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He has a cluster of tiny freckles at the corner of his mouth shaped like a copy editor’s caret and, since Nick can’t stop looking at them, those freckles are going to ruin his career.
Nick’s hair laughs in the face of pomade.
by the time you’ve mastered the hot-water tap in the eighth-floor men’s room, you probably have a byline.
“Safe and sound.” He pats Andy’s chest, then pulls his hand away like he’s touched a hot stove.
“This is quite the cultural experience,” Andy remarks calmly as a man a few seats over whips out his dick and begins to piss in the aisle.
Nick laughs, half from the shock of hearing Andy swear, and half from the unfamiliar note of vehemence in his tone.
He puts his hand on Nick’s forearm, a glancing brush of soft fingertips across bare skin.
She pauses, watching as Nick and Andy perform their usual exchange of pickles (which Andy regards as an abomination) and tomatoes (which Nick maintains threaten the stability of his sandwich).
Nick is dimly aware of a grumble coming from the direction of the copyboys’ bench, and he realizes he’s probably smiled enough in the past two minutes to make a mess of their betting pool for the entire month of July.
Andy rolls his eyes. “We both know that if you bleed on that shirt, you’re going to gripe about it for the rest of the day. Let me stick a Band-Aid on your forehead so we can move on with our lives.”
He pushes the man onto the bed and gives him what he wants, but keeps his own clothes on, smelling Andy’s aftershave on his collar.
Nick tries not to think about the fact that he spends most of his life doing his best to avoid talking to his brother but would get him on the phone in a heartbeat for Andy Fleming’s fucking sink.
He turns around in time to see Andy’s face light up. It’s the brightest thing in the shadowy newsroom, the brightest thing in the city, and all Nick can do is stare.
He looks like he’s ready to handle whatever’s thrown at him, whether it’s a punch or a breaking story, and after a year Andy knows this impression is correct. Nick is frighteningly competent.
His head’s still a little foggy from last night’s drinking and he realizes that his eyes are sort of glazing over as he watches Nick cook. It’s just eggs. He’s watched people make eggs before, hasn’t he? There’s nothing so mesmerizing about it. Andy’s just tired and emotionally overwrought.
“I do like soup,” Andy agrees. “I take it that’s an invitation, not you taunting me with soup I don’t get to eat.”
Nick turns around, his arms folded across his chest, like he’s furious that Andy’s making him say this. “It’s nice having you here. I hate cooking for myself. I wind up eating scrambled eggs or Chinese food every night.”
Any man who breaks Nick’s heart will be lucky if all Andy does is give them the evil eye and hold a grudge, but he doesn’t say so.
Whenever Andy attempts to protest, Nick shuts him up with a glare, making Andy suspect that Nick secretly likes waking up early. This is the most disturbing thing he’s learned about Nick or possibly anyone.
The idea of being alone in Nick’s empty apartment feels all wrong, like Nick’s absence will be a tangible thing, like it might sink into his bones and never leave.
He thinks about that man looking back over his shoulder at him, and he thinks about what some other, braver version of himself might have done, and he has to admit to himself, even if never to anyone else, that the article is talking about him, at least a little. At least theoretically.
Nick sits on the edge of the table, and in order to get close enough to be any use, Andy has to stand between his legs. He feels like he’s never been so close to anyone.
He doesn’t think he’d be so conscious of their breath against his cheek as he bends to unfasten the buttons at their cuffs. He doesn’t think that with anyone else he’d have to suppress the bizarre urge to kiss their temple when he finishes.
He feels as if he’s been turned inside out, as if he just learned that a part of his heart is on the outside of his body, in the possession of somebody else entirely.
Andy doesn’t even try to pay attention to what’s happening on the television. Instead he brushes Nick’s hair off his forehead, and then—God, he hopes he isn’t being a creep—combs his fingers through Nick’s hair.
He tells himself that the ache in his chest is what anyone would feel when a friend is injured. But Andy has dozens of friends and has never felt the urge to curl up beside them on the sofa.
