12. Connor
CONNOR
I ’ve been staring at Eli for ages. Heart pounding in my chest, resisting the urge to touch him while he sleeps. I keep watching him while he opens his eyes. He blinks, surprised to see me, before realization sweeps across his face and he blushes and buries his face in the pillow.
“Morning,” I say, my voice croaky.
Elliot returns the greeting into the pillow.
“Why are you hiding?” I ask, laughing.
“You saw me naked last night.”
“You saw me naked, too.”
He lifts his head and looks at me. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because….” His eyes roam over the blanket covering me. He licks his lips. “People would pay to see you naked.”
“They’d pay to see you naked, too.”
He snorts, flipping onto his back. The blanket shifts enough for me to get a better view of his bare chest. My cock stirs. Was last night a one-time thing? Would he want to do it again with me? Could anything ever just be ‘casual’ with Eli? What we did last night sure as fuck didn’t feel casual.
“Eli.”
“Yeah?”
“Last night was …” Fuck, how do I describe what last night was?
He turns his head to look at me, waiting for me to say something.
“Amazing.”
That coy smile kills me, makes whatever the fuck the fall-out of this will be more than worth it. For me at least. I have no idea what he’s thinking, and I need to.
“Was it … okay for you?”
He lets out a brash laugh. “Was sleeping with the guy I’ve had a crush on since I was a kid ‘okay?’”
I raise an eyebrow, feeling suddenly cocky and inflated on the compliment. “I’ll take that as a yes?”
“Yes, Connor. It was the best sex I’ve ever had by a landslide. Of course it was.”
Before I can bask in that compliment, or drag him under the sheets for a repeat, Elliot slips out of bed and starts putting a pair of shorts on.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting my clothes on.”
I lean up on my elbow. “I can see that, but why?”
“So I can take a shower and get ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“The library.”
I flop back onto the bed with a groan of complaint. “The library? Seriously, Eli? Do you have to study right now? I don’t have to be at the rink for like an hour.”
When I turn my head to look at him, he’s grinning.
“What? ”
“Nothing, you just sound exactly like Scout right now.” The smile slips from his face.
“Hey,” I say, sitting up. “Don’t feel guilty.”
He chews his bottom lip.
“Seriously. I’ll take the blame. This was all me.”
“It takes two to tango, Connor.”
I can’t help but smile at the stupid saying. What is he, eighty? “Sounds like something my grandma would say.”
He snorts, but he’s still looking guilty.
“Scout doesn’t have to find out, okay?”
Elliot takes a seat on the edge of the bed. The skin on his back looks so smooth I want to touch it.
“Not telling her doesn’t make it right,” he mumbles.
“No. But what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”
“Urgh, gross. Sounds like we’re having an affair.”
I can’t help it any longer, I reach out and stroke his back. He stiffens before relaxing into my touch.
“How would you word it?”
He turns to look at me. “How would I word lying to my best friend and your sister?”
“Um, yeah.”
He swallows. I track the way his throat moves, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and forget what we were talking about.
“I like you, Eli. I like you a lot, and last night was….” I sigh, trailing off. I run my hand through my hair, searching for the words. Before I can find them, he gets there first.
“Let’s just keep things casual,” he says. Why does my stomach drop when he says that?
“Casual?”
“Yeah.” He’s flushing now, his cheeks that adorable pink I love on him. “We’re adults. I’m going back to college in a few weeks, and you’ll be back in California. There’s an expiration date on this thing. If we can’t control ourselves, then time will control it for us.”
I hate how methodical and distant he’s being right now. Talking about ‘us,’ about what happened last night, like it’s a math problem he needs to solve or something he needs to get out of his system.
I’m about to refuse, but when he looks at me, something wavers. “I can’t lose Scout,” he adds. “She’s my best friend and I love her.”
And you don’t love me. Right, got it.
I nod dumbly. What are the options? Say no and have him run away completely?
Or say okay, and keep things ‘casual?’ Get to enjoy him a little while longer before he goes back to school and I’m forced back to California.
Hanging out with Elliot this summer has been the first time I haven’t felt like a complete loser.
When I’ve been able to think about something other than my failures.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s keep things casual.”
He lets me give him a ride to the library and I grill him on his study schedule to take my mind off the way he looks in my car with his glasses on and his hair a little messy.
I can still smell him on my skin. I didn’t want to delay him by taking a shower at his dad’s house.
Also, I don’t really want to lose his smell.
