#additional notes on ao3 as awlays

[aknosde]

aurum

Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard // Post-Canon // Long Distance Relationship // Off Season // Foreplay // Piercings // Lake Michigan // 1.4k

ao3

—————

Neil’s waiting for him outside the bar on Friday night. 

Duffle bag thrown over one shoulder, leaning against a graffitied parking meter, chewing a piece of gum. He looks straight out of one of those doctors office magazines—Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health, GQ. They’re across the sidewalk from each other, the Snakes’ starting lineup milling about drunkenly in wait of cabs and sorting into groups for the L, partially obscuring him from view. He holds eye contact with Andrew through the crowd for three, four, five seconds, before he snaps a bubble of gum. 

“Well hey, Josten,” Alvarez says, already looking at him. A couple tipsy heads turn. 

They dap each other up—grasp, pull, half-hug, release—and Andrew inspects the lines of Neil’s body in the dark. Black bandana, stained New Balances, a worn-thin US Court bomber jacket dated 1985. The glint of jewelry. Not his watch, his chain. An earring. 

“Vintage,” Cat says appreciatively, briefly thumbing at his lapel. Neil’s always been oddly receptive to Catalina, the two of them exhibiting a chemistry on the court that seems to spill over at the edges. He hums, pleased. More teammates are making their way over. She turns to Andrew. “You didn’t tell me your guest was arriving tonight.”

Pretenses and such. 

Andrew extends his hand for the same familiar motions—callused palm against callused palm, short nails briefly biting into the sensitive skin of his fingers, the warm muscled slope of Neil’s shoulders under his hand, counting the seconds. The only direct flight from Albuquerque to Chicago is just over three hours, which doesn’t include the drive to ABQ from Santa Fe, nor Neil’s paranoid travel tendencies, and it arrives at ten in the morning. Andrew set a traffic alert for tomorrow before he ordered his first drink. And yet. 

They release late and not at all. Neil doesn’t let go of his hand, stays too close, makes Andrew look up at him. Gold hoop, left earlobe, perfect.

“Hi,” Neil says. 

So he’s not going to bring it up. Well, as they say, two can play at that game. Andrew shifts his weight away, allows Lewis to interrupt them—the back of his hand to Neil’s shoulder, a fist bump, posture that makes him look like he’s hanging off a hook. Friendly, assuredly drunk. The Snakes’ second best backliner now that they’ve got Cat. 

“What’re you doing in town?” he asks. 

Andrew and Neil haven’t broken each others’ gaze, not that anyone but Cat will notice, and he watches Neil settle into Lewis’ dialect, thick and local. 

“Well,” Neil says, eyes loch-deep on Andrew, tongue shining wet pink in the street light, settling on a vaguely midwestern accent, “I’m trying to swim the country’s hundred largest lakes.”

They take the bus to Andrew’s apartment. 

It’s a quiet ride, twenty minutes and a transfer. The city is spring-cool at night, and Metra’s already turned on the AC for the season. Neil’s torso is a line of heat against Andrew’s own, duffle bag spilling over his lap, fingers on the strap and circumstantially Andrew’s thigh. His clever eyes track the transit map posted across from them, and he stands at La Salle without a word, hops to the sidewalk, offers his hand. 

“Chivalrous,” Andrew says. He takes it. 

They walk six blocks to a North-South line and loiter in the shadow of the museum. Its lights are on, the building dormant, and Neil is cast aurate against the stone. A dark curl has escaped his bandana, tracing a parabola to his eyebrow. It flutters as he tilts his face to the coming breeze. His earring gleams.

Andrew puts his leather jacket back on and turns to the street, counts three minutes of gum chewing and snapping. 

“Staring.”

Neil comes around, closer, but doesn’t dispute. 

“What did you think the extra twelve hours were for?”

The bus pulls up, slightly less crowded, slightly more drunk. Andrew scans his pass and feels the weight of Neil’s presence at his back, ducking the fare. The driver says nothing. 

