Chapter Text
It’s not an auspicious first meeting by any definition of the word: Andrew on his knees, a dick in his mouth and five minutes before he needs to be behind the bar, when the storeroom/backroom/office door slams open. Andrew sits on his heels, one hand still pressed to the base of the dick in front of him. He raises an eyebrow as their intruder skids to a halt.
“Close,” Andrew drawls, casually wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand. “Exit’s the next door down.”
The guy nods jerkily, and Andrew can see he’s panting a little, panic-like, and it’s not like Andrew cares about whatever has sent the guy running into this storeroom, but fuck if Andrew doesn’t recognize that look. Viscerally. Andrew sighs, dramatic and loud and long-suffering, and hops to his feet.
“What the fuck?” Brenden whines when Andrew drops his hand from his dick.
“Shh,” Andrew says, pressing a flat palm to Brenden’s chest and shoving a little, his eyes still on the guy, who is frozen in place, staring back at him. Andrew gets a better look now that he’s on his feet - dark red hair, wiry, stupid pretty. Taller than Andrew, yes - everyone is - but only by a few inches. A single scar runs down his cheek and pulls the side of his lip into a perpetual smirk, and even in the low light of the storage room Andrew can see that his eyes are bluer than blue. Glacial.
“This way,” Andrew says, motioning back out the door.
“Andreeeew.” Brenden drags his name out in a needy request. “Really?”
Andrew throws him a quick look. “You’ve got two hands Brandon. Pick one.”
“It’s Brenden,” Brenden mutters, but Andrew knows that and Brenden knows he knows that. It’s not Brenden’s first rodeo in the back room with Andrew. No means no means no even when your dick is waving in the air.
“This way,” Andrew repeats, ignoring Brenden to corral the guy in front of him out the door and through the next one, depositing them into the back alley and the cool night of North Carolina in November. “Got a name?” Andrew asks.
“Neil,” Neil says eventually, after collapsing against the wall, after taking greedy gulps of the crisp air, after unclenching his hands from the hem of his flannel shirt.
Andrew lights a cigarette and props up next to him, watching curiously as Neil leans oh so slightly towards him, eyes on the smoke rising up between them. Andrew lights another and hands it over, and that’s how Kevin Day finds them, silent and smoking into the night, holding up the brick wall behind them with their shoulder blades.
“Neil,” Kevin says, his voice somehow simultaneously relieved and full of censure. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He flicks a cautious look at Andrew and frowns. “Andrew,” he says with a small incline of his head before turning his frown back to Neil. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
Andrew says nothing as Neil drops his cigarette and pushes off the wall. “I’m fine. Sorry.” He offers up a small smile to Andrew, and Andrew winks at him, gratified when Neil startles before following Kevin back inside.
Andrew closes his eyes. Of course Neil is a horse boy. Of course he’s one of Wymack’s. He lights another cigarette and rolls his eyes at the sky about it.
***
Andrew doesn’t fuck with horse boys. He has reasons for this rule, several reasons, but none of them are the real reason. The real reason is something he doesn’t admit, even to himself, is tangled up in memories of warm muzzles and big fences and dreams that had only ever belonged to Andrew on borrowed time.
So Neil is off limits, for all of those reasons, admitted and otherwise, but Neil doesn’t seem to get that memo, doesn’t read the writing on the storage room wall, because he keeps coming back to Andrew’s bar - which would be nothing of note in and of itself - it’s not like there are other options in the tiny town of Southern Pines. He and Roland do the bulk of their yearly business between November and March, when a handful of the top tier trainers from up north caravan down with their riders and their horses and post up in North Carolina to ride out the winter - ha! - at one of the numerous fancy barns for lease along the Walthour-Moss Foundation. It’s a horse town through and through, yes, but sprinkled liberally with a seasoning of golf courses and guys named Blaine and Justin sporting polo shirt tans. These are the ones Andrew sticks to; golfers are safe, a dime a dozen, and they don’t stay in town long enough to be a problem, usually passing through for a boys’ weekend or the amateur tournament here and there. Horse boys, on the other hand, are a problem. Even the ones who leave usually come back every year, like clockwork, when the leaves start to turn. Problems, the lot of them. And Neil Josten is definitely a problem.
