Fic: Sonder [RPF]
Title: Sonder
Fandom: RPF
Characters/Pairings: Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone/Jesse Eisenberg
Summary: Andrew feels like this is something he should have known.
Word Count: 10,160
Notes: Written for the Polyamory Ficathon, but it got too long to comment-spam (UNEXPECTED PLOT TWIST, AMIRITE?) so I'm posting it here. Written for impromptu_song, who wanted Andrew/Emma/Jesse in any way, shape, or form. Since I will never not OT3 a thing, I obliged. Fair warning, this fic makes absolutely no attempt to adhere to any kind of accurate timeline, because what is filming.
Many thanks to moogle62 and laliandra, who politely refrained from pelting me with biscuits when I commandeered half the sofa and wrote this instead of our Big Bangs, and letting me have a lot of threesome feelings in their general direction.
Title comes from this entry in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
The first time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, it's on an exceptionally beautiful day. He'd managed foreign public transport and had the correct change ready and everything, and he didn't have to inconvenience a local by asking for directions, which he always considered to be a pinnacle of personal achievement.
Nobody likes a tourist, and Andrew Garfield is nothing if not a perpetual tourist in other people's permanent lives.
The rosemary is in bloom; long skinny stalks of purple that bob over his head as he walks along the median, traffic a quick shining flash on either side. The sunlight is so bright and heavy it feels like swimming, the air gone as crystalline as water's surface. A man with a violin and a yellow beanie cap pulled low over his dreadlocks crouches behind an open case, his instrument tucked easily under his chin like a man asleep with something beloved, and the sunlight winks off the high, smooth polish. Andrew tosses the last of his spare change into the case, because why not -- the man is making music for no reason other than it's there to be made, to be heard, and Andrew isn't so attached to his coins that he can't spare them for that. The same snatch of "Ode to Joy" is stuck in his head all the way back.
Once he's inside the lobby and out of the sunshine, everything goes cool and dark; it's physical, sudden, the shade, a prickle he feels all along his skin. It leaves him blinking.
He's walking, and almost doesn't see it -- something stops him, a flutter of recognition that steals a heartbeat and doesn't give it back, and in that space of a beat, Andrew realizes what he's looking at.
Jesse, who hadn't been ready to go when Andrew checked earlier, stands in an alcove by a potted plant with his shirt buttoned all the way up his throat, out of the way of other people and dwarfed by the enormous painting behind his head. His hair is flattened in the back from his pillow, where he can't see it when he checks in the mirror. He's holding a woman's coffee for her as she straightens the straps of her wedge heels, the both of them clutching each other's forearms with their free hands to keep her balanced.
He doesn't recognize her for one moment, then another, and then she smiles and he does, feeling incredibly stupid and a little slow.
"Thanks, babe," says Emma Stone -- he doesn't hear it so much as see the words form on her lips -- and she straightens, testing her weight. Finding it sound, she takes her coffee back and sips at it, grinning around the lid at something Jesse says to her: Andrew can't hear it, but he sees Jesse gesturing and it's impossible not to smile at Jesse when he talks like that, like he can only construct words if he uses his whole body.
He didn't realize anyone else found it as endearing as he did.
Andrew's only ever seen the two of them together in TV interviews on YouTube. He'd forgotten that they knew each other.
He stops walking.
He stares, which isn't a dumb thing to do yet because people don't know who they are. They aren't famous. Not yet. Not really, and if Andrew's drawing attention to them, it won't matter. They don't matter yet.
When Emma leans in, their eyes close. The kiss is gentle, easy, and quick: it's the kiss of people who aren't worried about where their next kiss is coming from.
Andrew feels steamrolled, feels like this is something he should have known.
-
The second time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, it's technically the other way around, and Andrew has a glass of water in front of him with a slice of lemon perched on the rim.
The tablecloth is very white, the glass is glazed a deep cerulean blue, and Andrew isn't a big fan of water that tastes like fruit, so he gingerly plucks the lemon off his glass like he's picking up an insect, and sets it aside. There's nobody else here at their table yet, except for Jesse to his right and Emma two seats down. The rumble of conversation is muted by distance.
They cranked the venue's air conditioning up overzealously, because all of the men here are in their finest suits, their undershirts stained an off-yellow by nervous sweat -- and it means that most of the women are freezing. Emma, dressed in sleeveless blazing gold like fishscales, is goosepimpled all down her bare arms, and Andrew already gave his jacket to Hailee Steinfeld earlier, so he has nothing to offer her unless he starts stripping. He glances over as she tilts forward, pinching her nose between her fingers. She's wearing a bracelet with turquoise beads and a mermaid-shaped clasp.
She doesn't feel good, Andrew's gathered. She's cramping, and her meds haven't kicked in yet. Hidden by the folds of the tablecloth, she and Jesse are holding hands.
IMDB lists both of them as single, and there's always speculation whenever they're photographed out and about with other (famous) people, but there are bigger fish flopping in the sea of relationship drama, and Andrew endlessly admires Jesse and Emma for their ability to field any questions about their love lives in a way that makes them seem entirely uninteresting.
He's watched their press videos, and that's the thing. Chemistry was never a word that crossed his mind, not the way he's used to seeing, where the act of seeing felt like combustion.
He never saw any sparks, and it was a while before it occurred to Andrew that maybe they didn't need them.
What Jesse and Emma have ... it's respect. The way they stand next to each other with a polite amount of space in between them, the way their fingers touch like they're just finding each other for the first time, the way they tilt wry smiles to each other when they think nobody is looking ... they just respect each other, in their own unassuming way, and Andrew's starting to realize the vast kind of strength they've built themselves on. Their relationship is something that twists very, very deep down.
Emma turns her head when Jesse murmurs something, her eyes slipping past his face to catch Andrew's in a way that seems almost physical.
Jesse kisses her mouth -- brief and reassuring -- and they let Andrew see it. It's conscious, and deliberate, and Andrew feels about a dozen things he doesn't have names for, all in the time it takes his heart to skip from one beat to another.
Then Jesse stands, fidgeting and tugging at his cuffs until they cover the heels of his hands, and he leaves Emma and Andrew alone.
Emma tilts her head at him. He really likes her bracelet, and he wishes he could do something to make her not so ... so grey and in pain. Her eyes are incredibly luminous, even in real life -- Andrew had always figured that was just a thing they liked to highlight in photographs, but no, her eyes actually do sparkle without provocation. Who knew?
"Lemon?" he goes, perking up, because being able to give a girl a gift is simply the best feeling, even if it is just sour fruit from his water glass.
Her mouth curves into a half-smile, and it's sort of breathtaking, how immediately it becomes Andrew's life mission to get Emma to smile a full smile.
"No ... thank you?" she says, half a question.
"I hear it's not good for you to take ibuprofen on an empty stomach."
"Right, and so the thing you give me to settle my stomach is, like, pure acidity." The word acidity comes out bitten between her teeth, the consonants clipped, and Andrew can't help but laugh, the sound of it startled out of him, and in the corner of his eye, he sees Emma's triumphant smile, and realizes that, momentarily, their life missions had been identical.
-
"Your silence is starting to unnerve me," Jesse tells him later that night, when they're in the back of a 24-hour convenience store at a little past two in the morning, looking at prepackaged sandwich meats, because that's just what you do.
Emma's gone home already, since someone needs to feed the cats and she has a glamorous date with chamomile-scented bath soap and a Jodi Picoult novel, and Andrew has an exquisite roll that he stole from the banquet ceremony and absolutely nothing to put on it.
They're across the street from an old church with crooked stone tombs scattered in its yard, set behind a rusted fence, moss-covered and phantom-like in the dark. The store is manned by a twitchy guy with the red-rimmed eyes of the permanently stoned and one finger poised over the silent alarm at all times, in case Jesse or Andrew turn out to be notorious convenience store robbers whose master plans involve standing in front of the freezer door, unable to decide between two kinds of turkey slices and talking about their relationships.
"You have something to say about everything," Jesse continues. "And I always listen to you, but whenever I expect you to bring up Emma and -- and me and Emma ... you never do."
Andrew glances up. The air from the freezer is a wash of cool across his collarbones.
Jesse picks at one of the shelf stickers. "It turns out I'm not that great at figuring out what you're thinking unless you tell me, which I didn't know until now because you tell me everything, so ..."
His eyes flick briefly to Andrew's and then away, and then back again, a question in the tilt of his eyebrows and the nervous dance of his fingers.
But Andrew just smiles and shakes his head, because there aren't words for that.
How can there be any words to describe what Jesse and Emma are?
It's like ... it's like that part of a book, or a movie -- not the most important part, not the loudest part or the brightest part or even the part that effortlessly steals hearts, but more like the part you find yourself liking without really meaning to, the words you tuck close to your heart and don't really share with anyone else, because how could they mean the same to somebody else that they do to you? They're like the couples he sees in airports, on trains, the ones that walk along boulevards, quietly in love; the ones he can't help but smile about, his toes curling with happiness even as some part of him aches with a formless jealousy.
He doesn't need to know their story -- they're amazing, they're wonderful to see, just as they are, like a picture and a postcard and a snapshot of the world at its most beautiful, something you find yourself nostalgic for later.
They're like the part of the evening where the sun is gone but it's not quite dark, the world shrouded in a shade that's just off blue, comforting and a little strange, a little mysterious, and divine.
No, there aren't really words for that. Not anything he can say out loud and not feel ten kinds of fool, because he does enough of that as it is.
Instead, he picks up a package of turkey breast and turns, kissing Jesse's cheek in a moment that feels like stunning bravery, his heart throbbing sudden and hard, heavy with feeling.
Jesse startles, lips twitching like he can't help it. "What was that for?" he wants to know.
Andrew shrugs again, smiling.
-
They hang out less, after. Andrew's life is going to get very busy, very soon, and he can see it coming the same way one can feel a storm coming, electric and close and dark on the horizon.
He's thinking about buying a flat in New York, and he says as much to Jesse, who proceeds to tell him several anecdotes about living in the city that always end with, "but it's not really as bad as I just made it sound, promise."
To assuage his guilt about buying real estate in one of the most sought-after cities in the world, when he probably won't live there maybe more than two months out of the year, Andrew sees himself going for somewhere with a lot of character, by which he means somewhere with a lot of rust and potential for blood-born diseases and a wonderful view of the neighboring brick wall. Really, though, he's most likely to settle for whatever is cheapest, even though -- and this is the weird thing, the thing that still doesn't sit quite right on his shoulders -- he could afford somewhere nice.
The city in May is busy, flushed fast with foot traffic, and Jesse walks his bike alongside them as they walk, one-handed.
The sidewalks become choked in places, and once, they get diverted different ways around a group of recent graduates in dancing tassels and flowing black gowns, all talking loudly, and a woman pushing a pram with a sunflower-patterned blanket draped over it as a shield, and two freegans with Navajo-patterened headbands and shoes with no socks being aggressively territorial against a pair of homeless women, a grocery cart parked between them as an impasse. When he and Jesse meet again on the other side, Andrew makes an exaggerated desperate face and reaches out to him plaintively, like a dog that's been left home alone all day.
Jesse laughs, but he reaches back, and his palm is damp and gritty, but Andrew doesn't care.
He curls his fingers around the meat of Jesse's hand and holds on, like they're kindergartners paired up in a buddy system, like he's afraid of the streets without him.
When Jesse tries to pull his hand away after a polite amount of time, Andrew just squeezes it and then distracts him with a question about living here in the winter, because Andrew's comfortable with winter as an abstract, romantic idea, less so if it actually involves months of interminable grey weather the way people always tells him it does. He's English: he's been there, done that.
