Work Text:
vehicle collision.
When involved in a vehicle crash, your car will come to a violent and sudden stop, no matter what speed you are going. As the vehicle begins to slow down upon impact, it will begin to crush.
Steam curls hazily above the Columbia house’s wonky showerhead when Andrew forces the bathroom door open, fingers tingling with adrenaline.
It had been five minutes. Five minutes of going out to buy himself a new pack, because God knows he needs it with the company he keeps, and Kevin had not answered when Andrew called his name from the doorway. Five minutes; just about enough time for calling a taxi, for buying plane tickets to North Virginia, for becoming flotsam on the wreckage of Kevin’s career. Five minutes of silence is more than enough. Andrew feels that his sudden barging in is well-justified.
For his part, Kevin doesn’t even startle. Hands still on the hem of his shirt, he looks at Andrew over his shoulder; calm and measured, like someone who is used to their every command of “jump!” to be followed by a rave.
“Yes?” Kevin says, looking down from the supercilious crook of his nose.
Gritting his teeth, Andrew does not bother with niceties. “I have told you to answer when I call you.”
Kevin’s eyes glance down to where he is halfway through undress, a flicker of acknowledgement with more contempt in it than most would have on their entire body. “I was busy.” He pulls his shirt all the way off, so patently uncaring of Andrew’s presence it circles back into a boyish sort of unselfconsciousness. “And perhaps my life is not worth much to you, if you find that buying second-hand lung cancer is a fit thing to gamble it for.”
The expanse of his back is tanned and broad, shoulder blades curved like the arch of a bow. Kevin is a mansion with a view. Andrew’s eyes cursorily trail down, and the frailty of Kevin’s waist surprises him — not small, not quite, but narrower and angular, carved into the home of his hips. With Kevin’s pants still on, it is impossible to follow the curve of his lower back down into the blue denim, but Andrew’s mouth dries with possibility, anyway.
There are small, razor-like scars running up the length of Kevin’s back, so thin they are nearly impossible to catch in the light, a gift left behind by brother dearest. The longer one seeks its way into the thin skin between Kevin’s shoulder blades, and the placement feels not only deliberate, but rather intimate. It is a very soft place to sting.
Forcing saliva to pool on his tongue, Andrew answers, “Jealousy does not become you, Kevin.”
The reply forces the bend of Kevin’s temper. “It is not jealousy. You and I have an agreement,” he says, imperious. “Part of it should be that you try and not destroy yourself when I’m not looking. Your life is not yours to waste away any more than mine is.”
“Cruel mistress that you are, Kevin Day,” Andrew replies. He has not yet closed the door behind him. He could. He should. There is no reason to be here, now that he knows Kevin is safe.
But the way Kevin’s hands don’t stop working his clothes off warns him that he is reaching a kind of danger Andrew is very bad at defending himself from. The sound of Kevin pulling open the fly of his zipper feels thunderous over the soft murmur of the shower. Fabric falls down long legs in a heap, a quick and practiced motion, and Andrew feels it down to his toes. It weighs so very heavy in his gut; this certainty that Kevin is undressing in front of him.
Better men than Andrew would have folded under the sight of Kevin’s legs, and Andrew is not a good man. He has never been.
Long fingers find the waistband of black boxers, then stop. “Are you going to watch?” Kevin asks, and there is something impatient to it — but amusement too, room to indulge. A willingness to give free reign.
Andrew loves free reign.
“You want to watch,” Kevin deduces after a moment, voice dropping in tone. He turns, then — twisting his body to stare at Andrew, something feline and contained in the way he does it, with the minimal amount of movement possible. His hair falls limply over his shoulders and ribs, inky black, and it covers nothing. “Do you want to watch, Andrew?”
White-hot fury crawls its way up Andrew’s throat, tightening his fists and coiling his muscles. He wants to. He wants to watch, and nothing is ever this easy when Andrew wants it. His fingers curl into his palm, nails digging hard enough to split skin, and Andrew rages; rages because Kevin is standing there half-naked, like a real, attainable person, and it makes him want to break something.
