Chapter 17
17
Elliot Crane
Can I take you out?
I stared down at my phone, having absolutely no idea how to answer that question. For one thing, it had been just over a month since he’d walked out on me after I’d confessed my feelings, and about two weeks since he’d ended up sleeping under a box at the bottom of my exterior stairs. After leaving me apology shoes, I hadn’t heard a word. I figured he’d moved on, and I should, too.
I hadn’t really done a very good job of that, though. I still thought about him, about what his rough hands felt like on my skin, about his sardonic smile… Even the fact that when he’d done something stupid—showing up drunk and shifted at my apartment—he’d apologized for it and tried to make amends. By buying me shoes to replace the ones he’d yarfed all over.
But this text message did not appear to have been sent in a state of inebriation, unlike the last ones he’d sent me before the badger-in-the-box incident. Needless to say, the question itself made my heart race, but I tried to force it to slow down again. For one thing, I wasn’t sure if the question meant that Elliot was offering to buy me a beer, or if he was asking me out on a date. That didn’t seem right, given our last few conversations, but that weird-as-hell chat with Hart in which the elf had said Elliot cared about me—that I had played through my head a thousand times despite telling myself it wasn’t even remotely healthy—had kept me hoping against logic and what I told myself was possible.
Maybe—just maybe—he did want to go on a date.
But it was far more likely—and I knew this—that he just wanted to talk to me. Or fuck me. Not that I didn’t want that, but Noah had been right, too. I wanted more than that. And me settling for a sexual relationship instead of a romantic one wasn’t good for me and wouldn’t make me happy. That road only led to bad places.
So I texted him back.
Seth Mays
Are you asking me on a date?
Yes.
A romantic date?
Yes.
Can I?
You know how when you want something badly enough with no hope of getting it, and then you somehow do get it, your brain sort of short circuits, and then you start wondering whether or not you actually do want it?
That wasn’t what I felt. Yes, my brain had absolutely short-circuited, but there was no question that I wanted it. Desperately.
I was also terrified out of my mind. Because I’d built up the relationship I didn’t have with Elliot to be something it couldn’t possibly live up to. Something I couldn’t possibly live up to. But I would be an absolute fool to refuse just because I felt unworthy or inadequate.
Yes.
I’ll pick you up at 6?
6:30?
I’ll be there.
Then I had to take about a dozen deep breaths just to be able to refocus on the microscope in front of me. The really old, desperately out of date microscope that was all the horrifically low budget of the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office could afford.
We’d gotten the blood test results back on the samples from the barn where they’d found the kidnapped shifter, and it was definitely Arcanid. And didn’t match anything in the database. According to Smith when I’d called to tell him, it would probably just end up in a cold case file if we couldn’t find an actual body to go with it. But the gleam in his eyes told me he wasn’t quite done with it yet.
There wasn’t anything else I could do, though, so I’d be done—assuming no one died—by five, and that would give me time to get back to my apartment, shower, and change so I didn’t smell like chemicals, which bothered my nose, so I was pretty sure it would also bother Elliot’s. He claimed I had a more nuanced sense of smell, probably because badgers spent most of the time with their faces in the dirt. That might be true, but I still didn’t want to smell like lab on a date.
An actual, honest-to-God date.
My blood pressure was probably through the roof. I’d tried convincing myself that while I did want a relationship—a real one—with Elliot, it wasn’t going to happen. He’d made that clear. And I had been trying for the past three months to convince myself to stop thinking about it, and failing utterly.
And now it seemed that maybe I had reason to hope.
I changed clothes at least three times between six-fifteen and six-thirty when Elliot texted me to let me know that he was waiting in the parking lot behind my building. I had forgotten to ask Elliot what level of dressy I should be going for, which meant I kept waffling between jeans, cargoes, and more formal slacks. I eventually settled on a pair of grey khaki pants that wouldn’t be glaringly out of place in a nicer restaurant, but also wouldn’t make me look overdressed in a bar.
I’d put back on a little of the weight I’d lost when I was sick, so my clothes at least didn’t hang off me, even if they were still a little bigger than they needed to be. I was trying to eat more, although that was hard to do with my dietary restrictions and my budget. I should also be exercising more, now that I was working again in a capacity that didn’t involve hauling heavy boxes—especially since most of the scenes I worked in Shawano didn’t have corpses attached to them.
It was… different. I wasn’t going to use the term refreshing , since I was still going to scenes where people had done horrible things to other people—robbery, assault, rape, domestic violence… Crime scenes were never good. Even accident scenes that we were called to resulted in catastrophic injury or death.
