Chapter Text
Andrew has already heard everything Kevin is saying to the man across the booth from them. Nathaniel Wesninski is their age, just a year younger than Andrew, two years younger than Kevin, but his face shows the same world-weary marks as theirs do. It ages them all. Kevin has worry lines already, a permanent crease in the center of the eyebrows he furrows so often. Andrew’s own cigarette habit has carved lines around his lips.
Andrew can’t put his finger on what it is that makes Nathaniel look older than his twenty-five years. The man is boyishly handsome, with bright blue eyes and glossy auburn hair that gleams cinnamon and paprika under the glow of the Edison bulbs hanging above. His features are finely cut except for the wide slash of his mouth. He has chapped lips and a couple of days worth of stubble on his jaw. It’s a face Andrew thought he had memorized from photographs and video, but the flesh and blood of it is somehow different.
Both of Nathaniel’s hands are flat on the table that separates them, his fingers spread and still as he listens carefully to Kevin’s lengthening monologue. The longer it goes on, the more intense Kevin gets, the quieter and faster he talks, the further he leans over the table, the closer he gets to Nathaniel.
“He killed your mother, too,” Kevin tells Nathaniel.
Nathaniel’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but Andrew is right on top of him, ready to exploit any weakness Nathaniel reveals. He’d watched and rewatched the leaked video of Nathaniel's interview with the FBI, compelled by the man’s unflinching narration of some of the worst, most brutal shit Andrew’s ever heard. If Andrew sees a chink in Nathaniel’s armor, any gap in his closed door facade, he’s prepared to wedge his foot inside.
They’ve role-played this moment, the three of them—Andrew, Kevin, and Jeremy. They need Nathaniel to say yes, or their documentary will be dead in the water. Kevin needs Nathaniel to say yes, or he’ll close the book on the whole thing and bury all the chaos and trauma of it at the bottom of a bottle. Without Nathaniel, Kevin insists, they’ll be just another outsiders-looking-in true crime documentary, seasoned only by Kevin’s connection to one of the victims. Without Nathaniel, they have nothing.
Nathaniel gives them access to the Butcher’s house. Nathaniel gives them a first-hand account of the Butcher himself. But most importantly, Nathaniel gives them a hook. He’s been completely silent on the subject, but even the grainy FBI video of a video had shown enough of his looks to turn him into the internet’s wet dream overnight. He was beautiful and composed and appeared out of nowhere with a story of blood and terror, a story that wrapped up twenty unsolved murders with a neat little bow. His is a face that has launched a thousand podcasts, but not a single one of them has managed to wheedle a comment out of him. He’s not going to be an easy get, but Andrew hasn’t met many people who can out-stubborn Kevin, not when he really wants something.
Kevin really wants this.
Thus, the role play. They’d started with Jeremy as Nathaniel, which had been great for a few hours of entertainment: Jeremy gently pointing out all of the ways this could be bad for Nathaniel and Kevin talking him out of each and every one of his objections.
It had gone a bit differently when Andrew had taken the role of Nathaniel. He’d just said, “No.” He’d said No over and over, in the face of all of Kevin’s pleas, his arguments, all of his logic and sincerity and desperation. When Kevin had finally broken, he’d thrown his hands up, frustrated, and asked, “Why not?”
“I don’t want to,” Andrew had said. And that was it, the crux of the matter. From the little there is to know about Nathaniel Wesninski, they do have one pretty good idea about him: he’s already lived a lifetime and he looks like he’s got the ‘fuck it’ energy of an old man who ran out of shits to give decades ago. If he doesn’t want to do it, he simply won’t. He simply hasn’t been.
“So we have to give him a reason to want to?” Jeremy had suggested. “Offer him something in exchange?”
“Like what?” Andrew had asked.
“Closure?” Jeremy had suggested.
This had seemed to make sense to Kevin, who’s seeking it himself, but Andrew has a different read on the situation now that they are in it. Nathaniel Wesninski doesn’t need closure. He doesn’t need revenge, not anymore. He probably needs a great deal of therapy, but Andrew can’t see him lying down on anyone’s couch once a week to spill his guts. What incentive do they possibly have to offer him in exchange for spilling them to the camera?
Nothing. Andrew is painfully aware of that.
The more time he spends watching Wesninski tonight, the more certain he is that Nathaniel will, in fact, say no. The man has been listening to Kevin talk, attentive even when he’s checking the perimeter, but there’s been no softening of his mouth, no yielding of his guard.