They still aren't famous yet, not really. They're award-winners and award-nominees, sure, and that's kind of mind-boggling, but that only really matters to a small interest group, and neither of them have learned to hate the sound of a camera shutter.
Not yet.
Andrew isn't afraid, not really, and he catches Jesse looking down at their linked hands, and the smile on his face makes Andrew think of violins, of sunshine, of the happiest things he has ever thought.
-
There's a photograph, somewhere in the world, of the two of them in the moment that happened immediately after. They never know about it, of course. Nobody does except for the person who took it, and even then, not really -- because we've all appeared as nameless ghosts on the fringes of people's pictures before, eternally captured in ways we'll never see -- and it's not the photograph that everybody remembers of that day.
It's taken by a girl named Aurelei while she's on holiday. In the frame, her friend has just realized that the camera lens is pointed at her. Kneejerk, she makes a silly face, her lips peeled back in a frog's grin and her eyes comically wide, the way people do before they consciously remember that they're about to be immortalized forever.
Behind her and across the street, visible but not center focus and partially obscured by the blur of a moving car, the small figure of Andrew touches Jesse's hair, pushing it back from his face in a gesture that is gentle, familiar, and proprietary, too. They're still holding hands, the bike held against Jesse's hip.
Aurelei never knows what she has -- she never posts the picture anywhere, because it's truly an unflattering shot of her friend, and why would she look at the people in the background?
It stays on her hard drive for five months before she deletes it, clearing space for an HQ Blu-ray rip of Inception, and that's that.
-
The next time he sees Emma, her hair's a different color and so are her eyes -- the new contacts are a shade off aquamarine.
She's dressed in soft-looking boots and cat hair, which she jokes about as she signs an autograph for a fan just inside the door, before self-consciously trying to brush the hairs off of her skirt, where they weren't really visible until she started fussing about them. The fan looks like she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry; Andrew gets those ones sometimes, too, and it's so very easy to be kind to them, because to be overwhelmed by absolute, speechless adoration of another human being?
Yeah, Andrew can relate to that one. He knows how it feels.
Emma catches his eye when she straightens up, and she instinctively pulls a face at him, like he's something unpleasant she scented on a crowded bus. He pulls his mouth down in response, exaggeratedly sad, and drops his shoulders like he's going to shuffle off in despair. It makes her laugh, and she catches him by the arm to pull him into her circle of conversation. It's good: Andrew enjoys talking about cat hair.
He says as such when they're alone again, and Emma casts him a wry look sidelong. "You like talking about anything of Jesse's," is her comment.
"Not true," Andrew replies immediately. "Well, not exclusively true. I like talking about anything and everything at great length, as expertly as possible. I'm Jewish. It's genetic."
"Oh my god, you're ridiculous," she mutters under her breath like it's a reflex, and Andrew doesn't mind because her fingers are still tucked into the soft spot in his elbow. He bounces on down the hallway with a spring in his step, with a feeling like walking on clouds.
When the studio finally produces a final cast list and he manages to get his hands on it, he calls everybody who's going to be in the film with him, just to introduce himself.
He saves Emma for last, because he wants to do something different for an introduction that isn't really going to be an introduction at all. The call rings through twice before it connects, and Andrew lifts up onto his tiptoes unconsciously, in preparation for hearing her voice, but before he can say anything, Emma says, "oh, hey, can I call you back in, like, ten minutes?"
"Um," goes Andrew. "Sure? I --"
But she's already hung up, and Andrew takes a moment to frown at the call ended notice flashing on his phone screen, but it doesn't sympathize with him or offer him any explanation.
He's in the kitchen ten minutes later, LA sunshine coming in tangerine-colored through the window, slicing up thin discs of kiwi to make popsicles out of, when the doorbell rings. Emma still hasn't called back, so Andrew sets down the knife, pockets the phone, and leaves the popsicle trays on the counter to go answer the door.
Emma herself stands on his welcome mat, wearing jeans the same rosy color as the inside of a seashell, her sunglasses perched on the top of her head. Her mouth is a slash of cranberry color, curved up enigmatically.
"Beat you to it!" she says, cheery, looking up at him with those eyes that make him want to live life like a cartoon.
"Are you visiting everyone on the cast list?" he wants to know. "I feel like such an underachiever. Here I was, using my unlimited minutes to make unlimited calls."
"Oh, shut up," she plants her hand in the center of his chest, pushing him back a step so she can step into his flat. "I'm raiding your fridge for something to drink. I forgot they confiscate water bottles at airport security."
He trails after her, back into his own kitchen, and doesn't say much, because it feels like his insides are made of helium, lightweight and about to lift off without him.
Trying to find the moment Andrew realized he wanted to spend every minute of every day with her is like trying to fall in love with a raindrop; impossible to see except for when it hits.
The reality of acting, however, is that he doesn't spend as much time with the rest of the cast as their presence in the credits would have you believe, and so while in his imagination (which has been overindulged by previous experiences,) they're together 24/7 and he can talk to her about everything just to see what she'll say and nobody bothers them about things that don't matter and nobody's cell phone rings ever, in reality, he goes through long periods of drought in which he doesn't see her at all, and when he does, it's never for long enough. They are always interrupted.
Andrew feels like he talks to more people in one day than the average politician, and the majority of them are either in make-up or are part of the stunt crew. He's never been on a production this big before.
There's Philip, who does handstands on top of the snack table just to prove he can do it without making the dishes rattle, and they commiserate at length together about the costume because he has to wear an identical one, and Andrew knows more about what's going on in his life than he does his own brother's.
There's Marguerite, who has severely drawn-on eyebrows and a tight bun that she uses to hold pencils when she isn't using them, and she always wears white leggings under a denim skirt that doesn't quite cover the tattoo on her thigh. She's supposed to be teaching Andrew how to skateboard, but this mostly devolves into Andrew wheedling her into showing, not telling, and he just usually winds up watching her do tricks and feeling overwhelmed by how amazing people are.
There's Veronica, who has the misfortune of being one of the first people who sees him in the mornings, armed with a tub of styling gel and manicured nails with miniature sparrows painted onto the ends. Veronica is Polish and pronounces her name with a heavy, wobbling "w" sound. She has legs as thin as toothpicks that don't support her weight, so she walks with crutches that hang from the crooks of her elbows when she's using both her hands in Andrew's hair. They bang him in the shins sometimes, but he never minds.
She maneuvers around hair and make-up with no difficulty, like her crutches are extensions of her arms. Her waist is small and compacted, and the muscles in her shoulders are more whip-cord strong, more pronounced than even Andrew's, and Andrew's the one thinking about starting a life-long feud with his personal trainer. He spends a long portion of the morning staring at them while Veronica does something complicated with a sponge.
Because she actually has a wicked streak, Veronica thinks it's a good plan to play word association games with him while he's still trying to achieve higher brain function, in which she'll give him a noun and he'll give her the first corresponding word that pops into his head.
Considering Andrew has no brain-to-mouth filter at all, and less so before eight in the morning, the results of this are sometimes hilarious. He's glad nobody's gone ahead and filmed it to put it on YouTube, although he personally feels like it has to be some quality YouTube-able material sometimes, thank you very much.
And sometimes it reveals more about him than he really wants her to see.
People are always where he loses it.
"Emma Stone," says Veronica, with the absentminded starstruckedness of someone who has the majority of an actress's interviews favorited and secreted into a particular bookmark folder.
"Gwen," because the themes of some love stories are universal across both fictional and nonfictional realms.
Her smile turns teasing. "Jesse Eisenberg."
"Ode to Joy," comes out before he can stop it, because word association games are the worst, and Veronica pinches his bicep through his sleeve and tells him that's cheating, it's more than one word.
It's stuck in his head again, though, everything becoming violins, and he hums it quietly to himself as he plays Bejeweled on his phone, while the lightning and rigging people do something at a height he doesn't feel comfortable thinking about quite at this moment.
"I don't know how you do it," Emma comments, dropping into the chair next to him and crossing one leg over the other. "Talk to everybody, I mean. I've usually run through my reserves of small talk by midmorning, and by lunch, I'm cracking jokes about Courage the Cowardly Dog to anyone who's stupid enough to come near me, and I'm pretty sure the lunch ladies think I'm permanently high."
He isn't really sure what to say in response to this, since it was all said very fast, so he just nudges her shoulder with his own.
He loves people. He loves being reminded that the world is full of people with their own stories, ambitions, likes and dislikes and prejudices and opinions and little obsessions that their minds wander to in the moments before they fall asleep. They have places to go home to at night, places they eat where they never order anything except one particular thing off the menu because they know it'll be good, chores that are never far from their minds, and being around them makes Andrew feel real, too, like some strange version of the Velveteen Rabbit.
Not that tourists aren't real people. It's just, tourists always seem superficial, gaudy, like some kind of temporary decoration hung on everybody else's permanent life.
Andrew loves people to the point where he feels worn, his corduroy coming apart at the seams and all the fur rubbed off his nose, but none of that makes him feel any less Real.
-
In his dreams, he finds a house.
It looks like the kind of stock image cottage you'd find on the front of a brochure. It has a kitchen with no corners, cool and rounded in a way that traps the toffee-colored sunlight that comes in early in the morning, when the birdcall and the drip of the coffee maker are the only sounds.
In his dreams, the house is alone, and a gravel road snaking off into the distance is the only clue that there's anywhere else to come from, or anywhere else to go. There are flower boxes in the windows and several multi-colored cats sunning themselves on the back porch, the daylight catching in the amber of their eyes. Their tails swish when Jesse steps out onto the stoop, wood creaking familiarly under his heels.
There's no one else around, just Emma picking her way back across an overgrown field, wearing galoshes the color of limes. A breeze picks at the hem of her skirt, setting it fluttering around her knees, and a wet and sandy dog bounces ecstatically by her side. She shields her eyes with her hand, and lifts the other in a wave that Jesse returns, and in his dream, everything fades away into a happy haze of color before he can determine his own place in it.
When Andrew was younger and nobody cared, he used to make up stories to tell people on international flights:
His name was Javier and he lived with his older brother and no parents on a strawberry farm in Kent, where there'd been nothing but drought for the past two years, and when he rode his rattling, rusty bike to and from town, he kicked up a long train of dust, going in between fields overrun by canola, dashes of yellow like paint drops against the dry grass.
Then he was Vance and he was on his way to visit his estranged father, who'd emigrated to Barcelona to work construction on the Olympic Stadium for the 1992 summer games, fell in love with the industry there, and bought a downscale flat just before gentrification of the area took off. They hadn't spoken in years and Vance was nervous about seeing him.
He was Kieran and he was the guitarist of a band called Sick Twisted Pickles, because come on, who hasn't wanted to be in a band at some point in their lives?
He was pretty sure his seating partner saw right through him that time, because Andrew didn't actually know anything about guitars, but it was still worth it to be able to babble about energy, music, and creation.
Now, Andrew flies economy (because fuck it, he's man enough, he doesn't need to be coddled in first class) and tucks his legs into bizarre shapes so that they fit. He listens to a grandmother from Texas tell him about how sick she got the first time she observed the month of Ramadan, a copy of Home & Garden folded over one knee, and thinks of the stories he could tell her in reply. She might not have Google, she might never know the truth --
My name is Andrew, and I'm in love with my best friend and my best friend's girlfriend.
My name is Andrew, and I'm in love with my best friend and her boyfriend.
My name is Andrew, and I'm going home. I live in the no-man's land at the edge of an airfield, where the planes come in so screamingly close that I feel like I can reach up and touch their bellies. No one else wants to live there, but I do, because I can spend whole days with the people I love in the house we chose for ourselves and never want for anything, not love or cats, and no one ever bothers us because they don't know where we are.
