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The heavy click of the deadbolt echoing through the quiet hallway was the only warning Neil gave before pushing the apartment door open. The moment he crossed the threshold, the stagnant, suffocating air hit him like a physical blow. The apartment was completely dark, save for the sickly orange glow of the streetlights bleeding through the half-open blinds, but Neil didn’t need the light to know exactly how bad it had gotten over the last four days.
The air was thick with the acrid stench of stale cigarette smoke, sour sweat, and the sharp, metallic tang of unwashed dishes piled in the sink. As Neil stepped inside, his boot caught on something on the floor—an empty takeout container that skidded across the hardwood. Glancing down, his eyes adjusted to the gloom, revealing the absolute wreckage of their shared living space. Clothes were discarded haphazardly over the furniture, empty bottles were clustered on the coffee table like a graveyard, and an overturned ashtray had spilled its gray, powdery guts all over the rug. It was a visceral, chaotic map of Andrew’s mind, the physical evidence of a depressive spiral that had dragged him under the second Neil had boarded a plane to New York.
Neil closed the door behind him, locking it with a sharp, decisive click. He didn't care about the mess. He had just spent the last four days wading through the absolute filth of the mafia underground, moving through New York with a cold, ruthless efficiency that would have terrified anyone else. He had blood under his fingernails and a dark, violent buzz humming under his skin, a lingering aftermath of the impulse and brutality his job required. But none of that mattered now. He was back in his first year of contract with the Lynx, returning to the only thing that kept him tethered to the earth.
He found Andrew in the living room.
Andrew was slumped deep into the corner of the couch, perfectly still, a lit cigarette burning dangerously close to the filter between his fingers. He looked awful. His skin was a sickly, ashen pale, his hair was greasy and flattened against his forehead, and the dark circles under his eyes looked like bruises in the dim light. He hadn't moved to turn on a light, hadn't eaten, hadn't done anything but sit in the dark and let the apathy rot him while he waited.
For a long, agonizing moment, neither of them spoke. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, as Andrew slowly turned his head to look at Neil. His hazel eyes were flat, devoid of any warmth or welcome, but beneath that deadened stare, Neil could see the sharp, cruel edge of control snapping back into place. The waiting was over. His property had returned.
"Drop it," Andrew's voice was a low, gravelly rasp, ruined by days of chain-smoking and disuse.
Neil didn't hesitate. He reached beneath his dark jacket, pulling the cold, heavy steel of his handgun from its holster, and let it fall to the floor. It hit the hardwood with a loud clatter. Next came the two knives hidden in his boots, then the switchblade tucked into his waistband. He emptied himself of all his lethal edges, stripping away the armor of the monster he had to be in New York, standing entirely defenseless amidst the ruins of their living room.
"Come here," Andrew ordered. The command left no room for negotiation.
Neil crossed the room, stepping over the trash and discarded clothes, the erratic, frantic beating of his heart the loudest sound in his own ears. When he reached the edge of the coffee table, Andrew didn't tell him to sit beside him. He didn't invite him into the space. Instead, Andrew let the cigarette drop to the floor, crushing it out with the heel of his bare foot, and stared pointedly at the narrow space on the rug between his knees.
It was a test. A demand for absolute submission after daring to leave him alone with his own mind.
Neil sank to his knees without a second thought. The rough fabric of Andrew's sweatpants brushed against Neil's cheek as he leaned in, pressing his face into the space where Andrew's thigh met his knee. He closed his eyes, inhaling the sharp, stale scent of nicotine and unwashed skin, letting out a long, shuddering breath. The frantic, impulsive energy that had kept him alive in New York began to bleed out of him, replaced by a desperate, starving need.
Andrew's hands were cold when they finally moved, his fingers curling harshly into the back of Neil's hair. He didn't stroke or comfort; he gripped, his nails digging into Neil's scalp hard enough to sting. He yanked Neil's head back, forcing Neil to look up at him, exposing the vulnerable line of his throat. Andrew's eyes swept over Neil's face, searching for bruises, cuts, or any sign of damage, his expression twisted into a mask of bitter resentment.
