on him like this. When Neil couldn’t sleep in college, when he would be up for days with red eyes, Andrew would put all his weight against Neil’s in their shared twin-xl and he would knock out in minutes. It feels too good. Neil thinks it’s only gotten better over the years, as Andrew’s grown more bulky and weighted, as each of his limbs have only gotten heavier.

Eventually, Andrew’s hair tickles wrong at Neil’s nose and he jolts awake. He tries to get Andrew to move his hand — licks him childishly, bites gently at his fingers, but he doesn’t budge. He taps Andrew’s shoulder blades, and Andrew’s fingers finally unlock from his mouth.

“Can we go to sleep now?” he asks into Andrew’s palm. 

Andrew’s derision comes across plainly, by the finger he digs into Neil’s lip. But he still acquiesces after only a moment — hefts himself off the couch with what seems like a lot of effort and drags Neil after him.

They get into bed after that. The mattress calls to Neil even more powerfully than before, with most of the angst put to rest behind them. They can deal with any of the leftovers in the morning. Andrew will make a therapy appointment with his new lady in the city, who will help him with the things outside of Neil’s expertise. Why he started driving faster, each one of his self-destructive tendencies, whatever woke him up in the first place. Right now, the best thing is to let them both sleep it off — to let Andrew’s body reset from everything it’s been through in the past twenty-four hours. 

Right now, Andrew’s weight pulls at the other side of the mattress as they climb in side-by-side, and it’s the only thing Neil can think about. His face hits memory foam and it nearly pulls him unconscious right then. It feels too good. 

He rubs his forehead against the pillowcase and yawns. Across from him, Andrew folds himself stiffly under the covers, watching Neil the whole time. That feels good, too — to have Andrew’s attention on him again. The weight of those eyes tracking his every movement is soothingly familiar.

“Think you can sleep?” he asks.

Andrew nods, slow and rigid. 

“Good.” Neil yawns again. “We’re fine.”

Andrew’s chin dips into the pillow. Okay, it means. I know. 

Neil narrows his eyes blearily. “Swear?”

He holds his hand up and Andrew reaches out to hook their little fingers together. Neil squeezes. Their arms drop to the mattress like that, their pinkies twined together, and Neil falls asleep with the afternoon sunlight spilling in through the blinds. 

—

He sleeps heavy, but weird. It makes sense, what with the absolute upheaval of his usual sleeping schedule. He has one of those now.

They must have gone to sleep at almost three in the afternoon — the next time Neil opens his eyes, their bedroom is dark around him, and he’s sweaty like he only gets after napping. He rolls back over. 

He wakes up a few more times. He always finds Andrew sleeping beside him, catalogues his weight there immediately, and knocks out again without a lot of thought. It’s a pattern that continues for probably hours, time stretching dark and sleep-fuzzy and strange. 

Until, eventually, Neil jolts upward — his heart racing, flying straight up in bed. His mouth tastes gummy. His attention lands blearily on their digital clock, blinking a peaceful 12:08 into their dark bedroom. He presses a fist into his racing pulse and coughs.

He doesn’t remember dreaming anything unsavory — probably just another symptom of an interrupted circadian rhythm more than anything. Both of their relationships with sleep are more tightrope-esque than the average person’s.

He feels Andrew move beside him, reaching out and finding Neil in the darkness.

“Come here,” Andrew says, this time. His voice is low and grumbly with sleep, deep and familiar, already sounding more settled than it had before. 

He doesn’t have to tell Neil twice. Andrew’s hands land heavy on Neil’s ribs, and he follows them across the mattress, shifting to land against Andrew’s chest. He melts there. The entire, hard-and-soft expanse of Andrew’s chest flattens beneath his cheek, the ecosystem of his lungs and heart audible beneath his ribcage. Neil groans again, more comfortable by far than he had been on his memory-foam pillow, and he feels Andrew snort sleepily. Feels Andrew’s arm settle heavy over his spine, featherlight fingers tracing Neil’s shoulders.

“Give me your knee,” Andrew says, then. 