“Hey,” he says, two days later when he comes back, sliding onto a stool at the very end of the weathered and polished bar. Hey, he says, like he and Andrew are friends now, bonded after a cigarette and the shared memory of a dick swinging footloose and fancy free in the back room. Except Neil never mentions the dick, just sits quietly with his soda water and lime, watching the room sometimes but more often watching Andrew.
“You’ve got a staring problem,” Andrew tells him, filling up his drink for the third time that particular night.
“Does it bother you?” Neil asks, interested. Unfazed. Andrew slides a napkin full of sliced limes over and watches as Neil squeezes three of them into his glass, one after the other. It doesn’t bother him, he realizes, and he tells Neil so. Neil nods and wraps his lips around the straw and Andrew looks away, catches Kevin watching them from across the room.
An hour and four vodka tonics later, Kevin inclines his head at Neil before making his way to the door, the table of Wymack's riders behind him like little ducks, and Neil leaves Andrew with a ten dollar tip on the soda waters Andrew didn’t charge him for, the bastard.
***
“You never sit with them,” Andrew says the forth or fifth time that Neil hops up onto what Andrew already thinks of as Neil’s stool.
“I don’t get free drinks if I sit with them.”
“Hate to break it to you, but we don’t charge for water.”
“It’s soda water,” Neil says. “With lime,” he adds, squeezing a lime in punctuation.
“You are ridiculous,” Andrew tells him, topping off Neil’s water, because somehow it has already become this easy - their banter, their orbit.
It’s only the fourth or fifth time Neil has come through his door.
Ridiculous.
It’s Tuesday, the bar is mostly empty, and Roland is running table service (because when you swing by drunk people’s tables they order more drinks than if they have to motivate to belly up to the bar) so it’s just Neil and Andrew and the not-so-casual watchful eye of Kevin Day when Andrew pulls his armbands off to dunk and rinse the defeated army of stemware lined up by the sink.
He feels Neil’s eyes on him, knows he can probably see from there, but that doesn’t mean that Andrew is going to put up with wet armbands all night, and they are running low on martini glasses. “Staring,” Andrew says.
“Yeah,” Neil says, but when Andrew looks up, Neil’s gaze is on his face, not his arms.
***
“My dad did this,” Neil says a week later, pointing at his cheek.
Andrew stops arranging lime slices and gives Neil his full attention, and ignores that this is tit for tat, a balanced ledger.
“A kitchen knife,” Neil says, all matter of fact, all impassive, all wrapped in a decisive nod. Andrew doesn’t react, and Neil shrugs. “Whips were more his thing, but he didn’t keep those in the house.”
“Okay,” Andrew says, when it’s clear that’s all Neil is going to say.
“You didn’t ask,” Neil says. “Everyone asks.”
“I’m not everyone,” Andrew says.
Neil snorts, and it’s a soft thing. “No,” he agrees.
***
It’s another week past and Andrew doesn’t want to ask about it, but he can’t stop thinking about it, his brain a merry little merry go round when it grabs onto something and holds tight, spinning everything until Andrew is dizzy.
So he asks, “Where is your dad now?”
Neil stirs his water, watching Andrew, and Andrew watches him back, watches how he struggles to keep his face together, watches and realizes it is a giddy smile Neil is trying to tamp down, not sorrow.
“Dead,” Neil says finally. “Kicked in the head by a horse. It took a while, a week, before he died. Hooked up to machines. But he never woke up, and my mom was gone so it was me they asked.”
“Asked?” Andrew repeats.
“To pull the plug,” Neil says, and this time the smile breaks loose, stretched crooked by his scar, but incandescent all the same, and Andrew has to look away.