"You're late," Andrew whispered, his thumb pressing down hard against the pulse point on Neil's neck, feeling the frantic, dependent thumping beneath the skin.
"I'm here now," Neil murmured back, his voice thick with a twisted reverence, leaning into the painful grip in his hair. He felt the tremor in Andrew's hand, the subtle, terrifying vibration of a man who was barely holding himself together. Andrew was suffocating in his own mind, punishing Neil for surviving a world outside of this room, and Neil welcomed every second of it. He needed the bruise. He needed the suffocating grip. He needed the absolute certainty that Andrew would tear the world apart just to keep Neil exactly where he belonged.
The pressure of Andrew’s fingers against Neil’s scalp was firm, a heavy, grounding weight that tethered Neil to the filthy floor of their living room. Beneath Andrew’s thumb, Neil’s pulse was finally beginning to slow, matching the lethargic, stagnant rhythm of the apartment. Andrew stared down at him, his flat, exhausted eyes tracking the minute shifts in Neil's expression. The silence stretched again, thick with the unsaid, until Andrew’s jaw tightened.
"Tell me to let go," Andrew said, his voice a hollow, raspy scrape against the quiet.
It wasn’t a threat. To anyone else, the harsh grip and the cold command would look like captivity, but Neil knew the shape of Andrew’s ghosts better than he knew his own reflection. It was Andrew’s twisted, self-sabotaging way of asking for a boundary. It was Andrew convinced that his depression was a poison, offering Neil an out, waiting for the moment Neil would finally flinch, realize how stifling this was, and ask to be released. Andrew was trying to push, waiting for the inevitable rejection so he could sink back into the rotting comfort of his apathy.
They were toxic, a terrifying black hole of codependency that sucked the air out of any room they walked into, but they didn't cross the lines they had carved in the dirt for each other. Andrew would never hurt him. The control was a careful ecosystem they mutually maintained—Andrew demanded it to feel anchored, and Neil surrendered it because it was the only way he knew how to exist without tearing himself apart.
Neil didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull away. Instead, he let his eyes flutter shut for a fraction of a second, leaning a fraction of an inch deeper into the palm of Andrew's hand.
"I like it when you hold me," Neil murmured, his voice entirely devoid of the frantic, impulsive edge it had carried in New York. He opened his eyes, taking in the bruised exhaustion painting Andrew's face, the greasy slump of his blond hair, and the way his shoulders were rigid with the effort of holding himself together.
Neil shifted, his knees protesting slightly against the hardwood as he raised a hand. He didn't break Andrew's grip, but he brought his own fingers up to lightly trace the sharp, tense line of Andrew's jaw. His own skin felt grimy, coated in the invisible, metallic residue of the violent world he had navigated over the last four days. He smelled like cheap airport coffee, stale adrenaline, and the faint, lingering copper of his job. Andrew smelled like stale smoke, sour sweat, and days of total neglect. They were a miserable pair, utterly insufferable to the rest of the world, a matching set of nightmares that didn't know how to function around anyone else.
"You smell like an ashtray," Neil said, the blunt honesty cutting through the heavy, self-destructive tension Andrew was trying to build. "And I smell like a corpse."
Andrew stared at him, the deadened look in his hazel eyes flickering as his brain processed the sudden shift in the script. His thumb stopped pressing against Neil's pulse.
"Let's take a shower," Neil offered, his tone casual, as if they were discussing the weather rather than carefully pulling each other out of the abyss.
For a long moment, Andrew didn't move. He kept his hand buried in Neil's auburn hair, studying Neil's face as if searching for a lie, for pity, or for the revulsion he was so sure he deserved. When he found none of it—only Neil's unwavering, almost terrifying dependency staring back at him—the rigid tension in Andrew's shoulders finally cracked. It wasn't a visible collapse, just a minute, barely perceptible release of a breath he had been holding for four days.
Andrew’s hand slowly slid from Neil's hair, his fingers trailing down the back of Neil's neck before dropping to his side. He didn't say yes, but he didn't protest when Neil climbed to his feet, ignoring the scattered trash and empty bottles littering the rug. Neil stood over him, extending a hand down into the gloom.
