Summer Sons(66)
“I hear you,” Andrew muttered.
“Seems like you’re smarter about it than those two chucklefucks, but I still keep catching you at it.” He gulped the rest of his drink and stood. “C’mon.”
Andrew carried his bourbon with him. Sam’s tattoo moved with the defined muscles of his back, trailing from the complex physical machine of his shoulders across the sweep of his lats as he strode to his room. Andrew paused in the doorway, the quiet urge to stay catching him. Sam sprawled onto his bed with a creak of springs, arms over his head, ambient light from the window caught on the hollows of his knees and the central valley of his chest. He tilted his chin expectantly. Andrew knocked the door shut behind him with his heel, set his drink on the dresser, and considered the floor with its pile of laundry. He hadn’t brought his blankets, but he grabbed a pillow off the bed and flopped onto the gritty roughness of the rug.
Sheets rustled; the bed frame creaked.
“Just get up here,” Sam said.
Andrew blinked into the black space under the bed. He sat up. Sam had turned onto his side to face the far wall. The mattress was at least queen-sized—and he was allowed this one thing, he thought, after the fucking nightmare and the dead deer. He missed sleeping beside a warm, breathing body. Andrew tossed the pillow into its proper spot and laid stiffly on the cool twist of sheets, tucking his lacerated feet and calves under them as unobtrusively as possible. Sam sighed. Andrew breathed to his rhythm.
He woke up alone the next morning in an empty house and wore his borrowed shorts home to Capitol, unsettled by the fleeting, sleep-muddled recollection of Sam’s knees pressed into the backs of his own, alive and sweat-damp. Underneath, the stirring whisper of further, further, you’re getting there. Riley was standing in the kitchen cooking eggs when he opened the porch door and Andrew paused, feeling inexplicably naked in borrowed clothes that he knew Riley would recognize. His soiled jeans dangled from a plastic bag looped around his wrist. The ring was still in the pocket, in the professor’s fancy paper packet. Riley glanced over at him, started to speak, then did a filmic double-take before shutting his mouth.
“Slept there, it was too late to get back,” Andrew said, not addressing the fact that he’d been with Sam in the first place. If he didn’t, he figured Riley wouldn’t.
“Sure,” Riley said, awkward. “Uh, how come you left after talking to Troth?”
“She gave me back Eddie’s ring, and brought up all that stuff about his research, their families. Couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” he admitted.
“Overwhelming, huh,” Riley said as he turned the burner off and scooped his scrambled eggs onto a plate.
Andrew sat at the table. The stag and the mud and the bones hadn’t quite dispersed under the strong summer light. Riley plopped down across from him and tapped the tines of his fork on his plate a couple of times, chewing his bottom lip. Andrew raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, so, I got curious,” Riley blurted out. “And I’m sorry, I know, but I went and dug out his notes in your room? I figured you were going through it so I’d help out. You didn’t miss the field notes—they’re not there. I can show you?”
Andrew let the whiplash range of emotions wash over him, from anger to exposure to reluctant interest; then he said, “Show me.”
Riley dashed up the stairs, leaving his eggs unattended. Andrew stole a bite with his fingers, then snagged the bag of shredded cheese from the counter to snack out of. On his return, Riley thumped the stack of journals and pages onto the glass tabletop—looking eager to present his research. With a flourish he spread them out.
“This is all personal stuff—like, his journaling and planning and thinking, but not the ethnographic stuff like demographic data and transcriptions and shit. I remember seeing his field notebook; it was like, this grey Moleskine. If this is everything you found, there’s a ton of shit missing,” Riley said. “Have you checked his carrel?”
“I didn’t know he had one to check,” he replied.
“Well, shit.”
The men stared at each other for a long moment.
“It’s under both our names, but I haven’t gone back since. He kept the spare key upstairs,” Riley said. “It’s reserved all through the semester.”
“Then let’s go see,” Andrew said.
“Let me change,” Riley said, cramming two bites of eggs into his mouth before jogging upstairs again.
Andrew bounced his leg, waiting. His phone had a text from West, asking him what had happened with Troth at the party, and he responded she returned one of Eddie’s rings to me and ambushed me about his research, I had to go after that. West’s typing bubble popped up, disappeared, popped up again. Riley returned before the message arrived, twirling keys around his finger and wearing a grey Henley, the bright butter-yellow of his sneakers offsetting black jeans. His glasses narrowed the lines of his face. Andrew was struck again at the chameleon effect of his roommate: one minute a grubby punk with an ugly, fast car, the next a svelte young academic. The contradiction made his skin crawl with sympathy. He had to fit in somehow.
“This might be nothing,” Riley said, as if to convince himself.
They drove the short distance to campus in tense silence, and a feral energy pushed their pace striding across the weekend-emptied quad, dotted with a bare handful of students appreciating the weather. The carrels were located in the central library, up a few flights of well-trodden stairs. Overhead fluorescents hummed ominously across the rows of cubicle-esque box offices. Riley strode through the first row, took a turn, and cut across two more before he stopped in front of number 32. Andrew unclipped the small brass key and fit it into the petite lock, scarred from decades of clumsy student handling. It turned with an audible click.