But instead something breaks in him. Hazy with fluster, Andrew takes an unsteady step back. He knows he must be pink all the way down to his toes, and he knows Kevin can see it.
Kevin does something terrible: he smiles that strange smile of his, so brittle and cold it could mirror Andrew’s. “I’ll let you watch,” he indulges. Andrew watches him hook his fingers on the waistband of his boxers, business-like, and clarity punches life back into him. With his heart pounding in his ears, Andrew extracts himself from the situation like it is poisonous — like Kevin is a dangerous animal he is not trained to deal with.
The brief glimpse he gets of Kevin’s bare hipbone sends him careening out of the room, desperately looking for the pack of cigarettes in his jeans pocket. The Columbia house’s front door bursts open when he slams into it, wood whining under pressure, and Andrew has one foot in the pedal before he can even taste the mouth of his cigarette. He squeezes it between his knuckles, willing his hand not to shake, willing his thoughts not to stray.
He had been at the edge of something dangerous when Kevin opened his mouth. A daze, an altered state of mind — a distraction that could’ve led him straight into the precipice. Andrew does not let go of control willingly. He has clawed what little of it he has out of the mess of his life, and this—this is not worth losing it for. The balance of him and Kevin, the back-and-forth winning hand they keep trading each other, is so carefully managed: whatever Andrew wants most would destroy it beyond recognition.
He drives and drives and drives; until his phone rings and rings and rings, until the velvety night blankets the whole of Columbia. Andrew’s heart booms in his heart still, adrenaline pumping well into the night. He cannot forget what he knows — he cannot let himself indulge in what he cannot have. But it is poison, almost, that what he wants is always just sleeping a bed away; reading down the hall; standing on the other side of the locker room.
The deal that forces Andrew to be in Kevin’s close proximity is no stroke of genius, now that he thinks of it in the light of sobriety.
Andrew finds an empty parking lot sometime close to midnight, far enough from Columbia all the signs point back to Charleston, and parks close enough to the wired fence he nearly strips a part of it with his wing mirror. The audi scoffs at his audacity to turn it off, the machinery of it growing still and solemn in the silence that follows. Up in the middle of nowhere, the only thing Andrew can hear is the sound of his heartbeat, and the occasional zip of another car speeding through.
The process of touching himself should be impersonal and business-like. Andrew has mastered all the ways to touch like he is not touching at all; every way to treat this like a bodily function not worth thinking twice of. Instead, the taste of his cigarette still lingering in his tongue, Andrew leans the back of his head against his headrest. The hand that feeds him bit him first — in the half-light of his car, Andrew can at last admit to himself that, if anything, Kevin started it.
And how he started it. Treacherously, out of breath, Andrew lets himself imagine what could have happened had he stayed; had Kevin meant what he said, and done good on his promise. He’d have sat there and stared like a dog stares at a spinning rotisserie chicken, the steam of Kevin’s shower blurring the long contours of his body, the delicate curl of his bare ankles. Obediently, beaten into submission by all that he wants, the spell would not have broken until it was too late: Andrew would have let himself go. He knows it with a vengeance.
There it is, Kevin’s long torso and the sharp edge of his hip; the dark hair sticking to the tender skin of his thighs. There it is again, the curve of Kevin’s rib and the way his skin seemed to barely contain what’s inside of him. Andrew’s hand is in his pants before he can think twice of it, before the decision cools into regret. Yes, yes, the lean line of Kevin’s legs, the way they curl inward from the years of standing to attention — how easy and grabbable and openable. Yes, of course: the snappable knob of Kevin’s wrists, and how sweetly they’d give under Andrew’s grip.
Andrew counts all the ways he could, would, should disgrace Kevin Day. He finishes only about a third into the list.
Bee would call this a breakthrough in his unrelenting habit of self-repression. Andrew, if pressed, would call it the indulgence of whatever cuts the sexual tension between a nine millimeter and his temple. He supposes the truth would be somewhere between those two statements, buried in the dip where Kevin’s leg meets his hip.
