24 + andreil omfg
24: “I don’t want to fight with you anymore.”
“You can keep going.”
Andrew looks up into Neil’s flushed face. His lower lip is caught up in a way that suggests he’s biting it inside his mouth.
Andrew didn’t ask if he could keep going. He was feeling for it, listening for it, because he always is, but he hadn’t asked. Neil had offered it up anyway, in his toneless lying voice, and Andrew knows he missed a wince while he was focusing on the summery heat of Neil’s body.
His whole body lurches and keeps lurching, a car punched sideways by a train, screeching along the tracks.
Andrew pulls his slick fingers out and drags himself from the bed all the way to the door.
Neil looks instantly disappointed, and he knocks himself up onto his elbows. He’s naked, red all over, and just as hard as when they started half an hour ago. Andrew can’t look directly at him or he’ll want violence, he can feel it grabbing at his neck.
“I said it was fine,” Neil says, already argumentative.
“That,” Andrew says, voice pulling like it’s caught in a sewing machine, “is not as helpful as you seem to think it is.”
Neil turns his head to the window, frowning, backlit by evening sun. “Why would I lie about something that’s hurting me?”
Andrew’s fists curl. He doesn’t recognize the version of himself that was just twisting three fingers inside of Neil, his own scars brushing the ones on Neil’s inner thighs.
Neil looks back at him seriously. “I would let you do pretty much anything to me.”
Andrew’s body goes cold. “I don’t want to do anything to you.”
“I trust you,” Neil insists, sitting up so he looks a little less terribly vulnerable.
“Don’t.”
He gathers his shirt off the floor, jams his armbands back on. He can sense Neil moving in his periphery but his vision is slurring with panic. He needs out.
“Andrew, wait.” Neil knows better than to try to touch him, but he crowds him back into the room with raised hands, the blue of his eyes icing Andrew over. “I wanted it. I still want it. It twinged for a second. You’ve dealt me worse on the court, easy.”
Like that means anything, like it’s not the exact set of circ*mstances that coils around his heart so it purples and bulges. “Do you think,” he starts, “that there might be a difference between the court and our bedroom?”
Neil’s eyes flicker and try to light Andrew on fire, like throwing matches on wet green wood. “It’s still me and you.”
“And seven of your teammates.”
“Our teammates,” Neil corrects instantly. Then his face goes patchy with confusion. “What, do you think they’re witnesses? You think you’re going to hurt me, just because no one’s around to tell you not to?”
That’s how violence works, and Neil should know that.
“We both know how bad you are at saying no,” he forces out.
“Andrew,” Neil breathes. “You would be able to tell if I didn’t want something. I’m not quiet.”
Andrew gestures for him to move, feeling hot and sick. “Loud does not equal honest.”
“It does for me. I was the quietest version of myself when I was running. I got loud when I got you.”
Andrew finally slips Neil’s block and walks out into the body of the dorm, trying to shake the feeling welling up from his skin. Neil scrambles behind him, and Andrew has an irrational moment of fear at the sound of him moving.
“You’ll never be like them,” Neil says viciously. Andrew doesn’t turn.
He pauses at Aaron’s door before bypassing it. He expects Neil’s quick footsteps to come raining down from the hallway or on the stairwell as he winds down it.
They don’t, and a familiar thickness settles in him, numbing and crowding his body.
He drives.
He considers going to Wymack’s to stay the night, but the road sweeps him in the opposite direction.
His cellphone rings in his pocket and he knows Neil’s on the other side of it with the shell of his ear pressed in too tight to the receiver, in that way he does.
He never wants to miss anything, he’d told Andrew once. Andrew had replied that listening wasn’t his strong suit, and they’d stared and kissed and smoked like that was the way to settle things.
The sky dumps buckets of darkness on the horizon and the hood of the car, until it starts to feel like he and the car and the road are all dipping under it. He pulls haphazardly to the side of the highway and chokes the life out of the steering wheel.
The shape of Neil underneath him is so f*cking impossible to think about, and impossible not to.
I wanted it. I still want it.
He had wanted it too.
He drives back late, imagining peeling the road up with him like the sharp-edged top of a can. Imagining destruction of property so he won’t think about what Neil’s wince looked like when Andrew’s weight had been all over him, inside of him, like some sort of sickness.
He pulls up at fox tower, seething, knowing Neil will be awake and stewing in arguments Andrew doesn’t want to hear.
When he gets upstairs, he breezes directly by Neil, who’s standing at the kitchen doorway wearing 80% more layers than the last time he saw him. It’s safer, this way —armour that keeps both of them protected.
Neil dutifully follows him to the bedroom in silence, even as Andrew keeps walking and shuts himself in the bathroom. He washes his hands for a long time, and scrubs them dry for longer. He doesn’t look in the mirror, and he doesn’t touch his own body or undress, doesn’t even consider it.
He walks back out and Neil’s sitting in the centre of his bed with his legs crossed.
“When I tell you to keep going—“
“I don’t want to fight with you anymore,” Andrew says simply, stepping on the heels of his shoes so they come off. He dodges Neil’s gaze, finding things to look at that don’t involve the bed or the person in it.
Neil ignores the dismissal. “When I tell you to keep going, I’ve already gauged my pain. I’m reminding you of my yes. I’m not saying it to placate you.”
He unfolds his legs so he’s kneeling on the mattress instead. “Ask me.”
Andrew’s eyes shift up, and Neil is too intense to focus on, like the blur of something too fast to see, or the roiling surface of a star. “No.”
“Yes,” Neil insists. “I told you. Anything.”
“And I told you I didn’t want it.”
Neil watches him, and Andrew knows he’s tracking the shifts in his stance, his unaltered expression.
“Then ask me tomorrow.”
“What makes you think I’ll want you then?” Andrew asks.
Neil gets off the bed altogether, crowds close enough that Andrew knows for sure that he left his anger out on the highway. “The same way I know now.” His mouth curls, a fine coil of calligraphy. “You came back.”
Andrew pulls Neil to him by the back of his neck.
“Yes,” Neil says, at the same time that Andrew caves and asks “yes or no?”
His hand flexes, and he presses Neil even closer, so his forehead knocks into Andrew’s. He feels equal parts helplessness and control boiling his blood.
“I came back because I live here.”
“You came back,” Neil says, “because this is your home.”
Andrew remembers the uncooperative road, tipping him away from Wymack’s and back to Fox Tower. He puts one hand on the garbled skin of Neil’s cheek, and closes his eyes.