It wasn’t like Elliot hadn’t seen my body post-illness. He knew what I looked like, clothed and naked. It probably didn’t matter what I wore.
But I still cared. I wanted him to find me attractive. To think that I looked… probably not cute , since that wasn’t a word that had ever been applied to me. I wanted to at least look good. Like someone that someone could be attracted to.
I sighed, knowing that I only had a minute or two before Elliot was due to arrive, and picked out my fourth or fifth shirt of the evening. I had on my light blue t-shirt, and I layered a pale green linen button-down over it. If we were going somewhere casual, I could unbutton it. Hot, I could roll the sleeves up. Formal, and I could button it up and tuck it in.
I was buckling my belt when my phone buzzed—Elliot telling me he was here.
I blew out a breath, ridiculously nervous.
I shouldn’t be nervous. I knew Elliot. I’d lived with him. I’d slept with him, repeatedly. There was nothing for me to be worried about. We both knew exactly what we were getting into in terms of who we were, what our habits were, and how we fit together in bed. We knew all those things.
And yet, I was still nervous.
Because I wanted us to be an us. I wanted to not be the only person breaking the rules—and I wanted to break all of them.
Elliot drove us down to Shawano Lake, to a bar on the wharf that specialized in strong drinks and fried fish. It was a Friday, which meant that they were serving all the fried fish I could eat —and nobody seemed to care that Elliot and I put away far more than two men should have been able to.
He grinned at me when I pointed this out.
“Welcome to Wisconsin,” he replied. “Where all-you-can-eat-fish-fry is not only popular, but an open invitation for anyone and everyone to gorge themselves.” He lifted his glass, a mostly-full brandy Old Fashioned. “And get shitfaced.”
Neither one of us was following the second example. Elliot was slowly nursing the one drink, augmenting it with water. I was too nervous to let myself get drunk—I was on my second beer by that point, as well as my third plate of fried fish, french fries, and coleslaw. Especially post-Arcanavirus, it would take at least five or six for me to start feeling the effects of the alcohol if I was drinking beer.
“I will accept this as a new state of existence,” I replied. “And thanks for checking that they use soy oil, by the way.” Not a lot of places used lard in their fryers anymore, but I’d encountered a few.
He smiled at me as he cut into a piece of fish. “Of course. I couldn’t very well take you out for fish fry only to find that you can’t eat it.”
As nervous as I had been, Elliot had been, well, Elliot. Sardonic, but kind and thoughtful. Doing things like making sure I would be able to eat at the restaurant where he took me before he took me there.
It wasn’t a perfect date. There is no such thing and probably never will be, no matter what the romance novels and rom-coms tell you. There were silences that went on a little too long, laughs that were a little too loud, moments when I wondered if I should reach out and touch his hand, but I didn’t. Maybe I was too self-conscious to draw attention to the fact that we were on a date—maybe for myself, maybe for him.
Maybe it was weird because we did know each other. The whole point of a date is to get to know someone, to find out if you have chemistry, or whatever. We already knew that—we definitely had sexual chemistry. I thought we had emotional chemistry, too, although it remained to be seen if Elliot did…
And that was actually the worst part. Because we both knew I felt something. And that he didn’t. Or hadn’t. Or, at least, not as much as I did.
I’d been the guy in the relationship who didn’t know it was over, the one who was pining and not being loved in return. It seemed like that was becoming a habit, which probably wasn’t good for me. It’s one thing for both people to be confused, figuring out their emotions and what it was they wanted out of the relationship. But this wasn’t that.
This was me absolutely falling for Elliot, and Elliot maybe being interested in me.
I don’t know what I thought would happen. If I expected that in the intervening few weeks he’d fallen madly in love with me in my absence and would declare his feelings during a sunset walk on the docks…
“What’s bothering you?” Elliot asked me, his rough voice interrupting the increasingly depressing trajectory of my thoughts.
“What?” I felt my neck flush. “Sorry, just… Lost in my own head.”
“When something’s bothering you,” he said. “There’s this furrow you get between your eyebrows…” He reached out as though he were going to touch my forehead, sending my pulse skyrocketing, but then he didn’t, his finger hovering just a few inches from my face. He shrugged with a small lopsided smile that set my heart a-flutter.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he did have feelings for me.
“I just—” I shrugged. “I overthink things, is all.”
Elliot ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “What are you overthinking?” he asked.
I let out a laugh that might have been a little bitter. “Oh, pretty much everything,” I told him.
“Everything?”