Andrew looked at the offered hand, then up at Neil's face, his expression settling back into its familiar, blank hostility. But he reached out. His skin was freezing as his fingers wrapped around Neil's forearm, and Neil braced his stance, hauling him up from the couch. The absolute disaster of the apartment remained around them—the overturned ashtrays and discarded clothes—but the air felt infinitely less suffocating now that they were moving through it together, two entirely ruined people finding the only comfort they would ever accept in each other.
The water had run hot enough to scald, steadily washing away the metallic, violent stench of New York and the sour, heavy rot of four days of absolute isolation. It was a quiet, necessary reset. They hadn't spoken beneath the spray. They rarely needed to. The mechanical motions of getting clean—Neil methodically working the shampoo into Andrew’s hair, Andrew leaning back into the touch with a heavy, boneless exhaustion—were grounding. For Andrew, it was a surrender of his hyper-vigilance, letting the water strip away the grime of his depressive spiral. For Neil, it was the physical proof that he had survived another job and made it back to the only place that mattered.
Once they were dry and dressed in clean, oversized clothes, the last of the adrenaline holding Andrew together completely bottomed out. The crash was always inevitable. Neil had guided him to the bedroom, the only room relatively untouched by the living room's disaster, and left him sitting up against the headboard, his eyes tracking the shadows on the wall with a blank, exhausted focus.
Leaving Andrew there, Neil walked back out to the living room to face the wreckage.
The silence of the apartment was no longer suffocating; it was just quiet, the tension finally broken by Neil’s return. Neil moved methodically through the space. He started with the garbage, sweeping the abandoned takeout containers, the empty bottles, and the mountains of crushed cigarette butts into a thick black trash bag. Then he moved on to the clothes, picking up discarded shirts, socks, and heavy hoodies, tossing them one by one into the overflowing laundry basket in the hallway.
As he wiped the gray ash from the coffee table, the reality of the mess settled comfortably, almost warmly, in Neil's chest.
Anyone else looking at the ruined state of the apartment would have seen a man who had simply given up, a careless slob who couldn't be bothered to maintain his own life. But Neil knew the shape of Andrew's demons flawlessly. He knew exactly what this mess meant. It wasn't laziness; it was a total, paralyzing terror masquerading as apathy.
Every time Neil packed a bag, every time he crossed state lines and disappeared into the violent, unpredictable underbelly of the mafia, Andrew’s brain began a meticulous, agonizing process of self-destruction. Andrew's logic was as cruel as it was absolute: his mind would flawlessly convince him that Neil was never coming back. Whether Neil ended up dead in a warehouse, or simply realized he could exist without the suffocating grip of the Lynx's goalie, Andrew would decide it was over. He would grieve Neil prematurely, burying him in his mind before Neil had even missed a scheduled check-in.
And in the face of that suffocating certainty, the physical world stopped mattering. The mere possibility of losing Neil completely drained Andrew of his will to function. Picking up a shirt, throwing away a food container, or turning on a light felt impossible when his mind was entirely consumed by the absolute, crushing void of an apartment that would never have Neil in it again. The mess wasn't just a symptom of a depressive episode; it was a physical monument to Andrew's worst fears. He couldn't keep things in place because, without Neil, he firmly believed there was no "place" left to maintain.
It was a sick, deeply broken way to live, knowing that his absences tore Andrew down to his very foundations, leaving him a hollowed-out shell staring at the walls. But as Neil tied off the garbage bag and carried the laundry basket to the corner, a dark, fiercely selfish satisfaction curled in his gut.
He didn't want Andrew to function perfectly without him. He didn't want to leave and have Andrew casually go to practice, clean the kitchen, and live a normal life. They were a matching set of nightmares, entirely unfit for the rest of the world. Neil wanted this terrible, toxic codependency. He needed the absolute certainty that his existence was the only thing keeping Andrew tethered to the earth, just as Andrew's iron-fisted, uncompromising control was the only thing keeping Neil from bleeding out or losing his mind on a job.
