Summer Sons(10)

“Heard so much about you, Blur.” Halse strode across the room and offered his hand for a shake. Andrew moved to accept, right-to-right, but Halse hooked their thumbs and yanked their joined hands into a tight clasp between their chests. His knuckles jammed against Andrew’s breastbone. He had a few inches of height on Andrew, and a couple more through his broad shoulders. “Some of it real good.”

“Sam, be chill for once in your goddamn life,” Riley said.

The exhaustion in his tone kicked the smile from Halse’s mouth. The shift left his face wolfish, closed off. Andrew looked straight at him with his chin up.

Halse asked, “You treating my cousin all right?”

“Of course he is, he’s been here like twenty-four hours,” Riley said.

“Okay, sure.” Halse dropped Andrew’s hand and rounded the coffee table to sit next to Riley, shoving his feet to the side to make room. “Ed was a good guy, and he made it sound like we’d all hit it off. You into the same weird shit?”

“Define weird shit,” Andrew said as his skin prickled.

Halse barked a laugh and took his hat off, tossing it onto the other couch. His buzz cut was a fraction too close-cropped to obscure the paleness of his skin, one stage past stubble. “That’s a yes.”

Riley kicked him in the hip. He frowned and scooted farther across the couch.

“It’s probably a no,” Andrew said.

“Whatever you say,” Halse drawled. “But, hey, give me your phone. I’m going to put my number in there.”

“I think it’s dead,” Andrew replied.

He listed to the side to lean against the living room doorframe, hovering outside the cousins’ space. Halse took up too much air with his presence alone, and Andrew was too tired to muscle his way in. Restless nights, two in a row lost to his revenant visitor, and the stop-motion bedroom upstairs—he’d had the intention of questioning Eddie’s new friends on arrival, but the reality of the situation tripped him over his own feet. He couldn’t marshal his thoughts past his raised-hackles resistance to their being more at home than Andrew was in the middle of his own living room.

“C’mon, man,” Halse prodded.

“You don’t have my number, either,” Riley said.

Easier to give in than to keep arguing. Andrew slipped the phone from his back pocket and tossed it into Halse’s outstretched hand, satisfied when he pressed the home button and nothing happened. Halse grinned, showing a broad white slash of teeth.

“You weren’t bullshitting,” he said.

“I don’t, much.”

Riley stole the phone from his cousin and fished around next to the couch until he found a dangling charge cord.

“This is scratched all to shit,” he said as he plugged it in.

“And the screen’s cracked,” Halse said.

The family resemblance was abruptly clear. Both of them looked at him with the same tilt to their heads, the same dimple-cornered mouths, identical cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes. The differences were telling as well. The bump of a past break on Halse’s nose, his squarer jaw, the thinner, ginger-tinged stubble on the line of Riley’s jaw—someone on that side of the bloodline was a blonde.

“Fuck, could you just sit down? Your hovering is making me anxious,” Halse said.

“I’m good here,” Andrew said, almost without meaning to.

The flat look Halse leveled at him in response spoke to how often people told him no. A flicker of a smile pushed at the edges of Andrew’s mouth, his shoulders squaring up wider at the brief burst of tense contest, bringing the agitation stewing inside him to the forefront of their strange domestic tableau. Maybe he had the energy to fight after all. Except then Halse snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Down, boy. It’s your house, stand all afternoon if you want to. I was being polite.”

Riley pressed the power button on the charging phone, load screen lighting up. Mid-reach to set it down on the table, the phone started to vibrate and didn’t stop, one missed message coming after another in an unending stream. The alerts went on and on with the phone balanced on Riley’s palm like a snake that might bite at the slightest provocation. Chagrin was a delicate and scholarly look on him, paired with the glasses.

“Thirty-seven unread messages, eight missed calls. Six voicemails. Also, a software update needs to be applied,” Halse said, peering over his cousin’s shoulder at the screen.

“That isn’t your business.” Andrew crossed the room to take his phone from them, but at one percent, he hesitated to unplug it again. He was caught towering awkwardly over the seated men on the couch.

“Let me get this straight,” Riley said. “You drove down here from Columbus, let your phone die, and haven’t turned it on since yesterday?”

“Who am I supposed to be calling?” he said against his better judgment.

“I’m assuming whoever left you all those messages,” Riley replied, incredulous.

Andrew fumbled for an answer he didn’t have. It doesn’t matter was staggeringly inappropriate, but also too close to the truth: I don’t care. He had no excuse, aside from his weeks of constant shuttling between irritated exhaustion and dead numbness. His fingers tightened around the plastic casing.

Halse clapped a hand on Riley’s shoulder and stood. “That’s our cue to get out of here, kid. I need some help with the car before we go out tonight.”