Author's Notes: This is the story of a boy. A young, confused, wayward boy who split himself in two (not three, or five, or seven). By day, he is a student, a bartender, and a model. By night, he is none of these things. He is simply a boy. A boy with a lot of problems. He has given up on the things he hoped for, once upon a time, instead taking comfort in keeping hold of the things he can control, improve, and perfect.

We come to observe this boy on one not-so-extraordinary Saturday evening, where we find him working his usual graveyard shift at the Crow Bar in central Minneapolis. He has just stepped back behind the bar after ejecting some particularly rowdy patrons who, in a fit of drunken genius, doused him with a nearly-full glass of ice cold Coors Light. As he pauses for a moment to curse the group of students—some of whom he recognizes from one of his classes—he has no idea that his life is about to change forever.

*

Effing customers. Effing customers getting effing drunk and making a giant effing mess.

Toby scrubs a hand through his already wild, bird's nest of hair and sighs, plucking his beer-soaked shirt away from his chest. “Vanessa, I'm taking my effing break already!” he yells into the back room, where she sits at the table with a cigarette, talking on the phone to the latest in a long string of boyfriends. She waves him off, somehow believing that the bar can go unmanned at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night. Granted, it's quiet since most of the younger patrons left for the far more glamorous nightclubs in the heart of Minneapolis, but still. Sighing heavily, he grabs one of the Crow Bar logo t-shirts from the display board behind the bar and rips it out of the plastic before pulling his own shirt over his head, not caring who sees. That is, until he turns around and sees the tall man seating himself at the bar, hair looking like he's tugged it in fifty different directions, eyes dark and wide.

Heart-breakingly, earth-shatteringly gorgeous. And staring straight at him.

“Just a sec,” he says with a sheepish grin, and yanks the shirt over his head. “Okay, what can I get you?”

The man groans, shakes himself a little and drops his head into his hands. “Anything—anything with fucking tequila or vodka or, just... You know what, fuck it. Surprise me. That seems to be today's theme.”

“Need a shoulder?” Toby asks easily, a habit he's picked up over the course of the ten months he's worked at the bar, even though it's not him at all. It's a carefully-constructed persona. His back turned, he begins mixing a Negroni with his head slightly inclined to the side.

“You offering?” the man asks, surprise evident in his tone.

“Sure.”

“So I just moved here—literally, just today—from New York,” he begins, and Toby finds himself nodding along as he realizes the reason the man sounded so surprised when he offered to listen. “I was supposed to be moving in with my partner, and I managed to work it so I'd get here a day early. Surprise, you know? Bought fucking flowers and everything. Only, when I got here...”

“Wasn't alone?” Toby asks knowingly, setting the cocktail down on the bar and tossing a hand towel over his shoulder. The man visibly shudders, and takes a large mouthful of the drink.

“Found him balls-deep in some fucking—ugh, he looked like freaking Marky Mark.”

Toby can't help but laugh. The man's eyes narrow dangerously, a heat and anger smoldering behind the brown, and Toby's breath catches just a little. “I'm sorry, I just—“

“Go ahead, fucking laugh it up. Worst day of my fucking life. I'm glad you're getting a kick out of it.”

“Hey, no, I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at the douchebag who broke your heart,” Toby says, leaning over the bar and staring him straight in the eye. “I mean, look at you.”

“'Look at me'?” the man asks, his tone growing more and more indignant, and Jesus rollerblading Christ, I'm going about this all wrong.

“Okay, let me start again,” Toby says carefully, straightening up.

“By all means,” he deadpans, waving his hand. “Perfect end to a crappy day.”

“I just—Marky Mark, over you? Guy must not be firing on all cylinders, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” he says, looking entirely taken aback, and he takes another sip of his drink. “What's in this?”

“Gin, Campari, Vermouth,” Toby recites by rote. “You looked like you could use a little Mothers' Ruin.”

“Mothers' what?"

“Mothers' Ruin. It's a nickname for gin back in England, where my mom was born,” Toby explains, before deciding to throw caution to the wind and hold out his hand. “Toby Hillard.”

“Andrew Fleischman,” the man answers, shaking his hand. “Um. Thanks for the drink. How much do I owe you?”

Toby shakes his head. “On the house.”

“I don't need your pity,” Andrew grumbles.

“Sympathy, not pity,” Toby corrects him. “I've been there. It sucks. So drink up, because you're going to need at least five more before you get to the point where you can dance on a bar in cowboy boots and sing country songs about how you don't need him.”

“You really have been there,” Andrew says, and he seems to be trying to search out something in Toby's eyes, lingering, like they hold all the answers.

“Got the bruises to prove it,” he replies quietly, caught somewhere between wanting to scan the bar for empties and never wanting to move again.

“Where?” Andrew asks, his tone mischievous as he raises his chin slightly. The moment fractures and the tension eases away, and Toby lets out a breathy laugh.

“Getting back on that horse,” he says, taking Andrew's now-empty glass and moving to pour him a refill.