With the living room finally cleared of the physical evidence of Andrew's spiral, the air in the apartment felt lighter. Neil washed his hands in the kitchen sink, watching the last of the grime spiral down the drain, before he turned off the lights and walked back down the hallway.
When he entered the bedroom, Andrew hadn't moved an inch. He was exactly where Neil had left him, a quiet, exhausted phantom sinking into the mattress. Neil crawled onto the bed, ignoring the empty space on his own side, and closed the distance. He settled against Andrew's side, pressing his face into the clean fabric of Andrew's shirt, inhaling the scent of their shared soap. Andrew let out a long, slow breath, his arm shifting heavily to rest across Neil's back, trapping him there in the dark. The house was clean, the anchor was secured, and their beautifully ruined world was perfectly back in order.
The silence of the bedroom was heavy, thick with the steady, rhythmic sound of Andrew’s breathing. Neil lay perfectly still for a long time, his face pressed against Andrew’s chest, listening to the slow thump of the goalie’s heart. The steady beat was the only metronome Neil’s life operated on. It was proof that the void hadn’t swallowed them entirely.
But as the minutes bled by, the quiet stillness wasn't enough. The residue of the last four days—the violence, the distance, the suffocating terror that Andrew had been drowning in alone—still lingered like static in the air. Neil needed to completely erase it. He needed to overwrite the sterile smell of the clean sheets and the hollow exhaustion in Andrew’s bones with something visceral, something undeniable.
Neil shifted, slowly pulling himself out from under the heavy drape of Andrew’s arm.
Andrew’s hand twitched instantly, his fingers catching the hem of Neil’s shirt before he could move more than a few inches. Even exhausted, Andrew’s hyper-vigilance was absolute. His hazel eyes opened in the dim light, heavy and dark, locking onto Neil's face.
"Where are you going," Andrew rasped, a low, gravelly demand.
"Nowhere," Neil murmured, his voice soft, almost a physical caress in the quiet room. "I'm right here. Just moving down."
Andrew didn't loosen his grip immediately, studying Neil’s expression for a long, calculating second. When he finally let go, his hand fell back to the mattress.
Neil slipped further down the bed, pushing the heavy duvet down to the foot of the mattress. He stopped when he was kneeling between Andrew’s spread legs. The air in the room was cool, but the heat radiating off Andrew’s body was a physical weight. Neil rested his hands lightly on the mattress on either side of Andrew’s hips, leaning forward until his face was hovering just above Andrew’s waist.
He looked up, meeting Andrew’s heavy, tracking gaze in the dark.
"Yes or no?" Neil asked, his voice steady, adhering perfectly to the unshakeable foundation they had built their lives on.
Andrew stared down at him. The deadened, apathetic look from the living room was entirely gone, replaced by a dark, simmering intensity. He didn't ask what Neil was offering; they both knew exactly what this was. It was a physical tether, a desperate, mutual claiming to prove they were both still breathing.
"Yes," Andrew said, the syllable rough and final.
Neil reached for the waistband of Andrew’s clean sweatpants, pulling them down along with his boxers in one smooth motion. Andrew was already half-hard, his body betraying the deep, instinctual reaction to having his property back where it belonged.
Neil didn't hesitate. He leaned down, his lips parting, and pressed an open-mouthed kiss directly to the blunt head. The contrast was staggering. After four days of cold, calculated brutality in New York, the soft, hot intimacy of Andrew's skin against his tongue felt like salvation. Neil dragged the flat muscle of his tongue right up the underside of the shaft, swirling over the highly sensitive frenulum and catching a heavy bead of pre-come.
Andrew let out a sharp, jagged exhale, his hips instinctively jerking upward into the wet heat.
Neil took him in completely, his lips stretching tight over the thick girth as he swallowed him deep. He established a torturously slow, dragging rhythm. He pulled back, keeping his lips firmly clamped around the shaft to maintain a tight vacuum, sliding all the way up until his lips popped softly off the head with a wet smack. Then, he sank back down, taking every single inch, his nose pressing into the crisp hair at the base.
