(I am sorry…… that this took me a year……. forgive me)
Allison’s family home, it turns out, is dressed for a gala but graver than a funeral. Everywhere there are cascading chandeliers, grim looking busts, and freshly cut flowers bordering huge open spaces like the frames on minimalist paintings. The ornate, vaulted ceilings remind Neil of the way Allison described her childhood — too perfect not to reach for, too far away to touch.
He can feel the foxes fanned out behind him, laughing and humming to fill the space, steering each other towards ornate birdcages and moustachioed portraits. Allison walks through the centre of the freckled marble, looking bored and regal. It’s easy to tell that she’s uncomfortable from the way her shoulders are so far back that the blades look skewered together.
Neil watches her bob towards the stairs and double suddenly back, heels deafening on the tile. She plucks gum from her mouth and wedges it on the underside of the foyer table.
“Hope it’s mummified by the time they get back,” she sniffs, and keeps walking. Neil looks to Andrew and finds his eyes following Allison as well, dark with thought.
It’s the sticky end of summer, and Allison’s parents are away on an island so remote that it doesn’t have a name. They spend their time there getting piss drunk and pretending they don’t have a daughter, from what Neil understands.
It was Renee who suggested that they pay the Reynolds mansion a visit as some sort of therapeutic release, Nicky who encouraged outright vandalism, and Dan who made it into a team retreat.
It hadn’t been hard for nine athletes to hop the gate, cancel the cleaning staff for the week, and break the artisanal handles right off the front door. It had even been thrilling in a farfetched kind of way, the way crime for fun instead of survival made the consequences look as improbable as bad dreams.
Neil likes the way the foxes shoe-prints look on the white flooring, the way they jostle smiles out of Allison the longer they walk through her old prison block.
“So, like, are their dungeons in this joint?” Matt asks, watching his own hand gliding up the golden bannister, his mouth quirked like he can’t believe it.
“Nah,” Dan says from a little further up the stairs, “They had to conserve space for the labyrinth.”
“There’s a home theatre in the basement,” Allison says airily. Then, thoughtful, “but who knows what’s under that.”
“If we watched Labyrinth in your swanky theatre it would almost be the same,” Matt jokes.
“You’re so dumb,” Dan laughs, pushing him so he falls one stair back. They get to a landing with a little unnecessary standing fountain and everyone shuffles around it, exchanging snapped, bewildered looks.
“Don’t you ever get lost in this place?” Nicky asks. He’s been craning his neck so constantly since they arrived that he’s been almost quiet.
“No,” Allison replies flatly, “but congratulations for being the lucky one thousandth person to ask me that.” They’re in a slightly less decorated area of the house now, with heavy-looking polished doors leading down spidering hallways. “Pick a wing.”
“A wing?” Aaron asks disbelievingly.
“Left,” Neil says, so they don’t stall out discussing it. He keeps looking back at Andrew to make sure he’s still there.
“West,” Allison corrects, and pulls back a tapestry on the left with a narrow staircase beyond it.
“What the fuck,” Dan breathes. “You’re richer than God.”
Allison shrugs. “Having no morals has paid off pretty well for the Reynolds, historically.”
They all trudge up another set of stairs and find an entire lounge set into a deep, windowless room at the top. Kevin makes a muffled noise at the sight of the bar, and Dan drapes herself dramatically into the chaise lounge that’s rubbing shoulders with overstuffed armchairs.
There’s a pool table, smokey amber light, pockmarked hardwood, and a sleek grand piano, propped open at the far side of the room. Neil’s hands creak, protesting under tight scars when he balls them into fists.
Andrew floats along the side of his vision and so he stops looking at the gleam of the pedals, feeling murky and caught like he’s pretending to be sober.
“Please drink,” Allison says, on cue. “If we don’t cost them at least a grand I’ll be fucking pissed.”
Kevin hops over the bar and Aaron follows him, lolling over the counter. Renee perches at the piano to teasing hoots from the upperclassmen. She puts her right hand to the keys and walks her fingers up, a simple melody from some standard piece. It’s something in a bland major key, and it has that flavour that hymns have — hard to mess up, clean and forgettable.
“Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd,” Andrew murmurs. What pleases me is above all the lively hunt. It takes Neil a scared gap of a second to realize that he’s quoting the piece she’s playing.
“I fucking love this place,” Matt says. “Neil, my boy, tell me you’re drinking with us.”
Renee smiles over at the piano, messing up, and plays a few smashed keys like she’s admitting defeat. Allison leans on an ugly chord, all flats, to make Renee laugh.
Neil thinks of his mother arranging his hands over the yellowing keys of the piano and leaving him there, stranded at a stranger’s house on a bench that groaned when he breathed. The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it might have been a kind of safe-house; he was never there at the same time, and he was always distracted with books and music and TV.
Nathan would start pounding at the walls like there was something inside them he wanted to wake up, and Mary would send him to Connie’s. She’d tell him he had to learn something for when she came for him or she’d leave him there for good.
“Neil.” It’s Andrew’s voice, and he knows that he must look as frozen solid as he feels.