Neil is too tired to think or protest much. He drags his leg up the mattress and Andrew’s free hand lands there, too. His fingers are heavy and warm as they massage Neil’s kneecap, working carefully into the joint.

Neil’s exhales shudder into Andrew’s hoodie. He tries to stay awake to revel in the feeling a little longer — to memorize the dizzying drag of Andrew’s fingertips — but he doesn’t last long at all before the comfort of it puts him to sleep.

—

He wakes up again, more permanently, before Andrew does. That’s how it almost always happens. 

They haven’t moved since the last time. His neck is stiff, his temple buried into Andrew’s sternum, Andrew’s arm thrown heavy over his back. He can tell Andrew is still asleep without looking, from only the repetitive drag of his breath out of his nose. Raspier than usual from the leftover nicotine-ache. A rhythm Neil has long had memorized.

He slots his eyes open and manages to catch a glimpse of the alarm clock. Three-thirty, this time. A little more than twelve hours, which is even better than Neil was hoping for. 

Still, the sight causes something to buoy uncomfortably in his chest. If they get up soon, Neil can make the drive home in time to at least show face at practice. Morning practices luckily aren’t required after game days, especially not after wins, but the whole team is required to attend the game-tape reviews at three pm.

He would stay, if he thought Andrew needed him to. Andrew certainly won’t be going to practice — he’ll be picking up his car and scheduling a meeting with his therapist, emailing his coaches and his managers and his PR people. But Neil thinks he’ll be just fine doing all of that. He would guess that whatever drove Andrew out of bed hasn’t been a recurring thing, isn’t one of those patterns he sometimes falls into. Just a hiccup. Something that got a little out of control. He’s good at guessing things about Andrew.

Which is why he knows Andrew won’t let him stay, even if Neil decided to blow off practice altogether. Tape reviews after every game are required in his contract. Risking his contract means risking his life.

It fills him with a bit of an ache, like it always does, heavy and certain. Driving away from Andrew never settles well in his stomach. 

Neil stays right where he is and waits for Andrew to wake up. It doesn’t take long — he feels Andrew flinch subtly, and then his fingers resume their slow, delicate movements on Neil’s shoulder. 

“I know you’re awake,” Andrew rasps above him.

Neil raises his head in reluctant admission, and Andrew kisses him.

Neil makes a noise low in his throat. He wouldn’t have complained if he’d driven back to Nashville without one, but there are few things Neil wants to do more than kiss Andrew. It’s warm, messy. Probably disgusting. Andrew tastes like sleep and Neil is obsessed with it, fisting his hoodie in grappling fingers. The fabric stretches and wrinkles in his unforgiving grip.

It lasts until Andrew makes a faint noise of complaint, drawing back.

“You’re disgusting,” he croaks, thumb running velvety circles at Neil’s nape. Neil doesn’t argue. 

— 

They get out of bed. They make breakfast — which might be an exaggeration, considering Andrew makes pancakes and Neil mixes up some protein-slop oatmeal, snagging Andrew’s hoodie with his fingers when he gets too close. The apartment stays shrouded by the darkness outside the windows the whole time, and it feels like a bubble. Like no one is awake or exists yet in the world except the two of them.

They eat. Andrew with his pancakes and Neil with his oatmeal, side-by-side at the counter. They brush their teeth, Andrew’s chin hooked sleepily over Neil’s shoulder as they do.

They get in the shower, and Andrew gets two fingers deep into Neil under the warm, relentless spray of water.

Neil’s back presses into the shower wall, the tiles slippery against his shoulders. Both of Andrew’s strong arms are wound beneath his thighs, hefting his weight upward, Neil’s own elbows hooked viciously over Andrew’s shoulders. 

Andrew always holds him up like it’s nothing. Neil is heavy — a dense athlete, pure muscle. He has the highest vertical jump in the NEL — 45 inches, recorded during a game against the Utah Pelicans — where it sometimes feels like he’s moving so fast on the court he might never come down to earth again. 