Later still, when he drives back, Kevin is draped over his provisory side of Andrew’s bed with perfect, statuesque stillness; an arm stretched under his pillow, a leg folded at the hip. The fact that he is in no state of undress feels much too deliberate. Andrew slips under the covers, almost an arm’s length away from Kevin, the chill of the wall pressed to his back. He counts sheep.
human collision.
During the second stage of “human collision,” all occupants in the vehicle will still be moving in the same direction and speed as they were before the collision happened. Inertia will keep the occupants moving toward the point of an impact unless a seatbelt or airbag stops them. However, if an occupant is unrestrained, occupants can be hurled forward and stopped by some part of the vehicle, such as a steering wheel, window, or the dashboard.
Andrew is not ignoring Kevin. But he is not not ignoring Kevin, either.
It is difficult to ignore him at all, when their lives are so closely entangled. There is nothing Andrew can do that will surgically remove Kevin from his life — he is way too deep into their deal to think it possible, way too tied in the binds between them to believe them anything but nooses. No, it is not ignoring. What he is doing is a deliberate retrieval of attention, and he sees the way it grates on Kevin.
Bee would not approve of this, but what she does not know cannot hurt her. Ever since Kevin’s dapple into voyeurism, Andrew had taken to denying the push of Kevin’s pull: he is trying to steel their relationship into something, but hardly knows what, yet. What he knows is that the look Kevin gets when he doesn’t have Andrew’s attention is an indulgence bigger even than the hours spent watching Kevin read in his desk.
The face that launched a thousand ships corners Andrew about it in the aftermath of a rather terrible practice, so bad it had Coach Wymack dismissing them fifteen minutes earlier than usual with instructions to not come back until the Foxes learn how to stop acting like animals. Reynolds sends glares over her shoulder to Andrew, and he knows her ankles will hurt from the balls re-bounced onto them for the rest of the week. It is just as well.
But Kevin is not angry, surprisingly. Whatever cat and mouse game they are playing seems to be the chase Kevin wants — with his hand just freshly out of the cast, the boredom of taking it slow with Exy has pushed him right into the place where he would take Andrew for anything, so long as it was interesting enough. Fools are those who think Kevin doesn’t do it all for the adrenaline; that he has known any real emotion in his life beyond the chase of it. Riko Moriyama only had him on a leash for so long because Kevin had not yet found the thrill of Exy in anything else.
“You are avoiding me,” Kevin points out in lieu of hello, catching up to Andrew on his way out of the locker room. His hands are crossed behind his back, absent of any guilt Andrew can think of; the faux obedience of him a tried and true role. To be on the other end of it has Andrew wondering just what it is that Kevin thinks of him, that he could be fooled as easily as Kevin’s brother was.
Poking a cigarette stick from his pack, Andrew does not deem him with an answer. He fumbles for his lighter with his free hand, but it gets snatched out of his grip just as soon he is able to find it. “Do you make it a hobby out of running from what you want?” Kevin asks, not at all impressed. The orange lighter looks ridiculously small in his hand.
“And here you go again with the idea that such a thing even exists,” Andrew replies, even though his mood is rather amenable today. He would take Kevin in a chase through the Foxhole Court, if he could — would do anything so silly for the sake of prolonging this tolerable abstract of his life.
“I would have thought you would be happy that I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart, Andrew,” Kevin says, sounding rather troubled, though it is mostly a performance. Andrew steals a glance back at him, and Kevin’s smiling that not-quite-smile; that infinite possibility for trouble. “That you would be pleased with me.”
It is entirely possible that Kevin Day has no such thing as a heart in the first place. But if he had it, it would have belonged to Andrew along with the rest of him.
“It is impossible to be pleased with you,” Andrew replies, twirling his cigarette between his fingers. “Are you offering something, or are you trying to find out where your leash ends?”
“My leash?” Kevin asks, and this time he sounds a little aghast. “Your leash, Andrew.”