“Yeah, I’ll drink,” he pronounces slowly. He hates that old panic can still walk up to him and put its hands around his throat, all the blood in his head rushing into the past. He hates that this is the crime scene of Allison’s tragedy and he still can’t help making it about himself. He’s always bursting into other peoples nightmares, drowning out their whimpers with his shouts.
It’s been so long since he’s thought about the way music felt like another language that he learned and owned, same as French or German or exy.
“Don’t come
crying to me when someone breaks your face.”
Andrew’s
words threw themselves back into his face like acid. If he’d known what would
happen just a few hours after he they had left his mouth, he would never have
allowed Neil to break their deal. He would have tightened his hold around the
other man until it threatened to smother them both.
He had woken
up before Neil, startled at the weight of another body in the bed before full
consciousness kicked in and he remembered that they were in the cabin. He lay
there now, tracing Neil’s profile as the sun leaking through the curtains
backlit the silhouette of his face. The long lashes and slightly upturned nose
had already been forever embedded into Andrew’s mind months ago, but somehow
they seemed completely new every time his eyes wandered over them.
Andrew
dropped his inspection down onto the scarred mess that was Neil’s cheek. The
burns looked better than they had when Andrew had pulled the gauze from his
face the previous Saturday, but the way Neil jolted awake every time he had
rolled onto his side during the night indicated that they still left Neil in agonising
pain. Neil was a stationary sleeper, but not even he could remain in the same
position all night.
He was still
enough, however, to never get close to Andrew while the two slept. The king bed
meant they could have easily fit in another person between them, and that space
had been left empty the whole night, for which Andrew was grateful.
Somewhere in
the back of his mind Andrew acknowledged that in the last few days he had slept
without his back against a wall twice, after years of making sure he was never
exposed. He wondered if this is what trust felt like, and when Neil had shoved
himself and dragged the other foxes into that space in his life. He didn’t feel
safe – he never did – but he could almost imagine what that would be like when
he was with his runaway.
Some emotion
that he couldn’t pick apart nudged at the edge of Andrew’s mind, and he set it
aside for later inspection when Neil’s breathing changed and his eyelids
fluttered open. His blue eyes looked almost warm in the yellow light and the
feeling became more insistent.
“Good
morning, Andrew,” Neil whispered into the still air. A soft smile pulled at his
lips as he tilted his head slightly to look at Andrew.
“Don’t look
at me like that,” Andrew said on autopilot. He almost regretted it when he
realised that he didn’t want Neil to
stop looking at him like that. Ever.
Neil,
however, just smiled wider and didn’t drag his eyes from Andrew. “I don’t want
to,” he said, and Andrew had never felt more grateful for a sentiment. For a
long minute the two just stared at each other before Andrew stretched his hand
out and rested it on the bed between them. Neil looked at it in confusion
before realising what Andrew was angling at. Neil twisted his body as much as
he could without pushing his face into the pillow and moved his own hand until
it was hovering just above Andrew’s.
“Yes or no?”
Neil Asked.
“Yes,” Andrew
said.
Neil dropped
his hand on top on Andrew’s, but didn’t make a move to actually hold it, and
Andrew thought that maybe, just maybe, this is what happiness felt like.
“Do you have any twos?” Neil asks, frowning down at his hand. He can’t tell if it’s a good one or not. He doesn’t know if that’s possible in this game.
“Nope, go fish,” Nicky says. “Any kings?”
Neil wordlessly hands two over just as Dan and Matt come into the suite, both talking about something that Neil doesn’t pay attention to.
“Do you have any fours?” Nicky says.
“Go fish. Any sixes?”
“Nope, go fish.”
“Are you two seriously playing Go Fish right now?” Dan says, popping up behind Nicky and startling him enough that some of his cards fall out of his hand.
“Jesus, Dan, give me some warning next time. Yeah, turns out Neil can’t play any card games, so we’re starting small and working our way up.”
“So you’re cheating at Go Fish with someone who’s never played cards before.”
“You’re cheating,” Neil says. “Seriously? It’s not like we have money on this game.”
“No one bets on Go Fish,” Nicky says, even though he definitely tried to when he suggested they play it. “Besides, cheating is part of the fun! He has to learn that.”
“You could’ve mentioned it,” Neil says. “I just assumed we were playing by the rules. Now that we’re cheating, I’m going to definitely beat you.”
“We need to introduce him to Bullshit.” Matt hands beers to Nicky and Dan and settles on the floor next to Neil. “You’d definitely kill at that. Plus you could get all your lying energy out during a game and be totally honest afterward.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” Neil says, and Matt laughs like Neil has just told a very funny joke.
“We were thinking,” Dan says. “You and Andrew, me and Matt—we should go on a double date! I mean, we’re on the same team as him and we’ve never really hung out properly, so wouldn’t it make sense if we got to know him better?”
Neil has a talent for deactivating sensors that tell doctors when a patient takes their medication. Andrew, a famous Exy player, has a sensor that needs deactivating.
Shadow In The Light 