Summer Sons(53)
“Hey,” Ethan said. Fingers tugged at the hem of his jeans, wrapped around his ankle. A thumb massaged tickling, tingling circles on the knob of the bone. He kept staring at the ceiling. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know he got so close to Halse,” he murmured.
Ethan let out a nervous chuckle. “It wasn’t a thing, man, don’t like—don’t get upset, okay. I’m not trying to speak ill of the guy. He wasn’t running game on you or something. He never even hit on Riley, and Riley’s fine as fuck, yeah?”
Responding to that broader implication was impossible in the split second he had before Leah interrupted from behind the couch. “Your host has arrived, and requests thank-yous in the form of kisses.”
She had a shirt on now, her hair damp and drying in a chlorine-tangle. Andrew wasn’t expecting it when she planted a hand on the seatback and vaulted over onto the couch between them, her knee almost clocking him in the jaw. He yelped and toppled backward. Ethan laughed. She kissed Ethan first, a chaste peck on the mouth, then wriggled to kneel over Andrew’s sprawled form. She, too, was bright-eyed, with the narrowest ring of green iris visible around her pupils.
“Say no if you want to say no,” she said.
He found himself murmuring “No” against her plush, sweet-tasting mouth.
She stopped and sat back on her heels with a small frown. “Is it the girls thing, or just a no?”
“Just a no,” he said. The skin contact felt all right, but his body wasn’t strung toward her, not the same as—
“Apologies, but it’s guys for me, as you’re aware,” Ethan said.
“No worries,” she said. She patted Andrew’s cheek and miraculously got up without kicking either of them again. “Forget it happened!”
“I’m going to go,” Andrew said.
“Yeah, sure,” Ethan said. He had a hangdog look on his elegant face. “My mouth got away from me. Sorry again.”
“Thanks,” Andrew said, and he was more thankful than Ethan knew, for revealing a fault line between Eddie and Halse that he hadn’t been aware of before.
Sitting in his car, waiting to sober up enough to see the road, he checked his email. His skin buzzed, needy, with the ghost of confident, masculine hands grabbing him at leisure, mind spinning with the assumptions people kept making about him. Amongst the junk emails, Troth had sent him a confirmation for the review meeting tomorrow afternoon—and since it appeared that Halse was connected to the fieldwork too, not only the parties and related mischief, he’d chase that down. Easier than digging at the burgeoning, unsettling quandary of what had changed so much with Eddie that folks kept referring to Andrew, without a pause, as his—boyfriend. Andrew swallowed against his sandpapery case of dry mouth and, methodical with each keystroke, agreed to her proposed time before hitting send.
14
Avoiding a roommate was an art form, and Andrew’s creativity had run dry. The front door opened a handful of minutes past three in the afternoon. Andrew, in his briefs and socks, eating applesauce directly from the container in front of the fridge, had the option to either stand his ground or flee to the yard. Neither was appealing, but the dull grey hangover of the molly he’d eaten the night before sapped the remainder of the motivation he needed to dodge Riley.
“Oh, hey,” the other boy said, stopping short in the small vestibule between the kitchen and living room.
“I have a meeting with Troth this afternoon,” Andrew said, gesturing aimlessly with the spoon and funneling another bite of fruit paste into his mouth.
The jar was running low, and the beer had disappeared from the bottom shelf. Aside from two packages of shredded cheese and a gallon of milk, it was a depressingly barren environment, befitting the home of two students.
“You still pissed at me?” Riley asked.
“I wasn’t pissed.”
“Hah, fuck you,” Riley snorted. “You were. But if you’re not, you’re not, I’ll let it go. I’m glad you’re going to class. And I guess I’m glad you’re getting social with my boyfriend, if that helps you sort yourself out.”
He set off up the stairs and Andrew rapped his knuckles on the fridge, caught off-guard. His phone vibrated on the table. It was Del. Please talk to someone. He furrowed his brow and opened the actual thread. At some point in the night, he’d sent her a series of messages he didn’t remember typing, mostly disorganized and unfinished:
I don’t know what’s going on
He wasn’t spending his time where I thought he was hiding it from me and people think we were
He changed his laptop password. What if he
Nothing to close the last line, more damning than the rest. He cringed.
As he read, another message came in: I’m calling you.
The phone rang a moment later. He set it on the table, leaving it to buzz its way across the smudged glass. Ethan had called Halse protective of his cousin. He wondered with a swoop how Halse had felt about Riley and Eddie’s friendship—the house, the research, the ghost stories—and where protection might come into the argument. The specter had shown him its death stripped of context, which remained to be filled in despite his guilty misgivings. Eddie as he had carried himself through Nashville was an enigma to him, increasingly unknowable. Instead of answering Del, he fired off a fast message to Ethan: How did Halse like Eddie and his cousin being friends?