But the trouble with the things you want so hard to be true is that it's hard to talk about them, like giving voice to them suddenly turns them intangible, like they're just wishes and not something you can make happen.
Andrew has played dozens of lives, has immersed himself in a dozen stories, but the life that's too strange to tell is his own.
He says nothing to the woman on the plane, and later, as they sit cross-legged on the floor in somebody's hotel room, eating couscous straight out of the little microwave sachets while Emma flips through e-mail on her phone ("Oh, hey, the pizza place by your old LA apartment, Andrew, wants us to know that they've expanded their delivery radius by another square mile. That's great, thanks for the head's up, except I don't think they deliver across state lines,") Jesse tilts his head at Andrew and studies him, and when Andrew ticks his eyebrows up questioningly, he goes, "Are you okay?"
It's Jesse, so there's a wealth of questions layered underneath the one he vocalizes, but this is the one subject on which Andrew has no words, so he just smiles at the both of them and says he's fine.
-
Jesse and Emma's apartment is on the second storey, so in the summer, they clean the dust from the bug screens and prop open all the windows, letting in a pleasant breeze and the sound of children shouting on the playground across the street and the odor coming from the dumpsters in the back.
The bathroom door needs a special shimmy in order to shut all the way, and even then, it still has a tendency to pop open at inconvenient moments, and the plumbing is hooked up incorrectly, so when any of the upstairs apartments (which is all of them) are taking a shower, the only water the second storey apartment gets is the barest trickle. The second time the water cuts off just as Andrew's hands are sudsy with soap, Jesse introduces him to the wonders of the travel-sized bottles of antibacterial.
Andrew spends all the spare time he's supposed to use looking for his own place at Emma and Jesse's flat, because it has the busy mismatched clutter of someplace that was supposed to be temporary and slowly became permanent by simple virtue of being loved.
The sofa stays mostly buried under two scratchy wool afghans with horrific clashing color combinations ("I think his grandmother tried to have a knit-off with my grandmother," Emma explains, while Andrew tries not to make it look like he's squinting at the pattern, rubbing one corner of the fabric between his fingers, "but I could never prove it in court,") and they don't have a dryer, so nearly every doorjamb and drawer knob usually has a hangar attached to it with one of Emma's cotton skirts or Jesse's button-down shirts.
Andrew kind of understands now, why their clothes almost always have cat hair on them.
"Not to be, like, the voice of reason here or anything --" he tries.
"Because that's absolutely something you're known for." Emma, of course, with Jesse's mouth half-open like he was going to say the exact same thing.
"-- but you could just take your laundry to a dry cleaner's."
One of the cats butts up underneath Jesse's hand, looking for attention, which is, of course, readily given. The cats here are never starved for attention -- it's only another reason on the long list of reasons why Andrew prefers here to, like, looking for his own place.
"But we have a perfectly good washing machine in the apartment," Jesse replies. It's tucked into the coat closet at such an odd angle that the door never closes properly, but Andrew doesn't point that out. The whole apartment smells like damp and detergent. "And besides, it's summer, it's usually not this bad."
Emma lifts her eyebrows.
"Okay, yes it is," Jesse amends.
Andrew smiles at him, unable to help it.
Jesse's the kind of person who goes through life apologizing to the universe for taking up space in it. He's said as such: one of the only things he likes about himself is his ability to be unobtrusive as possible.
Andrew's never felt as possessive about the attentions of another person as he did when he met Jesse. Every smile, every flutter of his curious fingertips along brick walls or braille plaques in elevators or the soft ends of his cat's noses or the seams in Emma's jeans as they sit together with cartons of takeaway on their knees -- all of it becomes something Andrew collects like currency, a jealous dragon's hoard, gleaming and golden inside his heart.
He's felt infatuation before, of course, and he remembers how all-consuming it becomes, how one person becomes the destination of every stray thought.
Other people notice, eventually, just how much Andrew goes out of his way to hang out with Emma on set. Nobody says anything to him directly, but he knows they talk about it. Why wouldn't they? This is Hollywood, Andrew is young and single and obviously that's the only thing about him that Emma might be interested in, and nobody knows about Emma and Jesse, the way they talk to each other like they each have a book in their hands in which every other page is blank, and it's only in each other's books that they find the complimentary text.
There's chemistry between Andrew and Emma, of course there is; the kind even Andrew can recognize because he's seen it in other people so often, where eye contact feels like striking a match and proximity feels like the anticipatory buzz in the air right before everybody leaps out of dark corners yelling surprise!
"I'm scared, have I told you that?" he tells her one day, while they're sitting together in the hallway outside their apartment door, legs stretched out and criss-crossing in the middle like they're trying to charge toll.
The air is stuffy, summer-hot, and there's a sign hanging from the doorknob, similar to the ones in hotels, and it says, come on in, we're already disturbed.
Andrew loves them an impossible amount.
She tilts her head. "How so?"
"Like --" he gestures with his hands, takes a deep breath, and tries again. "Like, you know how you know when something is going to change you? Like, if you survive this, you will be different? I know that's sort of hard to gauge in advance, since you only kind of notice that you've changed when you've already done it, but, like, whatever. That's how I feel about this, and ... I'm scared that I'm not going to like the Andrew Garfield that will exist when it's over."
Something in his voice makes her frown. "Hey," she goes, knocking her ankle up against his until he looks at her.
"Hey," he says back.
She considers him, and then she says, "You're going to be tired. More tired. You're going to dream of sleeping while you're sleeping, that's how tired you're going to be. You're going to appreciate it more when people cut the bullshit and don't waste your time. You're going to be thinner, which Andre's going to hate after all his work, but Andre doesn't have to do press, so. Oh, and you're going to be rude -- sorry," she adds, catching the way his face spasms at the thought. "But it's true. You're going to have to be rude."
"No," he protests. "Ack, no, that wasn't in my contract. Je refuse. I want to go back."
She knocks her leg against his again, fond. "But you won't really change as much as you think you will, I promise. And --" she brightens visibly. "You'll have me."
Sometimes he feels like he and Emma are mirrors, silvery bright and turned into each other. One pinpoint of light becomes reflected hundredfold, and one smile between the two of them becomes a hundred, stretching into infinity. He beams back at her. Their legs are completely entwined at this point.
At that moment, the doors to the stairs opens, and somebody Andrew vaguely recognizes as the tenant of one of the neighboring flats steps through, a heavy-looking bag of takeaway banging at his side. He's a beefy, crop-haired man who teaches gym to elementary school kids in a different borough. Emma says his life's dream is to go on the Food Network and win one of their bizarre cooking challenges.
Andrew and Emma both draw their legs in to give him enough room to go by. He spares them a polite smile as he steps over them.
"Hey, whatcha up to, 20b?" he asks by way of greeting.
"Adultery," Emma deadpans back, and Andrew jolts as if she'd poured boiling water on him.
"Right on," says the neighbor, and disappears into his flat.
Andrew stares at Emma. She stares back at him, and he can't tell what color her eyes are today, but her expression is incandescent, serious, and Andrew thinks of combustion, chemistry, and violins, all at once.
When Emma moves, she folds up her legs in order to scrunch herself over to his side of the hall, invading his space, and Andrew draws his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them protectively; everything inside of him screams like a whirlwind, because he doesn't know where this is going. That could have easily been a joke, a very tasteless joke, except her face is completely set, like someone who's come to a decision, and --
"I don't like this," he feels the need to point out, because Jesse. Because Emma and Jesse.
She stops, and Andrew watches her puzzle through several different emotions all at once. He knows, because he's feeling the exact same things, and then her face clears.
Her eyes widen. "Oh, honey," she goes, and curls her fingers around his wrist, which is the closest part of him she can reach. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. I thought we were being obvious. I wouldn't have -- if I hadn't thought --" she starts to look a little panicked, and Andrew can practically see her backpedaling in her head.
"We have to communicate," he hears himself say, sort of inanely. He feels every throb of his heartbeat, fast and heavy, in his temples and toes and the ends of his fingers. "We all have to communicate. What's obvious to you isn't -- I mean, I know we were flirting, but your boyfriend --" Because Jesse accepts affection and lets Andrew hold his hand and touch his hair, sometimes in public, but Andrew needs more active encouragement than just passive acceptance, and he genuinely had no idea until Emma just aggressively came at him, and --
She puts a hand over his mouth. Her palm smells like hand lotion and a little like salt.
Her serious look is back, blazing and intent, and Andrew's toes curl.
"You," she says. "Are being stupid if you think that anything of Jesse's, or anything of mine, isn't yours as well."
-
The third time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, Andrew's half-awake at a time that could be any hour, and Emma's just stuck her elbow into his rib so that she could prop herself up.
Through gummy eyelids, he can't see much: the gloom and the angle means that he just sees the bend of Emma's neck, the curly silhouette of Jesse's head. Jesse's standing, bent at the waist to meet her mouth -- come back from the bathroom, maybe, or letting the cats out, or he just got a sudden, irresistible urge to reread a paragraph out of one of his favorite novels, Andrew doesn't know -- and then he slides back into the bed.
Even though he's edging onto overwarm, and he's aware that he's balanced on the very edge of the bed so they can all fit, Andrew's asleep again within moments.
He isn't sure when he fell in love. He won't ever be sure.
It's the same way nobody ever really remembers falling asleep, just that they know they must have, because here they are, waking up, and Andrew feels like dawn, like first light, like that moment you're awake but the alarm clock hasn't gone off yet and there's nothing in that second but peace.
He stretches his legs against the sheets and Emma mutters in protest, a wordless sleepy noise, drawing his arm tighter around her without waking completely. He smiles into the back of her neck, and thinks of the Velveteen Rabbit, of surrounding himself with real people and being made Real in return.
-
And this is Andrew's life. Just, like, this is the life he actually lives.
He does sort of perpetually feel like a third wheel in Emma and Jesse's perfectly functional relationship, or kind of like he was just something they took into their home, like a new bathmat or a new paint color for the bedroom walls, except he forgets to feel this way whenever he's with them, because that's not how they treat him, and Andrew's insecurities aside, that's the important part.
On a Monday, he finds the remnants of a cake in the fridge.
It's cut into quarters, the curly frosting distended and unintelligible in places, and Andrew tilts his head and studies it for awhile, trying to pinpoint why, exactly, it unsettles him.
"What were you guys celebrating?" he wants to know, fetching the milk he'd gone in there for in the first place and turning around. They look up, questioning and half-asleep because it's a muggy, overcast Monday and nobody wants to be awake on a muggy, overcast Monday. He gestures over his shoulder. "The cake?"
Emma looks sideways at Jesse with one of those slow smiles, the kind that starts in one corner of her mouth and steadily moves to the other like it's remembering how.
Jesse looks back at her and shrugs, one-shouldered.
She swings her chair around, ignoring the way it creaks miserably in protest, and scoots to the very edge like she's about to bolt out of it, like she's just waiting for a signal. She tugs off one of her rings -- an enormous, fat gold thing like the kind Andrew's used to seeing at swap meets, a fat cluster of bright rhinestones perched on top in the shape of a flower. He sits down on the floor because the only other chair is currently occupied by two sleeping cats.
Behind the first ring -- and Andrew never even noticed because it was so big, which he supposes is the point -- is a simple band. White-gold, maybe, with no design, and she tugs it off, too, and drops it into Andrew's palm.
"... that was your wedding finger," he realizes. His brain fires through the implications, and an impossible thrill runs through him, something indescribable and airless. "Your --"
He flips the band over, holding it up so it catches the light.