***
Andrew comes out of the back room right on the heels of Bradley (or Chad? He doesn’t actually know this one’s name because he never asked for it) when he sees Neil, not perched in his spot at the end of Andrew’s bar, but tucked up against Kevin’s side at the booth with Seth and Laila and the one he doesn’t know the name of because he’s new this season, like Neil.
Neil’s eyes are already on Andrew, and Andrew looks right back at him because he can suck whosever dick he wants, and it’s not like that’s what happened anyway, it had been a quick handjob because Andrew has work to do - horse boys and golf boys to get drunk, good honest work - so he slips behind the bar and washes his hands because he’s not a fucking heathen even if Aaron and several social workers would disagree with that assessment, and by the time he looks up Neil has reclaimed his seat and pushed his empty glass Andrew’s way and Andrew is suddenly, irrationally annoyed.
“You left your boyfriend high and dry,” Andrew says, annoyance doubled down because his tone sounds irritated and he knows it does.
Neil’s brow crinkles and then clears as he looks back at Kevin, catching Andrew’s drift. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” he says.
“Does Kevin know that?” Andrew asks drily, fighting for and catching his equilibrium as he slides lime wedges over to Neil.
“Kevin knows everything about me,” Neil says.
“Cool,” Andrew says. He is absolutely not going to unpack that spike of jealousy.
“As in he knows I’ve never dated,” Neil adds.
Andrew is… surprised. Neil is messy and awkward and intense and a bit weird, but. He’s also hot as fuck and fit and, if he’s with Wymack’s crew, a talented rider in a sport dominated by women and gay dudes. For him not to have dated is… unlikely. But he’s just said it, and while Neil clocks as a liar, Andrew can’t shut down the voice that tells him that the fucker hasn’t lied to him. Yet.
Andrew raises a single, deadly eyebrow, and it’s not a question but it’s totally a question, and Neil answers, because… orbit. Because he reads Andrew like no one has, well, since Renee.
“I wasn’t allowed to date,” Neil says.
He looks at Andrew with such intensity then, with an open face that Andrew never asked for, and Andrew takes a step back, organizes his words, and says, “Newsflash, Neil, your parents are dead, you’re a fucking grown up, and you can do whatever you want, now. Congratulations.”
Andrew turns on heel and walks away from Neil and proceeds to (mostly) ignore him for the rest of the night.
***
It’s the very next night - the very next fucking night - that Neil comes in alone, without Kevin and his entourage, plops on his stool, and asks Andrew (like he’s asking for the time) if Andrew wants to take him to the back room.
“What,” Andrew says.
“It’s okay if it’s a no,” Neil says. He’s not even blushing; just sits there with his head cocked slightly to the side, hand resting on the edge of the bar. The ends of his hair are damp and curling and he smells like cedar and sandalwood when he normally smells vaguely of hay and pine shavings and horse. It’s disconcerting.
“To be clear,” Andrew says, “what exactly are you asking me?”
“Uh.” Neil stumbles over the word; it’s the first time Andrew has seen him falter, ever, except for that very first night, busting through the wrong door, and even then it had been his body and not his words that failed him.
He still doesn’t blush, though.
“Neil,” Andrew says. He has all the time in the world and there is nothing he wants more than to hear the next words out of Neil’s mouth.
“I could blow you,” Neil says, guilelessly, perfectly, earnestly.
Andrew stares at him, shakes his head. “I don’t do that.”
“Okay-,” Neil starts, pulling back a little. Not retreating, not fully, but putting back on the armor he’d sat aside to say this thing and Andrew, well. Andrew throws all his self preservation out the window because he steps closer, his movement arresting Neil’s withdrawal, and he says, Andrew says-
“Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t blow you.”
Andrew has no expectations riding on Neil’s response but his heart still takes a more than healthy pause when Neil hops off his stool and says “Okay,” looking at Andrew intently in his clean button down and jeans that fit.
“Neil,” Andrew says carefully.
“Andrew,” Neil says. He looks at him, and Andrew looks back, and Neil says, “I can’t be any worse of a choice than Brenden.”
“Fuck.” Andrew doesn’t entirely mean to say the word out loud, but Neil just blinks at him. “I hate you,” Andrew says.
