Chapter 25 Easton
EASTON
Eventually we return to the car. We carry in the stuff from the trunk and then Elijah climbs onto the running board to unload everything from the rooftop carrier too.
Just as he reaches over to unlock it, however, he hisses in pain, jolting upright.
Blood is spreading like an ink stain over the lower right side of his T-shirt.
“Goddammit,” he says, more focused on the piece of metal sticking up on the luggage rack than his wound.
I reach toward him. “Get down.”
He bats my hand away. “I’ll be fine.”
“If you were fine, you wouldn’t be bleeding like that. Get down from there and let me look.”
“It’s fine,” he argues. “It’s just a cut.”
I reach for the shirt again. “Hmm, I don’t recall you getting a medical degree. Refresh my memory.”
“You can’t even practice, remember?”
I snatch one of the guest towels out of a gift bag and press it to the wound. “I was only saying that so I wouldn’t have to save your grandmother,” I reply, tugging at his shirt hem. “Get down, now.”
Reluctantly, he gives in, but when I reach for the button of his shorts, he steps backward.
“I’ve got it.” His voice is gruff, meaner than necessary.
“Go up to the couch,” I demand. “I brought a medical kit. I’ll meet you there.”
I grab it from the trunk and follow him upstairs, where I find him lying on the couch. He’s unbuttoned the shorts and pushed them and his boxers just low enough that I can see the cut.
Also low enough that I can see the ridges of his abdominal muscles. The trail of hair beneath his belly button. The sharp rise of his hip bone.
But I’ll ignore that for now.
I kneel beside him and pull the towel away to examine the wound. For a single, sharp moment, I think of my brother bleeding out on my dad’s couch. Saying, “We could ruin your life with a single phone call.”
“Are you okay?” Elijah asks.
I shake the memory away. “I’m just on the fence about whether or not you need this sutured.”
“I can promise you I’m not going to the hospital over this. So take that into account.”
“You’ll go to the hospital if I tell you to go to the hospital,” I reply. “When was your last tetanus shot?”
He rolls his eyes. “Everyone in my line of work is caught up on tetanus shots.”
He’s cranky, and acting as if I’m being some absurdly overprotective mother figure instead of an entirely reasonable person who knows more than average about wounds. “If you’re really going to be a little bitch about going to the hospital, I can sterilize it and attempt to glue it together.”
“Do that,” he says.
I tear open an alcohol wipe and clean him off, then draw a thin line of glue while holding the incision together. I continue holding it, waiting for the glue to set, trying very hard not to think about the way his boxers are currently positioned.
It would be so easy to slide them lower.
My God, what an excellent doctor I’d make: this is the first patient I’ve dealt with in years, and all I can think about is molesting him.
“Are you done?” he grits out, between his teeth.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, looking from his clenched jaw to the position of my hands. I’d thought I was being gentle enough.
He huffs out a pained laugh. “No. Jesus Christ. Let’s just wrap this up.”
And that’s when I look lower, precisely where I was trying not to look, and notice the hard shape of his cock wedged against his boxers, swelling like a fucking balloon.
He got an erection from me sitting here fixing his wound. I guess I wasn’t the only one thinking of the possibilities.
God, the way I want to run my hand low and grasp him. I shake with the desire to do so.
It wouldn’t be quiet sex. It wouldn’t be sex we’d placed on a calendar, commencing after we’d digested dinner but before our ten p.m. bedtime. It would be desperate, fumbling and grinding, and hands and mouths that couldn’t do enough at once.
“Okay,” I say, my voice whistling high and thin through my throat, “I think it’s set. I’m going to bandage it, but just don’t get it wet for the next twenty-four hours, all right?”
I leave him to deal with dressing and whatever else he needs to deal with. I will not allow myself to consider how he might go about the latter.
I go down to the car and climb up to get the stuff out of the luggage carrier.
It’s a lot harder than he made it look, but Elijah’s got a foot on me.
I basically have to lie across the roof to reach the interior of the carrier.
..while avoiding the bent piece of metal that stabbed him.
It’ll be a tedious process when there’s no one to pass stuff to.
“Get down from there,” he demands. I’ve only gotten one box down. I guess he didn’t deal with that erection the way I was imagining he might.
“You can’t do it,” I tell him. “You’ve got to let that wound seal up.”
He plucks me off the roof with his hands on my waist as if I weigh no more than a pillow.
“I’m just going to have to glue you back together again,” I complain.
Although he didn’t seem to mind it all that much the first time. And neither, to be fair, did I. Maybe it’s okay if I have to glue him together again.