Emily Eisenberg, reads the inscription on the inside, the text minute and already showing wear. August 14, 2009.
Words cram themselves together at the back of his throat, and Andrew makes indistinguishable, inhuman noises for several seconds until finally, he gets out in a tea kettle squeak, "Emma!" and flings his arms out, grabbing her from an odd angle into a messy, uncomfortable hug, before he twists around and grabs Jesse, too, planting a wild kiss on the top of his head.
"Husband!" he goes, shoving Jesse's hair out of the way in order to kiss him again, which Jesse tolerates with one hand curled around Andrew's elbow, like he's worried Andrew's going to tip over and crash into something. "And wife!" Emma leans over, rescuing her ring -- her wedding ring -- from his flailing hand, and he stares at her. Wife.
No, no, he actually cannot handle it.
The adultery comment from Emma back at the beginning suddenly makes so much more sense.
Actually, everything suddenly makes so much more sense.
It's an anniversary cake.
"Oh my god, you got married! You've been married. You've been married for years! How do you keep that a secret, how have you not told everyone, I would have shout --"
He could never keep a secret like that, and for a second, he just completely panics, because why are they telling him? Andrew can't keep his mouth shut about anything. Oversharing is the most overt of his personality defects, and he just pictures himself referring to them as the Eisenbergs in casual conversation and causing a small national crisis, because that would be something he'd do on accident.
And then he thinks, but where would you find the words? And who would believe you? and then he feels so much better, hugging them both again out of sheer relief.
Emma's laughing, her eyes crinkled up, and Jesse's face is flushed through with color.
Andrew checks Jesse's fingers -- bare, which of course Andrew already knew because Andrew could pick every detail of those hands out of a line-up -- but Jesse catches the look and smiles, rosy and pleased around the edges. He reaches into his pocket, the one where he always keeps his cell phone, house keys, and a pocket book that Andrew will sometimes steal in order to write things in before they all go their separate ways for weeks on end, things like, this is a periodic reminder that you are my favorite person ♥, which he will later find annotated with various addendum from Emma, the majority of which are lewd.
And then from the pocket comes the matching ring. It's scratched a little bit, which makes Andrew think that it's sometimes on the keyring, and no wonder no one's noticed.
"My mom refused to speak to us for two months afterwards," Jesse says, shrugging in an embarrassed way.
"Because you eloped?" That seems odd.
"Because I'm not Jewish," Emma pipes up.
Andrew blinks. "That's ridiculous. You're perfect."
"Well, sure," she says, and gestures between herself and Jesse. "We know that."
"You're both perfect," Andrew insists, even though he knows Jesse's mom must have gotten over it eventually, because he's met the woman and she is nothing if not the sweetest person Andrew's ever had the pleasure of meeting. "You're married and you're perfect and I can't handle how you are as people, how are you real, come here," and he stretches his arms out, refusing to put them down until they both step into him for another round of hugging.
"Oh, my god," is what Emma has to say about that. "What did we do? How do we make it stop?"
"We don't," says Jesse, who kisses the corner of Andrew's mouth, soft and fond.
-
There's some part of Andrew that's always nostalgic for something.
He doesn't know if there's a name for it, what he feels; that homesickness for every place he's ever been, and everything he's ever remembered having. It strikes him at the most random times:
He's late and in an abysmal line for coffee during a layover in Atlanta, and he glances towards the long, shaded window overlooking the tarmac, and his chest hurts with the sudden want of a summer shower over the Manchester city heights, and the way the flora turns brilliantly colorful after it rains, whole fields of canola shot through with bright yellows and greens.
When he's in Manchester, stuck at the train station with his mates, the only place he wants to be is Tokyo, where the transportation is stunning clean, efficient, and fast.
In Hawaii, he wants Paris and the sight of the riverboat houses bobbing in the Seine, up and down with every inhale that swells in his lungs, and as he's holding one big, Tonka-truck boot still for his wobbly nephew to step into, he misses the feeling of burrowing his feet in the sand at Venice Beach, down to where it's cool and wet from the tide.
In LA, where he closes his eyes and breathes steady and lets a bead of nervous sweat drip down his spine just before the lights come on, he allows himself one perfectly painful moment, an ache that almost splits his chest, to be homesick for New York, for the feeling of soft cat fur under his palm and the sound of rain pattering on the balcony, for the last time he watched the grey ghostly pattern of it and listened to the sound of Jesse and Emma having slow sex, the kind that stopped and started when they got distracted with conversation -- the door open, the rain louder even than their voices, and Andrew felt so content it was like a constant, ballooning pressure inside of him, a happiness that stretched like a living thing against his ribs.
He doesn't know if it's possible to be homesick for love when you're in love, but he is.
Emma says that you don't really love a person until you love their ankles.
"No, really," she insists, somehow knowing that Andrew's giving her a strange look, even though their view of each other is obstructed by the half-closed bathroom door. Emma's trying to wash out a hotel towel in the sink; he hears the faucets stop and start. "Because think about it. Where you most often see people's ankles?"
Andrew thinks about it, and he's still frowning when she comes out, fanning her wet hands at her side.
She flops out across the hotel duvet, which smells like plastic in the way that hotel duvets usually do, and stretches her arm out to drum the ends of her nails against the bare ridge of his ankle bone, which peaks out underneath the cuff of his jeans, because he hasn't yet gone to his own room to change.
The light bulb goes on. He sits up straight.
"When they take their shoes off!"
Emma smiles. "The places they are most comfortable," she agrees. Her eyes are so bright. "It's so easy to love people for their smiles, or the way they smell, or how they make you laugh, or whatever," she waves a hand around, like Andrew didn't spend a ridiculous amount of the filming season obsessing over exactly those things. "But you don't really love a person unless you love their ankles, like, at home, you know? People relax in a very particular way that they almost never let people see."
"Do you like my ankles?" he flexes them at her, batting his eyelashes coyly.
"Yes."
She says it so matter-of-factly that it hits like a slap to the face, dizzying and strange all at once. "You have the prettiest ankles," she continues. "They're as pretty as Jesse's wrists."
Andrew doesn't know what to do with that, since it feels like the kind of compliment that decimates you. He self-consciously tugs at the cuffs of his jeans, but they're too short and he's too long and they won't cover his ankles, so he just leaves them be. His ears feel red and the bed underneath them quivers with Emma's quiet laughter.
He looks at her, still feeling a little sunburned inside, scorched clean through with the idea that she loves his ankles and Jesse's wrists and somewhere in between, she loves them like they're a full person, because how does anyone have it in them to love a full person like Emma does, down to ankles and wrists and toes and the little pieces?
Then he frowns. "You're bleeding," he says, reaching out and hooking a hand around her foot, pulling her leg towards him. There's a bright line of red on her shin, a dark ruby droplet gathering at one edge, threatening to fall.
She makes an upset face, sitting up and twisting so that the blood doesn't brush off on the duvet. "I cut myself shaving," she complains. "And bled all over their towels."
"I did wonder why you were washing the towels in the sink."
"I didn't want the cleaning staff to see it and think, like, I was up here slitting your throat or something." He starts laughing. "Because that's what it looked like!" she protests, and shoves herself over so she can sit on him when he just laughs harder, which doesn't actually do anything to make him stop, even when she accidentally knees him in the soft part of the stomach. "Shut up, it's a legitimate fear!"
-
In photographs, when they're out and about in public, Andrew and Emma look deeply unhappy together.
Bizarrely, this only makes people even more inordinately interested in them, and so the photographs are continuous. Their publicists are completely unsympathetic, and more or less tell them to deal with it. "You're British," Andrew's teases him. "Don't you have that stiff upper lip thing going for you?"
"Have I ever had a stiff upper lip in my life?" Andrew returns. "I think I got a genetic backlog of inability to not care what other people think of me. That's how much I care."
"Mmhmm," says the publicist, who only listens to one word in ten that Andrew speaks, regardless. It's an efficient system.
Emma says it's because that's what happens when you become a superhero -- people lose the ability to differentiate between you and their fantasies.
"Why did you agree to the part, then?" he touches his nose to the side of her face, enough to feel the soft peach fuzz of her cheek. "It bothers you as much as it does me."
She turns her head, the wind stirring her hair in a way that makes Veronica and the other hairdressers cry and have nightmares about flyaways. "Don't be stupid," she says, low and only for him. "Why do you think?"
He kisses her mouth and she tilts her head into it, the way she does when it's real and not just for show.
Jesse doesn't go out with them in public anymore. He doesn't even come in through the same entrance to their apartment, and when he leaves, he leaves for months at a time, filming in far-off places that Andrew's never stayed long enough to remember the shape of the outlets, or the way the people speak. Over the phone, Jesse's voice is tinged with the accents he's absorbed without noticing, always taking in little bits of other people and rarely giving any of himself away.
"I don't get it," Andrew complains, even though he does. "You and Emma were a lot less subtle, even when you were doing press, and nobody cared then. You got married. You were together for years before I came along."
"I'm not as inordinately pretty as you two, so they don't care as much," Jesse replies easily, spooning honey out of a glass jar that his sister sent him from a commune in upstate New York, where she raises bees and plants self-sustaining ornamental gardens that will eventually be transplanted to the campuses of a big-name corporation and sings psalms from the Tanakh as she works, unaccompanied except for two of the other beekeepers who sing with her -- Andrew's heard a few of their songs on YouTube.
He passes the spoon to Andrew, who licks it clean. He doesn't tell Jesse to shut up, but he thinks it.
Jesse's prettiness isn't something he wears or owns, not the way Andrew and Emma do, and Andrew covets it whenever it shows, adding it to his hoard of details, curling warm inside his chest with the satisfaction of the sated.
In interviews, they pull up pictures of Andrew and Emma together, unsmiling and in sunglasses, blown up to large proportions, and he sits there and listens to people he's never met coo over how cute they are, like it's something he gave to them willingly.
Andrew always smiles at them, being sure to dimple, and says, "It's embarrassing that you even have a picture of that, we aren't even doing anything, it just seemed like an ice cream day," and what he really means is, we were being harassed by paparazzi and I want to scream right now because you think that's cute?
"I hate everything, it's none of their business, make them go away," he mutters into Emma's shoulder, unable to help the impulse. His stomach feels tight, knotted, and he's frustrated by all the things he can't do to make it stop, because this wasn't part of the plan, this isn't how it felt in the beginning. Film was supposed to be the love of his life.
She tightens her arms around him and replies, "no, you don't. You don't hate me, and you don't hate Jesse," and he buries her face against her neck, which smells like the perfume she got out of a goodie bag from an awards show two years ago, and clings to that truth. Her bones feel like a bird's under his hands, and they hold on to each other until Andrew forgets he's angry.
There are pictures of that, too, and they show up online a few days later, when Andrew feels happier and more capable of handling it. He closes out of his browser and tucks his phone into his pocket.
Humming "Ode to Joy" under his breath, he ducks into a bodega, where he pays an old Turkish man with salt-and-pepper stubble for two packets of M&Ms. His mind is full of violins and sunshine today, and it feels like he's walking two feet behind his body, like it's not really him crossing the street against traffic, like the real him is made of balloons, cut free and drifting into the sky.
At home, he eats the brown ones first and Emma eats the red ones, and Jesse tells them there's absolutely no difference in flavor among the separate shell colors, but when he passes them the rest of his packet, he's left them the browns and the reds anyway.
This time, when Emma kisses Jesse, Andrew doesn't really notice.
He traces Emma's ankle with his fingertip, underneath the cuff of her sweatpants, and flips the page of his Internet print-out. There's a listing for a one-bedroom, two-bath, and the amount of square acreage makes him twist his head around, looking for a pen.