“You are very funny, sometimes.” He puts the cigarette to his lips.
“And you are not at all.” Kevin uses the lighter he’d stolen to light up the cherry, the flame burning his eyes a liquid green; almost hazel. His eyebrows scrunch sadly. It is possible that the sheep’s clothing has become one with his skin. “I am bored, Andrew. You have been careless of me.”
“I have not promised to be entertainment.”
“You have promised to keep me occupied. And I am not occupied.”
Andrew doubts he will be of any entertainment to Kevin Day; not for any significant period of time. “Don’t be crass, Kevin,” he replies, taking a puff of his cigarette and letting the smoke pool in his mouth. It tickles the back of his teeth, escaping through the gaps. “You were so good when you arrived in your virginal whites. Remember the first drink I put in your hand?”
Kevin rolls his eyes. “You are deflecting.”
“We are having a pointless conversation.”
“The point is my question, which I will ask again,” Kevin says, like he is explaining the concept of conversation to a very dense child. “Will you, or will you not stop running from me?”
Andrew almost rolls his eyes too. Afternoon sun soaks the Foxhole Court. Here he is, talking Kevin in circles — here he will be again, tomorrow, carrying Kevin’s gear until his erratic left hand stops acting up. Is Andrew the natural predator of his own convictions? “You are conflicting what I want with you, which is a mistake you can only make so many times.”
“Oh?” Kevin hums. That ego of his will be their end, one day. “But I could swear we were bedfellows. I do not plan on wearing white a second time, Andrew, you must know.”
And there it is: all the indulgence Andrew needs. He had made his bed, and now they get to sleep in it. A lifetime of deals on deals on deals — Kevin might be the first person to really take Andrew up on the offer of til death do us part.
“You assume too much,” Andrew tells him. “You want to test the patience I do not have. You want a chase that you will have no chance of winning.”
The non-committal sound Kevin makes next is immensely self-satisfied. “Are you taking pity on me, Andrew?” He asks, with the kind of faux deferentiality that makes Andrew wonder why this kind of behavior has gone through Kevin’s entire life unchecked. “Are you actually taking pity on me?”
Andrew calculates the consequences of giving Kevin just what he wants, right here, right now: pushing him against the wall in front of the team, shutting him up like he is so dearly begging Andrew to do. He decides against it, only because giving in at this point would be offering himself to Kevin on a silver plate.
And still, that Andrew considered it at all. Oh, I guess I want you more than I thought I did.
“You are a penitence to be around, Kevin Day,” he says at last. Andrew waves Nicky and Aaron over — these days neither want to be around Kevin and Andrew if they can help it, so obvious and rancid their game of cat and mouse is.
Kevin neatly takes a step away from Andrew, putting an end to their discussion, for now. He must know — he must know that he’s already won, by the way his mouth twitches humorously; by the way Andrew hasn’t immediately shut him off. Even the idea sours Andrew’s mood, true as it is. He has not grown up beautiful and revered like Kevin has. He does not see the appeal of being the mouse.
His lot in life drives back to the dorms in a mellow mood, even Nicky’s incessant chatter stuttering in the face of the massive tension up in the front seats. Aaron is the first to scatter, grabbing his backpack and leaving for the library without so much as a look in their direction, while Kevin picks up the book he’d left open and unfinished the night before. Andrew watches him settle in the beanbag chair, either facetious and aware of being stared at or entirely sincere in the way he folds his legs to his chest, pushing the back of his thighs into view through the absurd hem of his shorts.
Bothered by the thrill of possibility that thrums through him, Andrew picks up Aaron’s Game Boy and makes a point out of playing it next to Kevin, the volume high enough to be strident and an entire disservice to anyone trying to read. He sees the way it bothers Kevin — how the knot of his brow grows tense the longer Andrew takes to finish off a circuit in Mario Kart, how his mouth twitches, how he cannot seem to get comfortable. It is immensely satisfying to watch him squirm.
