We Could Be So Good

by Cat Sebastian

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.

With covert glances across the newsroom, Nick catalogs all the things he doesn’t like about Andy and stores them up like a misanthropic squirrel.

He ought to spend the rest of his career resenting the ever-living daylights out of Andy. Instead he lasts less than a week. Less than a day, even. About forty-five minutes, to be exact, and that’s Andy’s fault, too.

to a cafeteria worker who prays loudly for you in Hungarian if you don’t eat your potatoes.

Nick can’t send the kid back to the newsroom looking like he’s been mugged.

you can’t??? really Nick??

Andy flashes Nick a smile, a thousand watts of professionally straightened teeth, and it’s like a two-by-four to the head. It takes Nick a minute to arrange his face.

“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. “What’s the matter with you?” Nick shouts to the man. “Put that thing away. There are children here.” Andy’s face is bright red and his shoulders are shaking. “‘Put that thing away’?” he repeats. “I’m not going to shout dick in public,” Nick says reasonably. “No, of course not. Look at me, forgetting my manners.”

Andy gives him this flat, disappointed look that Nick recognizes because Nick invented it and now he’s going to have to sue Andy for copyright infringement.

But he’s really, really good at people—at guessing what a person might be feeling and knowing what it will take to make them feel better. It sounds so simple, so unremarkable, but when it comes down to it, Nick thinks it might be pretty rare.

He remembers Andy’s hand on the small of Emily’s back as they walked out of the restaurant. That’s what he wants, and he doesn’t even know what to call it.

He’s been patching himself up for a long time now.

“Back in his day they didn’t have Band-Aids,” Nick continues. “They just slapped mud on their wounds and went back to drawing the news on the walls of their caves.” “I can still hear you,” Jorgensen says. “It’s nice when the elderly keep their hearing,” Andy observes.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Emily says, pinching his shoulder. “Stop looking at me like I’m about to peel off my false mustache and reveal that I’m three KGB agents in a trench coat.”

“It’s the crème de menthe,” Nick says, eying the green liquid distastefully. “It’s like drinking toothpaste, if toothpaste got ideas above its station.”

Except—why the fuck not? Is Nick so mired in gay paranoia that he can’t even admit to being friends with another man without thinking vice cops are about to crawl out from under the desks and arrest him? Is he so used to being lonely that even companionship feels dangerous?

Andy hasn’t ever been to Nick’s apartment and doesn’t know what to expect. He has the vague idea that Nick ought to live in the sort of apartment that looks like a miniature spaceship, with one of those sofas that’s about as comfortable as a stack of corrugated cardboard.

Look, Andy knows that he’s a walking disaster. He knows that he’s clinging to a veneer of professionalism by the grace of God and his last name and every trick his mother ever taught him.

but the idea that Nick thinks sex is fine as long as you wear a rubber and everyone has a good time strikes Andy as the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

because the fact of Nick in his underwear seems like a riddle that Andy can’t quite solve.

The man looks appraisingly at Andy and shrugs. “A heart doctor, though,” he says in a tone that suggests that getting jilted in favor of cardiologists is all anyone can expect. That maybe Andy should have considered medical school if he didn’t want to get jilted. That Emily did what she had to do, because who could turn down a heart doctor?

Just lie to them the way you lie to everyone else, Andy wants to shout. But maybe lying to your family is a bad idea; Andy wouldn’t know. “I’m glad you don’t go too often, then,” Andy says, and it must sound more fervent than he intended, because Nick’s expression goes all baffled and dopey the way it does whenever he has to deal with the fact that anyone gives a shit about him.

“I was going to make minestrone soup,” Nick says. “You like soup.” “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 takes a ball of paper out of the wastebasket and throws it at Andy’s head.

It comes from too many mornings waking up to a note on the kitchen table, too many letters with foreign postmarks. He knows why he’s this way and that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.

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.

That’s what newspapers do, isn’t it? They make things concrete, they make it hard to look away.

Couldn’t the only person he loved try to take care of herself, for Andy’s sake if not for her own? It was a useless thought then, and it’s a useless thought now, so he grits his teeth and hopes Nick has a first aid kit.

He doesn’t think that with anyone else he’d have to suppress the bizarre urge to kiss their temple when he finishes.

just learned that a part of his heart is on the outside of his body, in the possession of somebody else entirely.

Andy worries that it’s his lot in life to be mocked by elderly Italian women.

Andy is depending on the correct adjective to act as a key to unlock the confusion in his mind, to open a door that doesn’t have “Congratulations, You’re Queer” printed in huge letters on the other side. But he doesn’t have an adjective. What he has, unfortunately, is the beginnings of a hard-on and the certain knowledge that he wants to touch Nick.

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.

He’s always so goddamn careful that sometimes he feels like there isn’t a person in the world he can speak freely to about anything that matters.

His heart’s already a little broken, so why not break it all the way through.

All Nick has to do is figure out what Andy’s offering. He could, in theory, just ask, but that’s a lunatic idea and he’s having none of it.

The idiot orange cat is sitting on the fire escape, so he scoops the animal up and brings him in. He doesn’t feel like carrying him downstairs, so instead he opens a can of tuna fish and puts it on the floor, then watches the cat scream bloody murder at the can before realizing that it’s food. Even the company of the world’s least competent cat is better than no company at all.

But here Andy is, laying himself bare, and Nick isn’t sure he’s ever seen anything so brave in his life. This is a man who plays it safe, a man who orders the same sandwich every day for lunch. And now he’s taking a risk, and he’s taking it for Nick.

If Nick quits the Chronicle and instead devotes his life to seeking out the least seductive activity, he’ll never find anything worse than folding laundry.

“If I hug you, are you going to pass out?” Nick brings a hand up to cover his eyes. “You’re the worst.”

When he finally slides his lips over Nick’s, Nick involuntarily grips Andy’s shirt. “Hi, Nick,” Andy says, and Nick can feel the smile against his mouth. “Hi yourself,” Nick mumbles, and he pulls Andy closer.

“Gay sex doesn’t have so much in common with bowling. You’d be surprised.”

Mostly chaste, sweet touches that Nick wants to hold in his hands and store someplace safe.

“Nick.” Just that one word, just his name, spoken gently and without reproach, and Nick is ready to cry for the first time in years.

“I want you to be safe. I need you to be safe, Nick. I can’t function in a world that won’t let you be safe.” And that’s too bad, because Nick has never heard of that world, but Andy looks so earnest and lovely and righteous that Nick has to kiss him.

The warmth of wanting and being wanted start to push away some of the fear and sadness.

He moves his hips so they rock together, and then after that there’s nothing but gasped names and soft words, the two of them sheltered together in a warm safe place.

Now when he looks at Andy, he doesn’t even see his component parts unless he makes himself pay attention. Instead it all coalesces into the shape of Nick’s favorite person.

And then when I moved in here, I saw it every day, because you don’t understand shirts, and now I’m committed to lewdness and homosexuality. And probably communism. We’ll find out, I guess.”

How are you feeling? the sheet of yellow-lined paper reads. It isn’t signed, but it doesn’t need to be.

“Egg soup,” Nick says, sitting down across from Andy. “It’s good when you’re sick.” Andy would eat a bowl of motor oil if Nick put it in front of him and it’s completely insane that Nick doesn’t seem to already know this.

Andy falls asleep to the feel of Nick’s hand stroking his hair, and he can’t remember if he asked Nick to do that or if Nick somehow knew.