Summer Sons(63)

“Sorry,” Andrew said to Luca as he waved her off and walked straight toward the door.

“Wait,” she called out.

Andrew didn’t pause in his flight, unbuttoning his cuffs as he jogged down the short porch steps. He swung himself into his car—his real car, his Supra, with its ugly wrap and sticky transmission—and pushed the clutch as he turned the key. The messages on his phone, which he read while he waited for the frantic shaking in his hands to quit, read:

I’ve got whiskey and two blunts

One blunt

Zero blunts but more weed

Tell me you’d rather stay there and listen to the nerds twist each other’s pigtails

He almost sounded like Eddie. Andrew put the car in gear and sent, what’s your address, then input it to his GPS as soon as he got a profanity-and-praise-laden response. The paper in his pocket jabbed into his thigh, pokey and unforgiving. He drove fast through the yellow-moonlit night, tracing steep hill roads to the house he was becoming familiar with. Troth was after him to fill Eddie’s shoes for her, to complete his research with her, to dredge the accident up for her—she forced her way into things no one else understood, probing secrets he’d rather leave buried.

But he had questions to ask, and he needed her answers for some of them.

“Fuck,” he barked, crunching to a stop on the gravel in front of Halse’s garage.

He wasn’t some whiskey-gentry scion playing historian for kicks, digging into his long-nursed wounds to find the festering bottom. He didn’t belong at Vanderbilt, and he didn’t belong in Troth’s world either. He hadn’t been groomed to inherit the Fulton name and legacy. He was just Andrew Blur. All he wanted to unearth was the truth of Eddie’s last hours, to set things as right as he was able.

The front door opened as he climbed out of the car and Sam jogged down the steps, his fingers looped through a plastic-ringed sixer of Old English tallboys and a smile on his face.

“I’ve got you covered,” Sam said.

Andrew met him halfway across the lawn and yanked a beer free. The rib-crushing squeeze in his chest hadn’t abated, but the hiss-crack of the can opening eased it a fraction. Bitter malt liquor on his tongue settled him another inch. Sam snagged the can and stole a swig. Companionable silence settled between them, unbroken by Riley’s chatter or the squabbling of other boys. It was the second time they’d been alone. In the ambient light, the square cut of Sam’s jaw was ghostly familiar.

“Let’s go for a drive,” Sam said.

“Yours or mine?”

“Mine. I haven’t gotten to show her off yet,” Sam said.

Andrew grunted his agreement and moved his car to the side of the drive while Halse cut through his house. He clasped the OE between his knees, since the can wouldn’t fit in the console holder. With a clamoring grind, the garage rolled open to reveal the WRX, gunmetal and black chrome and anticipation. Andrew squeaked his thumb over the low spoiler, touching the car for the first time. Sam had left the bolts unpainted, bare metal.

“Get in,” Sam said as he locked the door to the house.

The passenger door was already unlocked. Andrew glanced over his shoulder as he settled into the seat. The rear compartment was empty, bench seats removed. Halse snagged a hat from the scattered detritus, and Andrew passed him a tallboy from the sixer.

“Thanks, man,” Sam said.

He planted his hand on the back of Andrew’s seat as he turned in his own to reverse the length of the drive, fast enough to feel fun-sloppy, comfortable with his maneuvering. Upon executing a two-point turn onto the main road, he released Andrew’s seat to face front—and somehow managed to skim the tips of his fingers across the join of Andrew’s neck and shoulder, raising the hair on his nape in a bristling twitch. Opposite the direction of the city where Andrew had come from, the road climbed farther into the hills; Sam headed that direction, seeking distance from the rest of the world. Once he’d hit third gear at a maintenance speed, he cracked his beer open.

“So it sucked,” he said.

Andrew nodded.

Sam hummed and passed his tallboy across the console. Andrew balanced it on his knee, dropping his head onto the seat rest when Sam thumbed the controls to roll their windows down. Fresh summer air filled his mouth with the taste of a forest in the hot dark. The engine revved and Sam laughed under his breath, laughed for himself. Andrew had done this more times than he could count, with a different man at his side. The road leveled out around the side of a hill, a track cut wide and long with a gentle curve and a precipitous drop past the steel barrier rail.

“Well, fuck ’em,” Halse barked, and gunned it.

Acceleration flattened Andrew into his seat, pinning him. With eyes closed and lips popped open he allowed the vertigo to slam through him, cold beer spilling on his crotch when Sam pumped the brakes to corner hard around the curve. The tires slipped in a wild second of drift before he wrangled the car over the center line. Sam Halse drove with the confidence of a man who knew he was a king. Andrew lolled his head to the side and peeked at the broad set of his smile and his loose shoulders. The relaxed pleasure in his posture spoke to the fact that he’d taken this route a million times and would drive it blindfolded if someone asked. Andrew chugged the rest of his beer and tossed his crumpled empty over his shoulder.

There were no streetlamps. Sam’s bluish headlights and the partial moon were all that illuminated the world. Trees towered mossy green, eerily verdant, from out of the blackness on either side of the road as they cut through a flatter strand of hillside. As their pace leveled, fast enough to entertain but slow enough to split his attention without the risk of death, Sam reclaimed his OE. He tilted it to the side of his mouth and watched the road while he sipped. Andrew watched his throat work, watched a trickle of sweat leaching into the collar of his shirt.