Summer Sons(40)

“Spent the last couple of days laid up, so I’m behind on reading. I should probably go work on that,” he said.

West shook his head and offered, “Let me buy you a coffee, and I’ll tell you what you missed? We should catch up.”

Andrew clenched his sore fist around the strap of his bag, weighed the offer’s sincerity, and said, “All right, but it better be enough detail to help me through the lecture.”

“Pinky swear,” West drawled.

Andrew followed him to the café, keeping pace with his long stride through the mid-afternoon hustle. Distressed jeans hugged his legs straight into a pair of well-kept leather boots with the tops folded over. Andrew was abruptly aware that West’s whole ensemble—and West would’ve considered it one, he was sure—probably cost more than half of Riley’s closet. One thick silver ring flashed on his index finger when he reached up to adjust his glasses in the café line.

“I’m assuming there’s something you need in return,” Andrew said.

West gave him a lopsided grin. “In a sense, yeah. I need you to let me do my job as your mentor, or it reflects poorly on me and the place I’ve earned here. I also thought I’d follow up on those books you borrowed from Dr. Troth, see if you’re finding your feet. She’s been asking.”

“Give me the rundown for the lecture first?”

“Greedy,” West teased him.

Like you even know me, he wanted to say, grumpy at being forced to socialize when he could have been planning the next move of his investigation. True to his word, though, West spread his own notes out on the tabletop; his handwriting was unexpectedly blocky and messy. Once they reached the end of his notes, after twenty minutes of unexpectedly empathetic teaching, West trailed off into silence. He sipped from his perspiring iced latte. Andrew took a long pull of his own cold-sweet-bitter concoction. The swelling in his mouth had started to recede, but the cuts stung fiercely when he drank anything other than water.

A few individual locs hung over West’s forehead as he bent over his notes. They lent his expression a harried, professorial earnestness when he said, “Not to sound parental, but it’s only the second week. You can’t afford to get behind so soon.”

“Special circumstances,” Andrew answered with a gesture to his face.

“I’ll say.” Andrew watched him work his mouth around his straw, chewing the end, before he continued in a more subdued tone, “There were a couple of times it seemed like Ed might’ve had the same kind of accident. Sowell’s friends, I’m guessing.”

“No friends of his,” he grumbled, one harsh word lodged in his hindbrain.

West hummed, unconvinced. “I don’t know how Sowell hangs around guys like that, honestly. It must be difficult for him—you know, considering. God knows I’d be scared to head out into the country. You couldn’t pay me enough to take on that risk, even if I was a white gay man.”

Andrew shied from West’s openness, which he felt invited a return admission, to ask, “You said Eddie got in some shit, though?”

West drew a wet line between the two puddles of condensation on the table with his thumb. “Once or twice he looked like he’d gotten into a fight. Scuffed up, stiff, all that. But, and no offense intended here, he never showed up to our meetings looking like he lost.”

It wasn’t worth asking if Eddie had told West who he fought with. Instead Andrew said, “He had a temper.”

“I know,” West said. “One semester with him was enough for me to see that, in class and outside it. Which made it hard to get a read on him otherwise—he was so butch, unlike Sowell. I couldn’t figure him out.”

West raised an eyebrow and left the implication open a second time. Andrew shifted in his chair, turning his cup in his hands. Was he being invited to say something about Eddie, or about himself? The continued questioning, from one man after another, provoked a sour bump of resistance. His interactions with West had a dynamic cast, an air of performance that attempted to welcome him in—but still held the unavoidable insincerity of strangers, laid bundled around an uglier truth: both of them saw his discomfort, his inability to move through the academic world as well as Eddie had.

Unsure of his response, given Eddie’s apparent failure to correct people’s assumptions about him and Andrew’s own caustic guilt over it, he said without conviction, “Eddie was Eddie.”

West let it lie, as if sensing he’d misjudged. “Well, how’d the books go?”

“How’d Ed spend his time on campus, with who else?” Andrew redirected.

West blinked, a catlike blankness slipping over his face for a second before he said, “You mean like, what was he doing while he was here?”

“Yeah. What’d he get into?” Andrew steeled himself to admit, “He left some stories out, the fights you say he got in. I need to know.”

“Ouch, I’m sorry. And, well,” he said, the vowel hanging long. He considered his answer over another sip. “I’m not sure I’m going to be much help there. He had a couple hours with me every week, a couple hours with Dr. Troth. You probably already know that he wasn’t into extracurriculars. He didn’t accept a teaching position, gave off the impression that he didn’t need the money. He was friendly with his cohort, but he mostly…”