“The next time you consider being that kind of idiot, can you imagine how I’d feel if you didn’t come home? If I learned about your death in a police briefing?”
Nick rubs the back of his neck, somehow managing to look skeptical and pleased and extremely embarrassed all at once, which makes Andy want to keep going, keep telling him good things that he ought to already know.
It feels like the city is poised for something beautiful to happen, even though you can count on the weather to be intermittently repulsive until May.
He stares at the place where Nick touches him, his hand dark against the white cotton of Andy’s sweater. Nick doesn’t let go, and when Andy takes a breath, all he can smell are the daffodils’ sweetness mixed with the aroma of whatever Nick’s cooking. He has the same feeling that he did outside, of something lovely being about to happen.
The moment stretches too long, with Andy ineptly fiddling with daffodil stems and Nick watching him and something hanging in the air just out of sight, and if Andy keeps his eyes averted, maybe he won’t have to see it.
and Charlie’s relentless flirtation with Nick. Which is fine! And definitely doesn’t make Andy feel strange at all.
Nick finally moves out of the way, but Andy feels his eyes on him as he leaves the apartment.
Nick stretches his arm across the back of the sofa, his fingers so close to the nape of Andy’s neck that he can almost feel them, so close that Andy has a hard time thinking about anything else.
Andy isn’t expecting an epiphany at eight on a Monday morning when he’s still mostly asleep, when his first cup of coffee is still hot in his hand. Honestly, Andy isn’t expecting an epiphany ever.
The problem, really, is that Nick shaves without a shirt on. He stands there in his suit trousers but with no shirt, not even an undershirt, and tilts his jaw this way and that, and Andy can’t help but notice.
Something theoretical has become something altogether too real, too concrete, and there’s no wriggling away from the fact that this is very gay.
When he looks at Nick, he’s consumed with a wanting so intense that it feels tangled up with the core of who he is. It’s in there with newspapers and loneliness in the package deal that is Andy Fleming.
Andy can smell Nick’s soap—the green bars of soap bought three at a time at the grocery store and which Andy now uses himself—and wants to press his face into Nick’s neck and breathe it in. Like a maniac.
“You’re that dedicated to me getting my dick sucked.” Andy is going to die. “It’s a mission of mercy. Somebody has to look after it.”
It took so much effort for Andy to say something approaching the truth, to say out loud something he hadn’t admitted even to himself until recently, and now Nick wants to pretend he never heard it?
Nick tries to imagine how very much he would lose his mind if he let Andy touch him. He’d certainly lose his dignity. He’d probably say all kinds of soft and stupid things and it would be so embarrassing for both of them that they’d never be able to look one another in the eye again.
Andy matters a hell of a lot more to him than his own hurt feelings. He’s going to do whatever it takes to put things back the way they were.
“Hey, Andy? We’re always going to be okay. At least on my end. Understand?”
Nick is constitutionally incapable of sleeping past seven in the morning. He has some kind of godforsaken alarm clock in his brain that shakes him awake at about half past six every goddamn day, including weekends, including holidays, including days he’s profoundly and regrettably hungover.
“You’re going to wear a Red Sox cap and we’re going to get murdered—literally murdered, Andy—on the way from the subway to the stadium.” “Ah!” Andy says triumphantly. “We can take a car.”
A couple times a year, Nick finds a tale of gay misery and woe on his desk, because apparently Bailey has taken it upon himself to be Nick’s personal sad gay librarian.
And also because Andy is adorable like this, but Nick’s trying not to think about that.
Also, he hasn’t lost his keys, not once, since moving in with Nick. Nick hardly knows what to make of it.
Nick wants that—that thing that exists between people who are together for more than a night. And he’s never going to have it, not with his head screwed on the way it is, but he at least wants a chance to go to bed with someone he cares about. He doesn’t dislike the perfunctory, transactional sex he usually has, but sleeping with Andy would be—more. It would be more in ways that would result in Nick’s heart getting broken at the end of it, but he wants it anyway.