Neil fucking smiles - smiles - at that, then turns and walks down the hallway to the goddamned back room.
***
Neil is waiting for him, calm as a placid lake, cool as a cucumber, leaning up against the wall in the same place Brenden had been when Neil walked in on them the very first night.
Andrew remembers to lock the door this time, steps close to Neil, doesn’t miss the small exhale he lets out when Andrew is within touching distance.
“I don’t date,” Andrew says, and he briefly wishes the light in the storeroom was brighter, that he could see the striation of blue ringing Neil’s irises. His eyes are darker here; a lagoon, an alpine lake.
“Sure,” Neil says.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” Andrew adds.
“I know,” Neil says.
Andrew steps slightly closer and Neil’s hands twitch at his side but stay put. “I have two rules,” Andrew says. “Keep your hands to yourself, and you tell me if anything changes. If you want to stop I will stop, no questions asked.”
Neil nods and tilts his hips just far enough forward to tuck his hands in his back pockets. Andrew steps closer still, close enough to ghost his breath along Neil’s cheek, but not touching him, not yet.
“Tell me yes then,” he says, and Neil says “Yes,” and Andrew presses a palm to Neil’s chest and tucks his face into his neck, briefly, oh so briefly, but long enough to feel Neil’s pulse rabbiting against his lips. Neil lets out that little breath again and Andrew pulls back enough to see his face, to see his eyes wide and lips parted. “Yes?” Andrew asks again, because Neil is not as calm and collected and cool as he appears.
Neil nods and swallows and says, “Yes, it’s just that I haven’t done this before.”
Andrew searches his face but he doesn’t see a lie, so he presses close again, thinks irrationally he wants more Neil, thinks irrationally that he wishes Neil smelled like the barn, like he usually does.
“Anywhere I can’t touch you?” Andrew asks the skin behind Neil’s ear, and Andrew feels him hesitate, feels him shore up against him, lean towards him, lean on him, and then say, “I want to keep my shirt on.”
And maybe Andrew immediately thinks about splaying palms on Neil’s bare chest, licking a stripe across his nipple, but these aren’t things Andrew does anyway, so he nods, drags his fingertips down the front of Neil’s jeans, gratified to find that Neil very much is interested, and drops to his knees.
***
It’s over too fast and not fast enough - Andrew would take his time if he could, but he can’t because Neil is warm and pliant, and the scars he is so clearly hiding under his shirt lick down over his hip bones and slide under Andrew’s fingers to give Andrew pause, and Andrew can’t look at that too closely.
Neil is quiet in a way he never is, and when he orgasms he stills, holds his breath for a moment longer than Andrew expects before he sags a bit against the wall, looking down with wide eyes at Andrew, both hands still tucked into his back pockets.
Andrew doesn’t get off. Instead he wipes his mouth with a slow swipe of his thumb and stands to look Neil in the eye as he tucks him back into his pants, does up his zipper and button, buckles his belt. It’s more intimate, this gesture, the carefulness, than it was when Andrew’s mouth was on Neil’s dick. The intimacy is uncomfortable, and Andrew lets it push him back a step, tamps it down and tramples it until he’s able to gesture Neil back through the door.
Kevin’s not there, so Andrew doesn’t bother to wait before he follows Neil back out to the bar, but Roland watches them, his face a study of side eye and raised eyebrow that Andrew pointedly ignores as he slips back behind the bar and Neil slides onto his stool.
Andrew sends Neil on his way a few hours later - after Neil decorates a twelve inch radius around his glass with a graveyard of lime wedges, after Andrew tucks two fingers into Neil’s shirt collar and tugs him forward, to say, “Don’t borrow Kevin’s cologne next time.”
Andrew doesn’t miss the way that Neil’s gaze drops down to his lips before he repeats, “Next time?” and Andrew doesn’t bother to answer when he shoves Neil away from him and tilts his head to the door in clear marching orders.
