Page 17 of We Could Be So Good
The sunlight is coming from a strange direction and the sheets are all wrong, so Andy’s already braced for disaster before he’s even fully awake. When he opens his eyes, the reality of the previous day comes crashing back to him, but the blow is softened by therealization that he’s in Nick’s apartment. He can hear the sounds of someone moving around, which must mean that Nick is already awake.
He makes a halfhearted effort to arrange the bedcovers neatly and stumbles out to the kitchen, where he finds Nick making breakfast.
More specifically, he finds Nick in his underwear making breakfast. He’s wearing boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, a cigarette between his lips, the beginnings of a beard already showing on his jaw, and in general looking every inch the ruffian.
“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” Nick calls out without turning around. “There’s some coffee on the stove. Two eggs or three?”
“Two.” A patch of dark hair is visible at the neckline of Nick’s undershirt, and Andy finds this... arresting, somehow. He already knew it was there—Nick loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his shirt at the slightest provocation, so Andy’s had glimpses. But Andy must be a bit hungover or maybe he’s dealing with some emotional fallout from yesterday, because the fact of Nick in his underwear seems like a riddle that Andy can’t quite solve. “Did I take your only pair of pajamas?” he blurts out.
“Nah, I never wear them. Those were a gift.” Nick turns and looks at Andy, his gaze skimming up from where the pajama bottoms trail on the floor to where they barely cling to Andy’s hips. Nick is an inch or two taller than Andy and probably forty pounds heavier, if not more. Andy has always been whip thin, and Nick is—well. All you have to do is look at him to see where that extra weight goes. His arms and shoulders are—
“Milk’s in the icebox,” Nick says, flipping an egg. “Sugar’s on the table.”
Andy pours himself some coffee and sits at the kitchen table. His head’s still a little foggy from last night’s drinking and herealizes that his eyes are sort of glazing over as he watches Nick cook. It’s just eggs. He’s watched people make eggs before, hasn’t he? There’s nothing so mesmerizing about it. Andy’s just tired and emotionally overwrought.
Nick comes over to the table with two plates of eggs and some toast. “Want to play tennis later?”
Andy looks up in alarm. “Jesus, Nick, I got jilted; I’m not dying.” Nick hates tennis. He’s decent at it, which somehow only makes him hate it more. Last summer, Andy convinced him that he had to learn to play golf or tennis in case he ever needed to cultivate country club types of sources. This was horseshit. Andy wanted someone to play tennis with, and knew that with golf as an alternative, Nick would agree to tennis. Nick drew the line at buying tennis whites, saying that they could play at public courts like normal people, and Andy conceded.
Andy thought that Nick would make a grouchy, recalcitrant student, but was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. Nick watched, he listened, and then he did as he was told. Later, as they were cooling down on the side of the court, sitting with their backs against the fence, Andy said as much.
“If I only did what came naturally, I’d be knocking heads together outside a bar on Flatbush Avenue,” Nick said.
“What does that mean?”
“Just that I knew that if I wanted to get away from my family, if I wanted to be able to take care of myself, I’d need to work at it. There’s no use fighting the person who’s trying to teach you, whether it’s your boss at Woolworth telling you how to put things on shelves or some skinny WASP telling you how to serve a tennis ball.”
That was one of a handful of times Nick mentioned his family.Andy, no stranger to mixed feelings about family, recognized it as an area closed off by police tape.
Now Andy looks across the table at Nick, at his rumpled hair, at what he realizes is a vastly superfluous quantity of food. “You can’t possibly want to play tennis.”
“What I want to do is keep you busy. It’s a beautiful day.” This is only true if you’re grading on a steep curve—the weather’s decent for New York in March, meaning it’s not raining and there isn’t any slush on the ground. “Linda probably has a tennis racket you can borrow.”
“Linda?”
“Linda Ackerman. Remember her from—” Nick sighs. “From Emily and Jeanne’s dinner party. She was the artist with the long black hair and the trousers. She was looking for a place, and I mentioned that there was a room for rent in my building. She’s right next door.”
It’s odd to think of one of Emily’s circle living in Nick’s world, and something of Andy’s confusion must show on his face because Nick nudges him under the table with his bare foot. “Want me to go ask her if she has a racket?”
“You ought to get dressed first,” Andy points out.
Nick rolls his eyes. “Great idea. I’d never have thought of that myself. Good thing you came to stay with me.” He ruffles Andy’s hair on the way to his bedroom and Andy doesn’t even protest.
Chapter Three
“Let me get this straight,” Andy says as they walk approximately half a mile through a dark and damp tunnel, “the only way to get to Brooklyn on the subway is to switch trains and then pick our way through a maze of murderer-infested tunnels?” Something scurries across his foot, which is a shame because Andy is going to have to burn his shoes at Nick’s mother’s house. Not the best way to make a first impression.
“No,” Nick says. “There are lots of ways to get to Brooklyn. But this is the fastest way to get to Bay Ridge on a single fare from my place.”
When they finally get to the right platform, Nick lets three trains pass by, each bearing destination signs for places Andy has never heard of—Culver, Brighton, Sea Beach—before a train arrives with the correct sign: a brief4th AVE. It’s been forty-five minutes since they got on the subway and he thinks they’re still in Manhattan. Granted, it’s Sunday morning and trains are running slow, but it seems to Andy that if Nick deliberately chose his apartment for how inaccessible it is to and from his mother’s house, he couldn’t have done any better.
“We should have packed a lunch,” Andy says.
“I told you to eat that bagel.”
“I wasn’t hungry then,” Andy says, definitely not pouting.
That morning, Nick had grimly set a cup of coffee before Andy. “I have to visit my mother,” he said, in the same tone that people in movies use to break the news that they have to go off to war. “You should come with me. It’ll be fun.”