-
fin
Fandom: RPF
Characters/Pairings: Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone/Jesse Eisenberg
Summary: Andrew feels like this is something he should have known.
Word Count: 10,160
Notes: Written for the Polyamory Ficathon, but it got too long to comment-spam (UNEXPECTED PLOT TWIST, AMIRITE?) so I'm posting it here. Written for impromptu_song, who wanted Andrew/Emma/Jesse in any way, shape, or form. Since I will never not OT3 a thing, I obliged. Fair warning, this fic makes absolutely no attempt to adhere to any kind of accurate timeline, because what is filming.
Many thanks to moogle62 and laliandra, who politely refrained from pelting me with biscuits when I commandeered half the sofa and wrote this instead of our Big Bangs, and letting me have a lot of threesome feelings in their general direction.
Title comes from this entry in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
The first time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, it's on an exceptionally beautiful day. He'd managed foreign public transport and had the correct change ready and everything, and he didn't have to inconvenience a local by asking for directions, which he always considered to be a pinnacle of personal achievement.
Nobody likes a tourist, and Andrew Garfield is nothing if not a perpetual tourist in other people's permanent lives.
The rosemary is in bloom; long skinny stalks of purple that bob over his head as he walks along the median, traffic a quick shining flash on either side. The sunlight is so bright and heavy it feels like swimming, the air gone as crystalline as water's surface. A man with a violin and a yellow beanie cap pulled low over his dreadlocks crouches behind an open case, his instrument tucked easily under his chin like a man asleep with something beloved, and the sunlight winks off the high, smooth polish. Andrew tosses the last of his spare change into the case, because why not -- the man is making music for no reason other than it's there to be made, to be heard, and Andrew isn't so attached to his coins that he can't spare them for that. The same snatch of "Ode to Joy" is stuck in his head all the way back.
Once he's inside the lobby and out of the sunshine, everything goes cool and dark; it's physical, sudden, the shade, a prickle he feels all along his skin. It leaves him blinking.
He's walking, and almost doesn't see it -- something stops him, a flutter of recognition that steals a heartbeat and doesn't give it back, and in that space of a beat, Andrew realizes what he's looking at.
Jesse, who hadn't been ready to go when Andrew checked earlier, stands in an alcove by a potted plant with his shirt buttoned all the way up his throat, out of the way of other people and dwarfed by the enormous painting behind his head. His hair is flattened in the back from his pillow, where he can't see it when he checks in the mirror. He's holding a woman's coffee for her as she straightens the straps of her wedge heels, the both of them clutching each other's forearms with their free hands to keep her balanced.
He doesn't recognize her for one moment, then another, and then she smiles and he does, feeling incredibly stupid and a little slow.
"Thanks, babe," says Emma Stone -- he doesn't hear it so much as see the words form on her lips -- and she straightens, testing her weight. Finding it sound, she takes her coffee back and sips at it, grinning around the lid at something Jesse says to her: Andrew can't hear it, but he sees Jesse gesturing and it's impossible not to smile at Jesse when he talks like that, like he can only construct words if he uses his whole body.
He didn't realize anyone else found it as endearing as he did.
Andrew's only ever seen the two of them together in TV interviews on YouTube. He'd forgotten that they knew each other.
He stops walking.
He stares, which isn't a dumb thing to do yet because people don't know who they are. They aren't famous. Not yet. Not really, and if Andrew's drawing attention to them, it won't matter. They don't matter yet.
When Emma leans in, their eyes close. The kiss is gentle, easy, and quick: it's the kiss of people who aren't worried about where their next kiss is coming from.
Andrew feels steamrolled, feels like this is something he should have known.
-
The second time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, it's technically the other way around, and Andrew has a glass of water in front of him with a slice of lemon perched on the rim.
The tablecloth is very white, the glass is glazed a deep cerulean blue, and Andrew isn't a big fan of water that tastes like fruit, so he gingerly plucks the lemon off his glass like he's picking up an insect, and sets it aside. There's nobody else here at their table yet, except for Jesse to his right and Emma two seats down. The rumble of conversation is muted by distance.
They cranked the venue's air conditioning up overzealously, because all of the men here are in their finest suits, their undershirts stained an off-yellow by nervous sweat -- and it means that most of the women are freezing. Emma, dressed in sleeveless blazing gold like fishscales, is goosepimpled all down her bare arms, and Andrew already gave his jacket to Hailee Steinfeld earlier, so he has nothing to offer her unless he starts stripping. He glances over as she tilts forward, pinching her nose between her fingers. She's wearing a bracelet with turquoise beads and a mermaid-shaped clasp.
She doesn't feel good, Andrew's gathered. She's cramping, and her meds haven't kicked in yet. Hidden by the folds of the tablecloth, she and Jesse are holding hands.
IMDB lists both of them as single, and there's always speculation whenever they're photographed out and about with other (famous) people, but there are bigger fish flopping in the sea of relationship drama, and Andrew endlessly admires Jesse and Emma for their ability to field any questions about their love lives in a way that makes them seem entirely uninteresting.
He's watched their press videos, and that's the thing. Chemistry was never a word that crossed his mind, not the way he's used to seeing, where the act of seeing felt like combustion.
He never saw any sparks, and it was a while before it occurred to Andrew that maybe they didn't need them.
What Jesse and Emma have ... it's respect. The way they stand next to each other with a polite amount of space in between them, the way their fingers touch like they're just finding each other for the first time, the way they tilt wry smiles to each other when they think nobody is looking ... they just respect each other, in their own unassuming way, and Andrew's starting to realize the vast kind of strength they've built themselves on. Their relationship is something that twists very, very deep down.
Emma turns her head when Jesse murmurs something, her eyes slipping past his face to catch Andrew's in a way that seems almost physical.
Jesse kisses her mouth -- brief and reassuring -- and they let Andrew see it. It's conscious, and deliberate, and Andrew feels about a dozen things he doesn't have names for, all in the time it takes his heart to skip from one beat to another.
Then Jesse stands, fidgeting and tugging at his cuffs until they cover the heels of his hands, and he leaves Emma and Andrew alone.
Emma tilts her head at him. He really likes her bracelet, and he wishes he could do something to make her not so ... so grey and in pain. Her eyes are incredibly luminous, even in real life -- Andrew had always figured that was just a thing they liked to highlight in photographs, but no, her eyes actually do sparkle without provocation. Who knew?
"Lemon?" he goes, perking up, because being able to give a girl a gift is simply the best feeling, even if it is just sour fruit from his water glass.
Her mouth curves into a half-smile, and it's sort of breathtaking, how immediately it becomes Andrew's life mission to get Emma to smile a full smile.
"No ... thank you?" she says, half a question.
"I hear it's not good for you to take ibuprofen on an empty stomach."
"Right, and so the thing you give me to settle my stomach is, like, pure acidity." The word acidity comes out bitten between her teeth, the consonants clipped, and Andrew can't help but laugh, the sound of it startled out of him, and in the corner of his eye, he sees Emma's triumphant smile, and realizes that, momentarily, their life missions had been identical.
-
"Your silence is starting to unnerve me," Jesse tells him later that night, when they're in the back of a 24-hour convenience store at a little past two in the morning, looking at prepackaged sandwich meats, because that's just what you do.
Emma's gone home already, since someone needs to feed the cats and she has a glamorous date with chamomile-scented bath soap and a Jodi Picoult novel, and Andrew has an exquisite roll that he stole from the banquet ceremony and absolutely nothing to put on it.
They're across the street from an old church with crooked stone tombs scattered in its yard, set behind a rusted fence, moss-covered and phantom-like in the dark. The store is manned by a twitchy guy with the red-rimmed eyes of the permanently stoned and one finger poised over the silent alarm at all times, in case Jesse or Andrew turn out to be notorious convenience store robbers whose master plans involve standing in front of the freezer door, unable to decide between two kinds of turkey slices and talking about their relationships.
"You have something to say about everything," Jesse continues. "And I always listen to you, but whenever I expect you to bring up Emma and -- and me and Emma ... you never do."
Andrew glances up. The air from the freezer is a wash of cool across his collarbones.
Jesse picks at one of the shelf stickers. "It turns out I'm not that great at figuring out what you're thinking unless you tell me, which I didn't know until now because you tell me everything, so ..."
His eyes flick briefly to Andrew's and then away, and then back again, a question in the tilt of his eyebrows and the nervous dance of his fingers.
But Andrew just smiles and shakes his head, because there aren't words for that.
How can there be any words to describe what Jesse and Emma are?
It's like ... it's like that part of a book, or a movie -- not the most important part, not the loudest part or the brightest part or even the part that effortlessly steals hearts, but more like the part you find yourself liking without really meaning to, the words you tuck close to your heart and don't really share with anyone else, because how could they mean the same to somebody else that they do to you? They're like the couples he sees in airports, on trains, the ones that walk along boulevards, quietly in love; the ones he can't help but smile about, his toes curling with happiness even as some part of him aches with a formless jealousy.
He doesn't need to know their story -- they're amazing, they're wonderful to see, just as they are, like a picture and a postcard and a snapshot of the world at its most beautiful, something you find yourself nostalgic for later.
They're like the part of the evening where the sun is gone but it's not quite dark, the world shrouded in a shade that's just off blue, comforting and a little strange, a little mysterious, and divine.
No, there aren't really words for that. Not anything he can say out loud and not feel ten kinds of fool, because he does enough of that as it is.
Instead, he picks up a package of turkey breast and turns, kissing Jesse's cheek in a moment that feels like stunning bravery, his heart throbbing sudden and hard, heavy with feeling.
Jesse startles, lips twitching like he can't help it. "What was that for?" he wants to know.
Andrew shrugs again, smiling.
-
They hang out less, after. Andrew's life is going to get very busy, very soon, and he can see it coming the same way one can feel a storm coming, electric and close and dark on the horizon.
He's thinking about buying a flat in New York, and he says as much to Jesse, who proceeds to tell him several anecdotes about living in the city that always end with, "but it's not really as bad as I just made it sound, promise."
To assuage his guilt about buying real estate in one of the most sought-after cities in the world, when he probably won't live there maybe more than two months out of the year, Andrew sees himself going for somewhere with a lot of character, by which he means somewhere with a lot of rust and potential for blood-born diseases and a wonderful view of the neighboring brick wall. Really, though, he's most likely to settle for whatever is cheapest, even though -- and this is the weird thing, the thing that still doesn't sit quite right on his shoulders -- he could afford somewhere nice.
The city in May is busy, flushed fast with foot traffic, and Jesse walks his bike alongside them as they walk, one-handed.
The sidewalks become choked in places, and once, they get diverted different ways around a group of recent graduates in dancing tassels and flowing black gowns, all talking loudly, and a woman pushing a pram with a sunflower-patterned blanket draped over it as a shield, and two freegans with Navajo-patterened headbands and shoes with no socks being aggressively territorial against a pair of homeless women, a grocery cart parked between them as an impasse. When he and Jesse meet again on the other side, Andrew makes an exaggerated desperate face and reaches out to him plaintively, like a dog that's been left home alone all day.
Jesse laughs, but he reaches back, and his palm is damp and gritty, but Andrew doesn't care.
He curls his fingers around the meat of Jesse's hand and holds on, like they're kindergartners paired up in a buddy system, like he's afraid of the streets without him.
When Jesse tries to pull his hand away after a polite amount of time, Andrew just squeezes it and then distracts him with a question about living here in the winter, because Andrew's comfortable with winter as an abstract, romantic idea, less so if it actually involves months of interminable grey weather the way people always tells him it does. He's English: he's been there, done that.