***
There is a next time. Quite a few next times, before the winter season is over, before Neil leans against Andrew in the back room one Tuesday at the end of February after Andrew has come in his own hand and breathes, “We leave on Monday.” Andrew is still chasing his breath, his forehead pressed to Neil’s shoulder, so he nods, because the horse boys always leave with the last dregs of winter, and Neil is a horse boy.
They head back to the bar where Andrew supplies Neil with limes and bubbly water and doesn’t flinch when Kevin comes to collect Neil, ignores the hitch in his chest when Neil hesitates after slipping on his coat, refuses to give in the absurd urge to walk around the bar and press his fingers to Neil’s skin one last time. Andrew raises an eyebrow and Neil smiles as bright as the sun before walking out the door without a single look back.
It’s not until the next Tuesday rolls around - the bar filling slowly with locals and a few brave golfers chasing Carolina’s early spring, Andrew’s eyes wandering to Neil’s empty stool for the third time that night and his lime bucket overflowing because he cut more than he needs now that the menace isn’t setting up camp at the end of his bar - that Andrew thinks, briefly, that he should have broken his own rule and kissed the stupid horse boy at least once before he disappeared into the ether.
He wonders, fleetingly, if his mouth would taste of limes.
***
The first postcard arrives two weeks later. Roland waves it in Andrew’s face, and Andrew ignores him long enough that Roland drops it on the table and walks away, whistling. Andrew waits an entire minute before picking it up, frowning at the address - written in neat block letters to Andrew (no last name) and the address of the bar just underneath.
This cat’s name is Riverpants McFluffernut. Reminds me of you - N
Andrew flips the postcard over to find a black cat sitting stoically in the middle of a paisley sofa in an alleyway. The cat looks pissed off. Andrew rolls his eyes, but he reads the card three more times before abandoning it on the table.
The next postcard comes a week later, this one a line drawing of a house in the shape of a toad, shaded in with watercolor.
Imagine, a house that eats flies. Saves a heap on electric bills -N
The cards arrive like clockwork after that, waiting in the rusty old mailbox every Tuesday morning, which means they arrive on Monday when the bar is closed.
A potted lime tree. Did you know they DO grow on trees? -N
A movie still from Casablanca. Kevin quotes this movie all the time. Something about a horse walking into a bar. -N
Andrew pretends not to notice when Roland starts pinning them to the corkboard over the desk in the back room - a nonsensical collage built of a flamingo standing sentinel in the middle of a kiddie pool, a cactus wearing a sweater, a fox peering in through the broken corner of a window - but he leaves the postcards on the bar to be found just the same.
***
Andrew isn’t there when Wymack’s crew returns to Southern Pines for the winter. He’d had to run to the Food Lion for citrus - oranges, lemons, limes - because their delivery was delayed. It’s Kevin he sees first, holding court with his riders in their usual corner - still their spot even if they’ve been gone for 8 months. Andrew pivots in place, he can’t help himself, fists gripped tight around beige plastic grocery bags full of fruit, to find Neil perched on his stool, elbow on the bar, chin resting in hand, staring right back at Andrew. Roland slides a soda water in front of him, sans lime, and Neil doesn’t spare him a glance.
He looks. So fucking good. He’s filled out a bit, tanned up a bit, and has clearly just had his hair cut by someone who isn’t a half blind chimpanzee working with dull scissors. Andrew imagines that blue polo shirt he’s wearing is doing ungodly things to his eyes, but he can’t see the color from here.
He desperately wants to see the color.
Andrew walks straight to the bar and behind it, ignoring Neil for a moment to drop the bags on the workstation, to point at Roland, to turn around and look at Neil again from the safety of behind the bar, and yeah, yep fuck him for putting that shirt on; his blue eyes are glowing, and that sun-kissed tan has raised more freckles across the bridge of his nose, his cheekbones, and Andrew can’t quite tell if Neil is grinning at him or if it’s the work of that scar, pulling the side of his mouth up into a smirk.
“Hello Andrew,” Neil says.
“Neil.”
“Roland says you’re out of limes.”