Kevin slams his book closed ten minutes in. “Are you so childish that you’ve decided to employ school boy tactics to get my attention?” He snaps, reaching forward with a socked foot and lightly kicking the console from Andrew’s hand.
Grabbing him by the ankle, Andrew’s reply is a bored, “Shame you were not born a girl. I hear your kind of personality is famous with pageant queens and other sociopaths.”
The ankle in his grip thrashes around. If anything, Andrew is stronger than Kevin — this he is more than happy to display. He does not let go of Kevin’s ankle, digging his fingers in and feeling the wiry jut of bone struggle under it.
“Can you stop pulling on my pigtails?” Kevin hisses, the sound of it more birdlike than Andrew cares for.
“Keep them out of pulling distance,” Andrew replies. He hopes he leaves marks on Kevin’s ankle. He hopes it looks just as filthy as the implication.
He watches Kevin’s nostrils flare, indignant, before Kevin’s book gets thrown aside and he jerks his ankle out of Andrew’s grip to kneel over him on the couch, straddling Andrew’s lap but not quite, boxing Andrew in but not quite. Kevin hovers over him, his knees on either side of Andrew’s legs and his hands braced on the back of the couch, angry little face pointed downwards where Andrew can see it. They do not touch at all besides the brush of Kevin’s knee against his leg.
Andrew is halfway through reaching for his knives when the situation kicks in and he realizes Kevin is as dangerous to him as a fruit fly to a mountain lion.
“It is not my fault,” Kevin says, the corners of his mouth tugged downwards, his neck bobbing with each word, “that you cannot deal with yourself and what you want. It is not my fault that you cannot let yourself have a good thing when you see it. So do not take it out on me.”
Andrew rests his head on the back of the couch, looking up at Kevin. He feels his mouth stretch into a cold smile without wanting it to. “You say what I want so deliberately. Have you transferred to Psych without telling me?”
“You are so obvious anyone can tell. Five minutes in your presence is enough.” Kevin’s eyebrows furrow, and Andrew knows he’s caught him in the same snare Kevin caught him in. Under Kevin Day’s skin is not such a bad place to be. “Tell me to leave it alone and I will. This is beyond what our deal expects of me.”
But Andrew won’t, and Kevin knows it. The outing is a noble option to give Andrew, but he understands Kevin well enough to know it is in no way a show of humility on his part. Kevin doesn’t gamble with what he doesn’t have, and Kevin has, at some point, realized that he has Andrew ensnared and muzzled for as long as it serves him.
It would have been best to slide a knife out of his armband and gut Kevin where he stands, hovering over Andrew with his hair falling down his shoulders, a curtain around them. Do brother dearest a favor and put an end to this careening trainwreck before he takes out the rest of the world with him. It would have been best to suffocate that ego out of him. It would have been best to do anything, but this: Andrew lets one of his hands rest on Kevin’s thigh.
A shiver goes through them. An ancient, animal awareness. In that brush of skin Andrew hears the crunching of machinery, cogs spinning together, bones spat out from the mouth of a predator — and he knows, with certainty, that he and Kevin would like this very much. That, if given a chance to fall down this cliff, they would not even pretend to cling to the edges of the precipice.
“What are you doing,” Kevin asks, breathy. It is such a classic porn line, but Andrew knows that he is serious — that Kevin has not watched enough porn to even know it is a porn line. The truth hangs deliciously between them. “Andrew.”
Andrew tries to steady his breathing, and fails. “Blushing now, are we?”
Kevin presses his mouth into a thin line. Andrew is not a liar — he is blushing. The nature of Kevin’s vulnerable and girlish heart is that, for better or for worse, Andrew understands it. “You do know that if you want me to be yours, you will have to be mine,” Kevin says, eyelashes fluttering when he catches Andrew’s eye, “you do know. I am not your groping doll.”
“You have spared no efforts in showing me that you want to be.”
The words are molten between them. In the jankiness of Fox Tower’s athletic dorms, Andrew feels the ties that bind them together tighter than he ever has; that binded contract that declares Kevin his until death does them part. Better men would have fallen for this — better men would have ensnared this pretty thing and put his head up for decoration. Andrew was never expected to pass this test.
