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Neil Josten had never given the initials marking his inner wrist much notice. The AD had been there for as long as he could remember, just like any other soulmate mark, but his mother had beaten the idea of a soulmate out of him during the half of his life they spent on the run together. The idea of soulmates was nothing but a trap, she’d snarled at him, after she’d caught him kissing a girl with the same initials. Nothing but an anchor, weighing them down, something else to draw Nathan Wesninski and his murderous crew dangerously close to wherever they were hiding.
It didn’t take many beatings for Neil to learn the lesson, but he didn’t really feel like he was missing anything: sure, he’d kissed a few girls, but mainly out of curiosity rather than any kind of desire. Nothing and nobody caught his attention, so he took his mother’s warning on board and focused his energy on survival instead.
It had been a simple enough life, in its own, complicated way.
Then, his mother died, and Neil buried her bones in the sand, and he stopped running.
Then, he lingered at Millport and accepted an exy scholarship to Palmetto State.
Then, he met Andrew Minyard.
Andrew Minyard cared very little for the soulmate initials marring the skin of his own wrist. Over the long, painful years of his childhood and adolescence, he’d carved his own lines over those letters, the N and the W, over and over until both forearms were a ladder of silvery scars marking his time in foster care. The marks were still visible beneath the mess, but Andrew wore his arm bands that kept them covered, and it was if they’d never been there at all.
Andrew had little time or patience for romance, anyway. Not when he had promises to Aaron and Kevin to keep, and Nicky’s back to watch. Not when he’d never met anyone who could hold even a second of his attention beyond the sexual release he occasionally needed, or when the drugs buzzing in his bloodstream made him manic.
Then, Kevin set his eyes on an amateur striker from Arizona for the Foxes’ lineup.
Then, Andrew grit his teeth and got on a plane and smashed an exy stick into a runaway’s stomach.
Then, he met Neil Josten.
‘Andrew,’ Neil gasped helplessly, as Andrew kissed his neck and ground his hips roughly against Neil’s.
‘Shut up,’ Andrew hissed, his whole body on edge, and turned the kiss into a vicious bite. Neil just gasped again and let his head fall further back, exposing the vulnerable line of his throat to Andrew’s anger. Andrew growled against Neil’s skin and pinned his already unmoving wrists to the wall, keeping Neil’s body in place with his own hips and thighs. Neil never touched Andrew without explicit permission, and the fact that small measure of consideration made him feel so warm inside also drove his hatred deeper. He rolled his hips against Neil again, biting back his own groan as their hard cocks pressed against one another. ‘Neil,’ Andrew ground out, tightening his hold on Neil’s wrists, ‘yes, or no?’
‘Yes,’ Neil replied, and the word was like a prayer, whispered against Andrew’s sinners lips.
Andrew kissed him again, erasing Neil’s blasphemy with his tongue, his fingers stroking Neil’s wrists. One was bare, his skin soft and velvety, and the other was covered with a thick black band. Andrew knew Neil had a soulmate mark of his own hidden beneath it, but Neil had never removed his band and Andrew had never asked. He already knew Neil’s initials weren’t on his own wrist; he didn’t need confirmation of someone else’s on Neil’s as well.
A moment later, he’d released Neil’s wrists and dropped to his knees, hands already pulling on Neil’s sweats. ‘You can touch my hair,’ Andrew allowed, and Neil’s fingers were already tangled in the strands by the time Andrew had his sweats around his ankles. As Neil moaned Andrew’s name again, Andrew pressed a gentle kiss to the jut of his hipbone before swallowing him down.
Later, they curled on Andrew’s bed together, nose to nose, and Neil murmured soft words of love in the quiet darkness between them.
‘This is nothing,’ Andrew insisted, and when Neil opened his mouth — no doubt with a sassy retort primed on his tongue — Andrew gripped the band around Neil’s wrist, gently rubbing his thumb over the area he knew the initials would be. ‘You know as well as I do.’
That shut Neil up, for once, but Andrew could almost taste his unhappiness on the air. With a sigh, he gripped Neil’s chin and pulled him in for a kiss. They might not be soulmates, but they were both here, together, and maybe for now that was enough.
It wasn’t enough, but there was nothing Andrew could do about that.