That night, we order pizza for dinner and eat it out on the screen porch, him on the couch, me on the chair diagonal, our bare feet side by side on the ottoman.
“God, I love pizza,” I groan. I’m stuffed but I just want to keep going.
“Let me guess,” Elijah says. “Thomas doesn’t think you should eat it.”
I shrug. “I mean, it does have less-than-ideal macros.”
“Then this is the thing,” he says.
“What thing?”
“The thing you’re going to show him he needs to provide for you, Easton.
Every life needs to have the occasional moment of downtime and every diet needs to have the occasional piece of pizza.
Show him that you’re at the beach. Take a picture of your slice of pizza.
Make him realize you’ve been sacrificing for him, and you don’t fucking have to.
He’ll realize you’re happier without him and panic. ”
Thomas might worry, though he’s just as apt to think Jesus, that sausage on the pizza is full of nitrates.
I want him to think I’m happy without him. What makes me hesitate is that...I sort of am?
I blink the thought away as soon as it appears. Of course I’m happier. Who isn’t happier off a diet than on one? Who isn’t happier hanging out at the beach than sitting in a dark lab? That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to eat non-stop junk food and quit your job.
I take a picture of the pizza in my lap, our feet resting against each other’s on the ottoman, and post it to my stories.
I smile once it’s loaded, and it really has nothing to do with Thomas potentially seeing it. It’s just that after years of carefully curating my image and what I show the world, it’s now sandy bare feet, bare legs, the night sky, a piece of pizza.
My face isn’t even showing, but I finally recognize myself in this photo.
I close my eyes and release a tired laugh. “He’s going to write back to criticize me for not eating the appropriate ratio of protein to carbohydrates.”
“At last, you admit your relationship wasn’t perfect.”
I give him a sideways glance. “I never said our relationship was perfect.”
“But what would you change?”
I’d have him be more like you. He’d wake with a quarter-inch of scruff every morning. He’d laugh at my jokes, and he’d sometimes look at me like he’d give up a decade of his life to fuck me.
“I guess I do sort of miss nights like this. Sometimes I want to get a drink, or ice cream, or pizza. I want to sit outside somewhere and just hang.” Our feet brush against each other. It’s like a tiny electric charge. I move mine away and hitch a shoulder.
“And?” he prods.
I bet Elijah has never once written sex on a calendar. I bet when he wants someone, he’s precisely the way he was that night at the party, as if a nuclear blast wouldn’t have stopped him.
“All of our sex is scheduled,” I blurt, peeling the wrapper off my bottle. “It’s actually on the calendar.”
His own bottle was poised at his lips. He sets it down without drinking. “I don’t understand. You mean some kind of birth control method?”
Argh. I wish I’d just kept it to myself. “There was a study that said that once or twice a week was optimal, and that there aren’t really any benefits to having sex more than that. So it’s every Wednesday and Saturday like clockwork, and sometimes I just...”
“Sometimes you just what?” he asks.
I laugh, though it sounds more angry than humorous. “I bet you love this entire thing, don’t you, Elijah? You just love the fact that you didn’t want me, and the guy who came after you doesn’t seem to want me much either.”
“You can’t possibly believe that I didn’t want you,” he grunts.
I grow still. Is he talking about wanting me physically, or something else?
“That’s generally what you take from the situation when a guy says that he isn’t interested in you like that.”
He runs a hand over his face. “I think it was pretty obvious that I was interested in you like that. But there were other things going on at the time.”
What things, Elijah?
I want to call him on it, but have just enough pride not to let him know I still care. And there were things going on at the time is the exact sort of bullshit answer I’d give a person I’d dumped too.
“Whatever,” I reply, brushing his answer away.
“So, as you were saying, sex with Thomas is terrible, and fills you with dread, and—”
I laugh. “I didn’t say that.”
“I was interpreting. Please continue.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d had a little more fun before I settled down.”
“You could, you know,” he says quietly, his tongue sweeping his lower lip. He stares at the bottle in his hand rather than me. “You’re single. You can do anything you want.”
I’m holding my breath, every nerve ending strung tight and eager as I wait for him to finish that thought. To suggest I could do anything I want with him. It would be the worst idea, but God...I’d really like to.
But he isn’t offering, of course. Remember the way he blew you off, Easton? Why the fuck would you even want him to ask? “I guess that’s what weddings are good for, huh?” I finally say. “Kelsey is doing her best to set me up with Aiden, Hawk’s best friend.”
Maybe it’s all in my head—many things with Elijah are—but he looks absolutely stunned as he picks up the trash and walks back inside.