They still aren't famous yet, not really. They're award-winners and award-nominees, sure, and that's kind of mind-boggling, but that only really matters to a small interest group, and neither of them have learned to hate the sound of a camera shutter.
Not yet.
Andrew isn't afraid, not really, and he catches Jesse looking down at their linked hands, and the smile on his face makes Andrew think of violins, of sunshine, of the happiest things he has ever thought.
-
There's a photograph, somewhere in the world, of the two of them in the moment that happened immediately after. They never know about it, of course. Nobody does except for the person who took it, and even then, not really -- because we've all appeared as nameless ghosts on the fringes of people's pictures before, eternally captured in ways we'll never see -- and it's not the photograph that everybody remembers of that day.
It's taken by a girl named Aurelei while she's on holiday. In the frame, her friend has just realized that the camera lens is pointed at her. Kneejerk, she makes a silly face, her lips peeled back in a frog's grin and her eyes comically wide, the way people do before they consciously remember that they're about to be immortalized forever.
Behind her and across the street, visible but not center focus and partially obscured by the blur of a moving car, the small figure of Andrew touches Jesse's hair, pushing it back from his face in a gesture that is gentle, familiar, and proprietary, too. They're still holding hands, the bike held against Jesse's hip.
Aurelei never knows what she has -- she never posts the picture anywhere, because it's truly an unflattering shot of her friend, and why would she look at the people in the background?
It stays on her hard drive for five months before she deletes it, clearing space for an HQ Blu-ray rip of Inception, and that's that.
-
The next time he sees Emma, her hair's a different color and so are her eyes -- the new contacts are a shade off aquamarine.
She's dressed in soft-looking boots and cat hair, which she jokes about as she signs an autograph for a fan just inside the door, before self-consciously trying to brush the hairs off of her skirt, where they weren't really visible until she started fussing about them. The fan looks like she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry; Andrew gets those ones sometimes, too, and it's so very easy to be kind to them, because to be overwhelmed by absolute, speechless adoration of another human being?
Yeah, Andrew can relate to that one. He knows how it feels.
Emma catches his eye when she straightens up, and she instinctively pulls a face at him, like he's something unpleasant she scented on a crowded bus. He pulls his mouth down in response, exaggeratedly sad, and drops his shoulders like he's going to shuffle off in despair. It makes her laugh, and she catches him by the arm to pull him into her circle of conversation. It's good: Andrew enjoys talking about cat hair.
He says as such when they're alone again, and Emma casts him a wry look sidelong. "You like talking about anything of Jesse's," is her comment.
"Not true," Andrew replies immediately. "Well, not exclusively true. I like talking about anything and everything at great length, as expertly as possible. I'm Jewish. It's genetic."
"Oh my god, you're ridiculous," she mutters under her breath like it's a reflex, and Andrew doesn't mind because her fingers are still tucked into the soft spot in his elbow. He bounces on down the hallway with a spring in his step, with a feeling like walking on clouds.
When the studio finally produces a final cast list and he manages to get his hands on it, he calls everybody who's going to be in the film with him, just to introduce himself.
He saves Emma for last, because he wants to do something different for an introduction that isn't really going to be an introduction at all. The call rings through twice before it connects, and Andrew lifts up onto his tiptoes unconsciously, in preparation for hearing her voice, but before he can say anything, Emma says, "oh, hey, can I call you back in, like, ten minutes?"
"Um," goes Andrew. "Sure? I --"
But she's already hung up, and Andrew takes a moment to frown at the call ended notice flashing on his phone screen, but it doesn't sympathize with him or offer him any explanation.
He's in the kitchen ten minutes later, LA sunshine coming in tangerine-colored through the window, slicing up thin discs of kiwi to make popsicles out of, when the doorbell rings. Emma still hasn't called back, so Andrew sets down the knife, pockets the phone, and leaves the popsicle trays on the counter to go answer the door.
Emma herself stands on his welcome mat, wearing jeans the same rosy color as the inside of a seashell, her sunglasses perched on the top of her head. Her mouth is a slash of cranberry color, curved up enigmatically.
"Beat you to it!" she says, cheery, looking up at him with those eyes that make him want to live life like a cartoon.
"Are you visiting everyone on the cast list?" he wants to know. "I feel like such an underachiever. Here I was, using my unlimited minutes to make unlimited calls."
"Oh, shut up," she plants her hand in the center of his chest, pushing him back a step so she can step into his flat. "I'm raiding your fridge for something to drink. I forgot they confiscate water bottles at airport security."
He trails after her, back into his own kitchen, and doesn't say much, because it feels like his insides are made of helium, lightweight and about to lift off without him.
Trying to find the moment Andrew realized he wanted to spend every minute of every day with her is like trying to fall in love with a raindrop; impossible to see except for when it hits.
The reality of acting, however, is that he doesn't spend as much time with the rest of the cast as their presence in the credits would have you believe, and so while in his imagination (which has been overindulged by previous experiences,) they're together 24/7 and he can talk to her about everything just to see what she'll say and nobody bothers them about things that don't matter and nobody's cell phone rings ever, in reality, he goes through long periods of drought in which he doesn't see her at all, and when he does, it's never for long enough. They are always interrupted.
Andrew feels like he talks to more people in one day than the average politician, and the majority of them are either in make-up or are part of the stunt crew. He's never been on a production this big before.
There's Philip, who does handstands on top of the snack table just to prove he can do it without making the dishes rattle, and they commiserate at length together about the costume because he has to wear an identical one, and Andrew knows more about what's going on in his life than he does his own brother's.
There's Marguerite, who has severely drawn-on eyebrows and a tight bun that she uses to hold pencils when she isn't using them, and she always wears white leggings under a denim skirt that doesn't quite cover the tattoo on her thigh. She's supposed to be teaching Andrew how to skateboard, but this mostly devolves into Andrew wheedling her into showing, not telling, and he just usually winds up watching her do tricks and feeling overwhelmed by how amazing people are.
There's Veronica, who has the misfortune of being one of the first people who sees him in the mornings, armed with a tub of styling gel and manicured nails with miniature sparrows painted onto the ends. Veronica is Polish and pronounces her name with a heavy, wobbling "w" sound. She has legs as thin as toothpicks that don't support her weight, so she walks with crutches that hang from the crooks of her elbows when she's using both her hands in Andrew's hair. They bang him in the shins sometimes, but he never minds.
She maneuvers around hair and make-up with no difficulty, like her crutches are extensions of her arms. Her waist is small and compacted, and the muscles in her shoulders are more whip-cord strong, more pronounced than even Andrew's, and Andrew's the one thinking about starting a life-long feud with his personal trainer. He spends a long portion of the morning staring at them while Veronica does something complicated with a sponge.
Because she actually has a wicked streak, Veronica thinks it's a good plan to play word association games with him while he's still trying to achieve higher brain function, in which she'll give him a noun and he'll give her the first corresponding word that pops into his head.
Considering Andrew has no brain-to-mouth filter at all, and less so before eight in the morning, the results of this are sometimes hilarious. He's glad nobody's gone ahead and filmed it to put it on YouTube, although he personally feels like it has to be some quality YouTube-able material sometimes, thank you very much.
And sometimes it reveals more about him than he really wants her to see.
People are always where he loses it.
"Emma Stone," says Veronica, with the absentminded starstruckedness of someone who has the majority of an actress's interviews favorited and secreted into a particular bookmark folder.
"Gwen," because the themes of some love stories are universal across both fictional and nonfictional realms.
Her smile turns teasing. "Jesse Eisenberg."
"Ode to Joy," comes out before he can stop it, because word association games are the worst, and Veronica pinches his bicep through his sleeve and tells him that's cheating, it's more than one word.
It's stuck in his head again, though, everything becoming violins, and he hums it quietly to himself as he plays Bejeweled on his phone, while the lightning and rigging people do something at a height he doesn't feel comfortable thinking about quite at this moment.
"I don't know how you do it," Emma comments, dropping into the chair next to him and crossing one leg over the other. "Talk to everybody, I mean. I've usually run through my reserves of small talk by midmorning, and by lunch, I'm cracking jokes about Courage the Cowardly Dog to anyone who's stupid enough to come near me, and I'm pretty sure the lunch ladies think I'm permanently high."
He isn't really sure what to say in response to this, since it was all said very fast, so he just nudges her shoulder with his own.
He loves people. He loves being reminded that the world is full of people with their own stories, ambitions, likes and dislikes and prejudices and opinions and little obsessions that their minds wander to in the moments before they fall asleep. They have places to go home to at night, places they eat where they never order anything except one particular thing off the menu because they know it'll be good, chores that are never far from their minds, and being around them makes Andrew feel real, too, like some strange version of the Velveteen Rabbit.
Not that tourists aren't real people. It's just, tourists always seem superficial, gaudy, like some kind of temporary decoration hung on everybody else's permanent life.
Andrew loves people to the point where he feels worn, his corduroy coming apart at the seams and all the fur rubbed off his nose, but none of that makes him feel any less Real.
-
In his dreams, he finds a house.
It looks like the kind of stock image cottage you'd find on the front of a brochure. It has a kitchen with no corners, cool and rounded in a way that traps the toffee-colored sunlight that comes in early in the morning, when the birdcall and the drip of the coffee maker are the only sounds.
In his dreams, the house is alone, and a gravel road snaking off into the distance is the only clue that there's anywhere else to come from, or anywhere else to go. There are flower boxes in the windows and several multi-colored cats sunning themselves on the back porch, the daylight catching in the amber of their eyes. Their tails swish when Jesse steps out onto the stoop, wood creaking familiarly under his heels.
There's no one else around, just Emma picking her way back across an overgrown field, wearing galoshes the color of limes. A breeze picks at the hem of her skirt, setting it fluttering around her knees, and a wet and sandy dog bounces ecstatically by her side. She shields her eyes with her hand, and lifts the other in a wave that Jesse returns, and in his dream, everything fades away into a happy haze of color before he can determine his own place in it.
When Andrew was younger and nobody cared, he used to make up stories to tell people on international flights:
His name was Javier and he lived with his older brother and no parents on a strawberry farm in Kent, where there'd been nothing but drought for the past two years, and when he rode his rattling, rusty bike to and from town, he kicked up a long train of dust, going in between fields overrun by canola, dashes of yellow like paint drops against the dry grass.
Then he was Vance and he was on his way to visit his estranged father, who'd emigrated to Barcelona to work construction on the Olympic Stadium for the 1992 summer games, fell in love with the industry there, and bought a downscale flat just before gentrification of the area took off. They hadn't spoken in years and Vance was nervous about seeing him.
He was Kieran and he was the guitarist of a band called Sick Twisted Pickles, because come on, who hasn't wanted to be in a band at some point in their lives?
He was pretty sure his seating partner saw right through him that time, because Andrew didn't actually know anything about guitars, but it was still worth it to be able to babble about energy, music, and creation.
Now, Andrew flies economy (because fuck it, he's man enough, he doesn't need to be coddled in first class) and tucks his legs into bizarre shapes so that they fit. He listens to a grandmother from Texas tell him about how sick she got the first time she observed the month of Ramadan, a copy of Home & Garden folded over one knee, and thinks of the stories he could tell her in reply. She might not have Google, she might never know the truth --
My name is Andrew, and I'm in love with my best friend and my best friend's girlfriend.
My name is Andrew, and I'm in love with my best friend and her boyfriend.
My name is Andrew, and I'm going home. I live in the no-man's land at the edge of an airfield, where the planes come in so screamingly close that I feel like I can reach up and touch their bellies. No one else wants to live there, but I do, because I can spend whole days with the people I love in the house we chose for ourselves and never want for anything, not love or cats, and no one ever bothers us because they don't know where we are.