‘Come on, Neil, ‘fess up! You must have a mark, right?’ Nicky was as exuberant as ever, waving expansively towards the black band Neil always wore around his right wrist. Nicky kept the EK on his own skin permanently embellished with a riot of rainbow-coloured Sharpie drawings. ‘Have you found them yet? Is it someone from Palmetto?’
Neil shifted in his seat, feeling even more uncomfortable than Aaron, sinking into the beanbag chair as he killed more on-screen zombies, looked. Kevin, sat at his desk with a laptop open, didn’t even look up from the exy game he was watching. His wrists were both bare, although more than once Neil had heard Nicky tease him that he should have been born with the word EXY printed on both of them.
Andrew sat on his own desk, smoking. His eyes flickered to Neil’s, blank and uninterested.
Neil shrugged, not meeting Nicky’s eye. ‘Does it really matter either way?’ he asked instead, resisting the urge to touch his wrist. Until he came to Palmetto State, Neil had never given much thought to the idea of a soulmate, but now, he couldn’t believe the initials weren’t Andrew’s.
Not that he could ever, would ever, say that out loud. They were nothing, Andrew insisted, and it was blatantly obvious to Neil that the initials on Andrew’s wrist clearly didn’t match Neil’s name, either.
Better to have no soulmate mark at all, in that case, Neil thought, and stubbornly refused to be drawn into Nicky’s conversation any further.
This is nothing, Andrew insisted, time and again.
I hate you, Andrew taunted him, over and over.
I’m not your answer, and you sure as hell aren’t mine.
I’m not your soulmate, the unsaid undercurrent echoed between them, and you sure as hell aren’t mine.
Andrew didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand how anyone, soulmate or not, could rouse him to emotion, to desire, to fierce, furious protection, as much as Neil did.
If Neil was nothing, then soulmates must surely be fantasy. Nothing could burn as much as Neil’s touch, his stare, his mouth on Andrew’s…
And yet, no matter how hard Andrew stared at the unwelcome NW on his wrist, that second letter never changed, never morphed into a J. Instead, Andrew just grit his teeth and pulled his armband back into place, hiding the ugly truth indelibly marked on his skin.
‘Thank you. You were amazing.’
The words were all Neil could give Andrew, the only clue, the only reminder of him he could leave. Andrew’s eyes narrowed, and Neil knew he had questions, but it was already too late. The Foxes’ left the locker room, and before he knew it, Neil was cuffed to the car seat and Lola was burning and cutting him open. She laughed as she sliced the black band from his wrist, and sank the burning lighter into the skin at the side of his soulmates mark.
‘As if you’d ever live long enough to find a soulmate, Junior,’ Lola sneered, and Neil could only keen unhappily and let the tears fall down his ruined cheeks, the sting adding to the intense pain he was already in.
For the first time since falling for Andrew, Neil was relieved he was marked by someone else’s initials: it meant Andrew would be able to get over their brief fling, after they found Neil’s broken body, and find his true soulmate and have his own happily ever after, long after Neil was nothing but a faded memory.
When Nathaniel cowered on the cold stone floor of his father’s basement, cringing and begging not to have his legs taken from him, he wished for a brief, selfish moment that the initials were Andrew’s, after all: even if it meant more pain for him after Nathaniel died, just thinking of Andrew’s golden-brown eyes, the comforting scent of him, the press of his mouth on Nathaniel’s, was almost enough to let him face his inevitable death.
Later, exhausted and broken and shaking, kneeling on the floor of the motel, Andrew held him in place, gave him permission to stay, promised not to let him go again. Gave him back his name, made Neil real all over again.
He looked at Neil like he was his reason for living, and Neil’s heart broke all over with the knowledge that they weren’t meant to be.
How could they not be meant for one another?
Not for the first time, Neil wished he had no marks at all. He wanted nothing more than Andrew, by his side, in his bed, touching him and protecting him and smiling at him.
No cosmically-destined soulmate could even begin to compare to that simple truth.
Andrew’s head was still spinning, and every minute of every interview in that stuffy FBI room just made the dizziness worse. He’d known Neil was hiding some things from him, of course, but the full extent of the horrors of Neil’s life so far was a lot to take in. All Andrew could do was be by Neil’s side, silent and strong, lending him whatever support he could as Neil told his story over and again.
There was so much to absorb, to take in — so many almost-panic attacks of Neil’s that he watched for, anchoring Neil back in the present with his hand to the back of his neck — and such tiredness hanging heavily over them both, that Andrew couldn’t think straight through any of it.