Andrew just manages to not roll his eyes, snags one of the bags to fish out a lime, wash it, and cuts it into neat little wedges to dump in a pile on a napkin in front of Neil.
Neil is definitely grinning now. “Thanks,” he says, just before he shoves one of the wedges between his teeth and bites down, sucking out all the juice and, well. Andrew is only human after all.
“Come here,” Andrew says, slipping around the bar and hooking a finger in Neil’s belt loop. He tows Neil to the back room, and doesn’t realize the menace still has a lime in his hand until he has him pressed up against their wall.
“Miss me?” Neil asks.
“Of course not,” Andrew says. He grabs Neil’s hand, flicks the lime away, and looks him right in those impossible eyes as he sucks Neil’s middle finger into his mouth. It’s tart and calloused and warm and the most delicious piece of all is Neil’s mouth dropping open, his bottom lip still shiny from lime juice and right there for the taking.
Andrew bites the tip of Neil’s finger and then lets him go, and Neil’s little indrawn breath hits Andrew’s bloodstream like quicksilver. “This still means nothing,” Andrew says, pressing their hips together. Neil flicks a gaze over his shoulder, and Andrew freezes, but doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t have to, he knows what Neil sees: the mismatched rainbow collage of every last ridiculous postcard Neil had sent him, pinned to the corkboard until you couldn’t even see cork anymore.
Neil smirks softly, and his gaze drops to Andrew’s lips and stays there, and Andrew knows how to take a yes as a yes. He slides a hand into Neil’s hair and pulls him down into a searing kiss, all the heat Andrew has tucked away for months seeping out of him, melding them, and it’s a delicious kiss, a kiss Andrew has been starving for, a kiss that tastes of limes.
***
Andrew would deny it with his dying breath, but he and Neil end up with a date night.
They meet every Monday at 7pm in the empty gravel parking lot because the bar is closed on Mondays and because Andrew, for some unknown reason, still has not given Neil his number, and Neil has not asked for it.
There’s not much to do in Southern Pines except ride and drink and golf, but they find things in the quiet hours of night, the winter sun setting so early each day that Andrew realizes one evening that he’s never seen Neil in the daylight, and he wonders if the sun turns his dark auburn hair copper. What they do is spend a lot of time kissing, stealing touches, wringing out yeses and gasps and that little intake of breath that makes Andrew’s knees weak, and it’s nothing when Andrew gives Neil’s hands permission to roam over his clothes - waist up at first, and then one heated night under his shirt, and Neil isn’t tentative, and it is nothing, means nothing.
Andrew doesn’t tell Neil the first night he brings him home that he’s never; his hookups have been relegated to dark hallways and back alleys for so long, and yet here is Neil, trailing fingertips along the back of Andrew’s leather couch, walking through his tidy kitchen, lingering in front of the one piece of art hanging on Andrew’s wall - a gift from Roland that would have never been hung if Roland didn’t put it up his damned self one night when he showed up with takeout and a bottle of good rum.
That first night Andrew kicks Neil out when his chest is still heaving, his face still flushed, the taste of him still on Andrew’s lips.
The next though … the next time Andrew stops Neil when he goes to roll out of the bed, before he can swipe his discarded hoodie from the floor, before he can slip out the door. Andrew says “Stay,” and Neil pauses, looks at him, searching, and Andrew is immediately irritated, there and gone, the violent, molten anger he keeps padlocked in the pit of his stomach rattling its cage - but Neil stays, and the rattle drops to a dull hum as Neil climbs back into bed, kisses Andrew with lips that are already swollen, presses against him with eagerness that seems never depleted.
They sleep that night, Andrew’s back against the wall, Neil curled at the edge of the bed, Andrew’s fingers fisted in the back of Neil’s shirt, so he knows where he is, so he knows who he is, until just before dawn when Neil stirs, and slips away to the barn and his early morning rides.
On a particularly clear night in December Andrew piles blankets into his vintage red Chevy truck, along with a thermos of Bee’s famous hot chocolate that’s almost half bourbon, and drives Neil out to the middle of one of the closed golf courses.