But the trouble with the things you want so hard to be true is that it's hard to talk about them, like giving voice to them suddenly turns them intangible, like they're just wishes and not something you can make happen.
Andrew has played dozens of lives, has immersed himself in a dozen stories, but the life that's too strange to tell is his own.
He says nothing to the woman on the plane, and later, as they sit cross-legged on the floor in somebody's hotel room, eating couscous straight out of the little microwave sachets while Emma flips through e-mail on her phone ("Oh, hey, the pizza place by your old LA apartment, Andrew, wants us to know that they've expanded their delivery radius by another square mile. That's great, thanks for the head's up, except I don't think they deliver across state lines,") Jesse tilts his head at Andrew and studies him, and when Andrew ticks his eyebrows up questioningly, he goes, "Are you okay?"
It's Jesse, so there's a wealth of questions layered underneath the one he vocalizes, but this is the one subject on which Andrew has no words, so he just smiles at the both of them and says he's fine.
-
Jesse and Emma's apartment is on the second storey, so in the summer, they clean the dust from the bug screens and prop open all the windows, letting in a pleasant breeze and the sound of children shouting on the playground across the street and the odor coming from the dumpsters in the back.
The bathroom door needs a special shimmy in order to shut all the way, and even then, it still has a tendency to pop open at inconvenient moments, and the plumbing is hooked up incorrectly, so when any of the upstairs apartments (which is all of them) are taking a shower, the only water the second storey apartment gets is the barest trickle. The second time the water cuts off just as Andrew's hands are sudsy with soap, Jesse introduces him to the wonders of the travel-sized bottles of antibacterial.
Andrew spends all the spare time he's supposed to use looking for his own place at Emma and Jesse's flat, because it has the busy mismatched clutter of someplace that was supposed to be temporary and slowly became permanent by simple virtue of being loved.
The sofa stays mostly buried under two scratchy wool afghans with horrific clashing color combinations ("I think his grandmother tried to have a knit-off with my grandmother," Emma explains, while Andrew tries not to make it look like he's squinting at the pattern, rubbing one corner of the fabric between his fingers, "but I could never prove it in court,") and they don't have a dryer, so nearly every doorjamb and drawer knob usually has a hangar attached to it with one of Emma's cotton skirts or Jesse's button-down shirts.
Andrew kind of understands now, why their clothes almost always have cat hair on them.
"Not to be, like, the voice of reason here or anything --" he tries.
"Because that's absolutely something you're known for." Emma, of course, with Jesse's mouth half-open like he was going to say the exact same thing.
"-- but you could just take your laundry to a dry cleaner's."
One of the cats butts up underneath Jesse's hand, looking for attention, which is, of course, readily given. The cats here are never starved for attention -- it's only another reason on the long list of reasons why Andrew prefers here to, like, looking for his own place.
"But we have a perfectly good washing machine in the apartment," Jesse replies. It's tucked into the coat closet at such an odd angle that the door never closes properly, but Andrew doesn't point that out. The whole apartment smells like damp and detergent. "And besides, it's summer, it's usually not this bad."
Emma lifts her eyebrows.
"Okay, yes it is," Jesse amends.
Andrew smiles at him, unable to help it.
Jesse's the kind of person who goes through life apologizing to the universe for taking up space in it. He's said as such: one of the only things he likes about himself is his ability to be unobtrusive as possible.
Andrew's never felt as possessive about the attentions of another person as he did when he met Jesse. Every smile, every flutter of his curious fingertips along brick walls or braille plaques in elevators or the soft ends of his cat's noses or the seams in Emma's jeans as they sit together with cartons of takeaway on their knees -- all of it becomes something Andrew collects like currency, a jealous dragon's hoard, gleaming and golden inside his heart.
He's felt infatuation before, of course, and he remembers how all-consuming it becomes, how one person becomes the destination of every stray thought.
Other people notice, eventually, just how much Andrew goes out of his way to hang out with Emma on set. Nobody says anything to him directly, but he knows they talk about it. Why wouldn't they? This is Hollywood, Andrew is young and single and obviously that's the only thing about him that Emma might be interested in, and nobody knows about Emma and Jesse, the way they talk to each other like they each have a book in their hands in which every other page is blank, and it's only in each other's books that they find the complimentary text.
There's chemistry between Andrew and Emma, of course there is; the kind even Andrew can recognize because he's seen it in other people so often, where eye contact feels like striking a match and proximity feels like the anticipatory buzz in the air right before everybody leaps out of dark corners yelling surprise!
"I'm scared, have I told you that?" he tells her one day, while they're sitting together in the hallway outside their apartment door, legs stretched out and criss-crossing in the middle like they're trying to charge toll.
The air is stuffy, summer-hot, and there's a sign hanging from the doorknob, similar to the ones in hotels, and it says, come on in, we're already disturbed.
Andrew loves them an impossible amount.
She tilts her head. "How so?"
"Like --" he gestures with his hands, takes a deep breath, and tries again. "Like, you know how you know when something is going to change you? Like, if you survive this, you will be different? I know that's sort of hard to gauge in advance, since you only kind of notice that you've changed when you've already done it, but, like, whatever. That's how I feel about this, and ... I'm scared that I'm not going to like the Andrew Garfield that will exist when it's over."
Something in his voice makes her frown. "Hey," she goes, knocking her ankle up against his until he looks at her.
"Hey," he says back.
She considers him, and then she says, "You're going to be tired. More tired. You're going to dream of sleeping while you're sleeping, that's how tired you're going to be. You're going to appreciate it more when people cut the bullshit and don't waste your time. You're going to be thinner, which Andre's going to hate after all his work, but Andre doesn't have to do press, so. Oh, and you're going to be rude -- sorry," she adds, catching the way his face spasms at the thought. "But it's true. You're going to have to be rude."
"No," he protests. "Ack, no, that wasn't in my contract. Je refuse. I want to go back."
She knocks her leg against his again, fond. "But you won't really change as much as you think you will, I promise. And --" she brightens visibly. "You'll have me."
Sometimes he feels like he and Emma are mirrors, silvery bright and turned into each other. One pinpoint of light becomes reflected hundredfold, and one smile between the two of them becomes a hundred, stretching into infinity. He beams back at her. Their legs are completely entwined at this point.
At that moment, the doors to the stairs opens, and somebody Andrew vaguely recognizes as the tenant of one of the neighboring flats steps through, a heavy-looking bag of takeaway banging at his side. He's a beefy, crop-haired man who teaches gym to elementary school kids in a different borough. Emma says his life's dream is to go on the Food Network and win one of their bizarre cooking challenges.
Andrew and Emma both draw their legs in to give him enough room to go by. He spares them a polite smile as he steps over them.
"Hey, whatcha up to, 20b?" he asks by way of greeting.
"Adultery," Emma deadpans back, and Andrew jolts as if she'd poured boiling water on him.
"Right on," says the neighbor, and disappears into his flat.
Andrew stares at Emma. She stares back at him, and he can't tell what color her eyes are today, but her expression is incandescent, serious, and Andrew thinks of combustion, chemistry, and violins, all at once.
When Emma moves, she folds up her legs in order to scrunch herself over to his side of the hall, invading his space, and Andrew draws his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them protectively; everything inside of him screams like a whirlwind, because he doesn't know where this is going. That could have easily been a joke, a very tasteless joke, except her face is completely set, like someone who's come to a decision, and --
"I don't like this," he feels the need to point out, because Jesse. Because Emma and Jesse.
She stops, and Andrew watches her puzzle through several different emotions all at once. He knows, because he's feeling the exact same things, and then her face clears.
Her eyes widen. "Oh, honey," she goes, and curls her fingers around his wrist, which is the closest part of him she can reach. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. I thought we were being obvious. I wouldn't have -- if I hadn't thought --" she starts to look a little panicked, and Andrew can practically see her backpedaling in her head.
"We have to communicate," he hears himself say, sort of inanely. He feels every throb of his heartbeat, fast and heavy, in his temples and toes and the ends of his fingers. "We all have to communicate. What's obvious to you isn't -- I mean, I know we were flirting, but your boyfriend --" Because Jesse accepts affection and lets Andrew hold his hand and touch his hair, sometimes in public, but Andrew needs more active encouragement than just passive acceptance, and he genuinely had no idea until Emma just aggressively came at him, and --
She puts a hand over his mouth. Her palm smells like hand lotion and a little like salt.
Her serious look is back, blazing and intent, and Andrew's toes curl.
"You," she says. "Are being stupid if you think that anything of Jesse's, or anything of mine, isn't yours as well."
-
The third time he sees Emma kiss Jesse, Andrew's half-awake at a time that could be any hour, and Emma's just stuck her elbow into his rib so that she could prop herself up.
Through gummy eyelids, he can't see much: the gloom and the angle means that he just sees the bend of Emma's neck, the curly silhouette of Jesse's head. Jesse's standing, bent at the waist to meet her mouth -- come back from the bathroom, maybe, or letting the cats out, or he just got a sudden, irresistible urge to reread a paragraph out of one of his favorite novels, Andrew doesn't know -- and then he slides back into the bed.
Even though he's edging onto overwarm, and he's aware that he's balanced on the very edge of the bed so they can all fit, Andrew's asleep again within moments.
He isn't sure when he fell in love. He won't ever be sure.
It's the same way nobody ever really remembers falling asleep, just that they know they must have, because here they are, waking up, and Andrew feels like dawn, like first light, like that moment you're awake but the alarm clock hasn't gone off yet and there's nothing in that second but peace.
He stretches his legs against the sheets and Emma mutters in protest, a wordless sleepy noise, drawing his arm tighter around her without waking completely. He smiles into the back of her neck, and thinks of the Velveteen Rabbit, of surrounding himself with real people and being made Real in return.
-
And this is Andrew's life. Just, like, this is the life he actually lives.
He does sort of perpetually feel like a third wheel in Emma and Jesse's perfectly functional relationship, or kind of like he was just something they took into their home, like a new bathmat or a new paint color for the bedroom walls, except he forgets to feel this way whenever he's with them, because that's not how they treat him, and Andrew's insecurities aside, that's the important part.
On a Monday, he finds the remnants of a cake in the fridge.
It's cut into quarters, the curly frosting distended and unintelligible in places, and Andrew tilts his head and studies it for awhile, trying to pinpoint why, exactly, it unsettles him.
"What were you guys celebrating?" he wants to know, fetching the milk he'd gone in there for in the first place and turning around. They look up, questioning and half-asleep because it's a muggy, overcast Monday and nobody wants to be awake on a muggy, overcast Monday. He gestures over his shoulder. "The cake?"
Emma looks sideways at Jesse with one of those slow smiles, the kind that starts in one corner of her mouth and steadily moves to the other like it's remembering how.
Jesse looks back at her and shrugs, one-shouldered.
She swings her chair around, ignoring the way it creaks miserably in protest, and scoots to the very edge like she's about to bolt out of it, like she's just waiting for a signal. She tugs off one of her rings -- an enormous, fat gold thing like the kind Andrew's used to seeing at swap meets, a fat cluster of bright rhinestones perched on top in the shape of a flower. He sits down on the floor because the only other chair is currently occupied by two sleeping cats.
Behind the first ring -- and Andrew never even noticed because it was so big, which he supposes is the point -- is a simple band. White-gold, maybe, with no design, and she tugs it off, too, and drops it into Andrew's palm.
"... that was your wedding finger," he realizes. His brain fires through the implications, and an impossible thrill runs through him, something indescribable and airless. "Your --"
He flips the band over, holding it up so it catches the light.