Neil’s own body was a completely tightly coiled disaster. He hadn't touched himself in four days. Here, entirely enveloped in the absolute safety of Andrew’s control, the adrenaline crash was violently mutating into blinding arousal. His cock ached, pressed hard and painfully against the fabric of his own sweatpants, leaking thick pre-come.
He reached a trembling hand down, desperate to wrap his fingers around his own aching length.
"Stop," Andrew’s voice cut through the dark, sharp and absolute. His grip found Neil's hair, pulling his head back just enough to break the suction. "Did I say you could touch yourself?"
Neil gasped at the sudden loss, his chest heaving as he looked up at the goalie. "No."
"Hands on my legs, Neil," Andrew ordered smoothly.
Neil’s hands immediately flew back to grip Andrew’s thighs, his knuckles turning white. The absolute, iron-clad enforcement of the boundary completely shattered what was left of Neil's restraint. He was entirely at Andrew's mercy, forbidden from using his hands, but his biology violently demanded a release.
Denied his fingers, Neil found another way. He dropped his chest lower, shifting his weight until his hips were pressed completely flush against the mattress.
He leaned back down, taking Andrew's cock deep into his mouth, and began to move. But this time, every single time Neil dragged his head upward, pulling his lips tightly over Andrew’s length, he drove his own hips down. He started to hump the bed, grinding his rock-hard erection desperately into the firm mattress through the cotton of his sweatpants.
Suck. Grind. Swallow. Hump.
The dual friction was absolute, sensory obliteration. In his mouth, Neil was relentlessly worshiping Andrew, hollowing his cheeks out to create a devastating suction, his tongue swirling wildly around the head. Below, his body was completely hijacked by the desperate, rhythmic humping against the sheets.
"Fuck," Andrew growled, feeling the frantic vibration of Neil's hips against the bed. Andrew’s hand tightened in Neil's auburn hair, guiding the pace. "Tell me if you want to stop."
Neil moaned around the thick length, the sound vibrating directly against Andrew's skin. He didn't wanted to stop, all he wanted was the heavy, rhythmic bruising of Neil grinding his own cock into the mattress while utterly consumed by the taste and heat of the man in his mouth pushed him right to the absolute edge.
The climax hit Neil with terrifying force. He couldn't stop humping, his hips stuttering in a frantic, uncoordinated grind against the mattress as a thick, scorching rush of his own cum completely ruined his sweatpants. His spine bowed, his thighs trembling violently. His throat convulsed involuntarily, a tight, spasming swallow that flawlessly milked Andrew’s cock right as the white heat rushed behind Neil's eyes.
Andrew let out a harsh, feral roar at the sudden, crushing pressure of Neil's throat seizing around him.
"Neil," Andrew warned, his voice cracking, completely fractured by the sheer physical pleasure.
Neil didn't back off. Even riding the blinding aftershocks of his own orgasm, he sealed his lips tighter around the base, sucking the last dregs of control right out of the goalie. His hips continued to twitch and grind into the messy, wet spot on the bed, chasing the fading high.
Andrew’s control snapped with a violent shudder. He grabbed Neil’s hair, not hard enough to leave bruises, but yanking Neil down flush against his groin, and drove his hips upward with devastating need.
"Swallow it," Andrew commanded blindly, his body locking entirely rigid.
Andrew let go. The first flood was absolute and staggering. Neil gasped as a heavy, scorching rush of cum shot directly against the back of his throat. It was an obscene, relentless volume, filling Neil's mouth completely with thick, pulsing heat. Neil choked on a sob, his throat working frantically to swallow the heavy load down.
But as the initial spasms began to fade, the heavy, dominant grip in Neil's hair didn't slacken. Usually, the hypersensitivity of a climax would force Andrew to pull away, but four days of suffocating, depressive isolation and terror had completely rewired his biology tonight. He needed more. He needed to completely obliterate the void.
Instead of letting Neil pull back to catch his breath, Andrew’s hips snapped upward again.
Neil’s eyes flew wide open in shock, his pupils blown entirely black. Andrew was still completely, rigidly hard.