I nodded. “Career choices. Life choices. What I picked for dinner.” I hoped if I made fun of it, he’d drop it, since I was fairly certain that getting into my emotional relationship insecurities on a first date would be a very good way to also make it a last date.
“Well, I can definitely say that this was the right dinner choice,” he told me, and I was grateful that he did, in fact, leave it there.
Elliot pulled up into an open space along the curb on Main Street, right in front of my building. We’d finished dinner, had a leisurely dessert, and then actually had walked along the docks as the sun set and the moon came out. Elliot’s hands had stayed in his pockets.
So by the time we’d gotten back to my place I had a pit in my stomach.
He didn’t look at me when I put my hand on the door handle, and I knew I was right.
“Seth—” His tone was apologetic.
“It’s fine,” I said, trying to stop things before they got any more awkward or embarrassing.
“It’s—It’s not that I don’t like you,” he said. “I do.”
“But,” I said, because I knew there was a but .
“I’m just… not ready yet,” he said.
I blinked. It hurt, but that wasn’t what I was expecting. “What does that mean?” I asked him.
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “It means—” He sighed. “It means that… even though I do like you, I’m just… not ready for a relationship.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. There was disappointment, obviously—there wasn’t going to be a good-night kiss, a second date… None of the things I’d spent my afternoon fantasizing about while trying not to fuck up my job. But at the same time?—
There was no greater evidence that I was a completely hopeless romantic than the fact that some part of me found hope in the fact that Elliot had said that he liked me.
“Oh,” is all I managed to say.
“I—I don’t expect you to wait for me,” he said, the words tumbling over themselves almost as though they had minds of their own. “I—I wish I were ready. I just… I’m not.”
I nodded again, then pushed the door open. “Okay,” I said, sliding out of the passenger side of his truck, wincing as my knee protested to hitting the ground. “I understand.”
“Seth—”
I paused, but I didn’t turn around. If I looked at him, he’d see the tears I was only just barely managing to hold in check.
“I am sorry.”
I went inside without looking back.
I lay on my mattress until I-didn’t-dare-look-at-the-time-o-clock staring at the emptiness of the ceiling—my sad closet-sized bedroom didn’t even have a ceiling light—and tried to will myself into unconsciousness. It would be better than lying here, feeling the tears track their way out of the corners of my eyes and into my bargain-bin pillow.
I should have known better. Better than to get my hopes up. Better than to think that Elliot had developed real feelings for me. Better than to think that I might be someone that somebody wanted.
And I should definitely have known better than to lie in bed all night thinking about it, although, in my defense, I was trying to convince my body that it was tired enough to sleep. I wasn’t succeeding at it, but I was trying.
I wanted to text Quincy, but it was ungodly-in-the-morning, and I didn’t want to wake her up or disturb her if she’d been called into a scene. Part of me wanted to talk to Noah, but part of me also really didn’t. I didn’t have it in me to deal with the inevitable I-told-you-so-ing or the questions about whether or not I was going to move back to Richmond.
My other options for emotional support were… Hart? That seemed like an even worse idea. Hart was Elliot’s best friend, not mine. And as much as I liked Taavi and Ward, I didn’t feel even remotely comfortable enough to talk to them about the pathetic state of my love life. I didn’t really feel like I knew Hart well enough, either, but he’d started it. Not that I was going to continue it, because either he already knew Elliot’s side of the story, or it would just be too embarrassing for both of us for me to admit what had just happened.
That I had been rejected, again. That I wasn’t good enough—lovable enough. I could be a sexual conquest, a friend-with-benefits, but I wasn’t good enough to be a boyfriend. A partner. Not even a potential partner.
Elliot had said he wasn’t ‘ready.’ I didn’t know what that even meant. How can you be ‘ready’ for a relationship? I mean, okay, I understood wanting to not jump from one to another, to give yourself time to heal after a breakup, that sort of thing. But could anybody ever really be ‘ready’ for a relationship?
It wasn’t like I had some sort of timetable set up that I had to hit. Boyfriend at thirty, married at thirty-five, adopted kids at thirty-six.
Ugh.
No, thank you.
Not that I didn’t want those things… but I didn’t actually want them right now. Maybe I wouldn’t ever. I didn’t have a plan.
And I was okay with that—with the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to come. Of whether a relationship would work out or not. Where it would end up.
As far as I could tell, not knowing was part of the point. You didn’t know what was going to happen, but you wanted to find out—specifically with that other person.
I’d felt a connection to Elliot—one I thought and hoped that he shared. I wanted to know how we would fit together as we got to know each other. If we fit together.
Which I guess we didn’t, since he wasn’t ready .
I’d just really, really thought we did.