*

Two drinks and a lot of conversation later, they're stepping inside Toby's tiny studio apartment that's somehow always colder than it is outside. Andrew stumbles a little over the threshold, and Toby takes him by the arms to steady him. Their eyes meet, both somewhat glassy, and it's as Toby is clearing his throat and Andrew is licking his lips that the moment passes and they start laughing.

“Look, um,” Andrew says, scratching absently at the back of his head, “I really appreciate this. I used up my last paycheck getting here.”

Toby nods, flicking the light switch four times on auto-pilot and relaxing by a margin. “As long as you don't try and kill me in my sleep, we're good.”

“Ah, you're too pretty for that,” Andrew tells him with a slightly pained smile, Toby's brief interlude with the switch somehow not fazing him, and his shoulders slump. “So, where...?”

“You can take the bed,” Toby says, gesturing towards the corner of the room. Andrew is gazing around the space (or lack thereof) with appraising eyes, and Toby has to explain. They spent most of the night talking about Andrew, his time at 'The C.I.A.' as he affectionately dubbed The Culinary Institute of America, and New York. They barely touched upon the subject of Toby's life, which he had been fine with. Now, though, with Andrew in his apartment and clearly wondering why a barman and part-time model would be living right next door to campus, he has to explain, has to come clean that he's not the embodiment of the well-adjusted facade he presents to the world, and—

“Hey,” Andrew says, waving a hand in front of his face and breaking into his thoughts. “You... okay in there? You look fucking terrified.”

“Yeah, yes, I'm fine. Fine,” Toby says, swallowing hard and itching to flick the light switch some more. “So I go to college here, at—at Bethel, I mean.”

Andrew looks surprised, but not in a bad way, and Toby's fingers itch a little less. “What are you studying?”

“Business and Economics.”

“So you work at a bar, you model, and you're a Business student,” Andrew muses, summing it all up. “You get more interesting by the minute.”

Toby feels the apples of his cheeks flush. Inside the bar, he's a different person entirely. His personality changes, he eases into another skin, one that's comfortable and open and smiles a lot. Here, where everything is in order, where he makes the bed every morning and alphabetizes his bookshelves and flicks that damn switch whenever he's nervous, he can't keep it up. Here, he's just Toby and welcoming in other people—particularly ones he'd really quite enjoy having in his bed in a very non-platonic sense—is not something he does often. Hence the blushing.

“I'm sorry,” Andrew says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I'm making you uncomfortable, it's probably not a good idea for me to stay. Honestly, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing.”

“No, look,” Toby begins, huffing out a breath and closing his body off by clutching at his own arms, “it's late. We should just get some sleep. I guess you have a long day tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Um, bathroom?” Andrew asks, and his eyes follow where Toby points.

“Just through that door. I'll warn you, though, it's even colder than in here.”

“I could probably take a look at your heating, you know,” Andrew tells him, before disappearing into the bathroom with a duffel bag from the pile by the door.

Toby makes quick work of setting himself up on the couch and flicks the light switch sixteen times before finally finding that sense of dust settling within himself, and he leaves the room in darkness save for the dim lamp on his bedside cabinet. When he's sliding underneath the thick, scratchy Afghan that usually hides the stains and burn marks on his ancient couch, Andrew emerges from the bathroom in a thick hooded sweater and sweatpants, inexplicably looking more put-together than he had in his shirt-and-slacks combo.

“Fuck, no,” he says flatly, and Toby's head snaps up. Andrew's waving a hand in his direction. “I'm not taking your bed and having you sleep on that... thing. It looks ready to collapse.”

Toby shifts around uncomfortably, and he can count springs lodged into his back in approximately eighteen different places. “I'm fine. It's comfortable enough.”

“No, come on. Up,” Andrew orders, and Toby shivers when the afghan is suddenly gone, bunched up in Andrew's hands. “Go back to your own bed, I'll take the couch. You're already putting me up, I'm not taking the only comfortable-looking thing in this place as well.”

“Just—okay, trust me when I say you'd rather sleep on the floor than on this thing,” Toby tells him matter-of-factly, “so let's just share the bed. I'm not gonna try anything.”

Andrew seems to reason it all through for a moment, regarding him with quizzical eyes as if sizing him up, before nodding his way through a reluctant yawn. “Sure, why not?”

If someone were to inquire whether Toby was nervous, he would have been lying if he answered in the negative. As Andrew climbs into bed and Toby follows, his fingers are getting itchy again and it feels like there's something crawling deep in his gut. Andrew turns to face the wall, and Toby watches his fingers drift across the exposed brick that he wants to plaster over because it's all so raggedy and imperfect. He leans over the side of the bed, turning off the lamp as he waits for his laptop to power up and all but screaming because the urge to tap the base repeatedly is close to overwhelming. He hears Andrew sigh deeply before his breathing evens out to a shallow count of four, and Toby smiles at the even number and whispers a goodnight, opening up his Sleep playlist on iTunes: volume two clicks above mute, system volume on 44. One tap of the space bar, lid closed just enough for the screen to sleep, and he shifts onto his side, one leg out straight and the other bent at the knee just above the level of his waist. The deep bass beat of Anasthasia lulls him, and his eyes flutter closed as the panpipes intermingle with synthesized electronica.