"Do you need time?" Andrew rasped the question, the ensure was a quick shake of head that caused Andrew's cock to move against Neil's tongue.
"So I guess we should exhaust you", his voice a dark, feral scrape. "Keep your mouth open."
Andrew started to fuck Neil's mouth all over again, entirely ignoring the agonizing hypersensitivity of his own freshly-spilled cock. The friction of Neil's wet, cum-slicked inner cheeks and the desperate, tight seal of his lips sent a violent shudder through Andrew's entire frame. He drove his hips up in a brutal, unrelenting rhythm, pushing past Neil's lips to hit the very back of his throat with every single thrust.
Neil was completely overwhelmed, his hands turning white-knuckled where they desperately gripped Andrew's thighs. He couldn't breathe, forced to take short, frantic gasps through his nose as Andrew relentlessly used his mouth. The absolute degradation and the sheer, physical dominance of it hijacked Neil's nervous system entirely.
His ruined hips started to move again. Neil completely lost his mind to the rhythm, grinding his wet, highly sensitive cock brutally into the mattress through the fabric of his sweatpants, chasing the blinding high all over again.
Andrew’s breathing was harsh and ragged, his chest heaving as the unbearable tension spiked for a second time. The combination of Neil's suffocatingly tight mouth and the desperate, pathetic humping against the bed pushed Andrew right back over the precipice.
"Fuck," Andrew grunted, his spine bowing off the mattress.
He hit a second climax with even more violence than the first. Andrew roared, driving himself to the hilt, and a fresh, massive wave of thick heat erupted into Neil's mouth.
The volume was completely impossible. Neil's throat convulsed, trying desperately to swallow, but Andrew didn't give him a single second to clear it. Andrew kept his hand locked in Neil's hair, holding him down, and continued to pump his hips, completely emptying the impossibly heavy load directly into the striker.
It was too much. The sheer amount of thick, pulsing fluid entirely overwhelmed Neil's capacity to swallow. His cheeks bulged, completely stuffed full stupid, but Andrew kept coming.
The heavy, white mess breached Neil's lips. It spilled out of the corners of his mouth in thick, obscene ropes, running down his chin and dripping heavily onto Andrew’s thighs and the clean bedsheets. Neil was gagging beautifully around the length, his blue eyes rolling back in his head, completely drowning in the taste and the heat of the mant who owned him. He couldn't stop the spill; his mouth was entirely overflowing, a visceral, graphic testament to exactly how thoroughly Andrew was claiming him.
The sensation of being face-fucked while literally spilling Andrew's cum down his chin was the absolute breaking point.
Neil let out a muffled, gurgling scream around Andrew's cock. His hips slammed down hard into the mattress, his body violently shattering into a second, devastating climax. His muscles locked completely rigid, his chest heaving with desperate, breathless pants as a fresh wave of his own cum completely soaked the bed beneath him.
Andrew pumped a few final, trembling times into Neil's overflowing mouth, letting the last of his heavy seed spill past Neil's lips, before he finally, completely collapsed. His arm dropped from Neil's hair, hitting the mattress like a lead weight.
For a long minute, the only sound in the room was the ragged, desperate wheezing of two people trying to remember how to breathe.
Neil pulled back slowly. The wet, suctioning sound was obscenely loud. A thick bridge of saliva and cum connected them for a second before snapping. Neil was an absolute, completely ruined mess. His lips were swollen and bruised, his chin and jaw completely coated in the heavy, dripping white fluid that Andrew had pumped into him.
He didn't try to wipe it off. He was entirely too exhausted, his limbs completely liquefied by the violent, double orgasms. He crawled slowly, bonelessly up the length of the mattress, dragging his wet, ruined sweatpants over the sheets.
Neil collapsed heavily over Andrew’s chest, completely burying his messy face in the crook of Andrew's neck, not caring that he was smearing the evidence of his devotion all over Andrew's clean skin. Andrew let out a long, heavy exhale. He didn't complain about the mess. Instead, his arm wrapped heavily around Neil's back, his hand coming up to rest securely against the nape of Neil's neck, finally anchoring them both safely in the dark.