Only You by Willa Okati

“Nick?”
    “It’s fine, I said.” Nick shoved it out of sight and out of mind as he opened his email and scanned the short message. “There’s more typos in here than actual words,” he muttered.
    Barrett laughed. Hearing it relieved the tension in a twist of pressure Nick carried between his shoulders. “And that’s different from the usual, how?”
    “Come to think of it, it isn’t,” Nick said with a quiet snort. “Huh. Best as I can tell, we’re being invited to barbecue with them tonight.”
    Quiet. Then, “Them?” Barrett asked, tone so neutral that Nick’s ears almost went back. Damn .
    He cleared his throat. “Them, quote unquote. Guess they must have gone back to Ivan’s for the rest of the weekend.”
    Barrett hummed noncommittally. “Therefore, meat and fire.”
    “And apologies, maybe?” Nick wanted to fidget but didn’t. “You know Ivan. Too nice for his own good. He’s probably got a guilt complex going on about screwing up the trip to the game.”
    “Yeah, that would be like him,” Barrett said with what looked like a tolerant roll of the eyes. He stretched his legs and poked Nick’s thigh with his bare toes. “Might as well. We don’t have anything else going on.”
    “No?” Nick jerked his thumb at the stack of flat-pack boxes, now fallen askew. “Thought we were putting the pool table together.”
    “Not really in the mood for it anymore,” Barrett said. He took the tablet back and opened a new window in the web browser. “I’d rather go out and blow off some steam, anyway. Better to start in on a project when we’ve got the full two days to work with, not just one.”
    Which made sense, but… Ah, hell. Nick let it pass. “Same here. Ivan tagged a P.S. on there special, asking if you’d come, too. Apparently Robbie—aha, so that is his name—is going to have his brothers come around and Ivan’s agitating in favor of keeping the sides equally balanced.”
    “That sounds like something Ivan would do, yeah.” Barrett fell briefly quiet after that before saying, “Seems like it’s all moving kind of fast, isn’t it?”
    Nick started to agree, but his mouth and his mind clashed where they met in the middle. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe. I think it’s more like picking up where they left off.”
    Barrett leaned back against the couch arm. A shifting of light and shade mottled his face with shadow as a loose branch rat-a-tat-tatted a rhythm on the window pane. Didn’t seem to bother him as such. Nick wasn’t a hundred percent sure he noticed. “It really is strange, isn’t it? This soulmark business. No rhyme or reason to it. Barely legal is what, eighteen? Nineteen? And they got handed a mandate to direct the rest of their lives.”
    Something about the way Barrett said that rubbed Nick the wrong way. He tamped down the minor irritation and said with a trying-for-casual shrug, “Happens to more people than doesn’t. They call it college.”
    “Smart-ass. It makes me wonder, that’s all. Why it happens, when it happens, to who it happens. When it doesn’t. Why.” He shook his head. “Me, and all the scientists who research the things. If they don’t have the answers, I’m not likely to come up with any. And yet I still wonder.”
    Nick shifted his weight, pulling one leg beneath him in an echo of Barrett’s preferred sofa pose. He stretched the other leg out to knead his toes against Barrett’s calf.
    Barrett didn’t notice that, either. Too lost in his own head. Frowning, now, at the branch rattling on the windowpane. “Must have broken in that windstorm that took out Daniel’s wall.”
    “Likely.” The thin, spidery tapping sound raked wrong-way-up on Nick’s nerves. He withdrew, sitting up then standing. “That’s going to drive me crazy sooner rather than later. Did we end up stashing those handsaws and such in the old shed?”
    That got Barrett’s attention. He touched his calf, where Nick had been, as if only now