Still, he never feels more weightless than when he’s in Andrew’s arms. 

Neil’s teeth suck dark marks into Andrew’s shoulder, over the strong cut of muscle there, as Andrew’s fingers drag hot and torturous over the most sensitive, protected part of him. Each slow glide lights up the nerves of his spine like a christmas tree. 

He can’t see behind him, but he can picture it. The strong, defined muscles in Andrew’s forearm flexing with every movement. His middle and index fingers disappearing in and out of Neil, rhythmically, carefully, lewdly, slick with the lube Andrew keeps in the shower. His thumb meets his other two fingers, dragging over the furled, sensitive skin there, and Neil shudders. Bites silently at Andrew’s shoulder. Each breath comes choked up his throat, brainless, ah-ah-ah.

 He turns his forehead into Andrew’s collarbone. Andrew’s thumb circles his rim with punishing certainty.

“There’s something else,” Neil manages to say between gasps, smearing the words against Andrew’s skin. 

He can feel it, in Andrew’s usual silence — some pensive distance hiding behind the sex-hazed focus there. 

Andrew doesn’t speak right away. He leans his head down and bites Neil’s ear, presses his lips to his pulse, takes the lobe into his mouth and sucks. Neil’s muscles spasm, liquid heat seeping over his nerves like a weighted blanket.

And then Andrew pulls back just enough, his face still tucked close.

“They handed me the phone,” he says, lowly, pressed into Neil’s ear. The shower sprays endlessly. “In the police station, and they told me I had one call. Told me not to waste it.”

He twists his fingers. They feel so good, so heavy inside Neil, and he knows he’ll feel the phantom weight the whole ride back to Nashville. 

“And I didn’t have to think.” Andrew pauses. “It was you. My husband.” Neil’s only ever heard him use that word a few times, usually sardonically. He sounds very serious now. The shape of it in his mouth makes Neil dizzy. “My emergency contact. My power of attorney.”

He hefts Neil higher up and Neil’s ankles hook desperately around Andrew’s hips, searching for leverage. The angle pushes Andrew’s fingers deeper. Inches. Neil pulses around him. Ah, he breathes, soundless.

It pulls them closer, too. Neil’s own aching dick trapped hot between them. He ruts into the soft strength of Andrew’s stomach with every thrust of Andrew’s fingers. His gut burns with it, his attention going soft around the edges. Hazy. His head swims.

Andrew’s voice sounds heavy and rough when he speaks next, and Neil strains to keep up with him.

“When I called you,” he says, gravelly in Neil’s ear, “you answered on the first ring.” He tucks his lips into the dip of Neil’s jaw. “You were already on the way.”

Neil’s thighs quiver stupidly. He gathers his last bits of focus, gripping the short hair at the back of Andrew’s head, clawing for leverage. He pulls back and finds Andrew’s jaw with his free hand — forces his chin up, not gently, so they can look at each other. 

Andrew’s hair is wet, pale and damp, water skating down his face, his temples. His eyes are half-lidded and glazed, lips parted, his ears red. It’s how he always looks when he’s fucking Neil.

“Every time,” Neil promises, and his voice is just as wrecked as his body. 

He knows how much of Andrew’s trust he holds. How much trust Andrew pours into him. Even now — this closeness, all the places their bodies are touching, all the barriers that have shredded away between them. This is Neil and Andrew. Somehow, Neil’s earned enough trust for Andrew to call him these things, as saccharine and cliche as they are, more fitting for white-picket-fences than the two of them. They fit, somehow, and Neil treasures them. Their names laid side-by-side like that.

The knowledge that he did something right last night — kept Andrew’s confidence, earned another piece of that trust — wipes through him. It’s warmth, pride. Something so bone-deep that his muscles clench around it, something that tells him he’ll take care of Andrew with everything he has for the rest of his life. It’s NeilandAndrew, in this shower, the familiar girth of Andrew’s fingers rubbing so repetitively, so deep inside him, and Neil comes like that. 