Are we going to get the opportunity to have sex the way he did last night?
Or is it going to be quick, stolen fucks in our clothes from here on out?
“… then I should probably study Japanese grammar.”
Elliot’s voice has been lulling me into a trance while I drive, but I tune in just in time to hear him talking about grammar .
“Why do you need practice Japanese grammar? Didn’t you go to one of those supplementary schools when we were kids?”
He looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “A Hoshūkō~, yeah. How do you know that?”
I laugh. “We grew up together. I know everything about you.”
Is that a blush? He shuffles in his seat.
“I haven’t had someone to speak Japanese with since my mom died. I talk to my grandma in Tokyo sometimes on the phone, but it’s not often enough to stay fluent. I like to practice … to make sure I don’t forget anything.”
I swallow. I’ve never heard him talk about his mom like that. I’m sure he talks to Scout about her, but I guess we don’t have that kind of relationship … or we haven’t until now.
“Doesn’t Scout know any Japanese? That seems like something she’d be good at.”
That sad expression he was wearing when he talked about his mom drops and he smiles.
“She learned a bit, but a language like Japanese is a lot. You’d need to put aside an hour or more a day to study all the intricacies of reading and writing, learning Hiragana and Katakana.
Plus all the little nuances of speaking. ”
I nod. I’m impressed. I know he grew up speaking and reading Japanese, but it’s still cool that he knows two languages when my vocabulary is pretty basic in just one.
“In school, kids laughed at me for bowing over my food, so Scout started doing it, saying Itadakimasu before she ate. She even did it over her juice boxes and Graham crackers.”
I smile. I’ve never heard Elliot say anything in Japanese before and that story about Scout is nice. “She can be like that sometimes. ”
“She doesn’t give a shit what people think about her. And she sticks up for her friends.”
I nod. “That’s one of the things I love most about her.”
Elliot is quiet. I clear my throat. “I’m not great at learning languages. I took half a semester in Mandarin in high school and can barely remember three or four phrases.”
“You took Mandarin? Was there a hot teacher or something?”
I laugh. “No. I don’t have a one-track mind, you know.”
“Sorry.” He flashes me a shy smile. “I didn’t think you’d be interested in learning Mandarin.”
“I was, for a little bit. I don’t know why. I guess I thought it’d look good on my college applications.”
“But you’ve always wanted to play hockey. You must have known you’d get an athletic scholarship.”
The admission about Boston sits between us. I’m grateful that Elliot alluded to my scholarships always being a certainty. I shrug.
“I guess I thought if there was a competition between a smart hockey player and a dumb one, I wanted to be the smart one. Not that taking half a semester in Mandarin makes you smart.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“I remember hello, goodbye, thank you and my name is….”
He’s looking at me like he’s waiting for me to say it.
“I bet you know all that.”
“Why? I don’t speak Mandarin.”
“Eli?” I probe.
“Okay, fine,” he huffs. “I know hello, goodbye and thank you. ”
I laugh. I knew he’d be adorably nerdy enough to know basic greetings in a major language like Mandarin.
“I don’t know how to say my name is….”
I say it—probably in an awful accent—before I can get in my head about it.
“Wǒ jiao,” he repeats in a much better accent than mine.
“Yeah, there you go. Perfect first try.”
He shrugs. “A Chinese native speaker would pick up on a Japanese accent right away.”
He’s such a perfectionist. “Good thing you’re not being tested.”
He lowers his eyes to his hands, blushing.
We’re at the library way too soon. It’s scary how reluctant I am for him to get out of the car.
“Want me to pick you up later?” I ask.
He chews his lip. It kills me when he does that. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Thought we were keeping things casual?”
“Exactly.”
“A ride home isn’t casual?”
He doesn’t answer.
“When can I see you?”
One shoulder comes up in a half shrug. Fuck, I know a brush off when I see one.
“We can hang out when Scout goes to sleep.”
“So sneak around downstairs and hope we don’t get caught?” I don’t mean for my voice to come out so tense, but from Elliot’s downcast eyes, it did.
“I’m sorry,” I say, reaching out to touch him. I settle my hand on his shoulder and force a smile. “I just wanna see you, do more of what we did last night … casually.”
He looks up at me through his eyelashes and my stomach clenches so tight I wince.
Hold it in. He only wants casual, don’t let him see how much you want this or he’ll run for the hills.
He’s better than you, you don’t deserve more than this with him.
He’ll actually graduate from Harvard and make something of himself. He doesn’t need you.