“I’ve got a meeting in the morning,” Andrew responds later, in the elevator. It’s his last of post-season, scheduled at the ass crack of dawn because he wanted his hands washed of exy by the time he was to tackle Midway. “You’ll have to find another way to amuse yourself.”

“Don’t worry,” Neil says. “I already had something in mind. Unless you wanted to join me.”

The elevator stops and Neil strides out, beating Andrew to his apartment door and unlocking it with his keys.

“And what would that be?” Andrew asks. 

Neil kicks his shoes off, one hand on the door frame, before letting Andrew in. 

“I told Lewis. I’ve been meaning to go for a swim.”

He takes his duffle bag and starts down the hall. 

“The beaches don’t officially open until the Friday before Memorial Day,” Andrew remembers, half an hour later, when he’s lying on Neil’s side of the bed and reading the chapter of Midnight’s Children that he started that morning. The shower was on for barely five minutes, but steam wafts from the half-open ensuite door, and he sees Neil’s foggy reflection bouncing off the mirror. 

“Is that a ‘yes, I do want to come’?” Neil asks. 

They both know the legality is irrelevant, even if CPD did care about a lone few swimmers along the shore. 

The tap turns on, off. Neil leans out the bathroom door, toothpaste suds around his mouth, hair dark and wet around his crown, left ear flashing gold in the lamplight. 

“There’s supposedly unexploded ordnance to the north, you know,” he says, consonants pressing in on one another. “If you wanted to make it fun.”  

“Are there explosives in all the lakes you swim, or is Michigan special?”

The sink turns on again. Neil spits, gargles, exits the ensuite and crosses the room with a grin so clever it's almost sickening. He’s wearing black boxers and a light grey athletic t-shirt that for once fits him too well, pale against the dark of his skin. The one thing New Mexico is good for is keeping him in a deep brown. Aurate indeed. 

“Michigan is special,” Neil says, pausing to press his thumb into the vulnerability of Andrew’s palm, “because it’s the third largest lake in the United States.”

When he makes eye contact with Andrew it burns, molten ice. 

“That’s twenty-two thousand, three-hundred square miles in surface area.”

He swings one leg onto the bed, shin slotting perfectly along the outside of Andrew’s thigh. There’s the brief brush of a socked foot over the crest of his knee, the shift of the mattress. Andrew raises his arm on instinct, fingers playing at the air next to Neil’s waist, stalling in the face of his self-assured smile.  

“It’s the second largest by volume,” Neil continues, voice becoming lower, slower, “coming in at one-thousand, one-hundred and eighty cubic miles.”

They're close to the edge of the bed, but Neil’s second leg finds purchase on the mattress regardless. Andrew runs newly-branded palm over the warm expanse of Neil’s calf, and Neil’s smile becomes infinitesimally sharper. A canine licks at his lip. Looking up at him Andrew feels the sorts of emotions between them that come from deep below: confidence, pride, resolve, admiration.

“It’s home to the world’s largest freshwater sand dunes”—one of Neil’s hands comes forward to find the headboard, and he uses it to pull himself closer, closer, closer, the other lifting off Andrew’s reading glasses and setting them on the nightstand—“along the eastern shore.

“And,” Neil says, sitting back, making no acknowledgement of Andrew half-hard beneath him, nor his own partial, “it’s home to an estimated two-thousand shipwrecks, earning itself the moniker ‘shipwreck graveyard.’”

He rolls his hips once, a wicked conclusion, and Andrew aches. 

“S’that so?” Andrew says, pressing his voice into something that sounds less out of breath.

“It is.”

Andrew raises his hand where it’s come to grip Neil’s ankle and pushes back the hair next to his ear. The gold is warm, thick, hugging his lobe, and Andrew wants to feel it between his teeth. 

“I like the earring.”

It’s almost a preen. Neil tilts his head, shifts his weight further into Andrew’s in a way that makes his spine arch. Both canines. 

“Thank you.”