His thighs spasm, his knees squeezing Andrew’s waist as his cock pulses, as he paints white over Andrew’s ribs. His eyes fall closed. His head falls forward, his temple landing on Andrew’s chin. He feels Andrew press kisses down his hairline, wet and warm. 

He shudders in the aftermath. Dry sparks roll lazily up his spine and over his hips, each breath still catching uselessly. He feels, distantly, Andrew shift his weight further onto one arm, holding him against the wall. Andrew’s now-free hand smooths down Neil’s chest. Catching on each familiar scar, trailing a warm line to his stomach. There’s a patch of road rash beside Neil’s belly button, with a divot of tissue that fits Andrew’s thumb perfectly. 

“Fuck,” Neil rasps, eventually. When he comes back into himself, he can feel Andrew’s fingers still tucked carefully inside him, hot and unavoidable. The band of Andrew’s forearm under his thighs is slowly but surely making his legs numb. “Put me down.”

Andrew does, pulling out slowly and lowering Neil to the tile floor. Neil’s legs quiver pathetically, but he doesn’t let that stop him. He leans close, arms still hooked over Andrew’s shoulders, Andrew’s palm still dragging rhythmically down his chest.

He sucks at the most sensitive, reactive part of Andrew’s neck and feels him shudder bodily in response — predictably, like he does every time. Andrew’s own cock hangs heavy and untouched between them, hard and red, curving toward his stomach. Neil looks down and any soreness in his legs fades to the background. His mouth waters.

“Can I?” he asks, voice low, nipping at Andrew’s neck to show his meaning. “I want to be able to taste you on the drive home.”

Andrew scoffs and lets Neil sink to his knees.

—

At six, Neil sits in the front seat of his car, in the parking garage, with Andrew standing outside the rolled-down window. 

He can feel everything. The phantom stretch and weight of Andrew’s fingers; the line on the bottoms of his thighs where Andrew had held him; the pressure-ache from the dark marks hidden beneath his shirt, right over his heart. He can taste Andrew in the back of his throat, just like he had hoped. The sharp scent of eucalyptus-spearmint fills the front seat.

It’s all maybe enough to make the drive back to Nashville bearable, but only just. 

Right now, Neil can feel Andrew more literally, too — he’s leaning in through the window, one of his hands carding through the side of Neil’s hair. 

“Haircut,” he instructs, blandly.

“You said that last time.”

Andrew tugs at the strands above Neil’s ear, raising an eyebrow. “Seems like you haven’t gotten the memo.”

Hm, Neil intones, leaning his head sideways on the headrest. He isn’t in any hurry to drive away.

Andrew’s phone buzzes audibly in his pocket and he pulls it out, his hand not faltering once in its careful passes over Neil’s scalp. He flashes the screen at Neil.

“My manager’s calling me a car to the impound lot.”

“Good,” Neil says. He yawns. “When’s your therapy appointment?”

“Two-thirty.”

Neil hums again. “Will you talk to her about it?” he asks, and Andrew narrows his eyes. Neil’s always stayed firmly out of Andrew’s therapy business. “I’m not the expert,” he says, leaning into Andrew’s hand, “but you probably shouldn’t only care if you die in a fiery car accident because you'd leave me behind.”

Andrew grips Neil’s hair and tugs, sharply. Shakes his head. He looks sideways into the parking lot. 

Neil thinks he won’t respond, but his hand resumes carding through Neil’s hair after a moment.

“I don’t,” he says, very evenly.

There’s a lingering not anymore that floats, vaguely, between them. Neil scans Andrew’s side profile. 

“Was that another one of your midnight revelations?”

Andrew tugs again. “Something like that.”

And, Neil knows. He knows Andrew, and knows that Andrew stopped wanting to die, even casually, a long time ago. Probably before he ever met Neil. The reminder is nice.

“Good,” Neil shrugs. “Hey.”

Andrew looks back at him, the glare from the parking garage reflecting in his wire-frames. The light makes his hair look very white, too, washing him pale. Neil’s eyes flicker over every inch of him. He swallows and feels Andrew’s weight in his throat.

