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Friends meant nothing in comparison to what he and Eddie were to each other.
He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.
Mischief was Eddie’s personal passion, the one he barely kept separate from his academic or professional life by using the occasional grease of money and charm to smooth over his mistakes.
In the course of hours he’d learned that Sam Halse had cocaine and a fast car and apparently a goddamn death wish—inviting scabs on his knuckles, plus a mouth that could peel paint off a wall. The appeal was obvious. Eddie might have been fond of Riley, talked gothic bullshit with him and got drunk on cheap beer, but now Andrew understood where the hook had sunk in because it pierced straight through the meat of his cheek, too. He wanted to race Halse again, and that was a strange sensation: want. He also wanted to break his knuckles on Halse’s jaw.
Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.
“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”
Eddie had visited him at the end of the spring term and spent the whole five days manhandling him: scratching his scalp, digging thumbs into the knots of his trapezius muscles, rolling on top of him during naps, once gnawing absently on the knob of his wrist for a full five seconds during a movie. Eddie’s touch was a careless claim that meant home, home, home.
“You eaten today?”
SAMMMM YOU SOFTIE
“Hush, dude, you’re good. It’s done,” he said. His palm and fingers were broad, thumb pressed under one ear and nails scratching near the crown of Andrew’s scalp.
The tension has been there since the beginning istg
Andrew scrolled up and down the message thread as he stalked across the quad to the library.
Sam's texts are so sweet what
Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.
Andrew leaned against his rear bumper. “Yeah?” “I got something planned for you tomorrow, so don’t disappear on me.” A mom in a pickup truck pulled up behind him, two kids hollering in the back seat. Their conversation paused. She clambered out of the truck and cast them a judgmental, hassled look, proceeding to viciously input her zip code at the credit card swipe. Andrew braced himself on the WRX’s open passenger window as Sam sat back into his seat. The inside of the car smelled ripe and inviting, musky with weed and the scent he was starting to think of as Sam. “What is it?” “A surprise,
...more
Oof
Andrew lay his forehead on Sam’s collarbone. Sam went still, his breath stirring the hair over Andrew’s ear.
“You good?” Sam asked. “I think I am, yeah,” Andrew said.
The way sams always checking on him-
He closed the remaining distance to lean deliberately against Sam’s broad, inked back.
“Good,” he said, packing the word with expectation and vulnerability, far from on-brand for his provocative kingship.
Andrew ignored the reflexive burn of dampness that sprang to his eyes at the domesticity of the morning in favor of the fresh wonder of smooth skin under his cheek, magnetic and allowed. Life coursed through him with each thud of his pulse. He had no idea what he was doing, except that it fit. Sam pulled him apart one notch at a time to release the horror he held under his skin.
After Sam left with a smarmy reminder that he actually had a job and a brash, smacking kiss to the corner of Andrew’s mouth,
Awww
Andrew hesitated on the couch—he’d still assumed he was sleeping over. When he opened his mouth to ask, Sam bent and planted a hard kiss on his parted lips, then abandoned him in the living room.
“He’s spent so much time on me he didn’t bother with his own shit, until now. He deserves a good thing to happen to him, Andrew. I do like you, but I don’t know if you’re a good thing.” “I don’t either,” he said finally.
Andrew watched him go. As he lay on the couch with a pillow and his comforter, his phone buzzed with a single message. I don’t want to share not even with a dead man
AAAHHHH
Sam jogged down the steps in shorts and desert boots, caught Andrew’s waist in one big hand and snagged his coffee from the carrier. The casual touch felt like forgiveness, or an allowance.
Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?
After he hit fourth gear, Sam’s hand slipped briefly from the shifter to wrap around Andrew’s thigh, squeezing once before retreating again. The shape of his palm lay branded there.
“Andrew,” Sam wheezed—scared and hurting.
Sam had suffered that for him.
“Your eye,” he whispered. “It hurts,” Sam said, voice so small that it made goose bumps rise on Andrew’s arms.
He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.
“He murdered a man with his hands after watching that dude’s wife slit your wrists, and then”—he gestured sidelong at the mess that was Andrew, encompassing the broken remainder of his haunting, feral and barely controlled and part of him—“the ghost shit happened. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Sam gives and gives all the time, and he doesn’t get much in return. Have some patience if he’s being selfish. He seems tough as nails, but he almost died.”
Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.
Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.
“You’re worth it to me.”