“Are we supposed to be out here?” Neil asks when Andrew turns off the golf cart path and parks in the middle of the ninth hole.
“You aren’t usually in the habit of asking stupid questions,” Andrew says, and climbs into the bed of the truck with Neil and the blankets and the thermos and the stars above laid out in all their glory.
Andrew is privately pleased at Neil’s soft, “Oh,” when he looks up, their view unobscured by trees and undiluted by city lights.
“Do you know them?” Neil asks once they are situated shoulder to shoulder, Neil’s leg thrown over Andrew’s thigh.
Andrew looks at the stars, catalogs the constellations he’ll never forget simply because he took an astronomy class one time as a filler in undergrad. He points in quick succession, “Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco…” he sweeps his finger across the sky, “Cygnus, Pegasus, Pisces.”
Neil hums. “Are you making this up?”
“Yes,” Andrew lies, points farther across the sky. “That’s Jupiter.” Sweeps a finger. “That’s Mars.”
“You aren’t making this up,” Neil says, and he turns to Andrew instead of the stars, looks at Andrew with that look that says he wants to be kissed, and because Andrew has yet to find a reason to say no to Neil, he kisses him.
***
Andrew leaves for Christmas, north to Boston, which is fucking stupid if you ask him - the temperature is twenty degrees colder than Southern Pines - but Aaron only gets two days off from med school and there is a direct flight from Stuttgart and so they cobble together Christmas with gingerbread and lasagna because that’s what Nicky always made and Katelyn gifts Andrew with an amber colored puffy coat that is so fluffy and warm that he refuses to take it off the entire time he’s there.
Nicky corners Andrew in Aaron and Katelyn’s tiny kitchen the day after Christmas, the day before Andrew flies home to help Roland prep the bar for the annual New Years Eve party.
“You’re good?” Nicky says, leaning against the counter to watch Andrew cut limes for their traditional post-Christmas margaritas. “You seem good.”
Andrew throws a look at him and almost gives him a throw away line to go with it, but instead his traitorous mind offers up visions of Neil haunting this cramped Boston apartment like the ghost of Christmas future, and Andrew can see it in technicolor; Neil eating gingerbread and snarking with Aaron and sharing the one oversized chair with Andrew and looking bewildered when Katelyn hands him a Christmas stocking. Andrew can see him sitting on the counter, stealing limes, getting steamrolled into babysitting Nicky’s enchilada sauce on the stove.
Andrew can see it. Even worse: he wants it.
“Fuck,” is what he says, realizing he’s still staring at Nicky, whose eyebrows have shot straight up into his hairline, so he adds, “I’m good enough,” with a shrug that belies the flutter happening in his chest, and Andrew hopes he’s too young to have a heart attack because that’s sure what this feels like.
He’s still feeling like he’s been split apart and haphazardly taped back together once he’s back in Southern Pines, snug in the bar that he and Roland have made their home, overfaced with the New Years Eve crowd, distracted by the fact that it’s two hours later than when Neil said he would come and he’s still not there.
But he does get there, perches on his stool, tucks his chin into the palm of his hand and looks at Andrew with just enough seriousness to cause Andrew to frown at him in mild concern. He wipes his hands and inclines his head at Roland, ignoring Roland’s incredulous “Andrew!” - they’ve got half drunk patrons three deep at the bar vying for fresh drinks - and grabs Neil by the wrist to drag him to the back room.
“What?” Andrew says once he can turn his full attention to Neil’s face in the dim light.
“We’re leaving early,” Neil says, the words all coming out in a rush of breath.
“Tonight?” Andrew says, but Neil is already shaking his head.
“Wymack wants to hit Ocala this year. We’ve got a few horses to debut at Grand Prix that are on the market. That’s where the buyers are.”
“Ocala,” Andrew repeats.
“Florida,” Neil says helpfully.
“I know where Ocala is,” Andrew says. “When?”
“Day after tomorrow.” Andrew just stares at him. After a moment, Neil holds out a hand, palm up. “We’ll be back next year,” he says.
