Summer Sons(38)
10
“Is there something you can do to track it?” Andrew asked.
He held Eddie’s final phone bill crumpled in his fist. He’d waited until he had the house to himself to dig into the pile of abandoned mail next to the front door, sifting through junk and credit card offers and unpaid bills, all addressed to Edward Fulton.
On the other end of the line, the service rep said, “Unfortunately, no. If he’d had an app for tracking, it could be possible, but if the phone was turned off or out of charge, it wouldn’t work regardless.”
“All right,” Andrew said, and hung up.
He traded the phone in his hand for the perspiring bag of frozen corn he’d snagged out of the freezer, leaving a wet splotch on the coffee table. The cold on the fucked-up half of his face lanced through the heat-daze of the afternoon and the stuttering disappointment of the call. He tilted sideways to lie on the couch, letting gravity hold the makeshift ice pack in place.
Asking Riley—or worse, his cousin—who Eddie had been spending time with in his last weeks was unthinkable, both because he wasn’t certain of their personal culpability and because it would require an admission of ignorance. Attending the gathering had solidified his suspicions, though. The remembered thrum of the music, the coke, the liquor all carried recognition and temptation. Halse with his depth-charge grin holding court, one prince to another, magnanimous offerings hard to refuse. Andrew knew it without knowing it, how he and Eddie would’ve gotten on like a demolition. Halse had seemed in control of his scene, but Eddie had a gift for pissing people off when he felt the call to assert himself.
And aside from the danger presented by Halse, there were other violent men in his court. The split knuckles he flexed to feel the pulling skin were proof enough of that. From Riley’s admission that Luca skipped Sam’s parties for her own safety, to the fact that those two men had felt free to talk shit about Riley and Ethan, to the way they lumped Eddie in with their derision—aloud, where the whole crowd might hear—none of that was a good sign. More damning, no one had stepped in to deescalate the violence until Sam arrived to do so himself. Who would stop a fight that Sam wanted, stop violence the prince had ordained? Who there would have watched Eddie’s back, if he’d dived into a fight without Andrew to help him?
Dangers stacked onto dangers, but provided no clear answers. The tomb of the bedroom above him filled him with a miserable, childish yearning: his head hurt, his hands hurt, his soul hurt, his hangover was monumental, and he missed Eddie. Face in his hands, Andrew shuddered through a few hard breaths. He didn’t miss his parents, he didn’t miss Del, he didn’t miss his old apartment. Those gaps were all distant aches that didn’t require filling, only an awareness of loss. Eddie’s absence, though, cut a trough of tired need that no one else had the potential to fill up—
In a burst of confidence or cowardice, he tramped up the stairs and pulled open the drawer of Eddie’s bedside table. Several of the loose-leaf pages were crumpled from his haphazard attempt at storage. He grabbed the composition book and sat on the edge of the mattress. The gentle bow of the notebook, warped from use, fit naturally into the curve of his hands. He remembered the devolution in handwriting from the neat introduction to the scrawl on the final page, either rushed or excited, talking about land and sacrifice. Eddie might’ve sat there too, bending it this way and that while he talked to Riley about his theories.
Riley, who had been aware of the phantom since the first moment Andrew had arrived, and yet had said nothing. The abrupt click of realization, that those monstrous haunted nights had all been followed by Riley’s drawn, tired face in the morning, gave Andrew worse vertigo than his lingering head trauma. He hadn’t said fuck-all. He’d lain in his room across the hall and let it wreck him and said nothing. Out of respect, or out of guilt? Andrew’s crawling suspicion flitted between the two options. Since his arrival, he’d been struggling to find a direction to pursue, attempting to unearth what had happened to Eddie by grasping aimlessly at each sliver of a hint. Missing phone, grim research, strange roommate, a pack of boys with bad attitudes and worse tempers, uncorrected assumptions about himself and Eddie: all the lies and half-truths about Eddie’s life in Nashville, without Andrew, spilled disorganized around his feet.
Those strangers had called Andrew a faggot with their whole chests. Once at some frat party, he’d started to pass out on Eddie’s shoulder and slouched instead to push his face into the soft-solid plane of his stomach, one arm around his waist. Touch settled Andrew in a good place as his body shut down. Eddie had run a proprietary hand over the crest of his shoulder blade. When some guy had hooted derisively from across the room, Eddie had scooped Andrew onto the couch, walked over, and smacked him straight in his mouth with one big hand. “Say it again, you think I’m like that,” he’d commanded with bass in his voice. Andrew remembered how he’d buried his face in the disgusting couch cushions to keep from throwing up, trying to remind himself and his sour stomach: they weren’t like that.
He shied from that train of thought and flipped open the cover of the notebook, skimmed the initial page again. The second time, prepared for it, he didn’t recoil from seeing their personal business laid bare. He didn’t want to do this, not at all, but reading his familiar handwriting was as close to speaking to Eddie as he was going to get. Despite his advice to Riley, he was doing a piss-poor job of ignoring the haunting in his lonelier hours, and the visitations were getting nastier. He doubted there was a use for them other than jealous consumption.