Summer Sons(74)
Platinum refracted moonlight as it rolled across the desktop. Andrew caught the cold metal under his thumb, sitting sprawled and barefoot. For a moment, he rolled it to and fro, considering: one more piece of Eddie returned to him, to try to fit into his life. Nowhere near sufficient. He let the ring clink onto its side and unbuckled his belt, thumbed open the button and zipper of his jeans. He hesitated with a hand splayed over his hip bone, fingertips dipping under the waistband of his briefs. The heel of his hand pressed a bruise over his stomach, speckled in the shape of Sam’s knuckles.
With a groan, he stripped to his underwear and sprawled on the bed. The stale mess of sheets stuck grimy to his summer-salted skin. He kicked them to the end of the mattress, flopped onto his front. The air conditioner hummed. Eddie’s clock read 1:19 A.M. Exhaustion fogged his head, but the constant conflict of the past week left him wired: the vision at the tree, and connecting with Troth, and Del’s axis-wrecking goodbye speech all together, stacked against a whole afternoon spent with Sam—Sam feeding him, and refusing to let him fade out of conversations, and constantly touching him. Light from his phone caught his eye, a soundless notification. He snagged it from the bedside table and held it at an angle above his head at the strained end of the charging cable. Sam had texted him:
Sorry that was a bust
What’s your theory
The reason someone would commit murder over any of this
He responded that’s what I’m trying to figure out and turned the phone off. After another defeated, miserable span of minutes, he lifted his ass enough to fit his hand down his briefs, pinned between his weight and the mattress. The tacky heat of his soft dick filled his palm, skin silky and loose, faintly damp from a long day’s confinement. He pressed his thumb at the base and kneaded his fingers against his balls, holding the whole package more for comfort than pleasure. No response from his traitorous, anxious body; he stayed limp. The pillow smelled as much like old spit as Eddie’s lingering hair product. He let go of himself and rolled onto his side, facing the far wall.
At 3:05 A.M. he threw the pillow on the floor and padded in his underwear to the kitchen table with notebook in hand. The air-conditioning prickled goose bumps over his thighs. Beer at his elbow, he wrote:
The car was with him so someone drove it there. Notes are missing—so’s his phone. Bet someone’s name is in both. How’d he find
He stopped. His notes were sparse and his text blocky, uneven, ugly compared to Eddie’s wild meandering journals with their colorful ink, doodles, erratic trains of thought. Utilitarian at best. He closed the notebook with the pen still uncapped inside and took his beer outside to sit in the pitch-dark lee side of the porch. He wasn’t cut out for the life he’d inherited. It should’ve been him, not Eddie, in the ground.
20
A sedate robotic recording asked him to leave a message. The tone pinged.
“Where are you,” he said, one hand tucked in his back pocket, and hung up.
It wasn’t the most politic of voicemails, but he’d sent West three texts already, waiting out front of the campus café for almost an hour. The sun stabbed at his insomnia-sanded eyes through his shades. In the mood for a fight but without a contender, he grumbled a mashed-up curse containing the skeleton of fuckinggoddamnasshole and went inside to order himself a drink. The barista grimaced sympathetically at his expression.
“Exams, or worse?” the barista said.
Their hair was cotton-candy pink streaked with silver, complemented by a tiny silver nose ring and a light smattering of blond stubble on their upper lip. Signals crossed in his brain between pretty and handsome as Andrew struggled through a distracted pause to say, “Worse than that. Triple-shot iced chai, please.”
As he reached for his card, they said, “Nah, on the house.”
They turned from the counter to snag a cup for his drink, and he noticed from behind how the apron ties cinched their oversized shirt in close to reveal a tantalizingly narrow waist—petite enough for larger hands to wrap most of the way around. Would he have paid attention to them at all, before Nashville? They tossed him another winsome smile as he moved down the counter line. The other barista at the end handed him the finished drink as he muddled through his irritation with West and with himself, jamming his untimely insecurity about noticing and being noticed by the cute stranger in the basement of his brain where it belonged.
He finished the sugar-bomb concoction at a corner table, phone unresponsive at his elbow. Class started in fifteen minutes; West had ghosted him. He strode outside and threw the cup of melting ice into a trash can so hard that a man walking past flinched. Instead of heading for the humanities building, he made for the garage, tired and furious and unfit for human consumption. As he squeezed the steering wheel of the Challenger, another connection to the man he needed to be to get through this, he got a text.
Riley had said, meet me at the carrel in ten?
fine
Riley was drumming his fingers on the desktop when Andrew opened the carrel’s door. Documents spread across both desks, with the loaner texts from Troth in a stack next to the crumpled tote bag. Post-It notes and placeholder tabs bristled from pages of composition books and hardcovers alike.
“Take a look,” Riley said, handing him an open notebook.
Andrew read in Eddie’s scrawl, Hard to tell if West is trying to help or poach my shit. There are questions and there are Questions. He asks too many fucking Questions. And that he said/she said with him and Troth over their Novel article isn’t confidence inspiring either. Keeping him away from the actual research for sure. He went on to discourse at length on a disappointing collection of Southern-themed horror short fiction.