Kevin’s pupils dilate. Andrew lets his hand travel between them, slow and unsteady, up to the back of Kevin’s head; finding a grip in his hair and tugging him down, down, down—
“Andrew, have you seen my phone?” Nicky calls from the bedroom.
Kevin is off of him before the sentence is finished. Not a second later, Nicky waltzes into the living room, hands on his hips. He says something — something about Erik, maybe, and how you really should help, Andrew, come on, do something for me for once —, but for the most part, Andrew hears nothing but the zinging of his ears; the flatline of his heart. Kevin’s chest is moving harshly up and down, just almost visible from where he uses his book to cover it, but Andrew knows. Knows, and hungers for the heart underneath it.
They do not speak for the rest of the day. Acknowledgement is the hardest part of the process of something taking root.
internal collision.
As the vehicle and occupants slow down, the organs and body tissues inside a person will still be moving towards the point of impact. Again, inertia will continue to move organs and body tissue at this last stage.
With the effects of his medicine dwindling, Andrew feels scraped raw. The meds take more from him than he thought possible — in the off time where he does not find it funny, Andrew resents their existence with the kind of conviction therapists have told him he is unable to achieve. The lack of them sits heavy and noticeable even when the withdrawal has since been kept at bay, made worse by Eden’s Twilight’s perpetually flashing lights.
From his other side, Andrew’s bride-to-be fiddles with Andrew’s house key, the pill bottle he usually keeps on himself kindly stashed away in the Columbia house so Andrew does not fall into temptation. Kevin is swaying just a little, even sitting down — either from drink or dust, and possibly from the intersection of both. Andrew had given him the tightest shirt he could find: it stretches over Kevin’s frame when he moves, just barely keeping him inside.
Ill-advised, Andrew rests his palm on the place where Kevin’s top splits down his back, the décolleté deep enough to leave a sliver of Kevin’s lower back exposed. Getting him to wear this was the first battle of the night. Getting him out of it should have been the reward, if Kevin hadn’t immediately pounced on whatever narcotics he could get his hands on as soon as they stepped in the club.
Drunk and prone to dramatics, Kevin shivers lightly at the touch of Andrew’s hand. His back is molten hot, bordering on feverish, and his face is flushed red from the alcohol. Kevin looks like a little fool.
“Slow down,” Andrew warns, pushing Kevin’s shot glass away from him with his free hand. “Alcohol poisoning is beneath you.”
“Fine.” Kevin slumps over the table, cradling his forehead in his hands. “I want to go home.”
These days it’s hard to tell whether home means Columbia, Palmetto or the Nest. Andrew is not sure Kevin even knows what home is — isn’t sure he understands the word when he says it. There is nothing to miss in Edgar Allen aside from the familiarity of it. Brother dearest of his would have Kevin’s head taxidermied in a wall before he could even begin to beg for forgiveness.
“You do not know what that is,” Andrew replies.
“I do. I’ve lived there all my life. I grew up there, I’ve made friends there, I—”
Andrew sighs. “Spare me your life story. I have heard it and I don’t think it’s worth much. You will not convince me to send you back to the slaughterhouse because you’re nostalgic for the knife on your throat.” He slides his hand up the expanse of Kevin’s back, feeling the bumps of muscle and each divot of his spine. His hand finds a grip on Kevin’s nape, and he squeezes once.
“It wasn’t always a slaughterhouse,” Kevin murmurs, leaning back against Andrew’s hand as if begging for Andrew to secure his grip more firmly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“You should. I’m always truthful to you.”
Andrew squeezes warningly. “Except when you are not.”
Like a gap in the clouds, Kevin’s face scrunches up in amusement — the switch so sudden Andrew is left wondering how truthful it could really be. “Except when I’m not. But most of the time.” Kevin’s nose scrunches up slightly, satisfied with himself and poor at hiding it, and Andrew’s hand digs under the collar of his shirt; just skimming past the neckline, dragging his fingers there. “I thought I told you I’m not your groping doll.”
