Summer Sons(60)
“I’m not, but—fuck.” Andrew covered his face again. Riley wasn’t wrong; he had no desire to dig through the minefield of papers again—not if he could ask a human instead. “Guess I’m going to have to be.”
“We’re going to figure this out,” Riley said.
Andrew’s mouth moved on its own, numb with the shock of remembering, and he said, “Someone cut his goddamn wrists for him and left him to bleed out alone. He died pissed off and scared and knowing it was happening, and I was so fucking far away.”
“Jesus, Andrew,” Riley said, sounding strangled.
Tears streaked the bridge of Andrew’s nose, salt on his lips. He hiccupped with the force of stifling the broken, miserable wave of sobs that swept him under. Riley’s deep, wet, nose-clogged breathing next to him was also hid from sight in the gloomy dark. Sam—sitting on his couch, maybe, or on his porch with a smoke—was probably mired in the same loss. And worse than the pain was the gladness lurking underneath, Andrew monstrously pleased to know he hadn’t been cast off, hadn’t been left behind, that Eddie still wanted him in his final moment, even if he’d failed him in the grandest possible sense. Eddie had tripped himself into some trouble that even he couldn’t fix, had been taken from him.
The revenant was notably silent, absent, and Andrew’s usual humming awareness of the ground under his feet had gone dormant too. As if he’d spent himself dry reaching into the roots of the burial tree to pull forth blood from nothing—from stone, from water, he thought with the tiniest flare of panic. Before he got too caught up in the horror of it, Riley parked the car behind their house and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Two snot-clogged snuffles echoed in the enclosed space as he caught his breath. Though some barriers had crumbled in the face of grief, others remained upright; both men went to bed without speaking.
The first texts he saw in the morning were from Riley, asking: you going to the faculty party tomorrow? i’ll be there with luca. it’d be cool to go together maybe. you could ask Troth more about eddie
I’ll go, he agreed and sent Troth a similar email—because as West had said, and Sam too, Eddie had been asking people a lot of questions. Maybe too many.
16
Considering the nature of the event, Andrew wore a button-up and arrived an hour late—having napped through the afternoon, then loitered in bed, steeling himself for another hour. He hadn’t met the hosting professor before, but his home was grand: three stories brightly lit from top to bottom, set far back from a clipped lawn with a half-oval drive. Andrew entered into a foyer alive with the social noise of a large gathering. A younger woman he recognized from his introductory course greeted him near the door and directed him through the living room to a spacious dining room, where the table was lined with copious, generous amounts of alcohol. He poured two fingers of bourbon over a spherical ice cube in a squat glass snagged from the sideboard.
“Mr. Blur, hello,” greeted his intro seminar professor, Dr. Greene, from the kitchen across the way. “So glad to see you this evening.”
He tipped his glass in greeting. “You too.”
The cuffs of his shirt irritated his wrists, and his armpits had already begun to dampen. He paced the circular ground floor, passing through clusters of new students like himself, faculty, and the more senior cohort of students clumped around the faculty doing their dog-and-pony show with a mix of familiarity and desperation. He frowned, considering tactics for separating Dr. Troth off from the rest for a conversation. He made it almost back to the foyer before he found Riley and Luca, seated on a low couch in front of a bay window in the second den. The framed, ragged-edged original posters for silent films lining the den’s walls formed a strange audience as a ruckus in the dining room called the attention of the other mingling guests.
“Hey there,” Luca said.
She was wearing a cream blazer over a jet-black jumpsuit, belted at the waist with a gold cord. The cornflower blue of Riley’s dress shirt, cuffed to his elbows, complemented his black slacks. Riley’s smile lifted a notch.
“Glad you came, Andrew,” he said.
Andrew planted one cheek of his ass on the couch arm and crossed his ankles. Riley flung an arm over the back of the sofa and angled himself so he could look up at his face. The subdued air between them rang with unspoken, unprocessed meaning. Luca leaned across Riley to tap the edge of her glass to Andrew’s, a toast to nothing. She and Riley blended in to the posh get-together with a seamless prettiness that was at odds to the last time he’d seen them together: on the road, behind the wheel.
“How long am I expected to stay at these things again?” Andrew asked.
“I dunno, get comfortable and see how it goes,” Riley replied.
“We’ll duck out in a couple of hours—that’s usually about how long I can take the general atmosphere as a plus-one. The flavor of rudeness is more subdued than at Sam’s soirées, but a lot more … chilly, shall we say,” Luca added under her breath, conspiratorial.
Andrew’s phone buzzed. He slipped it from his pocket. Sam had texted, Guess you’re all being fancy tonight. Tell me if you get bored.
“Andrew,” called another voice from across the hall. West, displaying his usual mixture of sleek and tousled style from immaculate gleaming boots to a silver-threaded mauve shirt with two open buttons, stood framed in the doorway of the kitchen with a glass of wine loosely held at his side. “Did you just get here?”