Emily Eisenberg, reads the inscription on the inside, the text minute and already showing wear. August 14, 2009.
Words cram themselves together at the back of his throat, and Andrew makes indistinguishable, inhuman noises for several seconds until finally, he gets out in a tea kettle squeak, "Emma!" and flings his arms out, grabbing her from an odd angle into a messy, uncomfortable hug, before he twists around and grabs Jesse, too, planting a wild kiss on the top of his head.
"Husband!" he goes, shoving Jesse's hair out of the way in order to kiss him again, which Jesse tolerates with one hand curled around Andrew's elbow, like he's worried Andrew's going to tip over and crash into something. "And wife!" Emma leans over, rescuing her ring -- her wedding ring -- from his flailing hand, and he stares at her. Wife.
No, no, he actually cannot handle it.
The adultery comment from Emma back at the beginning suddenly makes so much more sense.
Actually, everything suddenly makes so much more sense.
It's an anniversary cake.
"Oh my god, you got married! You've been married. You've been married for years! How do you keep that a secret, how have you not told everyone, I would have shout --"
He could never keep a secret like that, and for a second, he just completely panics, because why are they telling him? Andrew can't keep his mouth shut about anything. Oversharing is the most overt of his personality defects, and he just pictures himself referring to them as the Eisenbergs in casual conversation and causing a small national crisis, because that would be something he'd do on accident.
And then he thinks, but where would you find the words? And who would believe you? and then he feels so much better, hugging them both again out of sheer relief.
Emma's laughing, her eyes crinkled up, and Jesse's face is flushed through with color.
Andrew checks Jesse's fingers -- bare, which of course Andrew already knew because Andrew could pick every detail of those hands out of a line-up -- but Jesse catches the look and smiles, rosy and pleased around the edges. He reaches into his pocket, the one where he always keeps his cell phone, house keys, and a pocket book that Andrew will sometimes steal in order to write things in before they all go their separate ways for weeks on end, things like, this is a periodic reminder that you are my favorite person ♥, which he will later find annotated with various addendum from Emma, the majority of which are lewd.
And then from the pocket comes the matching ring. It's scratched a little bit, which makes Andrew think that it's sometimes on the keyring, and no wonder no one's noticed.
"My mom refused to speak to us for two months afterwards," Jesse says, shrugging in an embarrassed way.
"Because you eloped?" That seems odd.
"Because I'm not Jewish," Emma pipes up.
Andrew blinks. "That's ridiculous. You're perfect."
"Well, sure," she says, and gestures between herself and Jesse. "We know that."
"You're both perfect," Andrew insists, even though he knows Jesse's mom must have gotten over it eventually, because he's met the woman and she is nothing if not the sweetest person Andrew's ever had the pleasure of meeting. "You're married and you're perfect and I can't handle how you are as people, how are you real, come here," and he stretches his arms out, refusing to put them down until they both step into him for another round of hugging.
"Oh, my god," is what Emma has to say about that. "What did we do? How do we make it stop?"
"We don't," says Jesse, who kisses the corner of Andrew's mouth, soft and fond.
-
There's some part of Andrew that's always nostalgic for something.
He doesn't know if there's a name for it, what he feels; that homesickness for every place he's ever been, and everything he's ever remembered having. It strikes him at the most random times:
He's late and in an abysmal line for coffee during a layover in Atlanta, and he glances towards the long, shaded window overlooking the tarmac, and his chest hurts with the sudden want of a summer shower over the Manchester city heights, and the way the flora turns brilliantly colorful after it rains, whole fields of canola shot through with bright yellows and greens.
When he's in Manchester, stuck at the train station with his mates, the only place he wants to be is Tokyo, where the transportation is stunning clean, efficient, and fast.
In Hawaii, he wants Paris and the sight of the riverboat houses bobbing in the Seine, up and down with every inhale that swells in his lungs, and as he's holding one big, Tonka-truck boot still for his wobbly nephew to step into, he misses the feeling of burrowing his feet in the sand at Venice Beach, down to where it's cool and wet from the tide.
In LA, where he closes his eyes and breathes steady and lets a bead of nervous sweat drip down his spine just before the lights come on, he allows himself one perfectly painful moment, an ache that almost splits his chest, to be homesick for New York, for the feeling of soft cat fur under his palm and the sound of rain pattering on the balcony, for the last time he watched the grey ghostly pattern of it and listened to the sound of Jesse and Emma having slow sex, the kind that stopped and started when they got distracted with conversation -- the door open, the rain louder even than their voices, and Andrew felt so content it was like a constant, ballooning pressure inside of him, a happiness that stretched like a living thing against his ribs.
He doesn't know if it's possible to be homesick for love when you're in love, but he is.
Emma says that you don't really love a person until you love their ankles.
"No, really," she insists, somehow knowing that Andrew's giving her a strange look, even though their view of each other is obstructed by the half-closed bathroom door. Emma's trying to wash out a hotel towel in the sink; he hears the faucets stop and start. "Because think about it. Where you most often see people's ankles?"
Andrew thinks about it, and he's still frowning when she comes out, fanning her wet hands at her side.
She flops out across the hotel duvet, which smells like plastic in the way that hotel duvets usually do, and stretches her arm out to drum the ends of her nails against the bare ridge of his ankle bone, which peaks out underneath the cuff of his jeans, because he hasn't yet gone to his own room to change.
The light bulb goes on. He sits up straight.
"When they take their shoes off!"
Emma smiles. "The places they are most comfortable," she agrees. Her eyes are so bright. "It's so easy to love people for their smiles, or the way they smell, or how they make you laugh, or whatever," she waves a hand around, like Andrew didn't spend a ridiculous amount of the filming season obsessing over exactly those things. "But you don't really love a person unless you love their ankles, like, at home, you know? People relax in a very particular way that they almost never let people see."
"Do you like my ankles?" he flexes them at her, batting his eyelashes coyly.
"Yes."
She says it so matter-of-factly that it hits like a slap to the face, dizzying and strange all at once. "You have the prettiest ankles," she continues. "They're as pretty as Jesse's wrists."
Andrew doesn't know what to do with that, since it feels like the kind of compliment that decimates you. He self-consciously tugs at the cuffs of his jeans, but they're too short and he's too long and they won't cover his ankles, so he just leaves them be. His ears feel red and the bed underneath them quivers with Emma's quiet laughter.
He looks at her, still feeling a little sunburned inside, scorched clean through with the idea that she loves his ankles and Jesse's wrists and somewhere in between, she loves them like they're a full person, because how does anyone have it in them to love a full person like Emma does, down to ankles and wrists and toes and the little pieces?
Then he frowns. "You're bleeding," he says, reaching out and hooking a hand around her foot, pulling her leg towards him. There's a bright line of red on her shin, a dark ruby droplet gathering at one edge, threatening to fall.
She makes an upset face, sitting up and twisting so that the blood doesn't brush off on the duvet. "I cut myself shaving," she complains. "And bled all over their towels."
"I did wonder why you were washing the towels in the sink."
"I didn't want the cleaning staff to see it and think, like, I was up here slitting your throat or something." He starts laughing. "Because that's what it looked like!" she protests, and shoves herself over so she can sit on him when he just laughs harder, which doesn't actually do anything to make him stop, even when she accidentally knees him in the soft part of the stomach. "Shut up, it's a legitimate fear!"
-
In photographs, when they're out and about in public, Andrew and Emma look deeply unhappy together.
Bizarrely, this only makes people even more inordinately interested in them, and so the photographs are continuous. Their publicists are completely unsympathetic, and more or less tell them to deal with it. "You're British," Andrew's teases him. "Don't you have that stiff upper lip thing going for you?"
"Have I ever had a stiff upper lip in my life?" Andrew returns. "I think I got a genetic backlog of inability to not care what other people think of me. That's how much I care."
"Mmhmm," says the publicist, who only listens to one word in ten that Andrew speaks, regardless. It's an efficient system.
Emma says it's because that's what happens when you become a superhero -- people lose the ability to differentiate between you and their fantasies.
"Why did you agree to the part, then?" he touches his nose to the side of her face, enough to feel the soft peach fuzz of her cheek. "It bothers you as much as it does me."
She turns her head, the wind stirring her hair in a way that makes Veronica and the other hairdressers cry and have nightmares about flyaways. "Don't be stupid," she says, low and only for him. "Why do you think?"
He kisses her mouth and she tilts her head into it, the way she does when it's real and not just for show.
Jesse doesn't go out with them in public anymore. He doesn't even come in through the same entrance to their apartment, and when he leaves, he leaves for months at a time, filming in far-off places that Andrew's never stayed long enough to remember the shape of the outlets, or the way the people speak. Over the phone, Jesse's voice is tinged with the accents he's absorbed without noticing, always taking in little bits of other people and rarely giving any of himself away.
"I don't get it," Andrew complains, even though he does. "You and Emma were a lot less subtle, even when you were doing press, and nobody cared then. You got married. You were together for years before I came along."
"I'm not as inordinately pretty as you two, so they don't care as much," Jesse replies easily, spooning honey out of a glass jar that his sister sent him from a commune in upstate New York, where she raises bees and plants self-sustaining ornamental gardens that will eventually be transplanted to the campuses of a big-name corporation and sings psalms from the Tanakh as she works, unaccompanied except for two of the other beekeepers who sing with her -- Andrew's heard a few of their songs on YouTube.
He passes the spoon to Andrew, who licks it clean. He doesn't tell Jesse to shut up, but he thinks it.
Jesse's prettiness isn't something he wears or owns, not the way Andrew and Emma do, and Andrew covets it whenever it shows, adding it to his hoard of details, curling warm inside his chest with the satisfaction of the sated.
In interviews, they pull up pictures of Andrew and Emma together, unsmiling and in sunglasses, blown up to large proportions, and he sits there and listens to people he's never met coo over how cute they are, like it's something he gave to them willingly.
Andrew always smiles at them, being sure to dimple, and says, "It's embarrassing that you even have a picture of that, we aren't even doing anything, it just seemed like an ice cream day," and what he really means is, we were being harassed by paparazzi and I want to scream right now because you think that's cute?
"I hate everything, it's none of their business, make them go away," he mutters into Emma's shoulder, unable to help the impulse. His stomach feels tight, knotted, and he's frustrated by all the things he can't do to make it stop, because this wasn't part of the plan, this isn't how it felt in the beginning. Film was supposed to be the love of his life.
She tightens her arms around him and replies, "no, you don't. You don't hate me, and you don't hate Jesse," and he buries her face against her neck, which smells like the perfume she got out of a goodie bag from an awards show two years ago, and clings to that truth. Her bones feel like a bird's under his hands, and they hold on to each other until Andrew forgets he's angry.
There are pictures of that, too, and they show up online a few days later, when Andrew feels happier and more capable of handling it. He closes out of his browser and tucks his phone into his pocket.
Humming "Ode to Joy" under his breath, he ducks into a bodega, where he pays an old Turkish man with salt-and-pepper stubble for two packets of M&Ms. His mind is full of violins and sunshine today, and it feels like he's walking two feet behind his body, like it's not really him crossing the street against traffic, like the real him is made of balloons, cut free and drifting into the sky.
At home, he eats the brown ones first and Emma eats the red ones, and Jesse tells them there's absolutely no difference in flavor among the separate shell colors, but when he passes them the rest of his packet, he's left them the browns and the reds anyway.
This time, when Emma kisses Jesse, Andrew doesn't really notice.
He traces Emma's ankle with his fingertip, underneath the cuff of her sweatpants, and flips the page of his Internet print-out. There's a listing for a one-bedroom, two-bath, and the amount of square acreage makes him twist his head around, looking for a pen.
-
fin