Andrew’s hand shifts from Neil’s hair to his cheek, thumb brushing against the fragile skin beneath his eye.

“Good to drive?” Andrew asks. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Call me if you get tired.”

“Uh-huh,” Neil promises. He smiles, sharply. “You can kiss me goodbye, if you want.”

Andrew leans through the window and kisses Neil goodbye.

Andrew Minyard Arrest FUNNIEST moments - BODY CAM COMPILATION 🚨🚔

[Shaky camera footage. Pavement. A black, sleek sports car pulled onto the grass, lit up by red-blue-white flashing lights. Minyard sits in the driver’s seat, D.A.R.E baseball cap pulled low, lounging casually. The officer raps on the frame of the car and Minyad rolls the window down.]

“This is officer Dougherty with the Chesterfield County Police department. Can you turn the engine off and place your keys on the dash for me?”

[Minyard does so.]

“Okay. I’m assuming you know why I pulled you over tonight?”

[Minyard hesitates and stares blankly. He touches his pointer finger slowly to his temple, as if in realization.]

“My left blinker isn’t working. I’ve been meaning to get that fixed.”

“Let’s not make this difficult. We’re in a 60 zone and I clocked you at almost 125. Can I have you step out of the car?”

—

[Minyard stands in front of his vehicle, hands in his hoodie pockets. More flashing lights pulse as a second police car arrives.]

“What do you do for a living?”

“I play stickball.”

“Exy?” [Minyard nods.] “At what level?”

“Professionally.”

“You’re an NEL player? What’s your full name?”

“It’s Andrew Minyard.”

[A beat of pure silence, thick with recognition.]

“Your name is Andrew Minyard?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“You’re— okay.” [Officer hesitates.] “You’re — do you have an ID on you?”

—

[Video shifts downward as Minyard hands over his driver’s license. Andrew Minyard-Josten is displayed clearly beside a photo that looks more like a mugshot than anything. Officer pauses again before tapping the ID and flashing it at Minyard.]

“This isn’t the name you gave me.”

[This time, Minyard doesn’t say anything at all. His stare can only be described as eerie. The officer moves on without pushing the issue.]

—

[Next frame, Minyard balances on the edge line of the road as he performs a field sobriety test. He walks for nine paces, heel-to-heel, and turns around. Camera cuts to Minyard standing on one foot and counting aloud to thirty. Camera cuts to Minyard very blandly reciting the alphabet in reverse.]

EXY TODAY: New rumors circulate about romantic relationship between Andrew Minyard and Neil Josten in the wake of released body cam footage

People Sports, by Joseph Kleinman  -  110k reads, 9k comments

Marie (Josten’s version) @exyprincess

Okay so

Marie (Josten’s version) @exyprincess

And the

Marie (Josten’s version) @exyprincess

So, like

Eevan @thatswhattheytellme

MARRIED ?? ??? ???? ???? ?

 

Joshua @jjshua11

No fucking SHOT is this actually happening

David Hill @DavidH

Terrible day for America and for the legacy of sports as a whole. Seriously shameful. I hope the NEL gets a handle on this situation quickly.

Daniellaaaaa @applepie

Dear david, 

Here is some furry porn I have taken the time to draw of you and your wife. 

[Attached Image]

Wishing you the best xx

Everyday bro @dellcmptr

@applepie legend you’re going to get your account banned for this 

123 drink @michaelbk

Everybody talking about the gay shit, can we discuss how minyard managed to make even field sobriety tests look fucking menacing lmfao

Ava @smileyavs

Me staring at the bodycam outing files knowing that Minyard was supposed to be my children’s last name …

Bebe @notrexha

Baby he doesn’t want you 

Ava @smileyavs

Fucking clearly LMFAOO

Andreil Proofs Account @AndreilProofsOfficial

[Attached Image — Screenshot from Minyard’s body cam arrest. Despite being dark and blurry, the image clearly displays Minyard’s ID, his full name spelled out beside his portrait.]

Checkmate.