“Mmph, what—what the fuck is that?” Andrew asks a few minutes later, and Toby blinks himself out of the dozing stage of sleep.

“Music. Deep Forest. I have trouble sleeping,” he says, sentences short and staccato as his addled brain claws its way back into consciousness. “I can turn it off.”

“No, no,” Andrew replies, his expression relaxing and breathing evening out again. “It's... nice. Focus. No thinking.”

“Exactly,” Toby murmurs, and he's half-asleep again by the time he feels callused fingertips pressing against his own, floating in the in-between where he can't really decide whether it's real or a dream.

*

Six months pass, and our boy is on a steep learning curve. He's beginning to learn that not everything has to be perfect. In fact, he's learning that some things are downright messy, but in that mess it is possible to find beautiful, beautiful things.

*

One Saturday morning before opening, six months after Andrew starts working at The Crow Bar as their new fry cook—a job Toby knows he hates but for which he's grateful nonetheless—they're being unabashed dorks and dancing around the kitchen to something fun and flirty on the radio that talks about memories and Sunday mornings and summers spent listening to Bob Marley. They move around each other almost effortlessly, and Toby hasn't felt that itch in his digits for sixteen days and counting. Andrew tosses a dish rag at him and tells him to wash the fucking dishes already, and Toby throws it right back into Andrew's face because it's his darn mess, and he's a Minneapolis fry cook, not some haughty Parisian sous-chef.

“Is that right?” Andrew asks, whirling around and backing Toby against the sink, hands either side of his hips. Toby just blinks: unexpected. Not part of the routine. This isn't the usual exchange that takes place some time between 10:36 and 10:38 every morning. Usually, Andrew just lets out a sound that's somewhere between a giggle and a snort, and Toby shakes his head and follows Chef's orders and washes the fucking dishes like he's told. This is new, and his fingers twitch by his sides.

“Yes, Chef,” Toby breathes out.

Andrew just groans and pitches forward, crushing his lips against Toby's, and Toby freezes for an awful moment that feels like waking up to the sensation of falling. But Andrew's mouth is warm, and soft, and insistent and Toby folds like a deck of cards, taking it all and giving it all back, working his hands along the scruff lining Andrew's jaw and up into his hair.

Things like this just don't happen to Toby Hillard. Not the things he really wants, deep down in those secret parts he keeps hidden, even when it's just the two of them hanging out in the evenings watching Jersey Shore and voicing their contempt for Snooki and all that she represents. He doesn't get to find someone broken and help put them back together, he doesn't get to find someone to say goodnight to while wanting to reach out and ask them to stay, he doesn't get to find someone who accepts all of his faults and unknowingly makes him care less about perfection. The things he gets instead are living his life in accordance with even numbers, photographers who instruct and point and shoot (and sometimes rake their eyes across his prone form in a way that, were it not for his carefully constructed facade, would make him feel dirty), and light switches.

No, things like this just don't happen to Toby. Except, with Andrew—handsome, irritatingly off-kilter, sometimes just plain devastating Andrew—apparently they do.

Andrew gently probes against Toby's lips with his tongue, and of course Toby yields, because that's what he does—he takes direction, and he takes it well. Andrew's hands skate along Toby's waistband and pull him closer by the belt loops as his kiss turns harder, more insistent, and for the first time in ever, Toby stops envisaging a cuff around his own wrist. He feels strong, and sure, and the tingling in his hands dies away to nothing more than the external brush of singular hairs fitting into the grooves of his fingerprints.

“How long?” he manages when Andrew breaks the kiss and presses their temples together, his exhale heavy and satisfied.

“Three weeks,” Andrew whispers, and immediately that strength and surety fades from Toby's body. Odd numbers, he can't deal with odd numbers. They make no sense. “Can I—was that okay?”

For a moment Toby is entirely static, can't move to nod—ask me six seconds ago and it was perfect—or shake his head or do anything because all he can think of is the number three and he slots his hands behind himself on the sink and leans back hard, his knuckles cracking as they mold to the ceramic edge.

“Toby, come back. Look at me,” Andrew says, tilting his chin upwards. “Don't zone out right now. Don't do that. Ask me how many days.”

“How many days?” Toby parrots, eyes flitting anywhere except Andrew's face because he just can't.

“Twenty-two,” Andrew whispers, and Toby's breath leaves his body in a whoosh. “I wanted to do this yesterday, but I—“

“You waited for an even number?” Toby asks incredulously. Things like this really do not happen to him. Andrew nods, tugging on Toby's arm until his hand comes free, and he twines their fingers together. “Why?”

“Because you're worth the crazy.”

- fin