Andrew puts a hand on Kevin’s arm, staying him—Kevin stops mid-word, looking at Andrew with surprise. There’d been no part of planning this night that had involved Andrew getting involved before Kevin got Nathaniel to agree, but Andrew will only allow Kevin to run head-first into a brick wall so many times.
Andrew doesn’t look back at Kevin. His gaze is trained on Nathaniel, who moves only his eyes to acknowledge Andrew’s inelegant entrance to the conversation.
“Yes or no?” Andrew asks.
Any more talking is a waste of time. If he knows Nathaniel—well, knows Nathaniel’s type, and he does, because it’s his type, too—the man has already made up his mind.
He braces himself for the “No,” feels Kevin do the same next to him, catches Jeremy in his backwards, pulled-up chair at the end of the booth already readying himself to reach out, to squeeze Kevin’s tense shoulders smooth again.
“Yes,” Nathaniel says, dropping the word into the no-shaped silence they’d left for him. It doesn’t quite fit, races like a marble around the rim of an invisible bowl.
“Yes?” Kevin asks, after a long minute.
“Yes,” Nathaniel says again.
“Why?” Andrew demands, suddenly suspicious of ulterior motives, some vulnerability in their plan that he hadn’t considered, some way for Nathaniel to take a shot at Kevin.
Nathaniel shrugs, his face as impassive as ever. Andrew’s only ever seen him look otherwise once. There’s video. Location: a private cemetery in northwest Baltimore. Nathaniel: furious, snatching and smashing a phone from some opportunistic live-streamer’s hand. Andrew had watched that on repeat, too, riveted by the raw anger, the potential for violence, the sharp-edged mess of grief and fear and hatred Nathaniel had to have been bottling up for years.
We’re alike, Andrew thinks, somehow, even though his mother hadn’t wanted him and Nathaniel’s father wouldn’t let him go.
“We don’t need your reasons,” Kevin tells Nathaniel. “We know you’re a private person.”
“You’re the subject, not the producer,” Andrew says, like Kevin hadn’t spoken. “You’re not getting a cut of any profits.”
“I don’t need your money,” Nathaniel tells him. He finally turns his head, facing Andrew more directly.
“Andrew,” Kevin scolds. Andrew can easily translate the censure in his tone, the unspoken command: Stop it. Don’t fuck this up. He said yes.
He said yes today. He could still back out tomorrow.
“What do you need?” Andrew asks. He adds, mockingly, a bonus shot at Jeremy’s relentless optimism: “Closure?”
A smile flickers over Nathaniel’s face, half there and then gone again in an instant—a reaction, finally. Good. He’d be awfully boring on screen otherwise.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Jeremy protests.
Nathaniel waves this off dismissively, cementing several of Andrew’s suspicions about him.
“I said yes,” Nathaniel says. “Would you rather I said no?”
“No,” Kevin says vehemently, glaring at Andrew.
“You’re going to have to be willing to answer questions if this is going to work,” Andrew points out. “This is a basic one. I don’t want to waste our time if you’re going to be cagey.”
Nathaniel watches Andrew too long. Kevin and Jeremy start to get restless—Kevin runs out of the breath he’d been holding and inhales, nearly inaudible but still conspicuous in the silence of their booth. Jeremy shifts his weight in his seat. Andrew keeps his eyes on Nathaniel’s, feeling something strum at the chord stretched taut between them.
When Nathaniel finally answers, he doesn’t direct his words to Andrew. He turns back to Kevin. “I’ll answer questions about the Butcher. I’ll tell you what growing up with him was like. I’ll show you my scars. I’ll tell you the story, everything I can, but I’m not baring my soul. You want tears, you’ll have to cry them yourself.”
“Understood,” Kevin says quickly, offering his hand to Nathaniel across the table.
Nathaniel leaves it hanging there. “I guess I do have one condition.”
“Anything,” Kevin swears. Andrew kicks him under the table. Hard.
“No one knows about this until it’s done.”
“No problem,” Kevin says, jutting his hand forward another inch.
Nathaniel gingerly takes Kevin’s palm, passively accepting the pump of a shake Kevin makes happen, like handshake deals mean anything, like Andrew doesn’t have an eleven-page legal document in his backpack that they still need Nathaniel to sign.
“This calls for a celebration,” Jeremy announces. “I’m buying. What’s everyone drinking?”