“And I thought I reminded you that you begged to be,” Andrew replies, deadpan. “Your memory is getting worse and worse. Too many balls to the head? No, let me guess: dropped as a baby? No, you have to be held to be dropped, after all. Oh, I don’t know. Enlighten me, Kevin.”
Smooth sailing only when he’s drunk, Kevin is happy to ignore Andrew’s barbs, scooting just close enough that the warmth of him is duly noted. Andrew moves his hand away from Kevin’s neck and dips it below the table, finding himself at home on top of Kevin’s thigh. The denim is stiff under his palms, but Kevin is, as always, a furnace and a half of a man. Testing the lines he set for himself, Andrew hooks his hand under Kevin’s thigh and tugs it nearer until it rests atop of his, their legs crossed together.
Kevin’s thigh is heavy on top of his, even as it curls around Andrew’s; any more and Kevin would be sitting on his lap. Any more and this would be a problem.
Their calves brush together, Kevin’s foot hooking itself behind Andrew’s ankle. This is the closest Andrew has ever been to another person before — he did not imagine it would happen under Eden’s Twilight’s sticky tables, hidden away in the neon noir. Kevin’s sneaker thumps the back of Andrew’s ankle one, two, three times before Kevin settles down, relaxing back into his chair with his shoulder pressing into Andrew’s.
They could—they could. They could go back to the Columbia house, wait until Aaron and Nicky are asleep, do the things Andrew had wanted to do before he knew how much they’d cost him. How foolish, and how detestable; the wish to sneak around with a pretty boy. Andrew had once thought himself better than this, but then again, that had been before Andrew broke. Now he doesn’t think himself better than anything.
“You know,” Kevin slurs, and Andrew knows they could, but they won’t. He can tell by the way Kevin’s voice sounds, velvety and slow, that this is a battle against sleep he won’t win. Maybe it’s the warmth of Andrew beside him, or the safety of protection, or the shots he’d thrown back with Nicky — maybe it’s all of it at once that makes Kevin’s head fall onto Andrew’s shoulder, so heavy he stiffens before he can register what he’s doing. “I think you want me a lot more than you think you do.”
“You don’t know anything,” Andrew replies, flexing his shoulder so it hits Kevin on the nose. “What you have are delusions of grandeur that will one day kill us all.”
Bumping his chin on Andrew’s shoulder, Kevin replies, “Perhaps. But that is what you signed for.”
“In a moment of madness.”
“You were sober, I remember.”
“Bullshit.” Andrew crosses his arms. Kevin’s head is still on his shoulder — Andrew’s body is so stiff he can hardly breathe through it. If he moves even a bit too harshly Kevin will be jostled. He’s not sure why it matters. “You were as sober then as I am on the daily.”
Kevin’s response is a soft, humming sound. It’s the noise one makes when they’re on the verge of falling asleep — just barely holding onto consciousness, clinging and unsure of why. Andrew can pinpoint the exact moment it happens, because Kevin slumps against his shoulder like a marionette with its strings cut, searching for warmth.
It is ridiculous. It is terrible. On the drive, Andrew takes twice as long to get them home to avoid bumpy roads so Kevin can sleep fine.
the crash.
The first thing Andrew sees is red. The second is the way it drips down Kevin’s collar.
It’s just blood, he tells himself, but just blood always meant something else when it pertained to Kevin — or Aaron, or Nicky, for that matter. An abrupt turn to detract from an accident is enough, sometimes; fragile things don’t thrive on a world that doesn’t want them. Kevin has a passerine aspect to him, a frailty, a brevity: that is why Andrew spends most of his days keeping Kevin where he can see it. It is so easy to snuff out candlelight. It is so hard to get it to a flame again.