Next year. Andrew knew Neil was leaving again, but he thought he had another two months. Next year is forever away. Next year, next year. Andrew hums lightly and shrugs. This is what he gets, for fucking with a horse boy. This is what he gets for wanting things. He takes one step back, and he sees it, Andrew sees the tiny moment when Neil almost steps to him, before he stops himself, drops his hand.
“Andrew-,” Neil starts.
“Don’t,” Andrew says, cutting him off. “It’s fine. I told you. This doesn’t mean anything, anyway.”
The light isn’t so dim that Andrew doesn’t see the hurt splash across Neil’s face - there and gone again in a flash - and Andrew’s heart does the same dance it did in Boston, fluttering in a way he doesn’t know how to manage, how to catalog, and he wants to organize better words, ones that put a different look on Neil’s face than the smooth mask that’s settled into place, but before Andrew can move Neil smiles at him, nods. “Okay,” he says, and walks out of the storeroom.
By the time Andrew makes his way back to the bar, Neil is gone, leaving Andrew with nothing but a butterfly for a heart and the unwavering gaze of Kevin Day on him from across the room.
***
It’s four weeks before the first postcard arrives. Holding the damned thing in tight hands Andrew takes a full breath for the first time since Neil left.
Roland buys a new corkboard, puts it up next to the old one, and quietly fills it with a porcupine sunbathing, hot air balloons floating in the milky way, a picnic basket full of cacti - reminds me of you - the last one had said.
It’s a Monday halfway through the summer when Andrew caves and asks Roland, “Do you still have Kevin’s number?” They’re lounging by Roland’s modest in-ground pool, hidden behind a six foot fence and the jungle of plants Roland has cultivated - Andrew and his pale skin hidden twice over in the shade of a very large umbrella.
“Kevin Day?”
“Is there another Kevin you had an ill advised winter fling with that I don’t know about?”
“Did you just say ‘fling’?,” Roland asks, his tone overly amused as he lolls his head to look at Andrew.
Andrew flips him off. “Ask him for his address.”
Roland snorts. “You mean Neil’s address.”
Andrew rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses and doesn’t answer.
“Only if you tell me what happened,” Roland says after a hot minute.
“I am immune to blackmail,” Andrew scoffs.
Roland shrugs and turns his handsome face back to the sun. “Sucks to be you then.”
Andrew groans and sits up to dig his cigarettes out from under his towel. “Fuck you,” he says after a long sweet inhale of smoke.
Roland hums. “No thanks, we tried that. I think we’re better as friends.”
“Ha, ha,” Andrew deadpans.
But they are, is the thing. Roland had been a hookup, then a little more than a hookup, then a friend when that ran its course. A friend who had invited Andrew to move home with him after college, to take over the family business, to sling booze and suck dick and it’s not like Andrew’d had any other prospects. It’s not like he could ride anymore so there was nothing tying him to Bee’s barn in Palmetto, and he wasn’t meant for the cold, gray winters of Massachusetts, or the eternal sunshine of Nicky and Erik’s love nest in Germany. Southern Pines and Roland and a fifty percent share in the bar had seemed like a good deal at the time. And it was still a good deal. Mostly. Maybe. Just. What if there could be more?
“I said something stupid,” Andrew says, after he’s smoked a second cigarette and tipped a little more of the good Cuban rum in his glass.
“Eh?” Roland says.
“To Neil. I said something stupid.”
“Well,” Roland says slowly. “Seems like he forgave you.”
Andrew sighs, leans back on the rickety lawn chair and props his glass on his stomach; the chill of it burns for a moment against his overheated skin. The new corkboard is more than half full of Neil’s postcards. The last card had depicted a small church overgrown with weeds, towered over by a verdant oak tree, and a rare earnest line from Neil: home for the summer.
The post office stamp proclaimed an origin of Somerset County, New Jersey.
Andrew downs his drink in one go, gets up with a slow stretch and says, “Get me an address, Roland,” just before he jumps into the cool, crisp water of the pool.