Summer Sons(20)
How would a normal person explain that? Just the wind, he lied to himself. He knew better, and his knowledge had the taste of fear. Revenants appreciated the vital spice of terror when leeched from the living. If he hadn’t been shaken before, he was now. Message received. The creature was not gone, nor resting.
He knelt next to the bed on instinct and reached beneath. Eddie only had one hiding place, it never changed. Sure enough, the antique wooden box carved with birds he’d gotten Eddie for his nineteenth birthday was right where he expected it to be. Andrew opened the box on its gliding, well-oiled hinges and snagged the respectable Ziploc full of weed from its nest amid Eddie’s pipe and accoutrements. On second thought, Andrew tapped the grinder, found its catch partially full, and carried it with him to the living room as well. The bedroom felt a bit too—occupied.
The tan leather couch whumped with how hard he fell on it. Distracted and distraught, he packed himself a bowl and reclined against the arm, right foot on the cushions and the other trailing on the floor. The stretch ached in his hips. After the bowl burned to ash, he set it aside and lifted his arm overhead. His shirt rode up and his hip bones stood out like small hills, drawing an artificial holler between them above the band of his briefs. He turned his marked wrist to and fro, flexing a loose fist. The round dots of faded blue-black ink were uneven, a poor imitation of an organized line. Where the loop should’ve joined at the knob of his wrist, one dot overlapped another in a crooked Venn diagram. The glossy healing patches of the cold burns—the grave-touch—were almost gone.
Andrew remembered holding Eddie’s wrist on his lap with his legs crossed and one knee propped against the sliding glass door of their postcard-sized campus apartment balcony in Columbus. The last cigarette drifted between them for a puff each, methodically fair. Eddie had bought the ink, bundled a set of needles together with string and electrical tape, then sterilized them with peroxide from the sparsely stocked medicine cabinet. Andrew finished off the cigarette and flicked it from the edge of the balcony.
Eddie locked eyes with him, grinning his best wolf’s grin. Andrew fumbled for the needles sitting on a saucer at his knee, unable to unlock their gazes, not even to watch the first stab of ink. The corners of Eddie’s smile flinched, eyes flicking down, then his mouth opened a fraction. His wrist twitched in Andrew’s grip.
“Ouch,” Eddie whispered.
“No shit,” Andrew said. He inspected the welling spots of blood, a lively ruby red.
Eddie flexed his fist, forearm muscles bunching. “Can’t back out now.”
“Nope,” he responded.
Finishing Eddie’s bracelet tattoo took the better part of an hour; as soon as the last dot was fully marked, they smeared antibacterial ointment across the oozing mess of lymph and ink and traded places. Andrew offered his wrist, palm-up, his fingertips catching on the hem of Eddie’s shorts. Eddie laced fingers through his and bent his hand over his thigh as he readied the needles, holding them like a fat pencil. The first poke pierced his flesh with a mix of ink and Eddie’s blood, Andrew hissing long and loud through it and the next few as well. Eddie sat half in light and half in shadow, glancing up at him periodically while he worked, serious and quiet with his hands trembling minutely. There was something momentous, ritualistic, about the marking that surpassed the six beers, the bragging game that had led to give me a tattoo, no seriously, we should do our first ones together.
Del had broken up with Andrew the next day, and hadn’t spoken to either of them for two weeks.
In the house on Capitol Street, Andrew touched the faded marks, stroked them and squeezed his own wrist in an unforgiving loop. He drifted, high enough to blur his vision, into a dream about a stag’s skull rimed with lichen, hot mud between his toes. He buried himself in the dirt, digging his hands into the flesh of the land, filling his mouth and his nostrils and his veins up to bursting. If he dug deep enough, he might find—
He woke gasping, suffocating and disoriented, to the increasingly familiar slam of the front door. His fingernails ached with the pressure of digging into the leather couch. The dreams hadn’t been so bad, so fucking persistent, up north. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to blame that on coincidence. Adrenaline slammed his heart against his ribs, pulse thumping in his eyes.
“Andrew,” Riley said abruptly, too loud.
“What?” he snapped, putting his face in both hands and swinging himself upright into a seated position on the couch.
“Uh, I just—” Riley paused and took a fortifying breath. “I noticed your Supra’s out front, and it’s got a bunch of your stuff in it. Do you need help bringing it in?”
“Shit,” he said.
6
The ghost of his spectacular high lingered as a throb in his temples. The structural integrity of his skin was questionable; the inside of his head swam with partial memories and rootless homesickness. He dug his thumbs against the edges of his orbital bones and nodded to his hovering roommate. When he stood, he checked his phone out of habit and saw seven unread messages. He thumbed through them while descending the front stairs with Riley. Del had sent him a few, the last of which was Are you going to pretend I’m dead too? Just let me know so I can set my expectations. He released a controlled smoker’s breath through his nose and responded, stop doing this shit Del you know I hate it.
An unsaved number had texted him as well, two messages: Sup? and You there