It’d been too fast. Andrew had the option of crashing into a truck or careening off-road — had only the briefest moment to muse on how ironic it’d be to die in a car accident before he was reminded of Kevin in the car with him, and suddenly nothing was funny at all. Life’s greatest crime is when Andrew does not get to amuse himself. The idea that Kevin’s death would be enough for that sits wrong with him.
“Andrew, what the fuck,” Kevin says, clutching his bloody face. Andrew does not dare relax — he has seen Kevin bitch through worst situations. This is by no means a sign of good health. “Are you fucking okay?”
Adrenaline has no answer to that question, so Andrew doesn’t either. He unlatches his seatbelt, reaching over to the passenger seat to take Kevin’s chin in his hand and inspect the damage. Andrew’s hand trembles as he unsticks Kevin’s hand from his face, his own coming out bloody where his fingers brush against the cut on Kevin’s cheek. It’s small — it has no business bleeding the way it does, pooling on Kevin’s bottom lip in a mockery of red lipstick.
Kevin hisses, a hand shooting up to wrap around Andrew’s wrist. “Don’t touch it.”
Andrew thumbs the cut, gathering blood on his fingertip. “You’ll live,” he says, furious at himself for worrying otherwise. Kevin’s temple is bruised — a red splotch stretching down to his right eye socket, sure to purple into a black eye in the days to come. Andrew tugs down on Kevin’s cheek, exposing the sclera of his eye, and finds it bloody red; framing the green. “You will live, but your right eye looks like a Christmas tree.”
Kevin hisses again, batting Andrew’s hand away. “Is no one coming to fucking help?”
“What help is needed?” Andrew replies. He complies on taking his hands away from Kevin’s bruises, but tucks his fingers under Kevin’s chin, keeping his stare. “Your damsel in distress proclivity is showing, Kevin.”
“Andrew, you just crashed your car.” Kevin’s bloody eye waters from either frustration or pain, reddish tears pooling on his waterline. “Fucking call Coach.”
Andrew presses his thumb onto Kevin’s lower eyelid, keeping the tears at bay. “I did not crash anything. We just swerved out of the road. Harshly.”
“That constitutes a crash!”
“It very pointedly does not, Kevin. Don’t be a bubble-headed American beauty now. It does not suit you.”
Kevin’s eyebrow scrunches in annoyance, head pending towards Andrew’s. It presses their foreheads together — either incidentally or not. It must not go easy on Kevin’s bruised face to have it press against another person’s face so soon, but all he does is close his eyes, ignoring the sting of tenderness. It feels like the start of something, or the end of it. Like a suitable end to their cat and mouse game, or the start of a worse dynamic.
His hands clutch to the sleeves of Andrew’s hoodie, holding tight. He moves no further.
“You want a kiss,” Andrew says, defaulting to blankness. He needs to hear Kevin say it.
Kevin sighs out, harrowed. “Do you want to kiss me?” He asks back instead, not giving an inch where Andrew doesn’t, either. Kevin makes no losing deals.
“You are asking,” Andrew breathes out, “the wrong questions at the wrong place.”
“Since when do you care about what’s wrong?”
Since when, indeed. Andrew crashes his mouth to Kevin’s bloodied lip.
The taste of iron stings his tongue when he swipes it over Kevin’s mouth, making a worse mess of them both as the blood spreads and mixes in with their saliva. Kevin gasps into it, fingers twisting into Andrew’s sleeves, finally ensnared into a trap he can’t walk away from. The skin of his bottom lip splits easily under Andrew’s teeth, thinned-out by Kevin worrying at it, and the kiss is nothing anyone could ever describe as gentle.
There are better times and better places to do this at. Branches scratch at the car’s front windows, a small crack onto the passenger window where Kevin’s head had run into it, grovel crunching under the wheels. They should go somewhere else. They should not do this — but even less so here.
“What are we doing,” Kevin asks, breathily, mid-kissing. “What are we doing, Andrew?”
Not a single clue, Andrew wants to say. “Nothing good for you,” he replies instead, pressing Kevin back against the car door, fingers sliding down the line of Kevin’s body.
Kevin sighs into his mouth. There are worse ways to go.