“Nothing,” Nathaniel says, sliding out of his side of the booth. “You’ll email me the details?”
Andrew reaches into his bag, emerges with the manilla envelope full of paperwork. “Consent forms. Waivers. We’ll want access to the house.”
Nathaniel nods.
“And the basement,” Andrew says, enunciating every syllable, so it sounds like he’s savoring the words. Maybe he is. It’s the murder basement they’re talking about, the one heretofore unseen by the public. From the limited forensic description available, Andrew pictures it as a cement box with drains in the sealed, blood-proof floor, decorated with hanging racks of knives and a stainless steel autopsy table, as much chef’s kitchen as it is surgery as it is morgue. Whatever it looks like, he can’t wait to see it through the camera’s eye, to find its shadows and light, to strip it bare of mystery, of romance, the same way it stripped its victims of their humanity.
“Of course,” Nathaniel says lightly. “Can I go now?”
“Sign the papers,” Andrew tells him. “We will come pick them up tomorrow. I want to see the house.”
“And we need your availability,” Kevin butts in. “To set a filming schedule.”
“All I do is run,” Nathaniel tells them. He grabs the envelope from Andrew and scoots the rest of the way out of his booth. “We can start any time.”
“Then let’s start tomorrow,” Andrew suggests, a challenge in his voice, a dare—if Nathaniel is going to back out, better they get it over with quickly.
But Nathaniel agrees easily. “Tomorrow,” he says, nodding, and then he’s gone, slipped out through the bar’s thick wooden doors.
They sit in heavy silence until the doors stop swinging. Maybe they’re waiting for him to come back, dump the paperwork on the table, and tell them he’s changed his mind.
He doesn’t.
“He said yes,” Kevin says, marveling, in a giddy sort of disbelief.
“You were very persuasive,” Jeremy tells him.
“I wasn’t sure he’d be persuadable,” Kevin admits.
“He isn’t,” Andrew says, as sure of this as he is of himself. “He has his own agenda.”
“As long as his agenda involves filming this documentary,” Kevin says grimly, “then I’m fine with that.”
“Not to harsh the vibe,” Jeremy says. “But can we even be ready to start tomorrow?”
“We have the equipment,” Kevin says. “We have the paperwork. We know what we need from him.”
“Camera is good to go,” Andrew tells Jeremy. “How long do you need to be ready to hold a boom in the air?”
Jeremy ignores him. It had taken him months to reach that level of rudeness, but it had endeared him to Andrew when he’d finally given in. Kevin needs someone with a little edge; he’s an ocean, the surf, relentless. He needs a shore to pound against, needs someone he can’t erode.
“Tomorrow,” Kevin says. There’s a sense of wonder in his voice, a delayed response to getting just exactly what he wanted for Christmas, the payoff to two years of obsession and research and planning.
“Where’s that round?” Andrew asks Jeremy. Pollyanna lights up, the way he always does when Andrew gives him a scrap of validation, a golden retriever on two legs. With washboard abs. And a soft spot for Kevin. Andrew bets he gives great head, but Kevin has neither confirmed nor denied.
As boyfriends go, Andrew could imagine far worse for Kevin.
Jeremy dismounts from his chair, spins it and sets it back in line at the table behind them. He disappears to the bar, not needing to ask for their orders. He knows them well enough by now, having tried for a long time to buy his way to Andrew’s heart with brown liquor, not realizing that his continued existence was proof enough of Andrew’s approval.
“I don’t trust him,” Andrew says into the quiet.
“Jeremy?” Kevin asks, sighing. “Andrew, we’ve—”
“Nathaniel,” Andrew interrupts. “I don’t know why he said yes.”
“Closure?” Kevin offers lamely.
“Try again.”
“Does it matter?”
“It does,” Andrew says. He realizes he hasn’t taken his eyes off the doors that had closed behind Nathaniel, like the wood grain holds some of the man’s secrets in the residual heat of his hand, in the whorls of fingerprints left on the metal plates.
“You’ll figure it out,” Kevin tells him absently, and then Jeremy is back with the drinks, setting them down with a flourish and slipping into Nathaniel’s abandoned side of the booth.
I will, Andrew thinks to himself as he slides his drink closer to him. If nothing else happens over the next weeks of filming, he will figure out Nathaniel Wesninski. He just needs to get him in front of his camera. The lens will peel back all of the layers and show the real boy to Andrew.