The slow, disbelieving revelation came when the FBI agent slammed down a stack of paperwork in front of Neil. Andrew glanced sideways at it, and recognised the name change forms easily enough: he had become an official Minyard, after all, after all those years in foster care. As Neil demanded a pen and Andrew snatched up the one the agent dropped, passing it over, his eyes flickered again to Neil’s new name, then up to his birth name.
Andrew’s heart almost stopped when he read it, and the words actually sank in.
Nathaniel Abram Wesninski.
Nathaniel Wesninski.
NW.
Neil was signing his new name on each page with a stab of the pen. The agent had left again, no doubt only for a few moments, but right then they were in a bubble of privacy of their own.
Slowly, almost against his own will, Andrew grabbed the end of the black armband at his right elbow, and pulled it off, watching Neil as he did. Neil’s pen went still as noticed Andrew move, and his eyes widened as the pale expanse of Andrew’s forearm, scars and all, was exposed. His mouth opened on a question, but then Andrew tugged the band free completely, and let his hand fall palm-up on the table.
There, on his inner wrist, were his soulmate marks: NW.
‘That’s what it took to finally render you speechless, huh?’ Andrew said quietly, and Neil’s eyes flew up to his, wide and blue and disbelieving.
‘Andrew?’ he murmured, and his fingers twitched on the table, as if wanting to reach out to Andrew’s arm. Andrew nodded in assent, and Neil carefully reached for him, stroking the initials beneath his fingertips. ‘I thought…’
‘I didn’t realise it was you,’ Andrew admitted, voice hoarse, taking a deep breath as Neil’s touch snagged on one of his silver scars. ‘I didn’t…’ He couldn’t finish his sentence, suddenly overcome by how close he came to losing Neil. He just shook his head, dismissing himself. When he looked back up, Neil’s expression had turned to one closely resembling horror, and Andrew felt as if he’d been doused in ice water. ‘Neil? What is it, are you hurt—?’
Neil shook his head desperately, stopping Andrew mid-word. He reached for the white gauze that wrapped around his own right wrist, frantically pulling it free.
‘Slow down,’ Andrew chided, reaching out to take the gauze in his own hands. He carefully unwrapped it, ignoring Neil’s panicked breathing as best he could, and finally bared Neil’s wrist to his gaze.
At first, he didn’t even notice the soulmate mark, too busy fighting down his fury at the angry, raw burn mark to the side of Neil’s wrist. If Lola wasn’t already dead, Andrew swore he would have hunted her down and killed her painfully, slowly, over several days. No-one got to hurt Neil, ever again.
Then, Andrew’s eyes flicked over to the initials, and for a moment, he just stared blankly at them.
‘Huh,’ he said eventually, and ran a finger gently over the AD on Neil’s pale skin.
‘I don’t understand how,’ Neil was babbling away, fighting to speak through tears and stuttered breathing. ‘Andrew, I swear— I want to be with you, I feel like you are my soulmate, but I — I don’t know who this is, I don’t — I don’t know—’
Neil started to hyperventilate, so Andrew did what he did best: he gripped the back of Neil’s neck in his hand, asserting just enough pressure to anchor him.
When Neil’s breathing settled a little, Andrew gave him a wry smile. ‘I mean, it does feel a little bit like a great big ‘fuck you’ from the universe, but the mark is correct,’ he said, keeping his voice as gentle as he could. Neil’s brow furrowed in confusion, but his breathing was back to normal again. ‘Tilda never accepted me as a baby,’ Andrew reminded him, and something deep inside him purred at the flash of dark indignance on Neil’s face before he continued. ‘I was officially Andrew Doe, in the system. I only became a Minyard when I moved in with Aaron.’
Neil’s chin wobbled as understanding dawned, and he instinctively reached out for Andrew, stopping with his hand a mere inch from Andrew’s chest. ‘Yes,’ Andrew whispered, without hesitation, and Neil closed the gap, pressing his palm against Andrew’s beating heart.
‘It’s always been you,’ Neil whispered, and the smile he gave Andrew was a thing of blinding, brilliant, wondrous beauty.
‘It’s always been you,’ Andrew agreed quietly, and he leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to Neil’s lips. ‘And I’m never letting you go, Neil.’
Neil smiled against Andrew’s mouth, and Andrew couldn’t help it. He smiled back, and let Neil bury him in kisses once more.
This was never nothing.